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It's time again for my quarterly "What Are You Reading Now?" thread! It can be anything...a NY Times bestseller, a technical journal, a trashy pulp novel...in short, anything! DO NOT answer by saying "I'm Reading This Thread". It stopped being funny a long time ago. Here's what I'm reading. I'm just about finished with "Blockaders, Refugees & Contrabands: Civil War on Florida's Gulf Coast 1861-1865." It's a very interesting book about how the US Navy was able to turn a substantial portion of Florida's Gulf Coast population against the Confederacy, creating a civil war within that part of Florida. So...

The President delivered his weekly radio address from the White House. In Focus: The Economy The President and Mrs. Bush and Jenna and Henry Hager participated in a commemorative tree planting ceremony Saturday, on the South Lawn of the White House. The tradition of planting commemorative trees dates back to 1830 when President Andrew Jackson planted two Southern Magnolias on either side of the South Portico of the White House. The National Book Festival continued today beginning with a breakfast in the East Room. Enjoy your visit to Sanity Island

Best-sellers Books Top 10

If you miss Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City, then we have fab news for you!

OH Freepers: I will be having a booksigning at "Books & Co.," in "The Greens," Beavercreek OH (Dayton, really) on Tues. Sept. 23, at 7:00 pm. for my most recent book, 48 Liberal Lies About American History (That You Probably Learned in School). This will be filmed for BOOK TV/C-SPAN, so even if you don't buy a book, come out and make it appear that there is some interest :)

Is anyone else reading Anathem (Google), Neal Stephenson's latest? I'm about 100 pages in, and as with all his books, I think it is quite excellent so far.

Autumn is coming on and it feels like Halloween in southwest Missouri. My wife and I were thinking of some seasonal reading. So what do YOU recommend? Scare me!

Valdis Krebs networks patterns of political book buying This network visualization of political book buying is insanely amazing. I’ve asked Valdis for a mind meld, but I’m sure I don’t have enough capacity to absorb even a one-millionth of what I’d need to think the way Valdis does. Thank goodness he thinks the way he does:

Amazon.com today launched a site that tracks America's political book buying. Books are classified as red, for right-wing, blue for left-wing and purple for neutral. How does it look as of today? Most of America appears to be reading red. Check it out. The site will be updated daily, and allows people to track book buying over time. It also has a tab to compare the 2008 election to 2004. Amazon created the map using its political book sales data.

When it comes to observing and analyzing the state of the country, nobody equals Michael Savage. His listeners are used to hearing him comment on things political. Now, he has taken time to remind them that he also often entertains with stories from his past.

WASILLA, Alaska- Back in 1996, when she first became mayor, Sarah Palin asked the city librarian if she would be all right with censoring library books should she be asked to do so. According to news coverage at the time, the librarian said she would definitely not be all right with it. A few months later, the librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, got a letter from Palin telling her she was going to be fired. The censorship issue was not mentioned as a reason for the firing. The letter just said the new mayor felt Emmons didn't fully support her and...

Despite repeated attempts to destroy her and her family's reputation since her selection as John McCain's Vice-Presidential running mate, Americans appear to be embracing Sarah Palin's nomination. This weekend will give voters yet another opportunity to meet Sarah Palin as Greta Van Susteren will host a 2 night documentary on the life and career of Palin. The documentary will be an accurate portrayal of Palin relying upon interviews and footage taken well before Palin was selected as the vice presidential nominee. The documentary will air Saturday and Sunday Night at 8pm eastern on Fox New. The announcement of Palin has...

The bogus Sarah Palin Banned Books List By Michelle Malkin  •  September 6, 2008 12:01 AM Photoshop: David LundePalin Derangement Syndrome strikes again. This time it’s hysterical librarians and their readers on the Internet disseminating a bogus list of books Gov. Sarah Palin supposedly banned in 1996. Looks like some of these library people failed reading comprehension. Take a look at the list below and you’ll find books Gov. Palin supposedly tried to ban…that hadn’t even been published yet. Example: The Harry Potter books, the first of which wasn’t published until 1998.The smear merchants who continue to circulate the list also...

Good evening. I am in search of a reliable online book store. I have visited Amazon, Borders, Abe, Biblio, and Alibris, but am not completely confident I'll receive the order in a timely manner due to the types of books (classic literature) I'm searching for. These books are needed for a college course, and so I am pressed for time. Your suggestions are appreciated. Sincerely, TJI

Jeannette Eyerly, one of the first writers for young adults to deal with themes like unwanted pregnancy, alcoholism and drugs, died on Aug. 18 at her home in Des Moines. She was 100. The death was confirmed by her grandson Josh Pichler. In books like “Drop-Out,” “A Girl Like Me” and “Escape From Nowhere,” Mrs. Eyerly moved beyond the pretty-in-pink world of dates and sock hops to focus on more serious problems confronting young girls. In addition to facing the usual troubles with school and boyfriends, her heroines dealt with their parents’ failing marriages, or with peer pressure to take...

