The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Fortunate Friendships
In this excerpt from his new memoir, The Man in the Middle, Tim Goeglein discusses the profound influence on his life of the thought and friendship of Russell Kirk.
Santayana’s Standing
A response to David Dilworth.David Dilworth’s review in the Spring 2011 University Bookman of George Santayana’s The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States (Yale UP, 2009) raises important questions about the permanent...
The Youthful Writings of Russell Kirk
The scribblings of Russell Kirk, as teenager and pre-teen, reveal a widely read, precocious and imaginative young man. Among the remnants of youth which are preserved one may find vastly detailed drawings of Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and all sorts of adventure...
An Everlasting Man of Letters
G. K. Chesterton: A Biography by Ian Ker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xiv + 747 pp., $65.00 cloth Among the genres in which G. K. Chesterton wrote was critical biography. With typical paradox, Chesterton defined two duties for such authors that seem...
Mr. Conservative
Dr. Russell Kirk is to American conservatism what Edmund Burke was to British conservatism. My equation is a product of the catalyst of history. Before Burke stood up to the savagery and barbarism of the French Revolution, not one man in all Europe raised so...
Ghostly Kirk
In time for Halloween, "Ghostly Kirk," a site that tracks the ghostly tales of Russell Kirk, is now on the web, courtesy of Jeff Pearce.
Revisionist History at Its Best
Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Frederick Kempe. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2011. 579pp, $29.95. In 1946, Winston Churchill spoke of an “iron curtain” descending across the continent of Europe from Stettin to Trieste,...
Death of a Giant
A tribute to Russell KirkWith the death of Russell Kirk on April 29th at the age of 75, American conservatism has lost one of its true giants. Prior to the middle of the twentieth century, by far the most powerful conservative force in the United States was the...
Why the Union Soldiers Fought
The Union War by Gary W. Gallagher (Harvard University Press, 2011), 256 pages, $28. Nearly every Southerner was raised studying the Civil War, or, as some here call it, the War Between the States. By the time I entered the public school system in Marietta, Georgia,...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.