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.

From the Man Who Loved America

“Angelo Codevilla advanced and argued for an anti-Wilsonian approach to both American foreign and American domestic policy.”

Smithian Wisdom on Demand

“Even readers who disagree with the collection’s broad normative valence will find that it consistently models a way of reading Smith as a unified thinker about persons-in-society—morally formed agents embedded in evolving rules, conventions, and institutions.”

In Praise of Poetry and Form

“Majmudar often takes the long view, and from the long view, free verse is a new arrival in a variegated poetic history that stretches back into prehistory. To embrace it alone is to cut oneself off from that sweeping history and from the resources to be found there. There is still vitality in these neglected traditions. They are not a dead past.”

Lewis’s Aeneid, Labor Amoris

C. S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile translated by C. S. Lewis; edited by A. T. Reyes. Yale University Press, 2011. Hardcover, 184 pages, $28.Every poetic translator worth our attention is, as it were, a secondary artist, one who attempts to employ his own...

Herrick and Donne and the Problems of Modernist Poetics

Occasionally, we are brought up short in our reading by a claim that is made with great confidence—even audacity—by its author, upon a point that seems to us rather dubious. Thus, F. R. Leavis, in his book New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), states: “My suggestion...

A Literary Patrimony

In this article from the Bookman’s 1994 Memorial issue, Russell Kirk’s daughter Cecilia discusses the literary heritage that she was given by Kirk’s regular evening readings.

Fortunate Friendships

In this excerpt from his new memoir, The Man in the Middle, Tim Goeglein discusses the profound influence on his life of the thought and friendship of Russell Kirk.

Santayana’s Standing

A response to David Dilworth.David Dilworth’s review in the Spring 2011 University Bookman of George Santayana’s The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States (Yale UP, 2009) raises important questions about the permanent...

The Youthful Writings of Russell Kirk

The scribblings of Russell Kirk, as teenager and pre-teen, reveal a widely read, precocious and imaginative young man. Among the remnants of youth which are preserved one may find vastly detailed drawings of Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and all sorts of adventure...

An Everlasting Man of Letters

G. K. Chesterton: A Biography by Ian Ker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xiv + 747 pp., $65.00 cloth Among the genres in which G. K. Chesterton wrote was critical biography. With typical paradox, Chesterton defined two duties for such authors that seem...

Mr. Conservative

Dr. Russell Kirk is to American conservatism what Edmund Burke was to British conservatism. My equation is a product of the catalyst of history. Before Burke stood up to the savagery and barbarism of the French Revolution, not one man in all Europe raised so...

Ghostly Kirk

In time for Halloween, "Ghostly Kirk," a site that tracks the ghostly tales of Russell Kirk, is now on the web, courtesy of Jeff Pearce.

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.

@ubookman The series seeks to advance understanding of the significance of the American founding to our times through fresh, concise presentations. The following piece by @ubookman editor @lsheahan sets the stage: https://buff.ly/Aakgs0W

Throughout the semiquincentennial year celebrating America’s independence, @ubookman 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.

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