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.”

What About Booth?

What About Booth?

Newton Booth Tarkington, Neglected Hoosier During a recent lecture, the eminent and usually trustworthy literary critic Joseph Epstein befuddled at least one audience member (me) by referring to Theodore Dreiser as the “greatest American author of the twentieth...

Look Homeward

The Bookman is very pleased to present this special issue on regionalism, with guest editor Bill Kauffman. Bill is one of the most provocative and compelling of a new generation of conservative writers. Hehas gone back and retrieved an almost forgotten tradition of...

Histories Right and Left

Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s by Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. (Harvard University Press, 2008), 373 pp. A Conservative History of the American Left by Daniel J. Flynn (Crown Forum, 2008), 455 pp. By some accounts,...

A Post-Election Reading List

Are you a conservative exile? Here are some thoughtful suggestions by a Bookman supporter on readings to live by.

The Conservative Exiles’ Reading List

The isle of Elba, just off the coast from Tuscany, a friend who visited there has assured me, is palmy, balmy, serene—a great place for a retreat of the mind and the spirit. I plan to stay in this part of the world, but as I climb aboard a skiff for my own private...

New Feature!

To commemorate the 90th birthday of Russell Kirk, we wish to announce that visitors to the Center's web page may now easily visit the valuable assessments of Kirk's accomplishment published in a special issue of The Intercollegiate Review shortly after his death....

Ex Tenebris Audio

Russell Kirk's ghostly tale “Ex Tenebris” has been released as an audio book on CD by The Trinity Forum. The production features an introduction by Senior Fellow Vigen Guroian on “The Importance of Place” and is narrated by David Schock. You can order copies...

Feulner on Kirk and Conservative Thought

Heritage Foundation President Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D. made a presentation in July on “The Roots of Modern Conservative Thought from Burke to Kirk.” It's a useful summary and assessment that is worth your attention.

Books in Little

The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett by Lee Oser (Cambridge University Press, 185 pp.) Although much ink has been spilled analyzing the mundanity and pessimism of modernist literature, the broader ethical perspective of...

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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