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.

A Problem Deeper than Groupthink

“Now a new volume comes our way from the busy desk of Robert P. George… an essay collection spanning subjects from Catholicism and civic order to ‘gnostic liberalism’ to the interplay of markets and civil society. Despite the broad subject matter, George’s overarching aim in this new collection is to discern how it is that civilization evolved from the ‘Age of Faith’ in the medieval period to the ‘Age of Reason’ of the Enlightenment and its aftermath, only to now arrive at what he calls the ‘Age of Feelings.’” 

Reconsidering Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Roosevelt’s true genius was the practice of politics. But his success at that practice did not come without costs of its own. Roosevelt may well have believed that his political success and his country’s economic recovery would proceed along parallel paths. But the evidence suggests otherwise. In fact, reading Beito leads one to surmise that the Rooseveltian preoccupation with the politics of leadership may well have significantly delayed and even retarded the very recovery that was supposed to result from his leadership.”

A Forgotten Russian Immigrant Poet in Hollywood

“Nostalgia unquestionably captivates all émigrés. There you may be, decades gone from the old country, and glad of it. Yet still you long for the taste of familiar foods, the sight of those Russian birch trees, and the sound of the language you never have the opportunity to speak outside the home.”

The Graces of Death and Nature

The Graces of Death and Nature

“Three of America’s most famous writers and intellectuals, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James, came to believe that death was a beginning, a moment of renewal and regeneration, not the finality of dissolution.”

Right Populism 

Right Populism 

“[Kendall] thus seems likely to remain a challenging figure within the conservative intellectual tradition, but the challenges he offers his readers should make a study of his thought a more profitable exercise, not less.”

Squeezing Out Virtue and Beauty

Squeezing Out Virtue and Beauty

“…the presence of CTLs raise a fundamental question about teaching and learning themselves: can teaching and learning be reduced to a single methodology or are they by nature resistant to it?”

Russell Kirk’s Book of Love

Russell Kirk’s Book of Love

“Kirk’s conservatism was the conservatism of loss—not of rout or retreat, and certainly not despair, but a conservatism that treasures what is gone as well as what we have. Our civilization of love, the age of chivalry, is dead. Yet the dead are with us still.”

Russell Kirk’s Book of Love

Conservatives’ Cornerstone

“A populist, anti-ideological Kirkian conservatism of the heart remains Americans’ best hope for national renewal, and the Right’s only real path back to national leadership.”

Russell Kirk’s Book of Love

Russell Kirk and The Conservative Mind

“With eloquence and conviction Kirk demonstrated that reflective conservatism is neither a smokescreen for selfishness nor the ritual incantation of the privileged. It is an attitude toward life with moral substance of its own.”

Russell Kirk’s Book of Love

The Conservative Mind at 70

“[Kirk’s] own brand of conservatism admitted principles but regarded ‘positions’ and ‘dogmata’… with hostility. He blended a nostalgic romanticism with a Burkean faith in the advantages of tradition and ‘sound prejudice.'”

Russell Kirk’s Book of Love

Whispers From Kirk

“The challenge for conservatives is to create a substantive program within their own tradition without having to feed off the carcass of liberalism.”

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.

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