The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

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Each week the Bookman brings you fresh reviews of the books that build culture, and essays that enliven the Permanent Things. Last year nearly 90,000 visitors engaged with the Bookman’s reviews, all free of charge and with no advertising to disrupt the reading experience. Our writers are touching hearts and minds across the globe with their reviews, bringing wisdom, creativity, and beauty to bear on the most important conversations happening in literature and culture.

Would you consider a gift to help us continue this work?

If just 1 in 4 of our readers contributed $10, we’d dramatically increase our capacity to recruit the brightest young writers and tackle more books and topics, all with a Kirkian angle. We’ve set a goal of raising $20k this month in order to continue our mission. Exceeding this amount will allow us to expand our work even more.

If you love the Bookman, and read us with regularity, we’d greatly appreciate your generous support this month.

With gratitude,

Luke Sheahan, Ph.D., editor
The University Bookman

P.S. As a special thank you to all Bookman supporters this month, we’ll send you a link to an audio recording of Ex Tenebris, one of Kirk’s best ghostly short stories. We think you’ll really enjoy it.

Campaign Progress

John Adams: Russell Kirk’s Founding Federalist

“…[Kirk] located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both ‘the most successful conservative device in the history of the world’ and a ‘great monument’ to the Federalists.”

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.

The Brothers Stuart and the Rise of Protestant England

“…Belloc remains a draught of fresh air and a happy antidote to the official version of English national history, with its idealized tale of public-spirited reforms and liberal advances broadening down to the happy present.”

The Fog of the American War for Independence

“Academic and popular history of the period has long noted the early intimidation and violence that accompanied the rise of an American political consciousness and revolutionary movement.”

“To Think Faith” as Educators

“…faith and pedagogy should be in harmony. Smith’s guide is not a theory of faith and teaching or how to sprinkle faith within teaching. ‘It offers repeated practice at noticing and thinking through ways in which faith and the process of teaching might connect in everyday practice,’ in the mundane moments of elementary, secondary, or higher education classrooms.”

Eliot’s Politics in Context

Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics, by Leon Surette. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011. Cloth, xv + 363 pages. $59.95.Some years ago at a conference a speaker mentioned in passing that Eliot had “flirted with fascism.” This comment...

Tolerance that Swallows Itself

The Intolerance of Tolerance by D. A. Carson. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012. Cloth, 196 pages, $24.D. A. Carson, a well-known Reformed theologian and exegete, has written a clear and well-reasoned analysis of today’s imperialistic tolerance from an...

Debunking the Demographers

What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster by Jonathan V. Last. Encounter Books, 2013, Hardcover, 240 pages, $24. Demography can be dull; to call it unimaginative would be to give it too much credit. But then there is Jonathan V....

The Left Bank in the Vieux Carré

Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s by John Shelton Reed, LSU Press, 2012, Hardcover, 320 pp., $38. The popular image of the French Quarter in New Orleans often seems to be one of unrestrained debauchery—particularly around Mardi Gras when it is not...

Chronicling the Conservatives

The Conservatives—A History by Robin Harris. London: Bantam Press, 2012, hb., 632pps., £30. Robin Harris brings to his account of the Conservative Party not just impressive erudition but also many years’ inside experience of how the party operates and “feels.” He is a...

Morality and Order

Redeeming the Time by Russell Kirk, ed. Jeffrey O. Nelson. Wilmington, ISI Books, 1996. Cloth, 321 pages, $24.95.Russell Kirk’s Redeeming the Time was published posthumously in 1996. And as its title suggests, it is a book about thinking and acting in light of moral...

Churchill After the War

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940–1965 by William Manchester and Paul Reid. Little Brown and Company, 2012. Hardcover, 1182 pages, $40. At the end of The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his history of the Second World War,...

Uncle Walt and the Lost Era of Network News

Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley. HarperCollins, 2012. Hardcover, 819 pages, $35.Somewhere near the far turn of this absurdly long and generally fawning biography of the “most trusted man in America,” it seems that something of real importance suddenly dawned on...

Conservative Mind at 60

This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Russell Kirk's influential book, The Conservative Mind. Kirk Center Vice-Chairman Jeffrey O. Nelson has written an op-ed for the Detroit News to celebrate the occasion and offer an assessment of the...

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.

Kirk saw poetry, fiction, tradition, and restraint as essential to understanding America and preserving its character. In his review of "On America," @cjscalia explores Kirk’s vision of the founding, statesmanship, literature, and the enduring ideas that have shaped the republic.

The Audacious Russell Kirk
Bruce P. Frohnen reviews "On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776" by Russell Kirk. Edited by Michael Lucchese.

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