A Good Book About Bad Books by Logan Gage 8/23/08 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn't Help Benjamin Wiker, Regnery, 260 pages, $27.95 If ever there were a book designed specifically for the enjoyment of InsideCatholic readers, surely it is Benjamin Wiker's new 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn't Help. Wiker should be renowned (if he is not already) for Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists -- a book that at once exposes both the ancient philosophical antecedents and modern cultural consequences of Darwinism. In the present book,...

<p>While Americans and their elected officials do everything they can to avoid even the appearance of criticizing Islam or using such words as “Islamist,” the French public seems to suffer from no such inhibitions, at least not in the area of fiction. For example, it has embraced Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal’s a plainspoken masterpiece that boldly uncovers the affinities between Nazism and Islamism. In March, the novel won the RTL-Lire 2008 prize, which is awarded by a jury of 100 readers chosen by 20 bookstores throughout France. One wonders how an American readership might receive such a book.</p>

So, here is a curious thing. I have been reviewing books at Amazon for a few years now and never had the occasion to have one censored by Amazon.com. But, I just had two reviews in a row deleted by Amazon and it has caused me to wonder how often other conservatives have their reviews summarily eliminated from the Amazon site? I have noticed, of course, that leftists use Amazon quite well to give conservative books a bad Amazon rating. In the past, whenever I wrote a positive review of a conservative book, for instance, I would be loaded up...

As a voracious reader, the genre does not matter as much as the story’s ability to engage and interest me, to help me view things from a different perspective and learn a bit along the way. As a child, I read books everywhere: school, home, church, and the car. During college, there was enough academic work -- and extracurricular activities -- to keep me busy, with little time for pleasure reading. In recent years I have begun to read more. As the mother of two young children, I have tried to pass this love of reading to them. We read...

Going negative against Democrat Barack Obama isn't just a campaign strategy for Republican John McCain. It's also a good formula for selling books.

When I looked at the reviews yesterday afternoon, there were over 250 reviews with about 220-30 ONE STAR reviews! As of this moment, there are only 23 reviews left! After all those reviewers took time to write some lengthy, well thought out, scathing reviews, Amazon decided to dump them. I'll give Amazon credit for dumping a couple of the 5 star reviews. But then again, they should have been dumped, because you could tell the person NEVER read the book!

(My first thread, hope I'm doing this right!)

The constant bad news from the liberal media corporations is very dangerous! I've been finding communist/Stalinist propaganda like this all over the net: Frankly the people ranting against "community" don't realize how they've benefited from it - it was non-profit inventions like the internet, computers, modern electricity, phones, x-rays, penicillin, radio waves, and lightbulbs (Göbel), that make life better today. (*Also* state funding of science, medicine, & university research!) "Conservatives" like to rant about how everything good came from greed, but it's just a huge lie: 1. The computer - “This came from pure scientific thought, and not at all...

Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy by Frederick W. Kagan, 2006. Encounter Books. Recommendation: read This book is an excellent accounting of the theories that have gripped and influenced American military thinking and planning since the Vietnam war. Theories? If all your information on the military has come from Hollywood (and there is a new series about Iraq out on HBO, surely this time written by writers who actually served and are thus knowledgeable), then it might come as a surprise that when planning a war you actually have to decide what to hit, what resources are...

Man arrested over Shakespeare theft     The Shakespeare book is worth an estimated £15m plus     A man has been arrested on suspicion of the theft of a priceless book from Durham University ten years ago. The first folio edition of a collection of the works of William Shakespeare, published in 1623, was one of a number of manuscripts and books stolen from the University library on Palace Green in December 1998. It is believed to be worth at least £15 million. Durham Police were alerted by the British Embassy in the United States, two weeks ago...

We met back in the early 90’s, December of ‘92 to be exact. I just had a major blowout with my first, somewhat dysfunctional family and decided that it was best for all if I just left. My foster dad gave me a ride to nowhere that ended up at a boarding house in Albany, NY. The place was great, warm with plenty of company, and their cheesy poof biscuits were to die for. On the downside, it was loud and smelly, not unlike me. Even a lowly pug could smell her coming from miles away. It was Monday, as...

[Click through to article to view interview with author James Piereson.] The central thesis of James Piereson's Camelot and the Cultural Revolution was that JFK's assassination was the key moment that caused a large portion of once sensible liberals to begin to tilt to the far, far left, and for lack of better word, become Unhinged. Like this calm, rational fan of the New Frontier! In the (admittedly totally tasteless) formulation of a friend of mine, the best thing that ever happened to civil rights in this country was the bullet through JFK's head. Along the way, as I wrote...

