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.”

Robert Nisbet’s The Social Philosophers Revisited: Conservative Pluralism versus the Mania for Unity

“…Nisbet shows that freedom and nobility (or excellence) can only survive when civic and social pluralism allows authentic human individuality and real (as opposed to ideologically-induced) community ample room to flourish.”

The Social Philosophers: A Reading for the Present

“…in Nisbet’s reading, conflict fulfills a paradoxical function: it is, to a large extent, the experience of uprooting and rupture that most strongly awakens the need for community. In other words, the longing for community becomes more conscious and pressing where community has been lost or weakened.”

A Sociology of the Permanent Things: Nisbet’s Tocquevillian Philosophy

“The great crisis of our time, which Tocqueville prophesied and Nisbet diagnosed, is the collapse of those intermediary institutions that can resist the drift toward democratic despotism.”

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.”

Returning to the Heights of Statesmanship

Returning to the Heights of Statesmanship

“…Mahoney exhorts us to hope for more from our leaders and to demand more from ourselves—more gratitude for great statesmen and the inheritance that they have passed on to us, more openness to human excellence and its importance, more conviction about moral truth, and more rigorous thought about the characteristics of statesmanship.”

Reclaiming Protestantism At Its Best

Reclaiming Protestantism At Its Best

“…the Reformers celebrated by so many churches today shared a far “thicker” vision of society than the American frontier ideal… Theirs was an era of magistracy and hierarchy, not of lone cowboys gazing out upon an untapped wilderness.”

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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