The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Join Kirktober and help support the mission of the University Bookman
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
The State of American Liberal Education These Days
What are the ends of education? We mean, of course, the ends for us, for us democratic Americans. So we begin with the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America—Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. America, Tocqueville...
Having It Both Ways
Novelist and poet James Lasdun speaks with the Bookman about why he feels violence is an important theme to be explored in poetry, how Chekhov modernized him as a writer, and why an industrial wasteland in New Jersey inspired the milieu for one of his novels.
Back to the Sources, Almost
Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir by David Grene. University of Chicago Press, 2006, cloth, 184 pages, $35. Reviewed by John Byron Kuhner Augustine, in praising God’s choice to place Adam and Eve in a garden that needed tending, waxed poetic. “When all is said and...
A Road Not Taken
A conversation with Michael Brendan DoughertyIn a pair of recent articles for the American Conservative, Michael Brendan Dougherty—who may also be the only conservative to grace the Apollo Theater stage—has been exploring a path not taken by the Republican Party, but...
A Conservative Scholar’s Wisdom
The Case for Conservatism by Francis Graham Wilson, with a new introduction by Russell Kirk. Transaction Publishers [1951, 1969, 1990, 2011], 74 pp., $20 paper. Forty years have passed since Francis Wilson first published the three lectures contained in this elegant...
Annette Kirk Remembers Valerie Eliot
Kirk Center President Annette Kirk has written a brief remembrance of Valerie Eliot, their meetings, and the literary friendship of their late husbands.
Mrs. Kirk on Valerie Eliot (1926–2012)
When a handsome, statuesque Valerie Eliot entered the restaurant at which we met in June 1999, the pianist broke into selections from the musical Cats, much to the delight of my two daughters who a decade earlier had attended that musical in London with Russell and...
A Candle in the Darkness
Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts by Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner. Thomson/West (St. Paul), 2012608 pp., $49.95, cloth.These are dark days for American law. In June, Chief Justice John Roberts, in what was a stark betrayal of his oath to uphold the...
The Character of Our Constitution
Rights and Duties: Reflections on Our Conservative Constitution by Russell Kirk. Spence Publishing Company, 1997, 208 pp., $28 cloth.The present book includes all of Kirk’s earlier work, The Conservative Constitution (too long unavailable), and adds to it a number of...
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.
