Previously, I have commented on Michael Barone’s book, Hard America, Soft America, which portrays the two different worlds occupied by those in our country who are products of the demands of competition (hard) versus those who have avoided or have not been subjected to such rigors in education, employment, and other walks of life (soft). […]

Those who criticize the Bush Doctrine in dealing with world terrorism and Islamofacsism as well as others who wonder about its place in historical perspective would benefit from a small book by John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience. Gaddis places George W. Bush in a context that reaches back to John Quincy […]

From time to time, I have commented that the Middle East that we are in the process of transforming never had the experience of either a Reformation or Enlightenment and therefore did not have the same cultural reference points as the West for a successful transition to the modern world. As we contemplate a possible […]

During the past few weeks, I have revisited two classics—one, a book, Witness, by Whittaker Chambers, and the other, a movie, Judgment at Nuremberg, with an all-star cast directed by Stanley Kramer—and I was struck by a profound thought: that you can’t fully understand the 20th century unless you understand the issues raised so penetratingly […]

Coincidentally, much of my summer reading happened to revolve around religion, its history and development in the West and America, and its centuries-old war with science, as follows: The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America, by Frank Lambert, surveys the development of religion in America by attempting to answer the question, “How […]

Before reading Samuel P. Huntington’s book, Who Are We? The Cultural Core of American National Identity, I read several reviews of it, some of which were highly critical of what they characterized as his tones of racism, xenophobia, and cultural elitism. These focused almost entirely on the aspects of the book that describe the massive […]

What unfortunate timing for Bill Clinton—the release of his long-awaited book just after the Reagan ceremony and eulogies, the content of which made Clinton’s legacy seem even less consequential and, in fact, pretty small by comparison, a smallness that I believe history will remember about him and his Presidency. I have no interest in reading […]

Two books recently released by authors occupying different positions on the political spectrum struck me as intertwined in their message. Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America describes the contrast, over several generations of Americans beginning with the Progressive era, as well as among different segments of contemporary society, and I generalize, of a “hard” America […]

In the annals of instruction on leadership and statecraft, Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513) was the break from the idealism of the virtues of antiquity and Christianity and the handbook for pragmatists and realists more concerned with the ends than the means of the preservation and advancement of the interests of the modern state. In […]

For a fascinating read on two of the 20th century’s dominant intellectuals, I recommend The Question of God, by Dr. Armand Nicholi. The theme is a theoretical debate between two giants, Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis, who never actually met, but whose lives surprisingly paralleled and whose thought, in the end, anchored opposite poles […]