The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
France and the Problem of Abstraction
“…French people’s love for ideas, indeed for ideology, often puts them at odds with the pragmatic requisites of a mature democracy and with reality itself. France is, as she very aptly puts it, ‘a country of dreamers who fall into melancholy when reality catches up with them.’ But far from being merely a psychological explanation for French unhappiness, this idealism is the key to a political understanding of our complicated relationship with the very principle of democracy.”
Humane Literature and the Divided Soul
“…White’s debut book… unites a memoir in fragments with a syllabus of literary works on the question of how to harmonize our duties and desires.”
Antisemitism, a Foreign Tradition
“…Nadell substitutes an explanation of what antisemitism is and how to chart it with a tacit theory that antisemitism always exists and always makes life miserable. For those reasons, [it] is a book best left unread.”
The Urbanity of Russell Kirk
“The urban fabric must also be mended and darned through continuous upkeep. The city is not yours to experiment. From Russell to Russello, our ancestral spirits cast their shadows whether or not we choose to observe the city of god in the cities of men.”
Buckley and Edwards: The Titan of Conservatism and His Titan of a Biographer
“By examining the major individual intellectual influences in Buckley’s life, Edwards is able to organically put together the various strands and ideas that became known as ‘fusionism’ without a lengthy or pedantic philosophical explanation.”
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.”
Natural Law and the Need for Moral Clarity
“Christians need clarity on the way their faith shapes their political activity. This ambiguous book fails to provide that clarity.”
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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