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.”

Magister

Last Rites by John Lukacs, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT) $25.00 hardcover, 2009 It is now twenty years since John Lukacs made his Confessions of an Original Sinner. Has time rolled ’round so soon for his Last Rites? That is the title of his second...

Looking Over Their Shoulder: Orwell and the Intellectuals

Every Intellectual’s Big Brother: George Orwell's Literary Siblings by John Rodden, University of Texas Press (Austin, Texas) 263 pp, $45.00, 2006   The title of Every Intellectual’s Big Brother seems to suggest that there is something malign about the influence...

Mystery Bathed in Light

The Mind that Is Catholic. Philosophical and Political Essays, by James V. Schall, S.J. Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC) 337 pp, $34.95, 2008 . . . but nobody thought the whole commonwealth fell with the king, or that he alone had ultimate...

Reading Peter Viereck Anew

Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals by Peter Viereck (Reprint Edition with an earlier preface by the author) Transaction Publishers (New Brunswick, N.J.) 330 pp., $34.95 paper, 2007 Unadjusted Man in an Age of Overadjustment by Peter Viereck (Reprint Edition with a...

New World Man

Champlain’s Dream by David Hackett Fischer, New York: Simon and Schuster,848 pp., $40.00, 2009In the 1830s Black Hawk, chief of the Sac and Fox nations, recalled one of his people’s earliest memories. Many years before, his ancestor in the St. Lawrence Valley had a...

Transition

This issue represents the end result of a half-century of conservative reflection on the important books in our cultural conversation. When Russell Kirk founded this journal in 1960, he faced a world beset by liberal ideology, with small place, if any at all, for...

regeneration of the spirit

The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, with the regeneration of the spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life...

Bookman in Print

The last full print issue of The University Bookman is now in the mail and posted here. Subscribers to The University Bookman who wish to receive a copy of The Essential Russell Kirk in lieu of the remainder of their subscription should e-mail the publisher at...

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

Load More

Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman