Free Republic

Crime novelist PD James, who penned more than 20 books, has died aged 94. Her agent said she died "peacefully at her home in Oxford" on Thursday morning. The author's books, many featuring sleuth Adam Dalgliesh, sold millions of books around the world, with various adaptations for television and film. Her best known novels include The Children of Men, The Murder Room and Pride and Prejudice spin-off Death Comes to Pemberley.

THE OPEN MIND Host: Richard D. Heffner Guest: William Safire Title: “William Safire on the Book of Job in Today’s Politics” VTR: 10/9/92 I’m Richard Heffner, your host on THE OPEN MIND, where only very rarely – indeed too rarely, as far as those of our viewers who want me to draw blood are concerned – only occasionally do I play at what Ross Perot has called “Gotcha journalism”. But when I do, or at least try to, it’s usually in the guise of – oh so innocently of course – asking a guest about this or her most fervently...

Stefan Ihrig's exhaustively researched new book, Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination, charts the outsized role that Atatürk and the New Turkey played in the minds of Germany’s Weimar-era far right—an influence that extended through the Nazi years. Turkish Revolution was the most hotly-debated foreign issue in the early 1920’s. Not only did the Nazis model themselves after the Turkish National Movement, but Nazi leaders from Hitler and Goebbels were personally entranced by everything Atatürk did. In the aftermath of World War I, Germans—conservatives became consumed with the idea they had been unfairly treated at the Paris Peace Conference (‘raped’ is...

Anyone watched this? Rush Limbaugh is watching it and I watched it before him. Call it liberal call it BS, this is a fine bit of writing that tackles serious problems. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/programs/series/worricker-s1/

The 19th Century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote about characters who justified murder in the name of their ideological beliefs. For this reason, John Gray argues, he's remained relevant ever since, through the rise of the totalitarian states of the 20th Century, to the "war against terror". When Fyodor Dostoyevsky described in his novels how ideas have the power to change human lives, he knew something of what he was writing about. Born in 1821, the Russian writer was in his 20s when he joined a circle of radical intellectuals in St Petersburg who were entranced by French utopian socialist...

Officials in a Polish town (Tuszyn) have opposed a proposition to name a playground after Winnie-the-Pooh due to the bear’s unclear gender and immodest clothing. […] Voice recordings of the meeting were leaked to the media in which officials complained that Pooh Bear is immodestly dressed and also lacks a clear gender. One called the bear a “hermaphrodite.” …

If you asked a scientist to create a test-tube liberal, chances are his product couldn’t hold a candle to Maria Luisa Tucker. Tucker, a new mother, is celebrating the arrival of her little bundle of joy by mooning over the “environmental impact of procreation.” Really. For a Nov. 13 piece for Alternet, Tucker asked, “Does Having a Child Make Me an Environmental Villain?” In it, Tucker outlined her “main source” of “maternal guilt:” “the mere fact that I created a person.” “Specifically,” she wrote, “an American person who will inevitably leave a large carbon footprint.” Her inspiration came from her...

Rebecca Traister attempts to come off as some authority on women, feminism, and the reality of abortion in her New Republic piece entitled “Let’s Just Say It: Women Matter More Than Fetuses Do.” She fails at this task. She opens her piece by commenting on how she woke up one day in September and realized the implications of the fact that she was 24 weeks pregnant—it meant she had “lost one of the most important tools available to women: the ability to exert control over what’s going on inside my uterus.” Despite the fact that she is carrying a baby...

Feminist author Margaret Atwood, on Tuesday’s Charlie Rose show, accused pro-lifers of chaining pregnant women to their beds to force them to have babies they don’t want. Invited on the PBS show to plug her new book, The Stone Mattress, Rose asked why her 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale was still being promoted on the cover of her latest work. Atwood explained: “The Handmaid’s Tale is having a big moment on social media and elsewhere because of the various states in the United States who’ve enacted some quite strange legislation having to do with pregnant women.” The PBS host and...

