The University Bookman
Reviewing Books that Build Culture
Gentlemen Losers
“Yet I suspect that one reason Steely Dan’s star has risen in our own day is that they cannot be exclusively claimed by cultural progressives. Whatever the personal convictions of Fagen and Becker might have been, their songs capture a certain temperamental conservatism, equal parts cynicism towards the promise of a brighter tomorrow and yearning for a sense of social order long past, that feels right at home in our age of fractured shabbiness. Combine this sensibility with the band’s relentless pursuit of aesthetic perfection, and you have a recipe for music that greatly appeals to a certain segment of young fogeys more indebted to T.S. Eliot than to Charlie Kirk.”
Thinking Ourselves into Oblivion
“Without formal and final causes… we have no access to the universal intelligible structures and purposes in the world. And without those, there is no possibility of meaningful philosophy.”
The “Christian Nationalism” Canard
“If the city and the soul are connected, as Russell Kirk affirmed, then what shapes the soul shapes the city, and vice versa, which means that vacating the public square entails transforming society…”
A Social Scientific Apologia for Marriage
“…Wilcox is here to do something unusual… He intuits a need for an updated social scientific apologia of marriage—something that champions marriage comprehensively from a social scientific perspective…”
Genesis Through a Glass Darkly
“Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis is not a commentary or a work of scholarship but a series of essays on the human encounter with the divine as portrayed in this first and perhaps most influential of all books.”
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Hope—Is It Warranted at This Point?
“The past generation of American life, on Hunter’s account, has been one of intensifying ‘exhaustion’ and distrust, as the sources of pluralism have multiplied, and the endlessly ‘worked-through’ soil of the hybrid-Enlightenment has come to seem dry and depleted, no longer able to provide plausible accounts of human nature and the meaning of history that a majority of Americans can sign onto.”
The Life of Joseph Epstein
“This might have been a highly political book detailing the evolution of a conventional Cold War liberal into the conservative that he is regarded as being (even if he doesn’t label himself as such in these pages). It might have been, but it isn’t. No, this memoir was written simply because Epstein sees his life as ’emblematic of the times’ and secondly because he sees himself as having acquired the literary skill necessary to ‘recount that life well.'”
Order for a Disordered Time
“When one thinks of order one might think of the phrase law and order. Kirk explains, however, that order is wider and larger than law.”
The Book Gallery
A collection of conversations with Bookman editor Luke C. Sheahan and writers and authors of imagination and erudition.
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!
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