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.”

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 Lives of Others

The Lives of Others

“A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature.” These words of Edmund Burke, which Russell Kirk often invoked, bring home to us, in a set of striking images and historical allusions (the girl is Joan...

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.

Jesuits and Revolutions
Rev. Anthony D. Andreassi, C.O. on "Dragons: A Roman Requiem" by Joseph Carola, S.J.
@SophiaPress

Taking Movies Seriously, Perhaps Too Seriously
Thomas Banks on "The Screen and the Mirror: What Movies Show Us About Ourselves, the World, and God" by Gina Dalfonzo.

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