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.
Sketches of Painterly Lives
The Art of the Art BiographyRecently I met up with an agent to discuss my next book. What about writing a biography of an artist?, he suggested. What about the research?, I responded. As an editor and art critic for a monthly magazine, I just couldn’t see clearing my...
The Man Who Built Ireland
Kevin O’Higgins: Builder of the Irish State by John P. McCarthy. Irish Academic Press (Portland, Ore.), xvi/312 pp., $35.00 cloth, 2006 The subtitle of John P. McCarthy’s new biography of Kevin O’Higgins, “builder of the Irish state,” seems, at first glance, to...
An Architect for all Purposes
Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests: Medieval, Modernist, American, Ecumenical by Douglass Shand-Tucci. University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst), 624 pp., $49.95 cloth, 2005Ralph Adams Cram was a man of such prodigious talents that even two volumes of...
Fromthe Nightstand of a Bookman . . .
University Bookman contributor Bruce Frohnen recommends the following biographies: Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. With three volumes out and one more to come, this masterful dissection of the corruptions of power should be a warning to all fans of the...
The State of Biography
“You’ve got to be a bit ruthless, I think, to write a biography.” —Peter Cameron, The City of Your Final Destination “. . . be versatile, cunning, and ruthless in his pursuit—in other words, have all the attributes of a good spy.” —Erika Ostrovsky, Eye of Dawn: The...
The Lives of Others
“A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature.” These words of Edmund Burke, which Russell Kirk often invoked, bring home to us, in a set of striking images and historical allusions (the girl is Joan...
New Bookman
The new Spring issue of the University Bookman is out and the full contents are posted on our site. The issue is devoted to the art of biography with reviews of new books on Ralph Adams Cram (by Dan McCarthy), Orestes Brownson, conservative luminary Gerhart Niemeyer,...
Kirk Audio: Two Revolutions
We have posted a 50-minute audio lecture from 1990 with Dr. Kirk speaking on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and related themes.
Kirk Audio: Rights Under Two Revolutions
Russell Kirk speaks on the French and American Revolutions in this 1990 audio recording.Recorded June 1, 1990, “Rights under Two Revolutions” is an almost 50-minute discussion comparing the French Revolution and the American struggle for rights under English law that...
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
