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.

To Find Eyes to See

“Hren selects earnest classics that have stood the test of time—books that generations of readers have found edifying and moving. But also, in the introduction and conclusion alike, Hren returns to another key point of fiction: it doesn’t just help us see extraordinary truth, although it can. More important is that fiction gives us eyes to see the transcendence of ordinary lives, including our own.”

Rural America as It Really Is

“Harold Bell Wright, regardless of how literary tastemakers viewed him in the 1920s, is the central figure in the origin of Branson. Though denigrated by the Baldwins and H. L. Menckens of his day, Wright was one of the century’s best-selling novelists.”

The Poet Watches Birds

“Jennifer A. Hartenburg’s debut collection of poems… offers such a poetic practice of waking, attending, and caring. These are poems rich with the life of the world, flocking with birds and bees both literal and metaphorical, but also closely attentive to the quiddities of language and the motions of the soul.”

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...

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...

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.

To Find Eyes to See
@NadyaWilliams81 on "More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature" by Joshua Hren. @WordOnFire Luminor

Rural America as It Really Is
Jason C. Phillips on "Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America" by Joanna Dee Das. @UChicagoPress

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