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.”

The Causes of Moral Agency

by Rachel Ferguson | Oct 30, 2022

“Particularly in these hyper-polarized times, conservatives should be the first to break out of the blame-the-system-versus-blame-the-victim false dichotomy.”

Resurrecting John Keats

by Paul Krause | Oct 30, 2022

“Lucasta Miller, in her brilliant new book on Keats, writes, ‘To read him is to participate in an invisible web that has connected human beings over millennia via the literary imagination.'”

Partisan Citizens

by Jeffrey Folks | Oct 23, 2022

“Citizenship demands open-minded discourse among persons from different backgrounds and with varying ideas in the interest of forming and preserving a consensus concerning the most advisable form of government.”

Navigating the “In Between” of Belief

by Rev. Joseph Scolaro | Oct 23, 2022

“…Desmond offers many incisive and rich critiques of an atheistic contemporary world as well as of static and insufficient presentations of religious belief, all from within his particular conceptual framework.”

Richard Weaver Explained Our Cultural Predicament Over 70 Years Ago

by Francis P. Sempa | Oct 16, 2022

“The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism.” – Richard Weaver

The Traditions That Gave Us Homer

by J. L. Wall | Oct 16, 2022

“Parry… ultimately became the most influential Classical—and perhaps literary—scholar of the twentieth-century precisely because he was able to side-step the Homeric Question altogether.”