The University Bookman

Reviewing Books that Build Culture

Join friends of the Bookman in New York City on December 8, 2025 for the Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture.

William F. Buckley Jr.: Literary Figure 

“…the American public intellectual might best be appreciated as a literary figure. Producing about 350,000 words for publication yearly at the peak of his career, Buckley was never at a loss for what to say or how to say it.”

Defending the Christian Faith

“In 100 Tough Questions For Catholics: Common Obstacles To Faith Today… David G. Bonagura, Jr. gives bite-sized answers to dozens of big questions about the faith.”

Revisiting Walter Lippmann

“Lippmann sought to be—and was—what might be described today as an influencer. As such, he never sought to wield power, but he long desired to have the ears and eyes of the powerful. Arnold-Forster is certainly not unaware of that. But it is never his central message. If there is such a message in these pages, and there is, it is his effort to make the reader aware that Walter Lippmann, believer in and defender of the efficacy of progressive government, was also Walter Lippmann, believer in and defender of both the reality and importance of empire in general and of the American empire in particular.”

Family Homes and Drive-in Churches

“After the optimism of the suburban boom, it all went bust. Mass attendance fell by 70 percent. Women’s religious life died out. Parochial education was crippled… The green grass of suburbia was starved into a desiccated, brown waste.”

William F. Buckley Jr.: Literary Figure 

“…the American public intellectual might best be appreciated as a literary figure. Producing about 350,000 words for publication yearly at the peak of his career, Buckley was never at a loss for what to say or how to say it.”

Christopher Dawson on the Causes of Culture

The Cultured Mind of Christopher Dawson

“Always in [Dawson’s] work is a sense of the creative interactions between religion and culture, between past and present, between man and his environment, between the material and the spiritual. Dawson had the confidence and humility of a polymath.”

Theologian of the Heart

Theologian of the Heart

On the passing of Pope Benedict XVI, we rerun this review essay by Religion Editor David Bonagura, which was originally published on October 20, 2008.

More Than a Commercial Republic

More Than a Commercial Republic

“Given recent ideological and partisan shifts, Gregg argues, America today faces a choice between the path of free markets or state capitalism.”

The Circumnavigation of Eliot

The Circumnavigation of Eliot

“A company of scholars, led by Professor Ronald Schuchard, labored for a decade to produce this monumental scholarly work… The project was brilliantly and painstakingly accomplished, and it is having a marked effect on scholarly studies of Eliot…”

The Waste Land at 100

The Waste Land at 100

“If poets came to speak less clearly in consequence of Eliot’s great reputation, Eliot also reestablished poetry as a way of coming to know reality and to perceive the order of being even amid the wreckage of history. If he staged a revolution, he also made possible a restoration.”

The Book Gallery

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

@ubookman The mission of @ubookman is to identify and discuss those books that diagnose the modern age through the prism of the Permanent Things and so to support cultural renewal. Thanks for joining Bookman writers and readers to do our part to redeem the time. https://buff.ly/6uf2yRz

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