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.”

Individual and Community—and God

The Difference God Makes: A Catholic Vision of Faith, Communion, and Culture by Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 2009.This collection of essays by Chicago Archbishop Francis Cardinal George brings the resources of the Catholic...

Habit and Being in Burke

Peter Stanlis is well known to students of eighteenth-century history and literature as the author of Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (1958) and, indeed, this book and his many essays and articles have brought him recognition as one of the country’s leading...

Ancient Virtues in a Postmodern World

Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Twenty-First Century by Howard Gardner. Basic Books, 2011, 244 pp., $26. As author of Multiple Intelligences, Harvard professor Howard Gardner stands as perhaps the most celebrated, and misapplied,...

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...

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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