The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Join friends of the Bookman in New York City on December 8, 2025 for the Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.

William F. Buckley Jr.: Literary Figure

“…the American public intellectual might best be appreciated as a literary figure. Producing about 350,000 words for publication yearly at the peak of his career, Buckley was never at a loss for what to say or how to say it.”

Defending the Christian Faith

“In 100 Tough Questions For Catholics: Common Obstacles To Faith Today… David G. Bonagura, Jr. gives bite-sized answers to dozens of big questions about the faith.”

Natural Law and the Need for Moral Clarity

“Christians need clarity on the way their faith shapes their political activity. This ambiguous book fails to provide that clarity.”

Moral Realism Over and Against Contingent Pluralism

“The challenge for… all natural law theorists is the proper ordering and integration of the contingencies of a given culture and the universality of the primary precepts of natural law.”

History on Improper Principles

“The condescending attitude—even animus—behind this book is, in fact, among the reasons Trump came to power in the first place. Voters, clearly sick of being sneered at by elites like Lichtman and his colleagues in the established commentariat, have turned to populism as an outlet for their frustrations.”

Northwest Passages

by Staff | Nov 30, 2008

The Canoe and the Saddle By Theodore Winthrop Edited By Paul J. Lindholt University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln) 240 pp., $13.95 paper, 2006 Good Pacific Northwest literature peels back the layers of cant that have accumulated over time about this region and gives...

Stealing Dorothy

by Caleb Stegall | Nov 30, 2008

‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ and My Fortunate Home by Caleb Stegall If ever an association between a book and state has been stamped on the national consciousness it must be the up-and-down literary-geographical marriage between Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz...

The ‘Time’ of Elizabeth Madox Roberts

by Staff | Nov 30, 2008

In 1926 Elizabeth Madox Roberts, a 45-year-old former schoolteacher from Springfield, Kentucky, published her first novel. The Time of Man came out to great acclaim; it was reviewed widely, admired here and abroad by writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Glenway Wescott,...

Robert Traver: Anatomy of a Fisherman

by Staff | Nov 30, 2008

The eight nudists arrested near Battle Creek, Michigan, had an advocate in the novelist and fishing writer Robert Traver. His disapproval fell not upon them but upon the police officers involved in the arrests. He called one of them a “deputized window-peeper” and...

On Brooklyn’s Side

by Staff | Nov 30, 2008

New York City does not normally figure in the regionalist imagination, either conservative or liberal. It is self- and other-described as the original melting pot, the place where people move when they are getting away from somewhere else, to land in a no-man’s land...

What About Booth?

by Staff | Nov 30, 2008

Newton Booth Tarkington, Neglected Hoosier During a recent lecture, the eminent and usually trustworthy literary critic Joseph Epstein befuddled at least one audience member (me) by referring to Theodore Dreiser as the “greatest American author of the twentieth...

Look Homeward

by Staff | Nov 29, 2008

The Bookman is very pleased to present this special issue on regionalism, with guest editor Bill Kauffman. Bill is one of the most provocative and compelling of a new generation of conservative writers. Hehas gone back and retrieved an almost forgotten tradition of...

Histories Right and Left

by Staff | Nov 11, 2008

Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s by Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. (Harvard University Press, 2008), 373 pp. A Conservative History of the American Left by Daniel J. Flynn (Crown Forum, 2008), 455 pp. By some accounts,...