The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

What the American Revolution Secured: Order, Justice, and Freedom

Throughout the semiquincentennial year celebrating America’s independence, The University Bookman will invite a range of writers and speakers to contribute to a series drawing upon Russell Kirk’s work on the American Revolution and the constitutional order it secured.

To Find Eyes to See

“Hren selects earnest classics that have stood the test of time—books that generations of readers have found edifying and moving. But also, in the introduction and conclusion alike, Hren returns to another key point of fiction: it doesn’t just help us see extraordinary truth, although it can. More important is that fiction gives us eyes to see the transcendence of ordinary lives, including our own.”

Rural America as It Really Is

“Harold Bell Wright, regardless of how literary tastemakers viewed him in the 1920s, is the central figure in the origin of Branson. Though denigrated by the Baldwins and H. L. Menckens of his day, Wright was one of the century’s best-selling novelists.”

The Poet Watches Birds

“Jennifer A. Hartenburg’s debut collection of poems… offers such a poetic practice of waking, attending, and caring. These are poems rich with the life of the world, flocking with birds and bees both literal and metaphorical, but also closely attentive to the quiddities of language and the motions of the soul.”

A Blinkered Life of Burke

The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke, by Conor Cruise O’Brien. University of Chicago Press, 1992.Paper 692 pp., $34.95. Conor Cruise O’Brien had a distinguished career before writing this book. He served in Ireland’s...

Testing the Metaphor

Extreme Metaphors: Selected Interviews with J. G. Ballard, 1967–2008, Edited by Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara. Fourth Estate, 2012. Hardcover, 304 pages, £25.In the program Frost on Interviews, recently rebroadcast on British television, the distinguished...

Burke Endures

The Enduring Edmund Burke, edited by Ian Crowe. Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1997. 221pp., $25 cloth.1997 marked the bicentenary of Edmund Burke’s death, the perfect occasion to measure the enduring relevance of his thought. What endures, amply evident from this...

Bloodied Beauty

The Poetics of Evil: Toward an Aesthetic Theodicy by Philip Tallon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Cloth, 266 pages, $74.While preparing an anthology, I once spent several months researching the “problem of evil.” I remember learning about genocides. Not...

True Ethical Humanism

Rousseau and Romanticism, by Irving Babbitt. With a new Introduction by Claes G. Ryn. Transaction Publishers, 1991. This reprint of the best-known work by Irving Babbitt (1865–1933) is a sturdy addition to Transaction’s Library of Conservative Thought. When it was...

Looking Forward and Back

The Bookman has had a banner 2012! This past year, we have seen all forms of our traffic increase, and we published in 2012 over sixty new reviews and articles, with weekly selections from our incomparable archives. Some highlights from the past year include our...

A Player Piano for the Twenty-First Century

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Dial Press 1999 [1952] Paper, 352 pages, $15.I have long resisted reading Kurt Vonnegut. In this life of finite time and seemingly infinite and ever expanding good things to read, his biography or writing just did not seem enough to...

On Quotations

On Essays and LettersOn my desk, I have a second edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. The original edition was in 1941; the edition that I have is from 1960. I have seen reference to a fifth edition [seventh —Ed.]. The fourth edition advertisement said that...

Conversation in Collapse

The Conversation, Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. American Zoetrope / Paramount, 1974. 113 minutes.Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation is one of the artsier entries in the long list of 1970s paranoia flicks. The film begins with a crane shot of a busy San...

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.

To Find Eyes to See
@NadyaWilliams81 on "More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature" by Joshua Hren. @WordOnFire Luminor

Rural America as It Really Is
Jason C. Phillips on "Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America" by Joanna Dee Das. @UChicagoPress

Load More

Subscribe and receive the Bookman weekly in your inbox.

* indicates required

Shop through Creed & Culture
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman