The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Watch James Panero of the New Criterion discuss “The Urbanity of Russell Kirk” at the 2025 Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.

The Urbanity of Russell Kirk

“The urban fabric must also be mended and darned through continuous upkeep. The city is not yours to experiment. From Russell to Russello, our ancestral spirits cast their shadows whether or not we choose to observe the city of god in the cities of men.”

Marxism and the Rising Generation

“Gonzalez and Gorka have performed an important service in bringing together a wide range of fact and theory and in establishing a coherent line stretching directly from Marx through many important figures to the present day.”

Cracking the Code to Civilization

“In a world flooded with online influencers, ‘red pill’ rhetoric, and algorithmic posturing, Newell offers something older, wiser, and far superior: a code of manliness rooted in the Western tradition of virtue, character, and service. His message is that true manliness is not a pose or performance; it is the integration of moral and intellectual excellence, what he calls ‘the manly heart.’”

France and the Problem of Abstraction

“…French people’s love for ideas, indeed for ideology, often puts them at odds with the pragmatic requisites of a mature democracy and with reality itself. France is, as she very aptly puts it, ‘a country of dreamers who fall into melancholy when reality catches up with them.’ But far from being merely a psychological explanation for French unhappiness, this idealism is the key to a political understanding of our complicated relationship with the very principle of democracy.”

Kirk Video Companion Site

On this, the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Russell Kirk, April 29, we would like to announce the posting of a link to a companion website that features video interviews with scholars, prominent persons in the conservative movement, and with Russell Kirk...

Companion Site for Kirk Audio and Video

Dr. David Schock has produced several audio and video recordings by and about Russell Kirk and is hosting them on a companion web site: TheWardrobe.org. We are pleased to welcome a companion web site, produced by Dr. David Schock, that features video interviews with...

Permanent Things Newsletter

We are pleased to announce a new number of Permanent Things, the newsletter of the Russell Kirk Center, edited by Ben Lockerd. The spring 2009 edition features a retrospective of thirty years of the Wilbur Foundation program. You may download it at this link (PDF,...

Books in Little

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Regnery Publishing, Inc., 289 pp.) Most standard surveys of Western civilization tend to treat superficially, if they treat at all, the period of history stretching from the fall of the Roman...

A Patron Saint of Teachers

A Patron Saint of Teachers

On Essays and Letters“Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the death penalty. I doubt whether you would know that St. Cassian of Imola was stabbed to death by his students with their styli. His death, a martyr’s honorable one, made him a...

Six Honest Serving-Men

Six Honest Serving-Men

The Information-Literate Historian: A Guide to Research for History Students by Jenny L. Presnell. Oxford University Press (New York City) 256 pp., $17.95 paper 2006I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And...

Morality in History and Historiography

Morality in History and Historiography

Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War by Harry S. Stout. Viking Penguin (New York) 576 pp., $29.95 cloth, 2006 Harry Stout, the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale University, has written another...

Toward a Conservative Conservation Movement

Toward a Conservative Conservation Movement

Why Conservation Is Failing and How It Can Regain Ground by Eric T. Freyfogle. Yale University Press (New Haven, Conn.) 302 pp., $37.00 cloth, 2006Environmental conservation has moved from the margin to the political mainstream in recent decades. However, despite the...

A Foreign Policy for (Probably Not Very Many) Americans

“Men of Kalidu, the centuries look down upon you!” So cried His Excellency, Manfred Arcane,Minister Without Portfolio to his Mightiness Achmet XI, Hereditary President of Hamnegri and Sultan in Kalidu. This day the wise and virtuous Minister, confidential servant to...

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.

"Delsol’s analysis stands out for the breadth of its perspective. Her essay covers topics as varied as corporatism, the French love for status and strikes, immigration, religion and secularism, populism and the role of intellectuals, Jacobinism, and the EU..."

Cracking the Code to Civilization
@CliffordBates12 on "The Code of Man: Love, Courage, Pride, Family, Country" (2nd Edition) by @waller_newell

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