The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

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Each week the Bookman brings you fresh reviews of the books that build culture, and essays that enliven the Permanent Things. Last year nearly 90,000 visitors engaged with the Bookman’s reviews, all free of charge and with no advertising to disrupt the reading experience. Our writers are touching hearts and minds across the globe with their reviews, bringing wisdom, creativity, and beauty to bear on the most important conversations happening in literature and culture.

Would you consider a gift to help us continue this work?

If just 1 in 4 of our readers contributed $10, we’d dramatically increase our capacity to recruit the brightest young writers and tackle more books and topics, all with a Kirkian angle. We’ve set a goal of raising $20k this month in order to continue our mission. Exceeding this amount will allow us to expand our work even more.

If you love the Bookman, and read us with regularity, we’d greatly appreciate your generous support this month.

With gratitude,

Luke Sheahan, Ph.D., editor
The University Bookman

P.S. As a special thank you to all Bookman supporters this month, we’ll send you a link to an audio recording of Ex Tenebris, one of Kirk’s best ghostly short stories. We think you’ll really enjoy it.

Campaign Progress

John Adams: Russell Kirk’s Founding Federalist

“…[Kirk] located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both ‘the most successful conservative device in the history of the world’ and a ‘great monument’ to the Federalists.”

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.

The Brothers Stuart and the Rise of Protestant England

“…Belloc remains a draught of fresh air and a happy antidote to the official version of English national history, with its idealized tale of public-spirited reforms and liberal advances broadening down to the happy present.”

The Fog of the American War for Independence

“Academic and popular history of the period has long noted the early intimidation and violence that accompanied the rise of an American political consciousness and revolutionary movement.”

“To Think Faith” as Educators

“…faith and pedagogy should be in harmony. Smith’s guide is not a theory of faith and teaching or how to sprinkle faith within teaching. ‘It offers repeated practice at noticing and thinking through ways in which faith and the process of teaching might connect in everyday practice,’ in the mundane moments of elementary, secondary, or higher education classrooms.”

Intercollegiate Review on Kirk

To commemorate the 16th anniversary of the death of Russell Kirk on April 29, we would like to highlight the new archives of the Intercollegiate Review, particularly the 1994 commemorative issue on Russell Kirk, featuring essays from several noted writers and friends...

Books in Little

Authority Not Majority: The Life and Times of Friedrich Julius Stahl by Ruben Alvarado (Wordbridge Publishing, 134 pp.) Principles of Law by Friedrich Julius Stahl, ed. and trans. Ruben Alvarado (Wordbridge Publishing, 140 pp.) Alvarado’s two volumes make available...

The High Achievement of Christopher Dawson

A Historian and His Word: a Life of Christopher Dawson, 1889–1970 by Christina Scott. The Dynamic Character of Christian Culture: Essays on Dawsonian Themes edited by Peter J. Cataldo.“Years ago when I was an undergraduate your Ballad of the White Horse first brought...

Safer in Minnesota

On Essays and LettersSomehow, on my shelves, I have an apparently unread book called Letters from the Country. This book, written by Carol Bly, was published by Penguin in 1981. Carol Bly, as I found out, died in 2007, a well-known figure in Minnesota literary...

Pianarchy

After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance by Kenneth Hamilton. Oxford University Press (New York) 304 pp, $29.95, 2008What if all classical recordings were destroyed tomorrow? Forget the obvious fact that such mass destruction could never be...

Dignity and the Law

In the Shadow of the Law by Kermit Roosevelt Straus & Giroux (New York) 384 pp, $24.00, 2005 Steadily emerging over the past two decades is an impressive collection of numerous books, essays, and academic writings making highly critical pronouncements of the...

The Right’s Exit

Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right by Paul Gottfried. Palgrave Macmillan (New York) 189 pp, $48.00, 2007 The 2008 elections raised important questions about the prospects for conservatism in the United States. Many conservatives express...

The Story of Carlton Hayes

Carlton Hayes, synonymous with European history to generations of twentieth-century American undergraduates, has been largely neglected since his death in 1964. He was a trailblazer, choosing to study what was then the unfashionable field of European history, and...

Knowing It All

Journals: 1952–2000 by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger. The Penguin Press (New York) 894 pp., $40.00, 2007Historians of the American presidency are notorious for composing lists. The five greatest presidents … the five...

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.

Kirk saw poetry, fiction, tradition, and restraint as essential to understanding America and preserving its character. In his review of "On America," @cjscalia explores Kirk’s vision of the founding, statesmanship, literature, and the enduring ideas that have shaped the republic.

The Audacious Russell Kirk
Bruce P. Frohnen reviews "On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776" by Russell Kirk. Edited by Michael Lucchese.

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