Books
May 18, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Today we conclude our celebration of the week of Charles — Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books and recipient of one of this year’s Bradley Prizes on Tuesday evening in Washington, DC — with our fourth preview from the new (Spring) issue of the magazine. Buy an annual subscription including immediate online access here for the modest price of $19.95. Forgive me for repeating myself: it is
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May 17, 2018 — Scott Johnson
We round the corner on our celebration of the week of Charles — Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books and recipient of one of this year’s Bradley Prizes on Tuesday evening in Washington, DC — with our third preview from the new (Spring) issue of the magazine that is hot off the press. Buy an annual subscription including immediate online access here for the modest price of
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May 16, 2018 — Scott Johnson
We continue our observance of the week of Charles — Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books and recipient of one of this year’s Bradley Prizes last night in Washington, DC — with the second preview from the new (Spring) issue of the magazine that is hot off the press. Buy an annual subscription including immediate online access here for the modest price of $19.95. It is an
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May 15, 2018 — Steven Hayward
(Dear reader—Fair warning: this is a long post, so best to settle in on the couch and make sure your dogs have completed their morning walks . . .) Okay class, everyone settle in for today’s seminar and get out your textbook, Jonah Goldberg’s Suicide of the West. Turn to page 316, and circle this sentence: “Indeed, as much as I hold Trump in contempt, I am still compelled to
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May 12, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Iran’s Supreme Leader (as he styles himself) wants it to be known that he is mightily unhappy with President Trump. That is what I deduce from Josh Delk’s story reporting in the Hill that “Iran’s supreme leader trolls Trump with photo of himself reading ‘Fire and Fury.'” If Fire and Fury is the Supreme Leader’s book of the week, let us recall that “Death to America” is the Supreme Leader’s
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May 8, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Nadezhda Mandelstam was the widow of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and author of the astounding memoir Hope Against Hope, originally published in 1970. It is still in print after all these years and well summarized here. Osip was first arrested and taken into custody in 1934 for having written an unpublished poem critical of Stalin. Later deposited in the Stalinist “sewage disposal system” (as Solzhenitsyn called it), Osip died
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April 25, 2018 — Scott Johnson
In its first week on sale, James Comey’s memoir cum manifesto A Higher Loyalty sold 600,000 copies in all formats (print, audio, and electronic). By contrast, Joe Concha reminds us, Hillary Clinton’s memoir cum apologia What Happened, sold 300,000 copies in its first week. Whereas Comey is one of the many villains of Hillary’s story, Comey is the hero of his own. I find it hard to believe that anyone
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April 23, 2018 — John Hinderaker
GQ, which stands for Gentlemen’s Quarterly, ran a feature on “21 Books You Don’t Have to Read.” Number 12 is the Bible: The Holy Bible is rated very highly by all the people who supposedly live by it but who in actuality have not read it. A liberal’s fantasy. Those who have read it know there are some good parts, but overall it is certainly not the finest thing that
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April 16, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Some weeks ago you may recall that I had Damon Linker, a liberal columnist for The Week, as a podcast guest, and this week I have on another of my favorite liberal thinkers, Steven Teles of Johns Hopkins University. Prof. Teles stands out from many liberals in part because he did his Ph.D work with a group of distinguished conservative professors at the University of Virginia, and would that more
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April 10, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Today is the official publication date of Joseph Tartakovsky’s book The Lives of the Constitution: Ten Exceptional Minds That Shaped America’s Supreme Law. Joseph is the James Wilson Fellow in Constitutional Law at the Claremont Institute, and was most recently the Deputy Solicitor General of Nevada. Tartakosvky has taken an original and innovative approach to illuminating the Constitution and its evolution over time, looking at ten individuals across the sweep of American
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April 3, 2018 — Steven Hayward
In this episode, I talk with Ed Whelan, president of of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, author of “Bench Memos” on National Review Online, and co-editor of Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and a Live Well Lived. It’s a wonderful collection. The speech Scalia gave to an Irish-American dinner on how an Italian thinks about the Irish is worth the price of the book alone. In addition to
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April 1, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Professor Amy Wax is of course the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She earned an M.D. degree from Harvard in addition to her J.D. degree from Columbia Law School. She holds an endowed chair at the law school. She must be one of the most prominent members of the faculty. Yet she is the subject of a campaign of vilification and stigmatization for
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March 29, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Will Rogers liked to joke that it was no trouble to be a humorist when you have the whole government working for you, and I’ve long thought that this should be amended to say that leftists are now working full time for our amusement. I had heard that Sean Penn had written a novel, but intended to spend zero time looking into it, because life is too short. (Besides, I’ve
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March 28, 2018 — John Hinderaker
You can measure any two things. In all probability, they will be different. If you have an agenda, you can call that difference a “disparity” or a “gap.” Thus, the difference between average white incomes and average black incomes is a “disparity,” but the difference between white incomes and Asian-American incomes, which on average are considerably higher, is not a “gap” that calls out for a remedy. This is the
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March 27, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Linda Brown was the young girl who gave her name to the four cases consolidated for consideration in Brown V. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court case that effectively invalidated the regime of public school segregation. She died on Sunday at the age of 75 or 76. Neil Genzlinger’s New York Times obituary (illustrated with good photographs) is here. Genzlinger deals inadequately with the Brown case. “In its ruling,”
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March 7, 2018 — Scott Johnson
When it was published in 1967, Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Making It met with the publishing equivalent of a lynch mob. It included Podhoretz’s friends and fellow members of the New York literary/intellectual establishment. They found Podhoretz guilty of crimes against taste and discretion. Among the lynch mob was the New York Review of Books. The NYRB set out to get the job done killing the book. Its first choice to
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March 6, 2018 — Scott Johnson
To borrow a resonant Shakespearean word, the new (Winter) issue of the Claremont Review of Books carries one review that represents the perfectest pairing of book with reviewer. It is Andrew Roberts’s review of Victor Davis Hanson’s new book, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. Roberts is of course the prominent historian and author of his own one-volume history of World War II,
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