Books
November 8, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Just in time for your weekend reveries, John Tamny of Freedom Works and RealClearMarkets joins me to discuss his provocative new book, They’re Both Wrong: A Policy Guide for America’s Frustrated Independent Thinkers, just out this week from our friends at the American Institute for Economic Research. Tamny is one of the great imaginative and original contrarian thinkers of our time on matters of economics and policy, as readers of
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November 6, 2019 — Scott Johnson
I am deeply saddened to note the passing of my friend Peter Collier at the age of 80 on November 1. Mark Tapson has posted an obituary here. Lloyd Billingsley adds a remembrance here. I first met Peter in 1989 or 1990 when he came to the Twin Cities with David Horowitz to promote Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the ’60s. Having just finished reading the book the day before,
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November 6, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Encounter Books commissioned Ben Weingarten to interview Glenn Reynolds in connection with Glenn’s Encounter Books pamphlet The Social Media Upheaval (video below). Episode 5 in the Close Encounters series, the interview takes up Glenn’s belief in the need to use antitrust laws to break up collusive big tech companies and his response to libertarian critiques of such a plan as well as the corrosive impact of social media on its
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November 4, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Lee Smith is the journalist and author of The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History. Published this past Tuesday, it is currently ranked number 5 on Amazon’s best-seller list. It was already back-ordered on its publication date. Given the fact that Lee is not a famous author, that Lee’s book is nonfiction, and that Lee has
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October 30, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Vladimir Bukovsky died this past Sunday at his home in Cambridge (UK) at the age of 76. The New York Times obituary is here; the brief AP obituary is here. The Vladimir Bukovsky site has much more. Bukovsky was of course the incredibly brave dissident who spent 12 years in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and labor camps before his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1976. His memoir — To Build
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October 29, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Today is the official publication date of Lee Smith’s book The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History. I haven’t read it but I state without reservation that it is, after Andrew McCarthy’s Ball of Collusion and Kim Strassel’s Resistance (At All Costs) (the links are to my review of each book on Power Line), the third
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October 27, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Kimberley Strassel is the Wall Street Journal columnist and editorial board member who has chronicled the wrongdoing of the unprecedented efforts to undermine the Trump administration inside the government and in the media. Her book Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America is a journalistic account of the phenomenon. The book was published on October 15, the date on which I bought it. Having now read the
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October 23, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Back in June, Scott reported on the embarrassment on live TV of feminist celebrity author Naomi Wolf (“Death Recorded Live“), in which it was revealed that her forthcoming book Outrages, which alleged that 19th century Britain executed homosexuals on a prodigious scale, was based on a misunderstanding of a legal term so simple that an undergraduate should have spotted it. I wrote separately at the same time that “I suspect
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October 14, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Kim Strassel’s new book, Resistance (At All Costs): How Trump Haters Are Breaking America, officially goes on sale tomorrow. Rarely has a book been so timely; I recommend that you buy it. I wrote a week ago about the terrific job that Kim did as a speaker at Center of the American Experiment’s Fall Briefing. After that post appeared, two organizations in other states contacted us to ask how they
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October 13, 2019 — Steven Hayward
This special bonus double-episode tests the proposition that a good podcast format is a conversation among friends at a bar—because that’s exactly what the first segment of this show offers. Last week I was overseas on the joint cruise of the Claremont Institute and the Pacific Research Institute, both celebrating their 40th anniversary this fall. Following a day tromping around Florence taking in the scenes of various locales for Niccolò Machiavelli,
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October 11, 2019 — Steven Hayward
Nationalism is the subject of the moment, and both the term and the idea come with more baggage than Paris Hilton and Khloe Kardashian after an afternoon of shopping on Rodeo Drive. I’ve had a few things to say about this controversial topic myself, but I am delighted to feature as this week’s special guest Colin Dueck of George Mason University, who is the author of a new book coming
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October 6, 2019 — Scott Johnson
At my oldest daughter’s primary school in the 1990’s, study of the Yanomamö bushmen permeated the curriculum. By the time my daughter moved on from the school to seventh grade, I believe she “knew” (I think much of what she was taught isn’t true) more about the Yanomamö than she did about American history. I should have been paying more attention, but I had other battles to fight with the
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October 4, 2019 — Steven Hayward
I am overseas at the moment and limited to Internet by smoke signals (another failure of globalization!), but as they say in Hollywood, the show must go on, and that includes the Power Line Show. (And in case you’re wondering, not to worry: The Week in Pictures is already buttoned up and scheduled for appearance at the regular time tomorrow.) Last week I caught up with Hadley Arkes, Edward N.
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September 26, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Michelle Malkin came to town this past Tuesday as the star attraction at an event sponsored by our old friends at AM1280 The Patriot. Michelle drew an audience of 500 to hear her discuss her just-published book, Open Borders Inc.: Who’s Funding America’s Destruction. Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey moderated the event at Ames Center in Burnsville. By my count this is Michelle’s eighth book and it is a critically important
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September 23, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Thinking about the advances in comprehension made possible by punctuation, I wondered about the exclamation point. When was it invented? Looking for help on the history of punctuation, we can turn to Keith Houston. Houston wrote the 2014 book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. Houston has a good summary here. Ashley Timms also has a good summary here. According to Houston, the exclamation
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September 22, 2019 — Scott Johnson
I’ve been reading Michel de Montaigne’s Essays with friends this year. When I took his course on Renaissance classics in college, Professor Dain Trafton observed that Montaigne was the one author we had read who in his estimation stood with Shakespeare. That made an impression on me because Professor Trafton is himself a devoted Shakespearian scholar and we had read Machiavelli, Cervantes, Rabelais, Erasmus, Castiglione, and Thomas More in the
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September 14, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Professor Gary Saul Morson’s essay “How the great truth dawned” leads off the September issue of The New Criterion. It’s not terribly long, but it must be the longest article ever published by the magazine, and you can easily see why. It is brilliant and moving. Beginning and ending with Solzhenitsyn, it takes up the Gulag, Communism, mass murder, Russian literature, the turn to God and much more. I want
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