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.”

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.

Register for our next book gallery on June 22, 2026:
Russell Kirk On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776

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