The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Frontier Fiction at Its Best

“This classic frontier story—of the fostered orphan who escapes the baddies who killed his family and who returns to wreak vengeance upon them—is enriched by a vivid depiction of Comanche culture and traditional way of life and by narrative motifs whose roots are deep in the soil of myth and fable…”

The Postmodern Poetry of J.R.R. Tolkien

“Even if Tolkien did not understand his literary enterprise as distinctively modernist, many of the techniques he deployed—the creation of a secondary world, for instance, or his invented languages, and above all the metatextual integration of poetry and prose—nonetheless bear a resemblance to the experiments in letters conducted by his more avant-garde peers.”

Catholic Zen

“Walsh’s philosophy is timely. For the Christian, it’s imperative to try to understand the mystery of the Trinity and always will be, so theology of the person is destined to be a never-completed project. For everybody else, the question of the person has invaded our daily lives. Invaded is the wrong word, of course. The person is always there, but occasionally we glimpse deeply the persons that are woven into our lives. Disputations on abortion and euthanasia reduce to warring conceptions of the person, and now artificial intelligence challenges commonplace understandings of persons and relationships.”

Outlining Sanity in the Garden

“…there are those books like The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deppe, which is a beautiful hybrid: mostly how-to gardening advice, but laced with a meditational attitude that, though rarely overt, informs the book as a whole… [It] is part of a rich bed of American gardening literature that, in the words of M.E. Bradford, mixes ‘practical agricultural advice and moral reflection.’”

Buckley at 100: Revisiting the Speeches of William F. Buckley Jr. 

Buckley at 100: Revisiting the Speeches of William F. Buckley Jr. 

“…I asked William F. Buckley Jr. which of his books was the favorite… Since I did not have a game plan other than to say ‘hello,’ speaking with him was an unexpected opportunity to pop the question. ‘It has to be the book of my speeches,’ he answered. ‘It covers fifty years of my life. No other of my books does that.’”

The Real Way to Build Back Better

The Real Way to Build Back Better

“If twenty-first-century America, as divided and rancorous as she has been in generations, is to find authentic peace and prosperity, her citizens must look inside their hearts rather than out at the government for a path to renewal. Self-reform is the only way to build society back better, and the Christian religion has long served as its greatest catalyst… Thomas Griffin offers us a model for reform: the way of Saint Francis of Assisi, who was so suffused with love for Jesus Christ that he was able to renew his world.”

The Original Struggle Between Globalism and America First

The Original Struggle Between Globalism and America First

“…what could be more timely than an account of the first national ‘America First’ campaign? And who should provide this accounting but historian H. W. Brands whose long string of solid books brands him as one of our most important and most prolific chroniclers?”

Proverbs, Virtues, and Callings

Proverbs, Virtues, and Callings

“This is at the heart of Melanchthon’s teaching on virtue in his commentary on Proverbs. We must ‘not undertake anything without our vocation constraining us,’ but within these vocations we must find the specific virtues that will adorn them and make our efforts useful.”

Cabrini: The Humble Saint Behind the Film

Cabrini: The Humble Saint Behind the Film

“Cabrini, the nun who would become a saint, dedicated her life to helping good people in practical ways… Her letters, carefully collected… showed the love that motivated her kindness.”

The Fessio Phenomenon

The Fessio Phenomenon

“I wish I could say that the recent history of Catholic higher education in America made sense, but, thanks to Father Buckley, it makes more sense to me than it used to.”

The Book Gallery

A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.

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