The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Join friends of the Bookman in New York City on December 8, 2025 for the Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.

William F. Buckley Jr.: Literary Figure 

“…the American public intellectual might best be appreciated as a literary figure. Producing about 350,000 words for publication yearly at the peak of his career, Buckley was never at a loss for what to say or how to say it.”

Defending the Christian Faith

“In 100 Tough Questions For Catholics: Common Obstacles To Faith Today… David G. Bonagura, Jr. gives bite-sized answers to dozens of big questions about the faith.”

Natural Law and the Need for Moral Clarity

“Christians need clarity on the way their faith shapes their political activity. This ambiguous book fails to provide that clarity.”

Moral Realism Over and Against Contingent Pluralism 

“The challenge for… all natural law theorists is the proper ordering and integration of the contingencies of a given culture and the universality of the primary precepts of natural law.”

History on Improper Principles

“The condescending attitude—even animus—behind this book is, in fact, among the reasons Trump came to power in the first place. Voters, clearly sick of being sneered at by elites like Lichtman and his colleagues in the established commentariat, have turned to populism as an outlet for their frustrations.”

The Void in Daniel Bell’s Soul

A Retrospective Review of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Thirty Years Later Tthirty years and more after its appearance, Daniel Bell’s challenging book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), still merits the Times Literary Supplement’s...

Who Gets it Right? Liberals or Originalists?

The Myth of Judicial Activism: Making Sense of Supreme Court Decisions by Kermit Roosevelt III. Yale University Press (New Haven and London), 272 pp., $30.00 cloth, 2006. By the celebrated “switch in time that saved nine” in 1937, the United States Supreme Court,...

On Living in the Present

Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics by Elizabeth Campbell Corey. University of Missouri Press (Columbia, Missouri) xi + 253 pp., $39.95, cloth, 2006. Michael Oakeshott, Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin are arguably the three most important political...

Faith and Reason, Reconsidered

Christianity and the Soul of the University: Faith as a Foundation for Intellectual Community edited by Douglas Henry and Michael Beaty. Baker Academic (Grand Rapids, Michigan) 192 pp., $24.99 paper, 2006. Since the death of John Henry Newman in 1890, the justly...

Ideologues at the Podium

The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America by David Horowitz. Regnery Publishing, Inc (Washington, D.C.) 448 pp., $27.95 cloth, 2006. Prof. Ward Churchill’s ugly characterization of the 9/11 victims of the Twin Towers attack as “little Eichmans” who...

A Storm-Tossed Nation

Pakistan: Eye of the Storm by Owen Bennett Jones. Yale University Press (New Haven, Connecticut), xxx + 328 pp., second edition, $17.00/£10.99 paper, 2003. (This is the second essay of a two-part review, the first half of which appeared in the Winter 2007 issue.)...

Prudential Conservatism?

The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and its Times by Jeffrey Hart. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware), 410 pp., $28.00 cloth, 2006.Jeffrey Hart’s The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times is both a memoir of...

Summer 2007 Bookman

The Spring / Summer 2007 issue of the University Bookman is here! The table of contents and articles are now here online. We've also updated the masthead. Don’t subscribe? You can join the oldest conservative quarterly review of books by clicking here.

Philip Rieff, Modern Prophet

The Triumph of the Therapeutic by Philip Rieff. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware) 325 pp., $18.00 paper, 2006. “For the last time psychology!” Kafka urged, already amid a Western civilization doomed to repeat the mistakes of psychological man. Once it was believed that...

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.

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