The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
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
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
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
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
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...
Error Has No Rights
Orestes Brownson: American Religious Weathervane by Patrick W. Carey. Wm. B. Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, Mich.), 2004. 448 pp., $29.00 paper.Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, predicted that Americans “will tend increasingly to fall into one or the other of...
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...
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.
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