The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

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Each week the Bookman brings you fresh reviews of the books that build culture, and essays that enliven the Permanent Things. Last year nearly 90,000 visitors engaged with the Bookman’s reviews, all free of charge and with no advertising to disrupt the reading experience. Our writers are touching hearts and minds across the globe with their reviews, bringing wisdom, creativity, and beauty to bear on the most important conversations happening in literature and culture.

Would you consider a gift to help us continue this work?

If just 1 in 4 of our readers contributed $10, we’d dramatically increase our capacity to recruit the brightest young writers and tackle more books and topics, all with a Kirkian angle. We’ve set a goal of raising $20k this month in order to continue our mission. Exceeding this amount will allow us to expand our work even more.

If you love the Bookman, and read us with regularity, we’d greatly appreciate your generous support this month.

With gratitude,

Luke Sheahan, Ph.D., editor
The University Bookman

P.S. As a special thank you to all Bookman supporters this month, we’ll send you a link to an audio recording of Ex Tenebris, one of Kirk’s best ghostly short stories. We think you’ll really enjoy it.

Campaign Progress

John Adams: Russell Kirk’s Founding Federalist

“…[Kirk] located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both ‘the most successful conservative device in the history of the world’ and a ‘great monument’ to the Federalists.”

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.

Confronting our Current Digital Malaise

“Luke Burgis has written an interesting book exploring the tension between belonging and differentiation.”

A Secular Confession

“The story that she tells in these pages is one of a brewing and ongoing civil war, a civil war not between left and right in America, but a civil war within the Democratic Party.”

Ames, Hamilton, Marshall: Russell Kirk’s Other Founding Federalists

“The Federalist party, of course, is no more. It barely lasted past the fiftieth anniversary of American independence. But, as Russell Kirk demonstrated throughout his work, its conservative vision remains one of the most profound expressions of the meaning of the American Founding itself. Its adherents cannot simply be dismissed as retrograde aristocrats—they were patriots who understood that ‘order is the first need of all.’”

Looking Behind the Mask

Masquerade by Joseph S. Salemi. Pivot Press (Expansive Poetry Online Bookstore), 84 pp., $12.00 paper, 2005. It is an act of courage to publish such a collection as Masquerade in the face of today’s feckless critics and the mindless gruel that most call poetry....

Toward a New Kind of History

Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge A Reader by John Lukacs (edited by Mark G. Malvasi and Jeffrey O. Nelson). ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware), 922 pp., $30.00 cloth, 2005. “By the end of the second decade of my...

A Placid Portrait of the Enlightenment

The Enlightenment & the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture by Louis Dupré. Yale University Press (New Haven, Connecticut), 397 pp., $25.00 paper, 2004. One of the more promising cultural developments in these waning days of the West is the growing...

Garet Garrett: Intellectual Ancestor to Postwar Conservatives

Salvos Against the New Deal: Selections from the Saturday Evening Post 1933–1940 by Garet Garrett. Edited by Bruce Ramsey. Caxton Press (Caldwell, Idaho), 282 pp., $12.95 paper, 2002. Defend America First: The Antiwar Editorials of the Saturday Evening Post,...

Literature As Moral Meditation

Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision by George A. Panichas. Mercer University Press, (Macon, Georgia) 165 pp., $35.00 cloth, 2005. Once again in this new volume, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, George A. Panichas has demonstrated what he means when calling literary...

A Prudent Approach To Social Security’s Future

Social Security: False Consciousness and Crisisby John Attarian. Transaction Books (New Brunswick, NJ), xvii + 393 pp., $44.95 cloth, 2002. During Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, the Republican Party ran a striking advertisement on television,...

Up From Scientism

Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing edited by William A. Dembski. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware) 366 pp., $28.00 cloth, 2004. This book contains a provocative collection of essays in which the educational and cultural authorities of...

Moral Visions of the Free Market

Wealth, Poverty & Human Destiny edited by Doug Bandow and David Schindler. ISI Books (Wilmington, Delware), 350 pp., $29.95 cloth, 2003. For religious believers, the complicated issue of reconciling the free market with traditional morality is one of increasing...

Scalia the Originalist

Scalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court’s Wittiest, Most Outspoken Justice edited and with commentary by Kevin A. Ring. Regnery Publishing (Washington, D.C.), 338 pp., $27.95 cloth, 2004. The Opinions of Justice Antonin Scalia: The Caustic Conservative...

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.

The @KirkCenter has announced that the McLellan Prize for Free Speech will be awarded to influential legal scholar Eugene Volokh! @VolokhC https://kirkcenter.org/highlights/eugene-volokh-awarded-2026-richard-d-mclellan-prize-for-advancing-free-speech-and-expression/

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