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.’”

In Dialogue, We Dwell

In Dialogue, We Dwell

“…political sentiment in America has atrophied to ‘factionalism,’ or precisely that against which James Madison warned in Federalist No. 10…”

Shakespeare and the Real 

Shakespeare and the Real 

“…Shakespeare has indeed become, like the body of Patroclus, the center of one of the most violent skirmishes in the larger battle that rages over the gargantuan remains of the West.”

Can We Trust the Gospels?

Can We Trust the Gospels?

“…McGrew contends not only that there is strong external evidence for the God of the New Testament… but that there is also good internal evidence—the information conveyed in the biblical accounts corresponds to what we know about the way truthful people talk and write.”

Betting on Catastrophe 

Betting on Catastrophe 

“…who better than The New Criterion’s bench of deep thinkers to mull over James Burnham’s hypothesis—’Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization’—with respect to Christendom’s funereal prospects.”

The War for the Second Age

The War for the Second Age

“At its core… Sibley’s volume is the story of a Fall, and as such gives readers unparalleled insight into the moral underpinnings of Tolkien’s world.”

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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