Books

A personal note on the Ides of March

Featured image I ask readers to forgive me for repeating this personal note from last year. It is meant to pay tribute to my high school, my high school teachers — Latin teachers Lyman Hawbaker (who also taught ancient history) and Dave Sims in particular — and to my classmates. In the course of our high school years we were required to study Latin and dip our toes into Caesars’s Gallic Wars, »

Mr. X

Featured image The current issue of the Claremont Review of Books carries the informative review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk by Helen Andrews. The Andrews review is relatively brief and extremely interesting. I want to single out the penultimate paragraph: Conservatives ought to support Musk because he will need all the help he can get. The deep state has him in its crosshairs and will not stop until he is »

Political pilgrimage revisited

Featured image On his current visit to Moscow Tucker Carlson is repeating the old phenomenon of political pilgrimage. Paul Hollander devoted an entire book to it 40 years ago — Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (1981). (The original subtitle of the book was Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba.) Hollander’s book was a powerful antidote to the phenomenon, but it did not »

Living with contradiction

Featured image New York Post columnist Miranda Devine literally wrote the book on The Laptop From Hell. Subtitle: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide. Whenever she updates the continuing saga of Hunter Biden, attention must be paid. Today the reader’s attention is rewarded with low comedy: Hunter has been making all of his 16 lawyers in cases across the country go through this charade of »

A note on “Shane”

Featured image I recorded Shane off TCM and watched it for about the tenth time last night. The film was directed by George Stevens with a script by A.B. Guthrie, Jr. Alan Ladd plays Shane, the gunfighter with a mysterious past who is looking for a new life in Wyoming circa 1889. A variety of currents and undercurrents run through the film. Some of them conflict. Indians have been cleared from the »

Black History Reading Month

Featured image Black History Month is “ridiculous,” Morgan Freeman contends, because “black history is American history.” Black History Month also tends to ignore certain works that merit attention year round. Consider, for example,  Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany, by Hans Massaquoi, son of a Liberian father and German mother. “In their many bloody clashes for dominance in Germany,” wrote Massaquoi, “the Nazis and Commies were virtually indistinguishable. Both »

Salmon Chase: Whodat?

Featured image In the last of the five stories that make up his third volume of stories about fictional alter ego Henry Bech, John Updike recounts the incredulous response to Bech’s receipt of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature. In Updike’s telling, the New York Daily News runs a story with the headline “BECH? WHODAT???” That doesn’t quite apply to former Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon Chase, but we should know him »

If you love military history

Featured image This past Saturday I met Aaron MacLean, host of the School of War podcast. Aaron is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Before that, he worked on Capitol Hill as senior foreign policy advisor and legislative director to Senator Tom Cotton and served on active duty as a U.S. Marine for seven years, deploying to Afghanistan as an infantry officer in 2009–2010. Following his time in »

Ed Epstein: A look back

Featured image The New York Times has published its Edward Jay Epstein obituary by Sam Roberts. It runs as “Edward Jay Epstein, Author and Stubborn Skeptic, Dies at 88.” The Times obit draws freely on Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe, the autobiographical memoir Ed published last year at age 87. Ed was a New York character and the Times obit isn’t bad. Indeed, it »

Edward Jay Epstein, RIP

Featured image Last week I declared Edward Jay Esptein’s Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe my book of the year. I followed up with Ed by email, asking him how he was doing and telling him I wanted to visit him in New York. Ed responded that he was “just recovering from [his] first bout of covid” and asked how I was doing. I am »

The Shambhalic Henry Wallace

Featured image Henry Wallace! I have long thought that Roosevelt’s replacement of Wallace with Truman on the Democratic ticket in 1944 provided irrefutable proof that God looks out for the United States. Wallace was a fool who would have altered the course of history very much for the worse if he had succeeded Roosevelt to the presidency in 1945 instead of Truman. Among other evidence of Wallace’s foolishness, one thinks of Wallace’s »

My book of the year

Featured image John recently highlighted the favorite books he somehow found time to read in 2023. I want to highlight my own favorite new book published in 2023. Writing about Edward Jay Epstein in the adjacent post reminded me that I flagged it last year on Power Line at the time of publication. Lapham’s Quarterly excerpted the third chapter of the book and published it as “Waiting for Brando.” Ed titles the »

Books of 2023

Featured image Was 2023 a banner year for books? Not exactly. It was partly a walk on the dark side. In 2022, I started reading John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee books. I read the rest of them–there are 21 altogether–in 2023. As I wrote last year, McGee is a guilty pleasure. Who wouldn’t like to live on a Florida houseboat and fend off beautiful women, while doing battle with evildoers? MacDonald was »

Random thoughts on the passing seen

Featured image I have adapted the heading of this post from the great Thomas Sowell’s occasional columns expressing “random thoughts on the passing scene.” It is unbelievable how many apothegms he formulated and shibboleths he pierced in those occasional columns. In no way can I rise to Sowell’s standards. I only claim to have a few random thoughts. Random I can do. Sowell compiled numerous random thoughts from his columns in Part »

Some call it realism

Featured image John Mearsheimer is R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He fancies himself an international relations scholar who belongs to the realist school of thought. With Harvard’s Stephen Walt, he is the author of The Israel-Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book to which I devoted a lot of attention on Power Line when it was published in 2007. Mearsheimer has regained a »

Three damn things

Featured image In his post on Bill Barr, Lloyd Billingsley draws on One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General to mount a critique of Barr’s service as AG in two administrations, the second time at the behest of President Trump. Along with former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, I thought Barr was one of Trump’s most impressive appointees. If Trump were to be reelected in 2024, »

Presidential Plagiarism

Featured image Harvard president Claudine Gay is being pressured to step down over charges of plagiarism as former president Obama lobbies the administration to stick with her. That makes sense because Obama is a Harvard law alum, like Gay soft on campus anti-Semitism, and no stranger to plagiarism his own self. In Dreams from My Father, released in 1995, the author visits Kenya and the account bears remarkable similarities to I Dreamed of Africa, published in »