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.”

Death of a Giant

A tribute to Russell KirkWith the death of Russell Kirk on April 29th at the age of 75, American conservatism has lost one of its true giants. Prior to the middle of the twentieth century, by far the most powerful conservative force in the United States was the...

Why the Union Soldiers Fought

The Union War by Gary W. Gallagher (Harvard University Press, 2011), 256 pages, $28. Nearly every Southerner was raised studying the Civil War, or, as some here call it, the War Between the States. By the time I entered the public school system in Marietta, Georgia,...

An Augustine for Our Age

I first met Russell Kirk when a professor of mine took me to the Kirk home—Piety Hill—in the winter of 1985. Shortly after that I attended an ISIPiety Hill seminar on renewing the higher learning with Dr. Kirk, Stephen Tonsor, and Gerhart Niemeyer presiding. I was a...

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...

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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