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.”

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...

From Materialism to Meaning

The Southern Critics: An Anthology edited by Glen Arbery. Wilmington, DE: ISI Press, 2010, 384 pp. paper, $22Glen Arbery has compiled the key writings of the Southern Critics, a loosely affiliated group of writers, poets, and teachers in the early decades of the last...

Conservation as a Conservative Concern

The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, 3rd edition, by Wendell Berry (Sierra Club Books, 1996; originally published in 1977), 234 pages.In one of his syndicated columns published during the 1970s, the founder of The University Bookman famously wrote,...

Max Lerner’s America

Max Lerner’s America

America as a Civilization, by Max Lerner. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957, 1,011 pp.By attempting to discuss everything in America, Professor Lerner succeeds in analyzing nothing well. Pretentious and shallow, America as a Civilization offers little insight into...

Spring Newsletter

The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Spring 2011) has just been posted. It features a profile of Ian Crowe, the new editor of Studies in Burke and His Times and an interview with W. Winston Elliott III. You can download it, and past issues, here.

Conservatism, Journalism, and Pop Culture

A conversation with John J. Miller.The University Bookman is delighted to post this interview with John J. Miller, who will become the director of the journalism program at Hillsdale College in August. He is also a long-time national correspondent at National Review...

The Big Life of Brownson

Orestes A. Brownson: A Definitive Biography by Thomas R. Ryan, C.PP.S. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1976, 872 pages. ISBN 0879738847.He was called “a walking variorum of all sorts of opinions,” “an American Marxist before Marx,” “the American...

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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