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.”

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...

A University Lecture

A University Lecture

The Regensburg Lecture by James V. Schall, S.J. St. Augustine’s Press (South Bend, Ind.), 174 pp., $20 cloth, 2007“The bravest act of our time is the act that insists, in a public university lecture, that what is unreasonable must defend itself in reason.” It should...

Chicago and a New Schema for the Liberal Arts

Chicago and a New Schema for the Liberal Arts

Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America by Donald N. Levine. University of Chicago Press (Chicago), 299 pp., $39.00 cloth, 2006; $19.00 paper, 2007 Donald N. Levine has lived most of his life at the University of Chicago. He earned his three...

The Witness Revisited

The Witness Revisited

Whittaker Chambers and American ConservatismIt is now 46 years since the death of Whittaker Chambers. His name is still iconic for many conservatives and a catalyst for boiling resentment among left-liberals. In those who know the full story of the Hiss case, and...

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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