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.”

Russello around the web

Here's a round-up of recent writings by Bookman editor Gerald Russello elsewhere on the Internet and in print. • At the Imaginative Conservative Russello responds to Claes Ryn's argument that conservatives have failed the culture. • He reviews Gregory Wolfe's Beauty...

Books in Little

Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto by Matthew M. McGowan (Brill, 264 pp.) At the height of his career and celebrity, the ancient poet Ovid was abruptly banished from Rome by the personal decree of emperor Caesar Augustus on...

Russell Kirk: An Appreciation

Samuel Johnson remarked once that we need to be reminded more often than we need to be instructed. It is a wise observation. The greatness of Russell Kirk’s achievement consisted in his surpassing ability to remind us of those permanent truths of the human condition;...

Germanna

Our friends at the Germanna Foundation are preserving the permanent things…literally… with this October 15 symposium on traditional masonry techniques to restore and maintain historic buildings.

Moving Briskly

Fall at the University Bookman has gotten off to a brisk start. We have published a symposium on conservatism and empire that garnered a number of notices across the web. We are preparing another symposium later this year; details to follow. This week, we are...

On Education, a Liberal that Liberals Shun

The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 261 pp., $17 paper, 2009 Toward the end of this highly readable book, E. D. Hirsch makes a very telling observation about the overall responses to his...

Knight of Truth

A eulogy for Russell Kirk.As we remember Russell Kirk, the author of an astonishing number of publications, the source of a new idea in American political life, the preserver and distributor of many treasures Of culture that without him would have slipped into the...

McAllister on Kirk

The Imaginative Conservative blog has posted an excerpt and link to an essay by Pepperdine's Ted McAllister on Kirk's Conservative Mind that is worth a look: “What was then more readily an act of preservation has become today an act of recovery.”

A Story of Redemption in Washington

A conversation with Tim Goeglein.Timothy S. Goeglein is currently Vice President of External Relations at Focus on the Family and a Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation in Washington. Before that he served in the White House of President George W. Bush as a...

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.

"Delsol’s analysis stands out for the breadth of its perspective. Her essay covers topics as varied as corporatism, the French love for status and strikes, immigration, religion and secularism, populism and the role of intellectuals, Jacobinism, and the EU..."

Cracking the Code to Civilization
@CliffordBates12 on "The Code of Man: Love, Courage, Pride, Family, Country" (2nd Edition) by @waller_newell

Load More

Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman