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.”

A Knight of the American West

A Knight of the American West

“His new book is an exciting chivalric adventure and romance, while also being a contemporary American novel set in the Southwest USA. Exceptionally well written, its straightforward crafting is an encouragement to the reader who eagerly returns to its pages.”

Coming to Terms with Sherman

Coming to Terms with Sherman

“…Glenn Arbery has contemporary America down cold, the more so since the cultural variations between North and South are far from being as marked as they were even fifty years ago.”

Solzhenitsyn and the Spirituality of Self-Limitation

Solzhenitsyn and the Spirituality of Self-Limitation

“…any so-called ‘progress’ or advancement of society must begin, always and everywhere, in the soul of the individual—not in the revolutionary fantasies of radical social reformers, whose aims work to dissolve the spiritual bonds that underlie the traditional fabric of human communities.”

How Should We Think About Inequality?

How Should We Think About Inequality?

“The book’s ultimate claim is not that the rich are virtuous, but that a democracy hostile to wealth will not become more equal—it will become more centralized, more bureaucratic, and less free. In that sense, McGinnis’s argument is less a defense of inequality than a defense of constitutional humility.”

The Machine or the Garden?

The Machine or the Garden?

“What Kingsnorth brilliantly exposes in Against the Machine is how the progressive vision of scientific, industrial, and technological progress is actually destroying the wisdom of the past in its merciless pursuit of perfection. Kingsnorth reminds us of the great taboo of modernity: ‘There is no such thing as a perfect society, and anyone who tries to build one will either go mad or become a tyrant.’”

What Plato Meant

What Plato Meant

“…Princeton University philosopher and political theorist Melissa Lane explores Plato’s notion of rule and governorship, attempting to refresh the humanistic, liberal reading of Plato’s political theory.”

After the Republic: Tacitus on the End of a Free State

After the Republic: Tacitus on the End of a Free State

“…you don’t really have to ‘wonder’ if you’ve lost the republic… This is one of the lessons of the first few paragraphs of Tacitus’ Annals. In this dour, grumpy review of the first decades of the Roman Empire, Tacitus gives us seven signs that the republic is well and truly dead.”

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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