The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Watch James Panero of the New Criterion discuss “The Urbanity of Russell Kirk” at the 2025 Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.

The Urbanity of Russell Kirk

“The urban fabric must also be mended and darned through continuous upkeep. The city is not yours to experiment. From Russell to Russello, our ancestral spirits cast their shadows whether or not we choose to observe the city of god in the cities of men.”

Marxism and the Rising Generation

“Gonzalez and Gorka have performed an important service in bringing together a wide range of fact and theory and in establishing a coherent line stretching directly from Marx through many important figures to the present day.”

Cracking the Code to Civilization

“In a world flooded with online influencers, ‘red pill’ rhetoric, and algorithmic posturing, Newell offers something older, wiser, and far superior: a code of manliness rooted in the Western tradition of virtue, character, and service. His message is that true manliness is not a pose or performance; it is the integration of moral and intellectual excellence, what he calls ‘the manly heart.’”

France and the Problem of Abstraction

“…French people’s love for ideas, indeed for ideology, often puts them at odds with the pragmatic requisites of a mature democracy and with reality itself. France is, as she very aptly puts it, ‘a country of dreamers who fall into melancholy when reality catches up with them.’ But far from being merely a psychological explanation for French unhappiness, this idealism is the key to a political understanding of our complicated relationship with the very principle of democracy.”

The Bookman goes back to school

The University Bookman has long had a focus on education. Indeed, the archive reveals numerous reviews of college and high-school textbooks, and of course our founder Russell Kirk wrote often on education. As we approach the beginning of another school year, we asked...

The Declaration as the Constitution

Original Intent and the Framers of the Constitution: A Disputed Question by Harry V. Jaffa. Regnery Gateway, 1994, 386 pp., $24 hardcover. Conservatives today are generally devoted to the scheme of constitutional interpretation known as “original intent...

Resisting Ideology’s Reductionism

The New Jacobinism: America as Revolutionary State (2d expanded ed.) by Claes G. Ryn. National Humanities Institute, 2011, 163 pp., paper, $15.Near the end of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke praised what he called the “combining mind” as...

An American Classic

Democracy and Leadership by Irving Babbitt. Foreword by Russell Kirk, Liberty Classics, 1979, 390 pp. The appearance of a new edition of Irving Babbitt’s Democracy and Leadership (first published in 1924) is one sign among many that interest in this controversial...

Joseph Mitchell and the Free Life

Joseph Mitchell and the Free Life

Joseph Mitchell was born in Fairmont, North Carolina in 1908, the son of cotton and tobacco traders, Averette and Elizabeth Parker Mitchell. The family had a bit of money—enough to see Joe through the University of North Carolina in the late 1920s and, afterwards, to...

The Architecture of a Man’s Time

Essays: Personal and Impersonal, by Milton Hindus. Black Sparrow Press, 1988 191 pp., paper, $10.00. Milton Hindus’s Essays: Personal and Impersonal is not an encyclopaedic volume except for the climate of its thought, tolerantly revealing to Hindus and his reader...

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans, by Lawrence N. Powell. Harvard University Press, 2012. Cloth, 448 pages, $30. The city of New Orleans has long had a firm grip on the imagination of Americans (a grip that existed long before the round-the-clock news...

Mistaken Identities

America’s British Culture by Russell Kirk. Transaction Publishers, 1993. Cloth, 150 pages, $25.The “identity crisis” is a relatively recent development of human psychology. Most people in history were what they were, and they didn’t bother overmuch to wonder what that...

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition. Click on the icon in the upper right corner of the video to see more episodes in this series or check out our YouTube page.

Cracking the Code to Civilization
@CliffordBates12 on "The Code of Man: Love, Courage, Pride, Family, Country" (2nd Edition) by @waller_newell

Marxism and the Rising Generation
Jeffrey Folks on "NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It" by @Gundisalvus and Katharine Cornell Gorka @EncounterBooks

Load More

Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman