The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Join Kirktober and help support the mission of the University Bookman

 

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.”

Birzer on Kirk and Strauss

We direct your attention to a recent post on the Imaginative Conservative Blog where Brad Birzer has collected a few forgotten items from the Kirk Center archives and elsewhere on the relationship of Russell Kirk and Leo Strauss. It was more amicable than is generally...

Pointless Protest of American Poetry

Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr. HarperCollins Publishers (New York, NY), 2011, xviii + 200 pp., $25.99 In this, his first book, David Orr, the poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, attempts to persuade the general...

From Materialism to Meaning

The Southern Critics: An Anthology edited by Glen Arbery. Wilmington, DE: ISI Press, 2010, 384 pp. paper, $22Glen Arbery has compiled the key writings of the Southern Critics, a loosely affiliated group of writers, poets, and teachers in the early decades of the last...

Conservation as a Conservative Concern

The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, 3rd edition, by Wendell Berry (Sierra Club Books, 1996; originally published in 1977), 234 pages.In one of his syndicated columns published during the 1970s, the founder of The University Bookman famously wrote,...

Max Lerner’s America

Max Lerner’s America

America as a Civilization, by Max Lerner. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957, 1,011 pp.By attempting to discuss everything in America, Professor Lerner succeeds in analyzing nothing well. Pretentious and shallow, America as a Civilization offers little insight into...

Spring Newsletter

The latest number of the Russell Kirk Center newsletter (Spring 2011) has just been posted. It features a profile of Ian Crowe, the new editor of Studies in Burke and His Times and an interview with W. Winston Elliott III. You can download it, and past issues, here.

Conservatism, Journalism, and Pop Culture

A conversation with John J. Miller.The University Bookman is delighted to post this interview with John J. Miller, who will become the director of the journalism program at Hillsdale College in August. He is also a long-time national correspondent at National Review...

The Big Life of Brownson

Orestes A. Brownson: A Definitive Biography by Thomas R. Ryan, C.PP.S. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1976, 872 pages. ISBN 0879738847.He was called “a walking variorum of all sorts of opinions,” “an American Marxist before Marx,” “the American...

You Have the Body

Habeas Corpus. From England to Empire by Paul D. Halliday. (Harvard University Press, 2010, 502 pp., $39.95) The legal right to be judged by a neutral arbiter before as a condition of imprisonment is deeply ingrained in the Anglo-American legal system, so much so that...

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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