OK everyone, it's time for my quarterly "What Are You Reading Now?" thread. I like finding out what Freepers are reading lately. It can be anything...a technical journal, a trashy pulp novel, an old classic...in short, anything! Please do not defile this thread by posting "I'm Reading This Thread". It became very unfunny a long time ago. I'll start. I'm close to finishing "The Last Valley" by Martin Windrow. It's about the siege/battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Well, what are you reading now?!

Hey, I've been reading a few conservative books lately, including: - God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley; - Save the Males, Kathleen Parker; - Feminists Say the Darndest Things, Mike Adams; - When Character Was King, Peggy Noonan; and, - America: The Last Best Hope, Vol. II, William Bennett. I was just wondering if anyone here has any particular recommendations? I can highly recommend all five of the above -- and particularly Bennett -- as a good read. Buckley can be a little dense to read at times, but he was always sharp. Mike Adams is pretty irreverent,...

ALA to Libraries: Keep Alms for Jihad, Pulped in the UK Andrew Albanese & Jennifer Pinkowski -- Library Journal At the urging of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), a scholarly book pulped by its British publisher is maintaining a safe haven in U.S. libraries. Alms for Jihad was the target of a potential libel suit in England by Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, whose charitable activities have reportedly been linked to terrorist activities, as conveyed in the book. In response, publisher Cambridge University Press (CUP) pulped its unsold copies of the book, put it out of...

Some 300 rare and valuable books confiscated from Iraq's Jewish community by Saddam Hussein's regime have been secretly spirited into Israel, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday. The books include a 1487 commentary on the biblical Book of Job and another volume of biblical prophets printed in Venice in 1617, the Haaretz daily said. The volumes are part of a massive collection of books confiscated by the secret police of the executed Iraqi dictator and stored in security installations in the Iraqi capital until the US-led invasion of 2003. Many volumes were damaged during the bombing of government buildings in...

FReeps have such great taste! So, I thought I would put this out there. One of my favorite things to do during the summer months is read to my children before they go to sleep. Actually, I do this year round, but particularly enjoy reading to them during the summer months. At times we get carried away with some of the great children’s lit available ~ with Mom finally coming up tho the bedrooms at 10:30 to shut down the evening's activities. At which point we may have to get real quiet and me straining my eyes. It’s great to...

Check out this new site for used Christian books. Creation, apologetics, abortion, theology etc. http://www.remnantbooks.org

[Book review] Excerpt: Mr. Riemen's Nobility of Spirit is intended as a meditation on the forces that threaten civilization and, no less important, on the forces that are desperately needed to sustain it... The originality of Mr. Riemen's argument resides less in its defense of universal values than in its analysis of the assault they have suffered for so long. If so many intellectuals today find it difficult to utter words like "truth," "beauty," "piety" or "goodness" without mockery or ironic derision, the cause may be traced, in large part, to the abuse of those terms by philosophers and social...

Scott McClellan’s controversial book, “What Happened,” jumped immediately to the No. 2 slot on this month’s political best seller list. And “Counselor” by Ted Sorensen, another title by a close adviser to a president, is No. 5.

CHAPTER ONE IN THE WEB Ten years I labored in the cause of Communism. I was a dedicated "comrade." All my talents and efforts were zealously used to bring about the triumph of Communism in America and throughout the world. To me, the end of capitalism would mark the beginning of an interminable period of plenty, peace, prosperity and universal comradeship. All racial and class differences and conflicts would end forever after the liquidation of the capitalists, their government and their supporters. A world union of Soviet States under the hegemony of Russia would free and lead mankind on to...

The Great Hall at the University of Reading is a lively piece of Victoriana: a broad neo-Romanesque structure suggestive of a nave, with a concave arched ceiling of gilt-edged rectangular sections painted a pastel green and decorated with rosettes. The uniformity of its architectural style contrasts with the people I can see under its roof. Perhaps 200 students are at work here, and my guess, from their faces, is that between them they could trace their ancestry to Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the far east and perhaps the Indian subcontinent. These observations collide with Kenan Malik's insistence in his new book,...

David Frum on Scott McClellan's new book: George Bush got the team he deserved Posted: May 30, 2008, 3:47 PM by Marni Soupcoff David Frum Except maybe for MSNBC’s wild-eyed commentator Keith Olbermann, nobody in politics or media seems to have a good word to say for Scott McClellan, the former George W. Bush press secretary turned ferocious Bush critic. The right complains of McClellan's disloyalty. The left complains that McClellan’s change of heart arrived too late. The old Washington hands shake their heads at a press secretary writing a book at all: FDR’s and Eisenhower’s men took their secrets...

