The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
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Each week the Bookman brings you fresh reviews of the books that build culture, and essays that enliven the Permanent Things. Last year nearly 90,000 visitors engaged with the Bookman’s reviews, all free of charge and with no advertising to disrupt the reading experience. Our writers are touching hearts and minds across the globe with their reviews, bringing wisdom, creativity, and beauty to bear on the most important conversations happening in literature and culture.
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If just 1 in 4 of our readers contributed $10, we’d dramatically increase our capacity to recruit the brightest young writers and tackle more books and topics, all with a Kirkian angle. We’ve set a goal of raising $20k this month in order to continue our mission. Exceeding this amount will allow us to expand our work even more.
If you love the Bookman, and read us with regularity, we’d greatly appreciate your generous support this month.
With gratitude,
Luke Sheahan, Ph.D., editor
The University Bookman
P.S. As a special thank you to all Bookman supporters this month, we’ll send you a link to an audio recording of Ex Tenebris, one of Kirk’s best ghostly short stories. We think you’ll really enjoy it.
Campaign Progress
Metternich vs. McEmpire
Symposium: Conservatism and EmpireConservatism is poorly understood in the United States. It is not right-wing liberalism or nationalism; nor is it political Protestantism. It has nothing to do with a neurotic longing for an ideal past, and reactionaries who insist...
Love and Evil in Nazi Germany
In the Garden of Beasts by Eric Larsen (Crown, 2011). 464 pages, $26. In the Garden of Beasts features William E. Dodd, the American ambassador posted to Nazi Germany from 1933 through the end of 1937. Dodd, a 64-year-old University of Chicago history professor, was...
First Principles: Remedy for a Nation at Risk
This April occurs the tenth anniversary of the now historic educational report A Nation at Risk. A flurry of activity from educators, editors, and legislators came as a result of that document, which stated “The ideal of academic excellence as the primary goal of...
rak variety
A “conservative character [is] suspicious of doctrinaire alteration, respectful toward history, preferring variety over uniformity, acknowledging a moral order composed of human persons, not of mere political and economic atoms subservient to the state.”
Updated Kirk Bibliography
A second edition of our archivist Charles C. Brown's Russell Kirk: A Bibliography has been released by ISI Books, fully revised and updated. There is a kind review by James Heiser at The New American.
Russell Kirk on C-SPAN
We recently updated our video links with listings from two talks from Russell Kirk, including The Conservative Movement, Then & Now, a talk given for the Heritage Foundation in 1980.
Hiatus
Have you caught up on the recent articles from Gerald Russello? Debating the Constitution in City Journal, and Faith from the Hearth and Public Schools: Faith-Free Zones in the National Catholic Register.
Bottom Rail on Top
Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son by William Alexander Percy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 348 pp. Lanterns on the Levee, William Alexander Percy’s eloquent autobiography, has been a minor classic since its initial publication in 1941. It was written...
A few links we recommend
• The New Atlantis has a great symposium on Place and Placelessness in America with several essays that are well worth your time. • The Imaginative Conservative has a three-part series by John Willson on the historian Carlton Hayes (whom we covered in this 2010...
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.