My Dragonfly And Me If I could be a Dragon Fly and wing my way through the sky I would never be shy just me and my Dragon Fly! By moonlight we ride the wind chase the comets tail for fun by day we would hide from the sun our fragile wings would come undone On darkest nights we would use fireflies as our guide we would dip and we would glide through the heavens open wide and scatter diamonds in the night sky my Dragon Fly and me... And we would wing past our lovers silent in the...

John Batchelor interviews Tim Wu author of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires audio 20:03

The latest installment in “The Hunger Games” film franchise opens on Nov. 21 and promises to be another blockbuster. What accounts for the movies’ success? The obvious answer, of course, is the combination of the irresistible Jennifer Lawrence and Hollywood special effects with a rollicking good story. But we shouldn’t ignore the deeper themes of the tale, which are not only classic but classical, reaching back to Greece and Rome and the very foundations of Western culture. At the heart of the story are three beautiful, heroic young people: Katniss Everdeen and her male romantic interests, Peeta Mellark and Gale...

Rapunzel is impregnated by her prince, the evil queen in Snow White is the princess’s biological mother, plotting to murder her own child, and a hungry mother in another story is so “unhinged and desperate” that she tells her daughters: “I’ve got to kill you so I can have something to eat.” Never before published in English, the first edition of the Brothers Grimms’ tales reveals an unsanitised version of the stories that have been told at bedtime for more than 200 years. The Grimms – Jacob and Wilhelm – published their first take on the tales for which they...

ColoringBook.com owned by Really Big Coloring Books, Inc. releases Ted Cruz Saves America in conjunction with the number one (#1) selling coloring and activity book Ted Cruz to the Future. The Ted Cruz to the Future Coloring and Activity Book is back by popular demand. Really Big Coloring Books ® is releasing Ted Saves America as a supplement to the Ted Cruz book. The additional eight (8) page supplement is complimentary with the purchase of the Ted Cruz book, the #1 selling coloring book. Releasing the book and supplement on Veterans' Day corresponds with 2nd Amendment values. "The supplement and...

Rare Bugs Bunny Featuring Hitler.

The Oscar-nominated "Memento" writer says "everyone would benefit from reading" the sci-fi trilogy HBO and Warner Bros. TV are teaming to produce a series based on Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy that will be written and produced by "Interstellar" writer Jonathan Nolan, multiple individuals familiar with the project have told TheWrap. Nolan, who is already working with HBO on "Westworld," has been quietly developing the project for the last several months. He recently tipped his hand to Indiewire, which asked him, 'what's the one piece of science fiction you truly love that people don't know enough about?'

Detective Hieronymus 'Harry' Bosch  is a literary character created by Michael Connelly in the 1992 novel The Black Echo, and the lead character in a police procedural series now numbering seventeen novels. The novels are more or less coincident in time frame with the year in which they were published. Harry, as he is commonly known by his associates, is a veteran police homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. Bosch was named after the 15th century Dutch artist, Hieronymus Bosch. A new TV series - Bosch - based on the character in the books, will be starting in...

Napoleon Bonaparte died on May 5, 1821. More books have been written with his name in the subject line than the number of days that have passed since. So writing yet another biography about one of the most iconic and controversial statesman of 19th century Europe seems, at first glance, like a fruitless task. That is, of course, unless one has something new to say about the French emperor. In Napoleon A Life the British historian Andrew Roberts seeks to revaluate what he calls the “caricature we have come to think of as Napoleon.” Ever since Hitler visited Napoleon’s tomb...

I know that some freepers here have written books that have done well. November is National Adoption Month and, surprise, I have written a book about adoption. Currently it is only in ebook format. Do any of the authors here have suggestions as to how an unknown author would go about promoting an ebook?

More than 200 acres of the wild and 'magical' heathland that inspired author Thomas Hardy have been bought for the nation by the National Trust. The £650,000 acquisition of Slepe Heath, Dorset, will connect existing protected heathland areas as part of efforts to conserve the landscapes of Hardy's novels. Slepe Heath, whose windswept landscape was immortalised as fictional Egdon Heath in Hardy's Return Of The Native, is an important site for wildlife, including rare birds such as Dartford warblers, nightjars and woodlarks, the National Trust said.