The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

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.

To Find Eyes to See

“Hren selects earnest classics that have stood the test of time—books that generations of readers have found edifying and moving. But also, in the introduction and conclusion alike, Hren returns to another key point of fiction: it doesn’t just help us see extraordinary truth, although it can. More important is that fiction gives us eyes to see the transcendence of ordinary lives, including our own.”

Rural America as It Really Is

“Harold Bell Wright, regardless of how literary tastemakers viewed him in the 1920s, is the central figure in the origin of Branson. Though denigrated by the Baldwins and H. L. Menckens of his day, Wright was one of the century’s best-selling novelists.”

The Poet Watches Birds

“Jennifer A. Hartenburg’s debut collection of poems… offers such a poetic practice of waking, attending, and caring. These are poems rich with the life of the world, flocking with birds and bees both literal and metaphorical, but also closely attentive to the quiddities of language and the motions of the soul.”

Books in Little

Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin, by Nicholas Ostler (Walker & Company, 382 pp., 2007) Writing in the seventh century, St. Isidore of Seville observed that “peoples have arisen from languages, not languages from peoples.” The history of the Latin language, as...

Donald Davidson and the South’s Conservatism

From The Politics of Prudence Leviathan is a Hebrew word signifying “that which gathers itself in folds.” In the Old Testament, Leviathan is the great sea-beast: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?” In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes—whom T.S. Eliot calls...

On the Fixing of Our Gaze

On the Fixing of Our Gaze

On Essays and LettersWhen college students go to Europe, as so many do, I tell them to be sure to send me a card from this place or that, places they visit, usually randomly. Moreover, I tell them before they depart that, on coming to Ostia Antica, the port of Rome,...

Show Me a Statesman

Jim Reed, Senatorial Immortal: A Biography By Lee Meriwether. Kessinger Publishing (Whitefish, Montana) 296 pp., $28.95 paper, 2007 Sen. James Alexander Reed of Missouri was one of the titans of the isolationist, individualist Old Right—though, like others of that...

Northwest Passages

Northwest Passages

The Canoe and the Saddle By Theodore Winthrop Edited By Paul J. Lindholt University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln) 240 pp., $13.95 paper, 2006 Good Pacific Northwest literature peels back the layers of cant that have accumulated over time about this region and gives...

Stealing Dorothy

Stealing Dorothy

‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ and My Fortunate Home by Caleb Stegall If ever an association between a book and state has been stamped on the national consciousness it must be the up-and-down literary-geographical marriage between Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz...

The ‘Time’ of Elizabeth Madox Roberts

The ‘Time’ of Elizabeth Madox Roberts

In 1926 Elizabeth Madox Roberts, a 45-year-old former schoolteacher from Springfield, Kentucky, published her first novel. The Time of Man came out to great acclaim; it was reviewed widely, admired here and abroad by writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Glenway Wescott,...

Robert Traver: Anatomy of a Fisherman

Robert Traver: Anatomy of a Fisherman

The eight nudists arrested near Battle Creek, Michigan, had an advocate in the novelist and fishing writer Robert Traver. His disapproval fell not upon them but upon the police officers involved in the arrests. He called one of them a “deputized window-peeper” and...

On Brooklyn’s Side

On Brooklyn’s Side

New York City does not normally figure in the regionalist imagination, either conservative or liberal. It is self- and other-described as the original melting pot, the place where people move when they are getting away from somewhere else, to land in a no-man’s land...

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.

To Find Eyes to See
@NadyaWilliams81 on "More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature" by Joshua Hren. @WordOnFire Luminor

Rural America as It Really Is
Jason C. Phillips on "Faith, Family, and Flag: Branson Entertainment and the Idea of America" by Joanna Dee Das. @UChicagoPress

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