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 Storm-Tossed Nation

Pakistan: Eye of the Storm by Owen Bennett Jones. Yale University Press (New Haven, Connecticut), xxx + 328 pp., second edition, $17.00/£10.99 paper, 2003. (This is the second essay of a two-part review, the first half of which appeared in the Winter 2007 issue.)...

Prudential Conservatism?

The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and its Times by Jeffrey Hart. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware), 410 pp., $28.00 cloth, 2006.Jeffrey Hart’s The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times is both a memoir of...

Summer 2007 Bookman

The Spring / Summer 2007 issue of the University Bookman is here! The table of contents and articles are now here online. We've also updated the masthead. Don’t subscribe? You can join the oldest conservative quarterly review of books by clicking here.

Philip Rieff, Modern Prophet

The Triumph of the Therapeutic by Philip Rieff. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware) 325 pp., $18.00 paper, 2006. “For the last time psychology!” Kafka urged, already amid a Western civilization doomed to repeat the mistakes of psychological man. Once it was believed that...

The Wolfe Who Cried Kirk

In the pages of the once-respectable New Republic, Alan Wolfe has written a scurrilous attack on Russell Kirk in the guise of a review of the recently published collection entitled The Essential Russell Kirk. The review is noteworthy not for its ugliness or completely...

Russello Interview

Gerald Russello has done an interview with John J. Miller at National Review Online discussing his new book on Kirk's thought.

Nash Heritage Lecture

Senior Fellow George H. Nash spoke at the Heritage Foundation on June 22, 2007 to give the Russell Kirk Lecture on Kirk's life and legacy and to celebrate the release of The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays. You can view the lecture or listen to the MP3 audio...

Is Life Worth Living?

Concluding a public lecture, Russell Kirk once assured his listeners: “If you look for the Supernatural, you will find it. I promise you: I have.” From the concluding chapter of Kirk's third-person autobiography.In some ages, what Thoreau says is true:...

Two Essays on the Imagination

We have added to the web site two pieces by Russell Kirk that touch on the moral imagination. First, “The Moral Imagination,” a 1981 essay that describes the concept. Second is “Is Life Worth Living?” the epilogue of Kirk’s autobiography, The Sword of...

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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