The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Frontier Fiction at Its Best

“This classic frontier story—of the fostered orphan who escapes the baddies who killed his family and who returns to wreak vengeance upon them—is enriched by a vivid depiction of Comanche culture and traditional way of life and by narrative motifs whose roots are deep in the soil of myth and fable…”

The Triumph of Love

Muses of a Fire: Essays on Faith, Film, and Literature By Paul Krause. Stone Tower Press, 2024. Paperback, 227 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Jesse Russell. oman Polanski’s 1974 masterpiece Chinatown is not only a classic of film noir, but it is also...

Understanding the Rest of Hemingway’s Iceberg

Hemingway’s Art of Revision: The Making of the Short Fiction By John Beall.  Louisiana State University Press, 2024.  Hardcover, 310 pages, $50. Reviewed by Sean C. Hadley. n Brad Paisley’s 2005 hit song, “Alcohol,” the country musician sings about...

The Postmodern Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien

“Even if Tolkien did not understand his literary enterprise as distinctively modernist, many of the techniques he deployed—the creation of a secondary world, for instance, or his invented languages, and above all the metatextual integration of poetry and prose—nonetheless bear a resemblance to the experiments in letters conducted by his more avant-garde peers.”

The Graces of Death and Nature

The Graces of Death and Nature

“Three of America’s most famous writers and intellectuals, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James, came to believe that death was a beginning, a moment of renewal and regeneration, not the finality of dissolution.”

Right Populism 

Right Populism 

“[Kendall] thus seems likely to remain a challenging figure within the conservative intellectual tradition, but the challenges he offers his readers should make a study of his thought a more profitable exercise, not less.”

Squeezing Out Virtue and Beauty

Squeezing Out Virtue and Beauty

“…the presence of CTLs raise a fundamental question about teaching and learning themselves: can teaching and learning be reduced to a single methodology or are they by nature resistant to it?”

Russell Kirk’s Book of Love

Russell Kirk’s Book of Love

“Kirk’s conservatism was the conservatism of loss—not of rout or retreat, and certainly not despair, but a conservatism that treasures what is gone as well as what we have. Our civilization of love, the age of chivalry, is dead. Yet the dead are with us still.”

Russell Kirk’s Book of Love

Conservatives’ Cornerstone

“A populist, anti-ideological Kirkian conservatism of the heart remains Americans’ best hope for national renewal, and the Right’s only real path back to national leadership.”

Russell Kirk’s Book of Love

Russell Kirk and The Conservative Mind

“With eloquence and conviction Kirk demonstrated that reflective conservatism is neither a smokescreen for selfishness nor the ritual incantation of the privileged. It is an attitude toward life with moral substance of its own.”

Russell Kirk’s Book of Love

The Conservative Mind at 70

“[Kirk’s] own brand of conservatism admitted principles but regarded ‘positions’ and ‘dogmata’… with hostility. He blended a nostalgic romanticism with a Burkean faith in the advantages of tradition and ‘sound prejudice.'”

Russell Kirk’s Book of Love

Whispers From Kirk

“The challenge for conservatives is to create a substantive program within their own tradition without having to feed off the carcass of liberalism.”

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.

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