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.

John Adams: Russell Kirk’s Founding Federalist

“…[Kirk] located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both ‘the most successful conservative device in the history of the world’ and a ‘great monument’ to the Federalists.”

The Patriotic Russell Kirk

“Taken together, the essays in this collection have a distinctly American air, but one spiced by the enlivening spirit of a much longer historical consciousness.”

Jesuits and Revolutions

“…these… reveal Carola’s gift as a novelist, reminding the reader that the great theological and ecclesiastical questions of the age were debated and decided by flesh-and-blood human beings with normal needs and emotions.”

Smithian Wisdom on Demand

Smithian Wisdom on Demand

“Even readers who disagree with the collection’s broad normative valence will find that it consistently models a way of reading Smith as a unified thinker about persons-in-society—morally formed agents embedded in evolving rules, conventions, and institutions.”

In Praise of Poetry and Form

In Praise of Poetry and Form

“Majmudar often takes the long view, and from the long view, free verse is a new arrival in a variegated poetic history that stretches back into prehistory. To embrace it alone is to cut oneself off from that sweeping history and from the resources to be found there. There is still vitality in these neglected traditions. They are not a dead past.”

Monster is the Machine

Monster is the Machine

“Few outside of Tolkien’s most dedicated students, however, were aware that he had written an entire satirical story against the automobile… [It] is (or rather was) the last significant piece of original Tolkien fiction to remain unpublished.”

After the New Left: Rereading Breaking Ranks

After the New Left: Rereading Breaking Ranks

“The recent death of Norman Podhoretz prompted me to return to his ‘political memoir…’ Published in 1979, it deserves to be read or re-read today—and not simply as a historical account of his evolution from left to right during the 1960s and 1970s.”

Amici

Amici

“…art historian William E. Wallace chronicles the rivalry and friendship of Michelangelo and Titian, noting that the two Italian geniuses were not as variant in outlook and craft as is popularly believed.”

Catholic or Nothing

Catholic or Nothing

“Her accounts inspire reflection on the allure of Roman Catholicism to noteworthy nineteenth and twentieth century thinkers, specifically its stress on authority, tradition, and dogma, its aesthetics (especially liturgical), and its forceful critique of predominant secularist ideologies and systems. However different these converts were, then, they all found countercultural Roman Catholicism a compelling counterstatement to their epoch’s regnant religious and social norms.”

No Seed Which Dies Remains Alone

No Seed Which Dies Remains Alone

“For all the weight that Christianity and its paradoxes pull in the Western poetic tradition, you’d think that the theme of death and new life would be a rather tired one. And perhaps it is, at least in the work of more amateur poets than Pastor. But Pastor shows that the great paradox of the empty tomb is, in truth, an indefatigable one…”

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.

Kirk saw poetry, fiction, tradition, and restraint as essential to understanding America and preserving its character. In his review of "On America," @cjscalia explores Kirk’s vision of the founding, statesmanship, literature, and the enduring ideas that have shaped the republic.

The Audacious Russell Kirk
Bruce P. Frohnen reviews "On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776" by Russell Kirk. Edited by Michael Lucchese.

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