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.”

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...

Karl von Habsburg on Russell Kirk

Von Habsburg speaks on the influence of Russell Kirk in Europe. This video is from a 2000 celebration in Prague for the publication of The Conservative Mind in Czech.You can watch it on Vimeo. Running time: 08:10. Karl von Habsburg is the son of Otto von Habsburg....

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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