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.

Would you consider a gift to help us continue this work?

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

John Adams: Russell Kirk’s Founding Federalist

“…[Kirk] located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both ‘the most successful conservative device in the history of the world’ and a ‘great monument’ to the Federalists.”

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.

The Brothers Stuart and the Rise of Protestant England

“…Belloc remains a draught of fresh air and a happy antidote to the official version of English national history, with its idealized tale of public-spirited reforms and liberal advances broadening down to the happy present.”

The Fog of the American War for Independence

“Academic and popular history of the period has long noted the early intimidation and violence that accompanied the rise of an American political consciousness and revolutionary movement.”

“To Think Faith” as Educators

“…faith and pedagogy should be in harmony. Smith’s guide is not a theory of faith and teaching or how to sprinkle faith within teaching. ‘It offers repeated practice at noticing and thinking through ways in which faith and the process of teaching might connect in everyday practice,’ in the mundane moments of elementary, secondary, or higher education classrooms.”

Habit and Being in Burke

Peter Stanlis is well known to students of eighteenth-century history and literature as the author of Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (1958) and, indeed, this book and his many essays and articles have brought him recognition as one of the country’s leading...

Ancient Virtues in a Postmodern World

Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Twenty-First Century by Howard Gardner. Basic Books, 2011, 244 pp., $26. As author of Multiple Intelligences, Harvard professor Howard Gardner stands as perhaps the most celebrated, and misapplied,...

The Rescue of Culture

The Rescue of Culture

The Intemperate Professor, and Other Cultural Splenetics by Russell Kirk. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965 [revised edition: Sherwood Sugden & Co., 1988]. 163 pp. The afternoon this reviewer completed his reading of this book, he drove along the...

Memories of Johnson

On Essays and LettersI. The two volumes of Johnsonian Miscellanies were abridged and edited by G. Birkbeck Hill and published by Oxford and Harper & Brothers in 1897. Theserecollections contain comments on Johnson from sources other than Boswell. Volume One is 488...

When free trade is not fair exchange

How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly—and the Stark Choices Ahead by Dambisa Moyo. London: Allen Lane, 2011, paper, 226 pages In 2009, when Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo published Dead Aid, her devastating analysis of the inefficacy of Western...

The Deviant University

The university today is being subjected to the brutal searchlight of inquiry and criticism. Ironically, at a time when education has acquired a new mystique and is the method offered for curing most of the ills of society, this mystique is not associated with...

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...

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.

Kirk saw poetry, fiction, tradition, and restraint as essential to understanding America and preserving its character. In his review of "On America," @cjscalia explores Kirk’s vision of the founding, statesmanship, literature, and the enduring ideas that have shaped the republic.

The Audacious Russell Kirk
Bruce P. Frohnen reviews "On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776" by Russell Kirk. Edited by Michael Lucchese.

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