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 Celebration of Conservative Politics in France

Bibliographie générale des droites françaises edited by Alan de Benoist. Dualpha (France), Four volume set, 736 pp. cloth, 2005. Alain de Benoist, the main exponent of the French New Right, published this major work in 2004 and 2005, during a...

Parliamentary Men, Then and Now

William Pitt the Younger: A Biography by William Hague. Knopf (New York), 556 pp., $35.00 cloth, 2005. William Hague, one of the only leaders of Britain’s Conservative party in the twentieth century never to have become his nation’s Prime Minister, once...

The Art of Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South by Ralph C. Wood. William B. Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, Michigan) 265 pp., $22.00 cloth, 2004. The Incarnational Art of Flannery O’Connor by Christina Bieber Lake. Mercer University Press (Macon, Georgia) 243...

Kirk on Moral Imagination

The moral imagination is the principal possession that man does not share with the beasts. It is man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events. Without the moral imagination, man would live merely day to day, or rather moment...

The Essence of Conservatism

A friend of mine, whom we shall call Miss Worth, fell into a conversation with a neighbor—Mrs. Williams, let us say—who, the day before, had sold a fine old building, long in her family, to be demolished that a lot for used-automobile sales might take its...

A Conservatism of Thought and Imagination

Ten Conservative Principles (1993) First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. Third, conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription....

Ten Conservative Principles

Ten Conservative Principles by Russell Kirk Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata. So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first...

A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale

Since most modern men have ceased to recognize their own souls, the spectral tale has been out of fashion, especially in America. As Cardinal Manning said, all differences of opinion are theological at bottom; and this fact has its bearing upon literary tastes....

Frights and Chills, Intelligently Rendered

Acquainted With the Night edited by Barbara Roden and Christopher Roden. Ash-Tree Press (British Columbia, Canada), 384 pp., $48.50 cloth; $26.00 paper, 2004. Ash-Tree Press specializes in classic supernatural fiction. From the village of Ashcroft in British Columbia,...

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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