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.”

Eliot Conference

The Kirk Center is co-sponsoring a conference on T. S. Eliot on August 14–16, 2008 in conjunction with the new edition of Dr. Kirk's book, Eliot and His Age. See the conference page for details. A full schedule is now available.

Colson on Kirk

We were pleased to note Chuck Colson referencing Russell Kirk so warmly, and correctly noting Dr. Kirk's rejection of ideology, in a commentary from June 6, 2008 titled “True Conservatism.”

Defending the Conversation

In the newest of the Bookman's web-only content, James Seaton reviews Anthony Kronman's stirring defense of a traditional liberal-arts education. Click here for the review!

A Stirring Defense of the Conversation

Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T. Kronman. Yale University Press (New Haven), 320 pages, hardcover, $27.50; 2007 In the decades since The Closing of the American Mind became a bestseller, many critics...

Kirk on Eliot

A new edition of Dr. Kirk's acclaimed literary biography, Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century is being published in July 2008 by ISI Books.

From National Executive to Therapist-in-Chief

The Evolution of the Modern Presidency: An Interview with Gene HealyThe University Bookman is pleased to offer this exclusive interview with Gene Healy, a senior editor at the Cato Institute. A widely-published writer on the modern executive, he has just published The...

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

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...

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

Load More

Subscribe and receive the Bookman weekly in your inbox.

* indicates required

Shop through Creed & Culture
Support the Kirk Center
& University Bookman