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.”

From Materialism to Meaning

The Southern Critics: An Anthology edited by Glen Arbery. Wilmington, DE: ISI Press, 2010, 384 pp. paper, $22Glen Arbery has compiled the key writings of the Southern Critics, a loosely affiliated group of writers, poets, and teachers in the early decades of the last...

Conservation as a Conservative Concern

The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, 3rd edition, by Wendell Berry (Sierra Club Books, 1996; originally published in 1977), 234 pages.In one of his syndicated columns published during the 1970s, the founder of The University Bookman famously wrote,...

Max Lerner’s America

Max Lerner’s America

America as a Civilization, by Max Lerner. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957, 1,011 pp.By attempting to discuss everything in America, Professor Lerner succeeds in analyzing nothing well. Pretentious and shallow, America as a Civilization offers little insight into...

Spring Newsletter

The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Spring 2011) has just been posted. It features a profile of Ian Crowe, the new editor of Studies in Burke and His Times and an interview with W. Winston Elliott III. You can download it, and past issues, here.

Conservatism, Journalism, and Pop Culture

A conversation with John J. Miller.The University Bookman is delighted to post this interview with John J. Miller, who will become the director of the journalism program at Hillsdale College in August. He is also a long-time national correspondent at National Review...

The Big Life of Brownson

Orestes A. Brownson: A Definitive Biography by Thomas R. Ryan, C.PP.S. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1976, 872 pages. ISBN 0879738847.He was called “a walking variorum of all sorts of opinions,” “an American Marxist before Marx,” “the American...

You Have the Body

Habeas Corpus. From England to Empire by Paul D. Halliday. (Harvard University Press, 2010, 502 pp., $39.95) The legal right to be judged by a neutral arbiter before as a condition of imprisonment is deeply ingrained in the Anglo-American legal system, so much so that...

Two Cold Warriors

The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War by Nicholas Thompson. Henry Holt and Company, 2009, ISBN: 978-0-8050-8142-8, pp. 403, $27.50The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War is not a...

The Farewell Address Revisited

As late as a century ago Washington’s Farewell Address would have ranked along with the Declaration and the Constitution as an intellectual source of periodic self-renewal for American patriots. It was still being memorized and declaimed in schools and referred to...

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

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