Books
April 9, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Our friend Roger Kimball wears hats including that of the publisher of Encounter Books. Roger writes us with this public service announcement: Amazon made headlines in February when they got into the censorship business. Without notice or warning, they summarily delisted Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, a thoughtful, deeply researched, and humane study that I published at Encounter Books some three years ago. But
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March 22, 2021 — Scott Johnson
In parts 18, 20, and 27 of this series we noted Amazon’s suppression of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement, by Ryan Anderson. Anderson is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the founding editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. Anderson’s book was published by Encounter Books under the leadership of publisher Roger Kimball. Roger took up
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March 22, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I hesitated to post this video of Jewish Review of Books editor Abe Socher interviewing former Gulag prisoner Natan Sharansky and historian Gil Troy about their new book, Never Alone. The book is the subject of “Sharanksy’s Exodus,” the excellent review by Daniel Gordis in the Spring issue of the JRB. Gordis’s review highlights the phenomenon of Orwellian doublethink — “the round-the-clock public charade” of knowing one thing but saying
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March 14, 2021 — Scott Johnson
In earlier installments of this series we noted Amazon’s suppression of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement, by Ryan Anderson. Anderson is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the founding editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey. Anderson’s book was published by Encounter Books under the leadership of publisher Roger Kimball. Roger now takes up the story
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February 28, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The 9/11 boatlift is not exactly breaking news. The 2016 book American Dunkirk: The Waterborne Evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11 documented the event for historical purposes (reviewed here by Rick Spilman for gCaptain). Yet it comes as news to me, via our friend Jean Yarbrough of Bowdoin College. Professor Yarbrough draws my attention to the moving 10-minute documentary “Boatlift” (video below). The film dates back to the tenth anniversary of
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February 26, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson has made himself a valuable source of dissent from the party line of the public health establishment in connection with COVID-19. In 2010 Berenson left the Times to pursue a successful career as an author of espionage thrillers. In recent appearances on Fox News, he has mentioned that the previously friendly mainstream media have turned a blind eye to his new novel, The
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February 26, 2021 — Scott Johnson
As in a Stalinist purge, Amazon has silently “disappeared” Ryan Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally. Amazon tacitly alleges that it acted under revised guidelines prohibiting the sale of “content that we determine is hate speech … or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive,” including content that “promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, [or] advocates terrorism.” Beyond citing the policy, Amazon
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February 25, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Amazon isn’t talking about its suppression of Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally, but it has referred an inquiring reporter to its new hate speech policy. So Daniel Payne reports at Just the News. I infer that Amazon isn’t talking, however, because there is nothing that can reasonably described as hate speech in Anderson’s book. Anderson himself comments in his First Things essay “When Amazon erased my book.” The Washington
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February 22, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Our friend Roger Kimball is the learned publisher of Encounter Books. He writes to alert us to the statement Encounter has just posted on the suppression of one of its titles by Amazon: Yesterday, we learned that Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, which Encounter Books originally published in 2018, was removed without explanation from Amazon.com and from its subsidiary Audible. Encounter Books is
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February 19, 2021 — Scott Johnson
Ammo Grrrll provides the intriguing title WHERE THERE IS NO MAN. She writes: Before I explain the title of this column, let me “circle back” to the irrational exuberance when The First Black President was elected. As some of you may remember, I did not vote for him. I knew just what a steaming pile of disaster The Lowerer of Oceans was going to be from having spent a decade
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February 17, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I’ve written over the years about my friend Howard Root, the founder and former chief executive officer of Vascular Solutions. After his acquittal on the criminal charges brought against him and his company, Howard announced his resignation on the pages of the Wall Street Journal in the February 2017 column “Sally Yates’s legacy of injustice at the Department of Justice.” Howard tells the story of his case in the riveting
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February 16, 2021 — Steven Hayward
One of the great things about being a conservative is that there is usually an old text that explains the present moment better than it did the time in which is was first written. One of my favorite short axioms is Michael Oakeshott: “The conjunction of dreaming and ruling generates tyranny.” Lately I’ve been reading through some old essays of Richard Weaver, author of the classic Ideas Have Consequences. (I
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February 1, 2021 — Scott Johnson
I grew up admiring “the crusading syndicated labor columnist” Victor Riesel, as the New York Times called him in its 1995 obituary. In a scene with overtones of On the Waterfront, Riesel had been blinded in an assault just after leaving Lindy’s restaurant in midtown Manhattan at 3:00 a.m. on April 5, 1956. “An hour earlier,” the Times recalled, Riesel “had finished a radio broadcast in which he assailed the
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January 26, 2021 — Steven Hayward
Jason Riley of the Manhattan Institute has completed his biography of Thomas Sowell, and Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell will appear in May (though by all means pre-order it now). In the meantime, it really is worth finding a spare hour to take in this documentary about Sowell based on Jason’s book, from our friends at Free to Choose media:
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January 9, 2021 — John Hinderaker
I get a fair number of books in the mail, but I generally don’t read them, especially if they are political. But a few days ago I got a copy of The Man In Milan, by Vito Racanelli. Vito is a Power Line fan, and the book was inscribed to me and accompanied by a nice letter. So I gave it a try. Racanelli, to begin with, is a knowledgeable
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January 2, 2021 — Scott Johnson
The original source of this quote from Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels) appears to date to a 2005 Frontpage article or interview that is no longer accessible online: Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to
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December 31, 2020 — Paul Mirengoff
I always look forward to Tevi Troy’s annual summary of his year in reading. This year’s edition is here. Tevi has read 80 books since the onset of the pandemic, which puts me to shame. Among his favorites are Amity Shlaes’s Great Society, about the miscalculations and misguided ideas behind the War on Poverty in the 1960s; Craig Fehrman’s Author in Chief, about our presidents as writers, but also a
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