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.”

Bottom Rail on Top

Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son by William Alexander Percy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 348 pp. Lanterns on the Levee, William Alexander Percy’s eloquent autobiography, has been a minor classic since its initial publication in 1941. It was written...

A few links we recommend

• The New Atlantis has a great symposium on Place and Placelessness in America with several essays that are well worth your time. • The Imaginative Conservative has a three-part series by John Willson on the historian Carlton Hayes (whom we covered in this 2010...

Directions Back to the Public Square

Directions Back to the Public Square

Exiting a Dead End Road: A GPS for Christians in Public Discourse edited by Gudrun and Martin Kugler (Vienna, Austria: Kairos Publishing, 2010), paper, 353 pp. (introduction and table of contents available here).Europe is in decline. Once the cradle of Western...

In Praise of Latin

We never forget our Latin teacher, it has often been said. How true it is for others of my generation, I cannot say, but I most assuredly remember mine. In our small high school, situated in the remote Adirondack mountain fastness of northern New York, we had an...

Forgotten Name, Enduring Legacy

Founding Federalist: The Life of Oliver Ellsworth by Michael C. Toth (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2011). 240 pages, $25. When American schoolchildren study the Constitutional Convention, they typically learn a few names—Madison, Randolph, Patterson, Washington—and few...

Universities: American, European, Third World

The literature and documentation of our educational decline have grown enormously in the last quarter-century, but we have now reached the moment when we may see education in perspective. Perspective in this case means the retrospective and prospective glance—but also...

Peter J. Stanlis (1920–2011)

Peter Stanlis, who died on July 18, aged 91, was Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, at Rockford College and a world authority on Edmund Burke and Robert Frost. His scholarship and sheer intellectual courage reconfigured Burke studies by expounding the...

Robert Nisbet and the Idea of Community

A “Best of the Bookman” essay from 1978 discusses Robert Nisbet’s understanding of community and in particular his reading of the great sociologists on the subject of the severe and even pathological isolation of the individual in modern society.

Peter Stanlis, RIP

Dr. Peter J. Stanlis has died. He was a great friend of Russell Kirk and the Kirk Center and a great scholar. We have posted a remembrance of him by Senior Fellow Ian Crowe in the University Bookman. In addition, we would like to call our readers’ attention to two...

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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