Across the Great Divide
Say It One Time for the Broken Hearted: Country Soul in the American South By Barney Hoskyns. Bloomsbury (London) 256 pp., $17.24 paper, second edition, 1998Quentin Tarantino’s film Jackie Brown begins, to quote the script, with “the rhythms of funky seventies SOUL...
The ‘Time’ of Elizabeth Madox Roberts
In 1926 Elizabeth Madox Roberts, a 45-year-old former schoolteacher from Springfield, Kentucky, published her first novel. The Time of Man came out to great acclaim; it was reviewed widely, admired here and abroad by writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Glenway Wescott,...
Robert Traver: Anatomy of a Fisherman
The eight nudists arrested near Battle Creek, Michigan, had an advocate in the novelist and fishing writer Robert Traver. His disapproval fell not upon them but upon the police officers involved in the arrests. He called one of them a “deputized window-peeper” and...
On Brooklyn’s Side
New York City does not normally figure in the regionalist imagination, either conservative or liberal. It is self- and other-described as the original melting pot, the place where people move when they are getting away from somewhere else, to land in a no-man’s land...
What About Booth?
Newton Booth Tarkington, Neglected Hoosier During a recent lecture, the eminent and usually trustworthy literary critic Joseph Epstein befuddled at least one audience member (me) by referring to Theodore Dreiser as the “greatest American author of the twentieth...Look Homeward
The Bookman is very pleased to present this special issue on regionalism, with guest editor Bill Kauffman. Bill is one of the most provocative and compelling of a new generation of conservative writers. Hehas gone back and retrieved an almost forgotten tradition of...Two Histories
Bookman editor Gerald Russello takes a look at two recent books on conservatism.Histories Right and Left
Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s by Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds. (Harvard University Press, 2008), 373 pp. A Conservative History of the American Left by Daniel J. Flynn (Crown Forum, 2008), 455 pp. By some accounts,...A Post-Election Reading List
Are you a conservative exile? Here are some thoughtful suggestions by a Bookman supporter on readings to live by.
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!