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.”

Mr. Shakespeare’s Plays

On Essays and Letters Under the listings of Shakespeare, the Internet abounds in essays, reviews, texts, and comments, almost anything one can imagine about his works and about works explaining his works. My Viking Edition of Shakespeare comes to 1,471 pages. I...

The Odds According to Whom?

Intelligence Was My Line: Inside Eisenhower’s Other Command by Ralph Hauenstein and Donald Markle. Hippocrene Books (New York), 182 pp., $24.95 cloth, 2005. There cannot be many WWII veterans still active in public life like Ralph Hauenstein: nearly ninety-four...

Plucking Out the Heart of Shakespeare’s Mystery

Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare by Claire Asquith. Public Affairs (New York), xviii + 348 pp., $26.00, cloth, 2005. With the publication of Shadowplay, Clare Asquith joins the growing number of scholars who maintain not merely...

Permanent Things Here and Abroad

The University Bookman has long been concerned with issues of the nature of history and historical memory. We are therefore pleased to present in this issue a major review-essay on historical thinking, by Mark G. Malvasi. Malvasi captures the complexity of the debate,...

Current Problems and Eternal Questions

This issue of The University Bookman engages several subjects close to the heart of Russell Kirk’s work and vision in founding this journal. The study of history helps us to determine the underlying reality, what Kirk called the Logos, of the human condition. In...

Our Neighbors and the Ground Beneath Us

We are very pleased to present you with this issue of the University Bookman. As befitting a quarterly devoted to serious books, the reviews cover numerous subjects with, we believe, learning and clear writing in explication of the major issues of our age. Continuing...

History and the Moral Imagination

Historical Consciousness: The Remembered Past by John Lukacs Reprinted by Transaction Publishers (Library of Conservative Thought), 1994. Review reprinted from The Sewanee Review, Spring 1969, Volume LXXVII, Number 2. Applying a philosophical intellect to the study of...

Kirk on Imagination

Mere unthinking negative opposition to the current of events, clutching in despair at what we still retain, will not suffice in this age. A conservatism of instinct must be reinforced by a conservatism of thought and imagination.

NYT on Kirk

Russell Kirk’s 1953 book The Conservative Mind gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar conservative movement.

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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