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.

A Heroic Little Sparrow Shines Brightly in the Dark World of Children’s Literature

“The story is as delightful and charming as it sounds, recounting the odyssey of a virtuous sparrow named Passer who must move his family to a new home after ‘big yellow machines’ appear at his home.”

Ulyssean Interrogations at Dusk, or Slowing Down at 65

“Odysseus himself was offered immortality by the nymph Calypso—and refused it. He chose instead to return to his wife Penelope, a mortal woman who would age. He chose to return to a finite life marked by loss, memory, and longing; and in that choice, I have always thought, lies his greatest courage—and his deepest wisdom… I hope and I believe that I would have made the same Ulyssean decision.”

From the Man Who Loved America

“Angelo Codevilla advanced and argued for an anti-Wilsonian approach to both American foreign and American domestic policy.”

Imaginative Conservative

The Imaginative Conservative blog has been posting lots of great material by and about Russell Kirk, including Kirk's reflection on the twelve days of Christmas, the 1953 review of The Conservative Mind from the New York Times, and a selection on the unbought grace of...

Books in Little

The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion by Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger (Ignatius Press, 85 pp.) Does the free state have pre-political moral foundations? This slim volume contains opposing answers to this question by Habermas, one of...

What Is All This?

Russell Kirk presented this lecture as the 1986 Commencement Address at La Lumiere School. Once upon a time I was seated in an automobile passing rapidly along the broad highway that runs between Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. My companion in the back seat was the very...

The Long Twilight

On Essays and Letters“If we say that human civilization has existed for about a millionth of the age of this Galaxy, we may not be far wrong.” —Arthur C. Clarke, 1963. On every side, we are besieged with theories telling us that, due to man, we are depriving future...

Conservatism in Germany

In Remembrance of Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing (1927–2009)The year 1968 not only marked the culmination of the students’ rebellion, but also the starting point for a conservative counter movement in Germany. Three developments were caused by this event: In 1970 Caspar...

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...

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.

Smithian Wisdom on Demand
@mungowitz on "Just Sentiments: 22 More Smithian Essays" Edited by Daniel B. Klein and @erikwmatson
CL Press/Fraser Institute

From the Man Who Loved America
Chuck Chalberg on "Fighting Enemies Foreign and Domestic: The Legacy of Angelo M. Codevilla," Edited by @RpwWilliams @EncounterBooks

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