Nobility of Spirit, by Rob Riemen A thin, but powerfully written book in which man’s dual nature is explored and the spiritual side highlighted. Riemen emphasizes the importance of the world of ideas in the classical sense and appeals to our intellectuals to take seriously their role as the guardians of universal values such as […]
The Forgotten Man
The previous essay glides readily into the central theme of Amity Shlaes’s book, The Forgotten Man, which I recommend as a thoroughly engrossing history of the Great Depression. The connection to the charity analogy is with the image of “the forgotten man” created by the architects of the Franklin Roosevelt election campaign and the New Deal. This adaptation was […]
Book Notes
Two recent books to recommend, which have interesting overlaps in the several ways in which they treat the history of liberalism in America: **Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, by James Piereson. The subtitle of this book describes it well–“how the assassination of John F. Kennedy shattered American liberalism”. This is a fascinating and unique treatment […]
Recent Books
The holiday season provided some time to finish a couple of books I had been putting off, and I can recommend both very highly: Our First Revolution, by Michael Barone. This is great narrative history covering the period leading to the English Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, complete with a detailed description of the events and […]
Summer Books
Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson. This book has been on the NY Times best seller list for many weeks now, to no surprise. It is a very well written chronology of the life of a man whose exploits have become larger than life and the stuff of near-mythology for many among the […]
Current Reading
My reading time has been greatly curtailed lately because of my education reform priorities, but here are some recent books that are worth considering: *First Things: An Inquiry into the First Principles of Morals and Justice, by Hadley Arkes. The title is a dead giveaway, because this is a classic work of political theory as […]
Summer Books
For a variety of reasons, religious issues were dominant in my books of the summer just passed, possibly because our religious heritage informs so much of our thinking about the conflicting issues of the day. I was drawn to Against the World for the World: The Hartford Appeal and the Future of American Religion, […]
Bloom Revisited
Thinking about various recent events and spectacles in higher education—the Ward Churchill fiasco, the shameful dismissal of President Larry Summers at Harvard, affirmative action marketing to the GLBT community at my own alma mater, Yale admitting as a student a former ambassador-at-large of the Afghan Taliban, and the deliberations of the Department of Education’s higher […]
Speaking of the Founding
On the long flights to and from London, I was able to catch up with David McCullough’s 1776, a great book I strongly recommend to anyone who wants a vivid picture of our struggle for independence from Britain and the very real heroes who made it happen. The major impact of this work is to […]
Summer Books
The War for Righteousness, by Richard M. Gamble. This is a fascinating account of how the progressive Protestant clergy in America transformed themselves from principled pacifists to crusading interventionists in the period leading to World War I. Gamble explores the inner workings of the institutions of the “social gospel” and liberal theology, explaining how they […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- Next Page »