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.

Poetry of Transcendence

“A related, and most welcome, theme in Killing Orpheus is memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death. Our lives have become so long, easy, and comfortable that death has become something of an inconvenient truth, which many prefer to ignore or forget. McClatchey is not one of them, thankfully: the collection abounds with reminders of our mortality.”

The Consensus Reality

“In his study of an underlying consensus regarding education, race, and gender, Jonathan Butcher has performed a valuable service for those who wish to understand the true nature of the so-called division within American society today.”

Britain at the Turning Point

“A major theme that runs through Allport’s study is the shifting equilibrium of power relations between the United States and Britain. The war demonstrated that, as British power and resources dwindled, Britain became dependent on material and financial supplies from the United States.”

The Rescue of Culture

The Rescue of Culture

The Intemperate Professor, and Other Cultural Splenetics by Russell Kirk. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965 [revised edition: Sherwood Sugden & Co., 1988]. 163 pp. The afternoon this reviewer completed his reading of this book, he drove along the...

Memories of Johnson

On Essays and LettersI. The two volumes of Johnsonian Miscellanies were abridged and edited by G. Birkbeck Hill and published by Oxford and Harper & Brothers in 1897. Theserecollections contain comments on Johnson from sources other than Boswell. Volume One is 488...

When free trade is not fair exchange

How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly—and the Stark Choices Ahead by Dambisa Moyo. London: Allen Lane, 2011, paper, 226 pages In 2009, when Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo published Dead Aid, her devastating analysis of the inefficacy of Western...

The Deviant University

The university today is being subjected to the brutal searchlight of inquiry and criticism. Ironically, at a time when education has acquired a new mystique and is the method offered for curing most of the ills of society, this mystique is not associated with...

Education as Part of America’s Secular Religion

By leaps and bounds, the demand for education—that is, certified professional instruction in socially approved institutions—has been mounting. While some recentgrowth is the effect of high birth rates, demand for education has grown independently also. School age...

Birzer on Kirk and Strauss

We direct your attention to a recent post on the Imaginative Conservative Blog where Brad Birzer has collected a few forgotten items from the Kirk Center archives and elsewhere on the relationship of Russell Kirk and Leo Strauss. It was more amicable than is generally...

Pointless Protest of American Poetry

Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr. HarperCollins Publishers (New York, NY), 2011, xviii + 200 pp., $25.99 In this, his first book, David Orr, the poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, attempts to persuade the general...

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.

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