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.

Poetry of Transcendence

“A related, and most welcome, theme in Killing Orpheus is memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death. Our lives have become so long, easy, and comfortable that death has become something of an inconvenient truth, which many prefer to ignore or forget. McClatchey is not one of them, thankfully: the collection abounds with reminders of our mortality.”

The Consensus Reality

“In his study of an underlying consensus regarding education, race, and gender, Jonathan Butcher has performed a valuable service for those who wish to understand the true nature of the so-called division within American society today.”

Britain at the Turning Point

“A major theme that runs through Allport’s study is the shifting equilibrium of power relations between the United States and Britain. The war demonstrated that, as British power and resources dwindled, Britain became dependent on material and financial supplies from the United States.”

Kirk Audio at ISI

We commend to your attention the John M. Olin Online Lecture Library at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which hosts several lectures about Russell Kirk and his influence by scholars including Ted McAlister, Michael P. Federici, W. Wesley McDonald, George H....

Religious Modernity

The Theological Origins of Modernity by Michael Allen Gillespie. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 386 pages, $22.50. Seeking to clarify what we mean by “modernity,” Michael Gillespie provides an intellectual history of the subject by reaching back to the...

The Achievement of Irving Babbitt

To define Irving Babbitt’s central view of life, from which radiate all his other views—of letters, of education, of society—I commence by quoting not his own words, but those of a different writer—one whom he would not have approved. For in reading Bertrand Russell’s...

Hemingway in Perspective

Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934–1961 by Paul Hendrickson. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, 531 pp.Ernest Hemingway is to twentieth-century literature what Humphrey Bogart was to the same century’s cinema. More than any other actor, one need not...

Herbert Hoover, Revisionist

Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath. Edited and with an introduction by George H. Nash. Hoover Institution Press, 2011. 957 pp. $40.95. Herbert Hoover has always been in danger of falling down the memory hole. He...

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.

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.

The Consensus Reality
Jeffrey Folks on "The Polarization Myth: America’s Surprising Consensus on Race, Schools, and Sex" by @JM_Butcher. @EncounterBooks

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