The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

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.

To Find Eyes to See

“Hren selects earnest classics that have stood the test of time—books that generations of readers have found edifying and moving. But also, in the introduction and conclusion alike, Hren returns to another key point of fiction: it doesn’t just help us see extraordinary truth, although it can. More important is that fiction gives us eyes to see the transcendence of ordinary lives, including our own.”

Rural America as It Really Is

“Harold Bell Wright, regardless of how literary tastemakers viewed him in the 1920s, is the central figure in the origin of Branson. Though denigrated by the Baldwins and H. L. Menckens of his day, Wright was one of the century’s best-selling novelists.”

The Poet Watches Birds

“Jennifer A. Hartenburg’s debut collection of poems… offers such a poetic practice of waking, attending, and caring. These are poems rich with the life of the world, flocking with birds and bees both literal and metaphorical, but also closely attentive to the quiddities of language and the motions of the soul.”

The Arrogant Elite

The New Communitarians and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism by Bruce Frohnen. University Press of Kansas, 1996. vii + 271 pp., $30 cloth.In seven concisely written chapters, Bruce Frohnen has captured in The New Communitarians the misguided arrogance and deceit of...

Longshoreman, Philosopher, Mystery

Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher by Tom Bethell. Hoover Institution Press, 2012. Hardcover, 328 pages, $30.None of Eric Hoffer’s ten slim and streamlined books allowed room for photographic inserts. His biography, Tom Bethell’s Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman...

A Philosopher of Ordinary Language

Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language by Russell Nieli. SUNY Press 1987, 261 pp., $32 paper. One of the persistent themes of the Enlightenment was the need to simplify philosophy, to disentangle it from the rhetoric and methods of scholasticism, and to...

chords of wonder

All great systems, ethical or political, attain their ascendency over the minds of men by virtue of their appeal to the imagination; and when they cease to touch the chords of wonder and mystery and hope, their power is lost, and men look elsewhere for some set of...

Christopher Lasch, Conservative?

Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch by Eric Miller. Eerdmans, 2010. Cloth, 394 pages, $32. Christopher Lasch (1932–1994) has often posed a categorical problem for conservatives despite his insightful criticisms of liberalism. On many issues,...

The Household Gods of Freedom

John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in American Politics by Russell Kirk. Third ed., with select letters & speeches. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1978. [Fourth edition, 1997, cloth $24, paper $14.50.] For Southerners of my antique persuasion, Russell Kirk’s John Randolph...

The Kind of Man Modernity Can Afford

Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore by Peter L. Berger. Prometheus Books, 2011, 264pp, hardcover, $26.A good friend studied sociology at Boston University where Peter Berger spent much of his career. He recalls...

What Is Happening to History?

In 1979 millions of Americans will have spent twenty-three to twenty-six years (about one-third of their expectable lifespan) in schools without having had a single history course. During the late Sixties the majority of colleges and universities abandoned all history...

Freedom Complex

On the Road to Emmaus: The Catholic Dialogue with America and Modernity by Glenn W. Olsen. The Catholic University of America Press, 2012. 303 pp., $70. The Gospel account of the disciples meeting Christ on the road to Emmaus has long been understood as a metaphor for...

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.

To Find Eyes to See
@NadyaWilliams81 on "More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature" by Joshua Hren. @WordOnFire Luminor

Rural America as It Really Is
Jason C. Phillips on "Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America" by Joanna Dee Das. @UChicagoPress

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