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.”

Renee Radell—She Paints Confusion in Search of Order

Renee Radell—She Paints Confusion in Search of Order

The following article appeared in the Sunday News Magazine (Detroit, Michigan) on February 24, 1974. If ever the poems of T. S. Eliot should be published in a splendid illustrated edition, Renee Radell ought to be the illustrator. For like Eliot, Mrs. Radell shows us...

Latin America’s Five Deadly Sins

Liberty for Latin America: How to Undo Five Hundred Years of State Oppression by Alvaro Vargas Llosa. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (New York) 276 pp., $25.00, 2005. As co-author of the 1997 classic The Manual for the Perfect Latin American Idiot, Peruvian journalist...

On Pilgrims and Park Rangers

The Right to Be Wrong: Ending the Culture War Over Religion in America by Kevin Seamus Hasson. Encounter Books (New York), 220 pp., $25.95 cloth, 2005. When the federal courts ordered Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore to remove his Ten Commandments monument from the...

Seeking God in Strange Places

The Truth is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction by Thomas Bertonneau and Kim Paffenroth. Brazos Press (Grand Rapids, Mich.), 272 pp., $18.99 paper, 2006. The idea of finding a Christian moral lesson in TV science fiction could occur only...

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...

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

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