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.”

A University Lecture

A University Lecture

The Regensburg Lecture by James V. Schall, S.J. St. Augustine’s Press (South Bend, Ind.), 174 pp., $20 cloth, 2007“The bravest act of our time is the act that insists, in a public university lecture, that what is unreasonable must defend itself in reason.” It should...

Chicago and a New Schema for the Liberal Arts

Chicago and a New Schema for the Liberal Arts

Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America by Donald N. Levine. University of Chicago Press (Chicago), 299 pp., $39.00 cloth, 2006; $19.00 paper, 2007 Donald N. Levine has lived most of his life at the University of Chicago. He earned his three...

The Witness Revisited

The Witness Revisited

Whittaker Chambers and American ConservatismIt is now 46 years since the death of Whittaker Chambers. His name is still iconic for many conservatives and a catalyst for boiling resentment among left-liberals. In those who know the full story of the Hiss case, and...

Error Has No Rights

Error Has No Rights

Orestes Brownson: American Religious Weathervane by Patrick W. Carey. Wm. B. Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, Mich.), 2004. 448 pp., $29.00 paper.Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, predicted that Americans “will tend increasingly to fall into one or the other of...

Sketches of Painterly Lives

Sketches of Painterly Lives

The Art of the Art BiographyRecently I met up with an agent to discuss my next book. What about writing a biography of an artist?, he suggested. What about the research?, I responded. As an editor and art critic for a monthly magazine, I just couldn’t see clearing my...

The Man Who Built Ireland

The Man Who Built Ireland

Kevin O’Higgins: Builder of the Irish State by John P. McCarthy. Irish Academic Press (Portland, Ore.), xvi/312 pp., $35.00 cloth, 2006 The subtitle of John P. McCarthy’s new biography of Kevin O’Higgins, “builder of the Irish state,” seems, at first glance, to...

An Architect for all Purposes

An Architect for all Purposes

Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests: Medieval, Modernist, American, Ecumenical by Douglass Shand-Tucci. University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst), 624 pp., $49.95 cloth, 2005Ralph Adams Cram was a man of such prodigious talents that even two volumes of...

Fromthe Nightstand of a Bookman . . .

University Bookman contributor Bruce Frohnen recommends the following biographies: Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson. With three volumes out and one more to come, this masterful dissection of the corruptions of power should be a warning to all fans of the...

The State of Biography

“You’ve got to be a bit ruthless, I think, to write a biography.” —Peter Cameron, The City of Your Final Destination “. . . be versatile, cunning, and ruthless in his pursuit—in other words, have all the attributes of a good spy.” —Erika Ostrovsky, Eye of Dawn: The...

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