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.”

Transition

This issue represents the end result of a half-century of conservative reflection on the important books in our cultural conversation. When Russell Kirk founded this journal in 1960, he faced a world beset by liberal ideology, with small place, if any at all, for...

regeneration of the spirit

The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, with the regeneration of the spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life...

Bookman in Print

The last full print issue of The University Bookman is now in the mail and posted here. Subscribers to The University Bookman who wish to receive a copy of The Essential Russell Kirk in lieu of the remainder of their subscription should e-mail the publisher at...

Russello Writings

Bookman editor Gerald J. Russello has been active in publishing recently with a review of Kenneth Minogue’s The Servile Mind online at City Journal; a review of Jonah Goldberg’s Proud to be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation at the American Spectator; a...

Literature and the Contract of Eternal Society

Some years ago, I walked across the braes from Old Cumnock, in Ayrshire, to the village of Ochiltree. Now Ochiltree is the “Barbie” of George Douglas Brown’s grim realistic novel The House with the Green Shutters. And the Scottish village of Ochiltree is dying. Brown...

The Moral Conservatism of Hawthorne

Conservatism in America, though so often defeated at the polls, always has held its head high among men of letters. And in some ways the most influential American writer of conservative instincts was Nathaniel Hawthorne, the “boned pirate,” the master of allegory,...

Kirk in Traverse Magazine

John J. Miller has a lovely article about Dr. Kirk and his life and legacy in the January issue of Traverse Magazine, now released online. Take a look.

The Measure of Abraham Lincoln

“Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks were beginning to be felt, there would still be enough square miles of earth for elbow-room; but that ineffable sentiment made up of memory and hope, of instinct and tradition, which swells every man’s heart...

Education and the Information Revolution

The major ceremonies of the academic community have traditionally been the fall convocation and the spring commencement. This year Russell Kirk, a nationally recognized historian, author, educator and political theorist, played an important role in Grand Valley’s...

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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