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.

Poetry of Transcendence

“A related, and most welcome, theme in Killing Orpheus is memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death. Our lives have become so long, easy, and comfortable that death has become something of an inconvenient truth, which many prefer to ignore or forget. McClatchey is not one of them, thankfully: the collection abounds with reminders of our mortality.”

The Consensus Reality

“In his study of an underlying consensus regarding education, race, and gender, Jonathan Butcher has performed a valuable service for those who wish to understand the true nature of the so-called division within American society today.”

Britain at the Turning Point

“A major theme that runs through Allport’s study is the shifting equilibrium of power relations between the United States and Britain. The war demonstrated that, as British power and resources dwindled, Britain became dependent on material and financial supplies from the United States.”

Terror and the ‘Market State’

Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century by Philip Bobbitt (New York: A. A. Knopf, 2008) x + 672 pp, $35.00 (cloth).Phillip Bobbitt thinks big. In the 552 pages of the text of Terror and Consent, he displays a mastery of terrorism, intelligence,...

The Stature of John Courtney Murray

The Stature of John Courtney Murray

John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation edited by Robert P. Hunt and Kenneth L. Grasso (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 312 pp. In 1955, John Tracy Ellis critically chronicled the absence of a vital and distinctively Catholic intellectual tradition in...

Live Where We Are

Live Where We Are

A conversation with John Byron Kuhner, author of a Walden-esque book about Staten Island.

Albert Camus

It is not surprising that liberals and humanists, even the vaguely socialistic, have tried to appropriate Albert Camus. He can no longer protest, although in the posthumously published Carnets (dealing with the years from 1942 to 1951) he did make the contemptuous...

continuity change

Any healthy society requires an enduring contest between its permanence and its progression. We cannot live without continuity, and we cannot live without prudent change.

Welcome to the New Bookman

Welcome to the new University Bookman! After some significant behind the scenes reworking, the country’s oldest conservative book review is back with a new online presence, continuing our decades-long discussion of the important books and ideas of our age. The new...

Welcome to the new Bookman

We are delighted to announce and welcome you to the new online University Bookman. We will be updating weekly and hope you will follow us by e-mail, RSS, or Twitter. Please {encode=webmaster@kirkcenter.org title="let us know"} if any links are broken or pages display...

The Tolstoy Locomotive on the Berlin Track

Twenty-seven years ago, in 1953, at the height of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union, a short essay by an Oxford don produced a swiftly swelling wave of praise among public thinkers and intellectuals, elevating its writer to a situation of...

Five Faces of Death

Love Is Stronger than Death by Peter Kreeft (Ignatius Press, 1992; originally published in 1979), 121 pages. It might well be expected that a book on death and how we view it would be gloomy and depressing. But Peter Kreeft’s Love Is Stronger than Death, recommended...

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.

.@JM_Butcher himself admits that there are in fact important divisions within American society, but he believes that “Americans are united on some very important questions that are driving debates in statehouses, schoolhouses, and even your house.” In this, as in nearly all that

Despite [Kirk's] and others’ efforts to prevent further decline in transcendent beliefs, more than a century later, it is clear that those Americans who adhere to them represent a small and frequently marginalized minority. @fhmcclatchey must be counted among their number, for he

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