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.”

Terror and the ‘Market State’

Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century by Philip Bobbitt (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2008) x + 672 pp, $35.00 (cloth).Phillip Bobbitt thinks big. In the 552 pages of the text of Terror and Consent, he displays a mastery of terrorism, intelligence,...

The Stature of John Courtney Murray

The Stature of John Courtney Murray

John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation edited by Robert P. Hunt and Kenneth L. Grasso (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 312 pp. In 1955, John Tracy Ellis critically chronicled the absence of a vital and distinctively Catholic intellectual tradition in...

Live Where We Are

Live Where We Are

A conversation with John Byron Kuhner, author of a Walden-esque book about Staten Island.

Albert Camus

It is not surprising that liberals and humanists, even the vaguely socialistic, have tried to appropriate Albert Camus. He can no longer protest, although in the posthumously published Carnets (dealing with the years from 1942 to 1951) he did make the contemptuous...

continuity change

Any healthy society requires an enduring contest between its permanence and its progression. We cannot live without continuity, and we cannot live without prudent change.

Welcome to the New Bookman

Welcome to the new University Bookman! After some significant behind the scenes reworking, the country’s oldest conservative book review is back with a new online presence, continuing our decades-long discussion of the important books and ideas of our age. The new...

Welcome to the new Bookman

We are delighted to announce and welcome you to the new online University Bookman. We will be updating weekly and hope you will follow us by e-mail, RSS, or Twitter. Please {encode=webmaster@kirkcenter.org title="let us know"} if any links are broken or pages display...

The Tolstoy Locomotive on the Berlin Track

Twenty-seven years ago, in 1953, at the height of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, a short essay by an Oxford don produced a swiftly swelling wave of praise among public thinkers and intellectuals, elevating its writer to a situation of...

Five Faces of Death

Love Is Stronger than Death by Peter Kreeft (Ignatius Press, 1992; originally published in 1979), 121 pages. It might well be expected that a book on death and how we view it would be gloomy and depressing. But Peter Kreeft’s Love Is Stronger than Death, recommended...

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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