The University Bookman

 
 
Review 13 May 2012
book cover Christopher Lasch, Conservative?
Seth J. Bartee
Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch by Eric Miller. Eerdmans, 2010. Cloth, 394 pages, $32.
Best of the Bookman 13 May 2012
book cover The Household Gods of Freedom
M. E. Bradford
John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in American Politics by Russell Kirk. Third ed., with select letters & speeches. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1978. [Fourth edition, 1997, cloth $24, paper $14.50.]
Review 6 May 2012
book cover The Kind of Man Modernity Can Afford
Hunter Baker
Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore by Peter L. Berger. Prometheus Books, 2011, 264pp, hardcover, $26.
Best of the Bookman 6 May 2012
book cover What Is Happening to History?
John Lukacs
In this 1979 essay, the historian looks at the state of his field. He argues that “Popular interest in history preceded the teaching of history in schools; and there are many reasons to believe that it will survive it too.”
Review 1 May 2012
book cover Socratic and Secular Irony
Lee Trepanier
A Case for Irony by Jonathan Lear. Harvard University Press, 2011, 210 pages, $30.
Review 29 April 2012
book cover Freedom Complex
Gerald J. Russello
On the Road to Emmaus: The Catholic Dialogue with America and Modernity by Glenn W. Olsen. The Catholic University of America Press, 2012. 303 pp., $70.
Best of the Bookman 29 April 2012
book cover Belloc’s Social Thought
Jane Soames Nickerson
Hilaire Belloc, Edwardian Radical by John P. McCarthy. Liberty Press, 1978 [IHS Press, 2009, 373 pages.]
Essay 22 April 2012
book cover Adrienne Rich and an Assessment of Contemporary American Poetry
Eugene Schlanger
Even measured against the hyperbole of her obituaries, which are less about the quality and resonance of her poetry and more about the ideologies of her admirers, it is possible to assess the public value of contemporary American poetry in the context of Adrienne Rich’s words.
Review 22 April 2012
book cover Poetically Thinking
Micah Mattix
The Poetry of Thought: From Hellenism to Celan by George Steiner. New Directions, 2012. 224 pages, $25.
Review 15 April 2012
book cover The Sexual Revolution and the Will to Disbelieve
Eve Tushnet
Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution by Mary Eberstadt. Ignatius Press (San Francisco), 2012. 175 pages, $20.
Best of the Bookman 15 April 2012
Uncanny Tales of the Moral Imagination
Jerry Pournelle
The Princess of All Lands by Russell Kirk. Arkham House Publishers, Sauk City, Wisconsin 53583. 1979. 238 pages. $8.95. [The stories from this volume are included in Ancestral Shadows (Eerdmans 2004), Kirk’s collected ghostly tales. —Ed.]
Review 8 April 2012
book cover Grounding the Life of the Mind
Matthew A. Rarey
Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America by Daniel J. Flynn. ISI Books (Wilmington, DE), 2011. 187 pp., $28 cloth

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The ... conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.

Russell Kirk

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News

The Kirk Center and The University Bookman regret the passing of sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz, who died in March. Recipient of many accolades, Horowitz was a sociologist of wide-ranging interests, from religion to analysis of state power and social order in assessing a society’s quality of life, an approach that has since become standard. Horowitz has a special place in the memory of the Kirk Center. It is he who made possible the Library of Conservative Thought, a collection of more than thirty volumes published by Transaction Press, with which Horowitz was long affiliated, and edited by Russell Kirk. These thirty-odd volumes constitute a basic reading list for the educated conservative, and include classics such as James Burnham’s Congress and the American Tradition, Irving Babbitt’s Rousseau and Romanticism, Orestes Brownson’s Selected Political Essays, and Kirk’s own America’s British Culture. These books brought the tradition of conservative reflection to a new generation, and rightly placed them alongside other important works of sociology, intellectual history, and politics. In his eulogy for Russell Kirk, given at Kirk’s Memorial Mass in 1994, Horowitz stated that Kirk was now “at one with the great tradition he helped articulate and recover”—words that also aptly describe the legacy of Irving Louis Horowitz. RIP. (17 Apr 2012)

Here’s a round-up of recent writings by Bookman editor Gerald Russello elsewhere on the Internet and in print. • At the Imaginative Conservative Russello responds to Claes Ryn’s argument that conservatives have failed the culture. • He reviews Gregory Wolfe’s Beauty Will Save the World in the October edition of Chronicles. • At the National Catholic Register he discusses a recent Colorado religious liberty case denying families access to funds for private education, based on an outdated reading of a bigoted “Blaine”-style amendment. • In The Wilson Quarterly, he reviews Why Trilling Matters. (15 Oct 2011)

The Imaginative Conservative blog has posted an excerpt and link to an essay by Pepperdine’s Ted McAllister on Kirk’s Conservative Mind that is worth a look: “What was then more readily an act of preservation has become today an act of recovery.” (1 Oct 2011)

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