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.’”

The Divine Inspiration of Handel’s Messiah

The Divine Inspiration of Handel’s Messiah

“…to tell the story of the unusual circumstances and influences giving rise to Handel’s religious oratorio while ignoring that the purpose of the great work is to testify to faith in God in Jesus Christ is analogous to writing a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. and using examples of his use of Scripture to illustrate only his political savvy, and not also what he actually believed in as a Christian minister.”

Buckley at 100: At Sea with William F. Buckley Jr. 

Buckley at 100: At Sea with William F. Buckley Jr. 

“An elegant jet-setter with a flair for literary journalism, Buckley had few rivals in the art of travel writing, especially when it came to sailing. A master storyteller, he adeptly wove devices of fiction together with reportage to craft entertaining narratives full of exuberance and authority.”

Roadmap for Downsizing the Administrative State

Roadmap for Downsizing the Administrative State

“Ryun begins by describing the ‘leviathan’ that has overtaken our democracy. It is crucial to understand that the administrative state is not merely a costly and wasteful but essentially innocuous excess of bureaucracy: it is, rather, an ‘unelected, detached, powerful bureaucracy’ that now controls most of our nation’s legislative, executive, and judicial functions, and as such it represents ‘nothing less than a regime change against and over the Constitution of 1787.’

Halting the Assembly Line Life

Halting the Assembly Line Life

“Williams’s consideration of our culture’s denigration of life is a deep and thorough one, as she considers not merely overt manifestations but even subtle messaging…”

Looking at U.S. Trade Policy Through a Historical Lens

Looking at U.S. Trade Policy Through a Historical Lens

“…it is more important than ever that the electorate have a clear-eyed guide to follow, one that does not engage in fear mongering about the end of neoliberalism or the return to a mercantilist economic system, but that provides readers with ample context and useful anecdotes.”

The Mystery of Imitation

The Mystery of Imitation

“…Haven draws attention to the relevance of Girard’s writings for our times. When reading many of the other chapters she chose, I could not help thinking about contemporary American social and political disorders. In ‘The Totalitarian Trial’ and ‘Retribution,’ for example, Girard argues Job’s alleged friends, like Stalin’s interrogators, are really representatives of the community demanding Job’s consent to his own persecution. The unity of the community hinges on Job’s willingness to confess his ‘crimes.’ Only then can he be killed and forgotten, ‘unpersoned,’ as Orwell would say. A similar dynamic is at work in cancel culture.”

An Italian Apologia for the American Electoral System

An Italian Apologia for the American Electoral System

“The purpose of the book is to understand the reasons for the intricate electoral system, which has proven to be remarkably stable and orderly throughout American history. Mainly addressed to an Italian audience that is naturally less familiar with American voting, it can also be useful for Americans to understand how the whole design is ordered to secure a fair system against totalitarian democracy.”

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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