Books
July 15, 2025 — Scott Johnson
When the flash floods hit Texas and wiped out the lives of so many beautiful young people, I thought of Voltaire’s account of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 in Chapter V of Candide. The earthquake was a massive natural disaster. It killed thousands of people. In Candide Voltaire famously mocked the philosophical “optimism” of Alexander Pope (“whatever is, is right)” and Leibniz (this is “the best of all possible worlds”)
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July 10, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Andrew Stuttaford is the editor of National Review’s Capital Matters. This is from his review of John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics in the May 17-18 Review section of the Wall Street Journal, which appeared under the headline “Enemies of the Market Mindset.” Stuttaford writes toward the end of his review: * * * * * Mr. Cassidy observes that choosing his cast of critics “was greatly helped by the
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July 10, 2025 — Scott Johnson
The title of Walter Blair’s out-of-print classic is unfortunately obsolete, but I believe it remains a useful work. Originally published in 1937 as Native American Humor (1800-1900), it was updated and republished in 1960 simply as Native American Humor. The book was still in print when I studied it as a high school student in 1968, the year of Blair’s retirement from the faculty of the University of Chicago, where
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July 8, 2025 — Scott Johnson
ICE conducted some kind of sweep through MacArthur Park in Los Angeles yesterday. It was at the least a show of force in a hotbed of illegal immigrant crime. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass did not approve of the operation and managed to be filmed expressing her disapproval to others. At NR, Noah Rothman quotes Bass: “What I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege, under
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July 7, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Traveling today, I would like to continue what Chris Flannery has started in his posts on Mark Twain for us. I want to return to Mark Twain from the perspective afforded by the end of his career and the man who taught me Mark Twain in college. “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” is one of Mark Twain’s late bursts of indignation against American imperialism. It seems to derive from
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July 6, 2025 — Scott Johnson
David Garrow is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Martin Luther King Jr. biography Bearing the Cross and Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. He has also become my favorite reviewer in the weekend Washington Free Beacon’s rotation. Today Professor Garrow reviews the new book by the reporter President Trump calls “my Salena.” His Salena’s new book is Butler: The Untold Story of the Near Assassination of Donald Trump
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June 30, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Christopher Flannery is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books. With the publication of Ron Chernow’s new biography, this is once again the season of Mark Twain. Chris reviewed Chernow’s biography for the Claremont Review of Books in “Pure gold” and drew on it for the American Mind column “To absquatulate.” I asked Chris if he had any stray thoughts
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June 27, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Christopher Flannery is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books. With the publication of Ron Chernow’s new biography, this is once again the season of Mark Twain. Chris reviewed Chernow’s biography for the Claremont Review of Books in “Pure gold” and drew on it for the American Mind column “To absquatulate.” I asked Chris if he had any stray thoughts
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June 24, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Christopher Flannery is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books. With the publication of Ron Chernow’s new biography, this is once again the season of Mark Twain. Chris reviewed Chernow’s biography for the Claremont Review of Books in “Pure gold” and drew on it for the American Mind column “To absquatulate.” I enjoyed both of these pieces so much that
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June 4, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Karine-Jean Pierre has me daydreaming of the old Anthony Newley/Leslie Bricusse song “What Kind of Fool Am I?” In her case, it should go “What Kind of Fake Am I?,” though “What Kind of Fool Am I?” might do as well. The former White House spokesliar, KJP found eager consumers of the party line when she whipped up a storm alleging videos of Joe Biden lost in a haze were
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June 2, 2025 — Scott Johnson
The Free Press has just posted Rod Dreher’s long column “The woke right is coming for your sons.” Having toured the United States in support of the documentary Live Not By Lies! based on his book of the same name, Dreher writes that what he found “shocked me to my core.” He saw “the deep inroads, in such a short period, that right-wing totalitarianism, expressed most often as antisemitism, has
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June 1, 2025 — Scott Johnson
The forthcoming issue of the Claremont Review of Books features Chris Flannery’s longish essay on Mark Twain and the new biography of him by Ron Chernow. The essay runs under the heading “Pure gold.” Early in the essay Chris recounts: * * * * * In his Autobiography Mark Twain tells the story of a mesmerizer who came to Hannibal in May 1850, charging 25 cents for admission to see
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May 28, 2025 — Scott Johnson
The death of William F. Buckley, Jr. on February 27, 2008, deprived the modern American conservative movement of its founder, for Buckley was preeminently the founding statesman of the movement that gained its political expression first in Barry Goldwater and then Ronald Reagan. When Buckley founded National Review in 1955 at the age of 29, he lit the fire that sparked the movement. Buckley had already achieved notoriety–if not celebrity–with
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May 27, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Washington Post reporter and editor David Finkel spent eight months embedded with soldiers of the Army’s 2-16 infantry battalion in Iraq during the surge. Finkel’s devastating and widely praised The Good Soldiers (2009) is based on the time he spent with the unit in Iraq. “The good soldiers” are chewed up in the war waged on them by the terror masters in Iran. It is a book that made me
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May 25, 2025 — Scott Johnson
I wrote on Power Line a few days before my cousin Dean (i.e., Dean Phillips) announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination: “When Dean throws his hat in the ring, it won’t be because he thinks it will advance his career. It won’t. This past summer he called for some prominent Democrat to challenge Biden because he thinks challenging Biden is the right thing to do — the right
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May 20, 2025 — Scott Johnson
Today is the official publication date of the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on the cover-up of President Biden’s cognitive decline from those (like Tapper) who couldn’t or wouldn’t see what was in front of their nose. The Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles has now arrived on the scene with “The Tapper Dossier: How the CNN ‘Journalist’ Covered (Up) the Biden Cover-Up—Before Writing a Best-Selling Book About It.”
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May 14, 2025 — Scott Johnson
The University Press of Kansas has published Jeff Kisseloff’s Rewriting History: A Fifty-Year Journey to Uncover the Truth About Alger Hiss (with a foreword by Tony Hiss). You may be thinking, what a perfect title for a book seeking to vindicate Alger Hiss! Or you may be thinking, that’s not a journey I am ever going to take in this lifetime! Or you may be thinking, you have got to
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