Kevin MacDonald had just completed the first in a series of books that would come to define him. Awaiting feedback from his publisher 15 years ago, MacDonald sent his manuscript to a colleague in the psychology department at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). The feedback was not encouraging. "What troubles me most is that your criticism of Jews may be taken seriously by groups and individuals who both fear and hate Jews," Martin Fiebert wrote in a 12-point reply. "Your manuscript, unintentionally perhaps, reinforces the stereotype that all Jews, be they assimilated or not, are clannish, deceptive, and exploitive....

Diplomatic tensions have arised between Israel and Egypt due to a harsh statement made recently by Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni. In a conference that took place in the Egyptian Parliament last week, the minister said that he “would burn Israeli books himself if found in Egyptian libraries.” Israeli Ambassador to Cairo Shalom Cohen defined this statement in a classified report that he submitted to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem as “harsh and especially blunt, in a way which makes it impossible for Israel and for the international community to continue a regular agenda with Egypt.” Yedioth Ahronoth...

The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust (University Press of America, 265 pp.), $34.99. To pre-order call: 1-800-462-6420, promotion code = "UPREPUB." If I get just 100 pre-publication orders over the next few weeks, my book can be distributed nationally by June 1st. I promise that if you enjoy reading my Thursday & weekend WorldNetDaily columns, you will absolutely love reading my new book on the Nuremberg Trials which is written in clear, standard English without all the legal mumbo jumbo (although, for those who like legalese, I back up all my legal opinions and historical references with copious...

May 10, 2008, 8:30 a.m. Warring HistoryRethinking the Iraq critics. By Michael Barone In trying to understand news about the conflicts in Iraq, I work to keep in mind the difference between what we know now about decision making in World War II and what most Americans knew at the time. From the memoirs and documents published after the war, we’ve learned how leaders made critical judgments. But at the time, even well-informed journalists only could guess at what was going on behind the scenes. Today we’re only beginning to learn about what went on behind the scenes in...

Bolshevik Begats by: Malcolm A. Kline, May 07, 2008 If you wonder why your professors cannot let go of their pet theories no matter how badly they work out when practiced in the real world, you will find part of the answer in A Conservative history of the American Left by my predecessor, Daniel J. Flynn. “From persuasion to politics, politics to revolution, and revolution to a long march through the institutions, the Left’s methods for transforming society have evolved,” Flynn writes. “The ends, though, have remained more or less the same.” “A brotherhood of man, human perfection, complete equality,...

ERNEST Hemingway and Hollywood had a tempestuous relationship - but his utter hatred of the movies made from his famed novels is now just coming to light. In "The Good Life According to Hemingway," out next month, A.E. Hotchner, who traveled the globe with him, bares a series of never-before-published slaps Hemingway took at the film business. When producer David O. Selznick crowed that his wife, Jennifer Jones, was starring in "A Farewell to Arms" and he'd pay Hemingway a $50,000 bonus from any profits, the novelist wrote back: "If by some miracle, your movie, which stars 41-year-old Mrs....

College students and their families are rightly outraged about the bankrupting costs of textbooks that have nearly tripled since the 1980s, mainly because of marginally useful CD-ROMs and other supplements. A bill pending in Congress would require publishers to sell “unbundled” versions of the books — minus the pricey add-ons. Even more important, it would require publishers to reveal book prices in marketing material so that professors could choose less-expensive titles. The bill is a good first step. But colleges and universities will need to embrace new methods of textbook development and distribution if they want to rein in runaway...

The Black Dog, symbolising depression and made famous by Churchill, was the bane of ad executive Matthew Johnstone’s life – until he put it in a book and brought it to heel. Interview by Catherine O’Brien Matthew Johnstone’s meteoric career as a creative director in advertising took him from Sydney to San Francisco and New York, earning him a clutch of awards on his way. He was a man who appeared to have it all – and yet, for many years, he hid a dark secret. He was suffering from clinical depression. “Advertising is about being shiny and up. You...

Pope's cat writes purrfect book BY STEPHANIE GASKELL DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER Sunday, April 20th 2008, 4:00 AM There's one very unusual biography of Pope Benedict - a children's book, supposedly written by his cat."Joseph and Chico: The Life of Pope Benedict XVI as Told by a Cat" is a 36-page illustrated book that chronicles the life of Benedict through the words of his cat, Chico. "I'm meeting you in the pages of this book to tell you a story about my very best friend, a wonderful man with whom I've shared so many happy times," Chico says. "I...

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - When it comes to literary pursuits in the United States most people agree on at least one thing -- the most popular book is the Bible, according to a new survey. It came in first in a Harris Poll of nearly 2,513 adults but the second choice in the survey was not as clear cut. "While the Bible is number one among each of the different demographic groups, there is a large difference in the number two favorite book," Harris said in a statement announcing the results. Men chose J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the...

Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course." Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give...

I would like to buy my son a copy of The Art of War, but I've noticed that there are several editons, each with a different co-author. Would someone please recommened a particular edition/co-author? Thank you in advance.