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.”

Poetically Thinking

The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan by George Steiner. New Directions, 2012. 224 pages, $25. In an often-cited passage of Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Monsieur Jourdain explains to the Maître de Philosophie that he wants to write a love note to...

Spring Newsletter

The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Spring 2012) has just been posted. It features news on the launch of the publishing partnership between the Kirk Center and Brazilian publisher É Realizações and a profile of Wilbur Fellow Ryan Streeter. You...

The Sexual Revolution and the Will to Disbelieve

Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution by Mary Eberstadt. Ignatius Press (San Francisco), 2012. 175 pages, $20.Mary Eberstadt’s slim new essay collection, Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, may at first be more...

Uncanny Tales of the Moral Imagination

Uncanny Tales of the Moral Imagination

The Princess of All Lands by Russell Kirk. Arkham House Publishers, Sauk City, Wisconsin 53583. 1979. 238 pages. $8.95. [The stories from this volume are included in Ancestral Shadows (Eerdmans 2004), Kirk’s collected ghostly tales. —Ed.] On the surface, these are...

RIP Irving Louis Horowitz

The Kirk Center and The University Bookman regret the passing of sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, who died in March. Recipient of many accolades, Horowitz was a sociologist of wide-ranging interests, from religionto analysis of state power and social order in...

Grounding the Life of the Mind

Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America by Daniel J. Flynn. ISI Books (Wilmington, DE), 2011. 187 pp., $28 clothThe Great Books approach to education, promoted by one of the subjects of this book, Mortimer Adler, is noble in...

A Thundering Paradox of a Life

George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis. New York: The Penguin Press. 2011. 784 pp. $40. William Manchester in his acclaimed biography of Douglas MacArthur, American Caesar, introduced his subject as a “thundering paradox of a man.” The same could be...

Man, Proud Man

Liberalism: A Counter-History by Domenico Losurdo, translated by Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso Books, 2011. Pages viii+375. $35. Paradox and irony immediately confront the historian of liberalism. Commonly understood as the tradition of political thought...

On Being a Basel Professor

On Essays and LettersIn Walter Kaufmann’s chronology of Nietzsche’s life, under 1889, it states briefly, that “Nietzsche becomes insane early in January in Turin.” Insanity, evidently, is no impediment to writing letters. Chesterton said that the maniac was the man...

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

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