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.”

Forgotten Constitutional Founders

An Incautious Man: The Life of Gouverneur Morris by Melanie Miller (ISI Books 2008, $25.00). Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin by Bill Kauffman (ISI Books 2008, $25.00). Even after more than two centuries, the story of the Constitution...

Marshall McLuhan: Postmodern Grammarian

The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time by Marshall McLuhan Edited by W. Terrence Gordon Gingko Press (Corte Madera, Calif.) 356 pp., $39.96 Cloth, 2005. The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion by Marshall McLuhan. Edited...

Kirk Video Companion Site

On this, the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Russell Kirk, April 29, we would like to announce the posting of a link to a companion website that features video interviews with scholars, prominent persons in the conservative movement, and with Russell Kirk...

Companion Site for Kirk Audio and Video

Dr. David Schock has produced several audio and video recordings by and about Russell Kirk and is hosting them on a companion web site: TheWardrobe.org. We are pleased to welcome a companion web site, produced by Dr. David Schock, that features video interviews with...

Permanent Things Newsletter

We are pleased to announce a new number of Permanent Things, the newsletter of the Russell Kirk Center, edited by Ben Lockerd. The spring 2009 edition features a retrospective of thirty years of the Wilbur Foundation program. You may download it at this link (PDF,...

Books in Little

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Regnery Publishing, Inc., 289 pp.) Most standard surveys of Western civilization tend to treat superficially, if they treat at all, the period of history stretching from the fall of the Roman...

A Patron Saint of Teachers

A Patron Saint of Teachers

On Essays and Letters“Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the death penalty. I doubt whether you would know that St. Cassian of Imola was stabbed to death by his students with their styli. His death, a martyr’s honorable one, made him a...

Six Honest Serving-Men

Six Honest Serving-Men

The Information-Literate Historian: A Guide to Research for History Students by Jenny L. Presnell. Oxford University Press (New York City) 256 pp., $17.95 paper 2006I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And...

Morality in History and Historiography

Morality in History and Historiography

Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War by Harry S. Stout. Viking Penguin (New York) 576 pp., $29.95 cloth, 2006 Harry Stout, the Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale University, has written another...

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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