The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Join friends of the Bookman in New York City on December 8, 2025 for the Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.
A New ‘Rasselas’
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, by Samuel Johnson. Edited by Warren Fleischauer. New York: Barron’s Educational Series, Inc., 1962. 189 pp. [Edition reviewed; Penguin edition (Kindle); Free edition (Kindle)] Warren Fleischauer’s edition of Rasselas...
The Empire Goes Overboard
Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America by Benjamin L. Carp, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, Cloth, 328 pp, $30 Boston had had enough. After a merchant ship refused to return to England with its controversial tea cargo, John...
Memo to Irving Babbitt
One of the most influential critics in the history of American letters receives (posthumously) a note from a [then-] associate professor of English at Michigan State University. Dear Professor Babbitt, I have, of course, no way of knowing where you are at the moment,...
Political Correctness and the War Against Authority
Society Against Itself: Political Correctness and Organizational Self-Destruction by Howard S. Schwartz, Karnac Books, 2010. Paper, 240 pp. The congeries of ideological positions known as “political correctness” has long posed a threat to Western civilization. As an...
Witness over Sixty Years
Witness by Whittaker Chambers (Random House, 1952) Visitors to Ronald Reagan’s Rancho del Cielo, just north of Santa Barbara, will discover that the late president’s large bookshelf, just inside the front door of the main house, is filled largely with books on Western...
Fall Newsletter
The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Fall 2011) has just been posted. It features a profile of the new complete Kirk Bibliography, compiled by our archivist, Charles C. Brown. It also includes an interview with Márcia Xavier de Brito, who is...
Celebrated Minor Contemporary American Poetry
The Best American Poetry 2011 Edited by Kevin Young with David Lehman Scribner (New York, NY), 2011, xxvi + 211 pp., $35.00 Consider the following—“Rally”—the first poem in this year’s annual Best American Poetry series, reproduced in its entirety: The awesome weight...
‘The Greatest Fool That Ever Lived’
On Essays and Letters“It is easier to believe that one’s self is a fool than that Socrates was a fool; and yet, if he was not right, he must have been the greatest fool that ever lived.” —Robert Lynd, “On Not Being a Philosopher.” In book six of the Republic, the...
Lukacs and Kennan: Reflections on a Friendship
A Lukacs SymposiumThere are relationships, Michael Oakeshott once wrote, “in which no result is sought and which are engaged in for their own sake and enjoyed for what they are and not for what they provide. This is so of friendship.” John Lukacs could not have known,...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
