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.
Santayana’s Liberty
The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion in the United States by George Santayana, edited by James Seaton. Yale University Press, 2009. Paper, 240 pp. $16.This volume contains in full the two title works of George Santayana (1863–1952) as...
Modern Flaws and Lasting Norms
Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics, by Russell Kirk. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1969 [Open Court 1999]. Russell Kirk remains consistently one of the most interesting American defenders of the conservative...
On What Knowledge Pertains To
On Essays and LettersIn tightly reasoned and intricate books, especially those of great writers, we find short segments that we do well to spell out as short essays of our own. A thing is never ours unless we state it, articulate it. The great Platonic teaching is...
The Dark Ages of the Enlightenment
The Brave New World of the Enlightenment by Louis I. Bredvold. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961. 164 pp. Fifteen years ago, Louis I. Bredvold noted that Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers needed badly to be rewritten....
Significance and Missteps
Adam Schwartz looks at a recent intellectual biography of G. K. Chesterton that breaks new ground in the field, but also makes some significant missteps in interpretation.
Wilhelm Roepke and the ‘Third Road’
The enormous span of Wilhelm Roepke’s interests and writings complicates the task of doing justice to his thought within the confines of an essay. Hence, I have elected to focus on just one aspect of his approach and of his philosophy, but one that has proved to be...
Democracy’s Immoderate Friends
A conversation with Daniel J. Mahoney.The University Bookman is pleased to present this interview with Daniel J. Mahoney, Professor of Political Science at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and author of a recent book, The Conservative Foundations of the...
The Merging of Cultures
The West in Russia and China by Donald W. Treadgold. Volume 1, Russia 1472–1917, xxx + 324 pp. Volume 2, China 1582–1949, xxi + 251 pp. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973. This work is an extraordinary undertaking. One scholar working by himself traces the...
The Public Responsibilities of Known American Poets
Recently, Forbes magazine attempted to measure the effect of Ruth Lilly’s $185 million bequest to the Poetry Foundation. That foundation, which publishes Poetry magazine, claims that it reached 19 million new poetry readers last year. John Barr, its president, a poet...
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.
