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.”

C-SPAN Radio Broadcast

C-SPAN Radio’s American Political Archive program will be broadcasting for the first time ever a conversation between Russell Kirk and the late liberal social critic Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., recorded in the late 1970s. It will broadcast live on Saturday, March 31 at...

The Virgin and the Dynamo

The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value Is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness by Virginia Postrel. HarperCollins (New York), 237 pp. $24.95 cloth, 2003. The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and...

Ernest van den Haag (1914–2002)

In Memoriam With the death of Ernest van den Haag on March 21, 2002, the conservative movement lost one of its most redoubtable intellectual warriors in the decades after World War II. And the University Bookman lost one of its longtime friends and supporters. Like so...

Decline and Fall

At the End of an Age by John Lukacs. Yale University Press (New Haven, Connecticut), 240pp., $22.95 cloth, 2002. In his new book, At the End of an Age, historian John Lukacs argues that the Modern Era, which began about five hundred years ago, is rapidly coming to its...

A Touchstone of Eloquence and Wisdom

Creed & Culture: A Touchstone Reader Edited with an introduction by James M. Kushiner. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware), xv + 239 pp., $15.00 paper, 2003. “If Christian dogma is irrelevant to life, to what, in Heaven’s name, is it relevant?—since...

On Not Thinking in Slogans

The American Cause by Russell Kirk. Edited with a new Introduction by Gleaves Whitney. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware), xxii, 169 pp., $13.00 paper, 2002. This is a most appropriate time for the appearance of this short book, ably edited by Gleaves Whitney, aide and...

Behold the Reign of Man!

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular Theocracy by Paul Gottfried. University of Missouri Press (Columbia and London) 158 pp., $34.95 cloth, 2002. While shaken by the imbroglio of post-victory Iraq, many American conservatives nevertheless...

A Conversation with Joseph Pearce

In an office just off a busy street in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the Writer-in-Residence at Ave Maria College sits down to his work. This is Joseph Pearce, one of the preeminent writers of Catholic/Christian biography today and co-editor of the bimonthly St. Austin Review....

Conservatives and the Environmental Question

Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists; A Conservative Manifesto by Peter Huber. Basic Books (New York, New York), 224 pp., $15.00 paper, 1999. The Greening of Conservative America by John R. E. Bliese. Westview Press (Boulder, Colorado), 339...

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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