Free Republic

It's the cultural crime we don't dare admit - starting that big, high-brow book with the best intentions before leaving it half-read down the back of the sofa. So those who give up on tough reads will be relieved to hear they're not alone. A mathematics professor has singled out which books are our most 'unread' - and intellectual big-hitters are far and away the worst culprits. Readers in their droves gave up on Hillary Clinton's memoirs, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century before they were even a tenth of the...

While parents of public school children may feel besieged by alternative lifestyles, one public school teacher doesn’t think the literature available to them is diverse enough. “It takes a lot of work to find books that include same-gender parents, step-parents, foster or adoptive children, or other nontraditional families as background in an adventure tale, a friendship parable, or a holiday romp; nontraditional families are either the topic of the story or, more likely, not included at all,” Willow McCormick writes in the summer issue of Rethinking Schools magazine. “When two-parent, heterosexual families are presented as the norm in story after...

What are you reading? There used to be a quarterly "What are you reading?" thread, but I haven't seen it for a long time. I got a lot of good book suggestions that way, and I miss it. So here's a thread! If you're reading something interesting you think others would like, or something boring you'd recommend we all avoid, jump in! If you have a ping list of FReepers who might be interested, ping them!

I am working on a project to collect as many books as possible for a new library that opened on May 21 in Tuttle, Oklahoma. Tuttle is a tiny town of about 6,000 people west of OKC. This library is operated and funded by volunteers. To my knowledge, they receive no public funding.The volunteers have worked incredibly hard to raise money for their location, books, and services. If you're an author, or know of one, this would be a great way to get your book(s) on library shelves. Tuttle Public Library 305 W Main Street Tuttle, OK 73089 http://www.tuttlelibrary.org/ I...

As she exited her Hard Choices book event Tuesday in Washington, D.C., former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was approached by conservative activist Jason Mattera, who asked her to sign a copy of the book out to one of the four Americans who perished in the 2012 Benghazi attack. “If you could make it out to Christopher Stevens,” Mattera asked, referring to the U.S. Ambassador to Libya who was a victim of the terrorist siege. “I think you knew him.” After a brief pause, Clinton responded, “Yeah, I’m not going to make it out to Chris Stevens.” “What difference does...

...Muslim Movements to Christ Something is happening in the Muslim world, something unprecedented in history. Over the past 14 centuries, Islam has forged a ‘spiritual empire’ that stretches from West Africa to Indonesia. Today, the Dar al-Islam or “House of Islam,” as Muslims call their religious community, counts more than one in five persons on earth.

Thomas Woods' book titled HOW THE CATHOLIC CHURCH BUILD WESTERN CIVILIZATION is an unanswerable antidote to anti-Catholic bashers and their mindless sychophants. Prof. Woods provides a compelling case that Western Civilization could not have thrived without the valuable achievements of the Catholic Church over the past 2,000 years. Prof. Woods survey of the Catholic Church in late Ancient History and during the Dark Ages makes clear that the Catholic Church authorities and especially the monks were invaluable in preserving learning. He makes clear that the early Catholic monks and nuns were the only literate people in Europe, and they preserved...

SNIP As you've probably realized by now, we have a weakness for extremely quirky food combinations -- hello, Cronut and Ramenburger -- and extraordinarily large things, like the 4,000-pound chocolate cake Guittard made for Beverly Hills' centennial. So how could we not tell you about the Screamin' Pizza Burger? According to Nick, the blogger behind DudeFoods -- and the man who brought the concept of bacon-lattice into the public consciousness -- all you need to make one is two full-size frozen pizzas, one four-pound beef patty and a spatula of mind-blowing proportions. Find instructions and photos -- and details on...

"The lawlessness of Hitler's Germany, beneath a veneer of legal forms, was absolute. As Goering put it, "The law and the will of the Fuhrer are one." Hans Frank: "Our constitution is the will of the Fuhrer." Hitler worked entirely through decrees and ordinances, as opposed to law, here again resembling Lenin, who never showed the slightest interest in constitution-making."

- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com - Untold Stories of Israeli InnovationPosted By Jim Fletcher On May 30, 2014 @ 12:20 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments Marcella Rosen knew what she had to do. Standing on the sidelines while the state of Israel was being denigrated just wouldn’t work for the marketing professional from New York. If the news about Israel is almost always negative, she’d do something about it.She’d share untold news. And that’s how Untold News (www.untoldnews.org) was born.Untold News gathers and disseminates positive stories about the myriad ways Israeli innovation brings help, hope, and healing to...

