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.”

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.”

Reality Check for Politics

“…Lawrence Mead throws tact out the window and, instead, lays bare our collective failure to properly and honestly address myriad social changes that have occurred since the 1960s—namely, widening cultural difference and group balkanization; unprecedented levels of immigration from the non-West; and the rise of identitarianism, especially from the social justice-Left.”

How to Love What is Permanent

“Throughout the book, Gibbs pleads with his readers that we not only think of the soul in terms of salvation but also in terms of health. Good taste won’t save one’s soul. But it will nourish the soul and incline the soul towards virtue much more than the bad taste we will acquire from mediocre things.”

Eliot Conference

The Kirk Center is co-sponsoring a conference on T. S. Eliot on August 14–16, 2008 in conjunction with the new edition of Dr. Kirk's book, Eliot and His Age. See the conference page for details. A full schedule is now available.

Colson on Kirk

We were pleased to note Chuck Colson referencing Russell Kirk so warmly, and correctly noting Dr. Kirk's rejection of ideology, in a commentary from June 6, 2008 titled “True Conservatism.”

Defending the Conversation

In the newest of the Bookman's web-only content, James Seaton reviews Anthony Kronman's stirring defense of a traditional liberal-arts education. Click here for the review!

A Stirring Defense of the Conversation

Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T. Kronman. Yale University Press (New Haven), 320 pages, hardcover, $27.50; 2007 In the decades since The Closing of the American Mind became a bestseller, many critics...

Kirk on Eliot

A new edition of Dr. Kirk's acclaimed literary biography, Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century is being published in July 2008 by ISI Books.

From National Executive to Therapist-in-Chief

The Evolution of the Modern Presidency: An Interview with Gene HealyThe University Bookman is pleased to offer this exclusive interview with Gene Healy, a senior editor at the Cato Institute. A widely-published writer on the modern executive, he has just published The...

Books in Little

T. S. Eliot, by Craig Raine (Oxford University Press, 202 pp., 2006). “It has been a chief purpose of good poetry,” Russell Kirk wrote, “to reinterpret and vindicate the norms of human existence.” In his thorough reading of Eliot’s work, particularly his poetry, Raine...

The Truth about Roy Campbell

An excerpt from The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict (Wm. B. Eerdmans; Grand Rapids, Mich.; 1995) Another of Kirk’s friends of the Fifties, the lyric poet Roy Campbell, by accident went over an Iberian cliff, though he had survived...

A Portrait of the Artist as an Exile: Dante Alighieri

A Portrait of the Artist as an Exile: Dante Alighieri

Dante: The Poet, The Political Thinker, The Man by Barbara Reynolds. Shoemaker & Hoard (Emeryville, Calif.), 466 pp., $35.00 cloth, 2006 Renowned not only as the greatest Italian poet but also as a signal influence upon all of Western literature, Dante Alighieri...

The Book Gallery

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

How to Love What is Permanent
Sarah Reardon on "Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity" by Joshua Gibbs.
@CirceInstitute

Personalism in the Age of AI Grant R. Martsolf on "Personalism for the Twenty-First Century: Essays in Honor of David Walsh" Edited by Thomas W. Holman and Richard Avramenko.
@RLPublisher

Load More

Shop through Regnery
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman