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.”

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...

In Memoriam: Richard Durant

An ObituaryRichard Durant, a captain in the U.S. Army in World War II; an investment advisor; a leader in local, state, and national Republican Party activities for more than twenty years; a lawyer late in life; an avid reader; a father of four; grandfather of seven;...

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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