You probably SparkNoted these books before, but now's your chance to read them.

Lynne Cheney has spent decades studying and admiring the nation's fourth president, James Madison. Her new book, "James Madison: A Life Reconsidered" is a labor of political admiration that began five years ago and culminated in a historical journey in which Madison, the father of the Constitution, also becomes a prophet of productive conservatism. ....She considers Madison the prophet of small government. He pushed for a strong central government early in his political career when he served in the early House of Representatives, but he started having some doubts. "Madison began to worry about too strong a government," Cheney told...

As you've heard, Hillsdale College is offering its newest free online course: Great Books 101! Will you register today and become a Hillsdale student? You'll be able to watch brief 35- to 50-minute lectures by Hillsdale's professors who will empower you with knowledge and insights from some of the greatest, most exhilarating stories in world history. And as with all of Hillsdale's previous free online courses, there's no need to worry about missing a lecture. All 11 course lectures are archived so you can view them at your convenience at anytime and anywhere on your computer or tablet And when...

Hundreds of Meridian, Idaho high school students signed a protest petition when their local school board banned Sherman Alexie' young adult novel "The Absolutely True Diary of a part-Time Indian" from their 10th grade curriculum. But a private fundraising drive, organized by two Washington women, has now raised enough money to buy a copy for each of the 350 students who protested...

FULL TITLE: Boys turning to action-packed video games because books are 'too girly' for them, says award-winning children's author Boys are being put off reading because of the influence women have on children’s literature, says an award-winning children’s author. Jonathan Emmett warned that children’s books were too girly because of the influence of mostly female panels of editors, publishers, reviewers and judges. One publishing company’s research suggested women bought 95 per cent of picture books for children, he added. The writer believes boys are being starved of what they enjoy in books, such as swashbuckling pirates, battles, or technical details...

It was the best of hugs; it was the worst of hugs. Or so the description might have gone had Charlie Crist labored a bit longer on his new memoir, in which the erstwhile governor of Florida—who is now campaigning for the job again—relives the fateful embrace with President Obama that he claims sunk his political fortunes in 2009. Rather than try for style, Crist renders the moment with the racy, staccato gusto that one might expect from a pulpy romance. ................................................. But fiction is yours to write if you’re an aspiring politician with a book deal. Crist’s The Party’s...

http://amzn.to/1dSYZ7h “Havelock’s Inheritance.” Havelock is on a voyage of discovery involving fraud, deceit, two crime families and enough dead bodies to start his own morgue. http://amzn.to/1fR47nx “A Plague of Dragons.” Something is trying to kill Kyle Fortune and when it does, an ancient menace will return to enslave and devastate the world.

The loss of Doctor Richter's suggested reading list that saved my life was tragic, a fact that I am constantly being reminded of. Some books -- Whittaker Chamber's Witness, for example, or Orwell's Homage to Catalonia -- were unforgettable. Others, especially those that I could not locate at the time, never got read, so I had no memory at all in order to reconstruct. I did have a wisp of a memory about a book that had, I thought, the words "rebel colonel" in the title, but was marked down in Richter's precise handwriting as "American political economy." Imagine...

Professor Amy Chua of the Yale law school is better known as a "Tiger Mom" because of her take-no-prisoners, tough love approach to raising children. She and her husband Jed Rubenfeld (a fellow Yale law professor) have written what may turn out to be the best book of this year. It is titled "The Triple Package" because it argues that three qualities are found in spectacularly successful groups in America. These three qualities, they say, are a superiority complex, insecurity and impulse control. Whether you buy their theory or not, you will be enormously enlightened by their attempts to prove...

In 1898, British writer H. G. Wells wrote "The War of the Worlds," a science-fiction novel in which Martians invade the Earth and nearly decimate humanity. A decade later, in what was then the Russian Empire, writer and Marxist revolutionary Alexander Bogdanov wrote his novel "Red Star," also about Martians landing on Earth. But in Bogdanov's novel, the Martians are not violent or monstrous. Instead, they invite the main character, a young Russian student named Leonid, back to the Red Planet to see the Martians' civilization: a thriving, peaceful — and communist — utopia. The optimism of "Red Star" was...