Books
December 6, 2012 — Scott Johnson
We continue our Christmas extravaganza previewing the Fall issue of the Claremont Review of Books through Friday. If you lean conservative and love to read about history, politics, economics, literature, culture and current events, the CRB has earned your attention. Subscriptions are available here for $19.95 (including immediate online access). Students of Winston Churchill know that Aristotle played a key role in his self-education. Churchill’s search for “a concise compendious
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December 5, 2012 — Scott Johnson
We continue our Christmas extravaganza previewing the Fall issue of the Claremont Review of Books through Friday. If you lean conservative and love to read about history, politics, economics, literature, culture and current events, the CRB may be the magazine for you. It is for me. Subscriptions are available here for $19.95 (including immediate online access). The Fall issue is incredibly rich. As is typically the case, reading the issue
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December 4, 2012 — Scott Johnson
We continue our Christmas extravaganza previewing the Fall issue of the Claremont Review of Books (subscribe here and get immediate access to the issue online). To assess an extraordinary new book on affirmative action in higher education, the editors have called on the great Thomas Sowell. Sowell introduces the subject with a paragraph that could be chiseled in stone: Anyone who follows public policy issues can easily think of policies
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November 30, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Today (Churchill’s birthday, by no coincidence) our long-time friends at the Claremont Institute are launching a new video project entitled “The American Mind,” hosted by Charles R. Kesler, editor of the Institute’s indispensible journal, the Claremont Review of Books. The Institute kindly gave Power Line a preview and first crack at announcing its launch. Is this just another think tank video venture? On the surface, it appears the answer would
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November 29, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I’m working up toward a Christmas book gift list for the Claremont Review in a few more days, and the process has made me press ahead further into Jean Yarbrough’s indispensable new book, mentioned here previously, Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition. There are lots of TR books out there—some of them even pretty good, though most are not that good on the question of exploring and untangling his
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November 25, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The current issue of The New Republic has a long attack on Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and free market economics generally by the Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow, entitled “Hayek, Friedman, and the Illusions of Conservative Economics.” Ostensibly a review of the brand new book The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets Since the Great Depression by Angus Burgin, the review is less about the book than it is an excuse
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November 22, 2012 — John Hinderaker
I’m only half way through it, but with our readers starting to think about Christmas shopping, I want to join the chorus of praise for Jake Tapper and his new book about the war in Afghanistan, The Outpost. Tapper is well-known as one of the few real journalists in the Washington press corps, but The Outpost is an achievement of a whole different order of magnitude. It tells the story
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November 20, 2012 — Scott Johnson
I think that just about everything President Obama “knows” about American history comes from left-wing academics like American University professor Peter Kuznick, the co-author with Oliver Stone of The Untold History of the United States. The book is a companion to Stone’s Showtime series. At American University, incidentally, Kuznick teaches the “path-breaking course Oliver Stone’s America.” On Showtime, Stone presents Peter Kuznick’s America. They have got a circle of love
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November 16, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I’m always behind on my reading pile, so I was slow to catch up with the Wall Street Journal’s bizarro review last Saturday of the new Manchester-Reid Churchill biography, The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm. Most of the “review” was more a memoir of the reviewer’s casual acquaintanceship with Manchester rather than a discussion of the book. The subtext of the review, most people I’ve spoken with agree, seems to
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November 9, 2012 — Steven Hayward
So it’s back to the books. One of the black holes of the Cold War, and closely related to the impulse to “move on” after its end rather than reckon with the whole truth, is appraising the full extent of Soviet efforts to infiltrate and influence American government. My old mentor M. Stanton Evans, along with co-author Herbert Rommerstein, are out with a new book entitled Stalin’s Secret Agents: The
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November 5, 2012 — Steven Hayward
While we await game day tomorrow, let me refresh everyone’s memory about book news. Back in May I brought Power Line readers’ attention to the forthcoming final volume of William Manchester’s multi-volume Churchill biography, The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965. The official pub date is tomorrow, but Amazon is shipping it already and you can have your copy tomorrow if you want to distract from election day rumors
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November 4, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Tom Brown is the father-in-law of Dartmouth alum and ABC News White House correspondent Jake Tapper. I admire Jake’s work; he seems to me to be a straight shooter. He’s not toeing anybody’s line. Mr. Brown draws attention to Tapper’s new book, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, to be published on November 13. He writes: Jake details life for our soldiers as they build, man, support and
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November 2, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Charles Kesler appeared last night on the News Hour on (the soon to be defunded) PBS. Here’s the 8-minute segment: And if you haven’t yet read I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism, there’s still time to get it before Tuesday if you use Amazon Prime. And even if you don’t get to it by Tuesday and Romney wins, the book will not be obsolete; its
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November 1, 2012 — Steven Hayward
George Will’s column today begins with a wonderful epigram from Calvin Coolidge, which applies in obvious counterpoint to The Lightworker Obama: It is a great advantage to a President, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man. But there’s more where that came from. Here’s Not-So-Silent Cal’s immediate sequel: When a man begins to feel that he is
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October 26, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Daniel Botkin, who describes himself as a “renegade naturalist,” is professor emeritus of ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the author of one of my all-time favorite environmental books, Discordant Harmonies. Dan is just out with a new and updated edition entitled The Moon in the Nautilus Shell. I caught up with Dan earlier this month, and in the latest interview series for Power Line, here’s
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October 15, 2012 — Scott Johnson
Stephen Moore is the invaluable editorial board member and senior economics writer at the Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of one of the books of the season: Who’s The Fairest of Them All: The Truth About Opportunity, Taxes and Wealth in America, just published by Encounter Books. The book addresses a a subject close to our heart; John and I took a whack at it in the
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October 12, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
The Obama administration is attempting to throw U.S. intelligence under the bus, blaming it for the White House’s patently false claims about the attack in Benghazi. Our intelligence officials surely are used to this kind of treatment by now, but this doesn’t make the latest instance any more palatable. In my view, the most deplorable example of throwing intelligence personnel under the bus was the sustained mistreatment of the heroes
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