Free Republic

Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-meta­physical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.) These insults and more can be found in her marginal notes on a copy of Lewis’ Abolition of Man, as printed in Ayn Rand’s Marginalia: Her critical comments on the writings of over 20 authors, edited by Robert Mayhew. Excerpts appear below, with Lewis’ writing (complete with Rand’s highlighting and underlining) on the left and...

Nathaniel Philbrick's new book gets at the on-the-ground reality of the American Revolution, which the author writes began as 'a profoundly conservative movement.' John Trumbull's "Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill." (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Viking / May 12, 2013) It turns out the modern incarnation of the tea party may have more in common with the original Boston hell-raisers than people think. Americans have long romanticized the events leading to the Battle of Bunker Hill and the start of the American Revolution, most without really understanding what happened or what was at stake....

Little things slow down the process of putting 40 million pages of ancient manuscripts in the Vatican Library online: gold or silver in the illuminations, bindings that disintegrate if you open them, getting the synergy right. “It is important to realize if there is gold or silver in a manuscript. That requires a very particular process because the light will be different,� said Luciano Ammenti, who is in charge of IT at the Vatican and the project to digitize the storied library’s 82,000 manuscripts. The project, finally up and running a year after its announcement, uses an armada of equipment...

In many ways, Jonathan Sperber suggests, Marx was “a backward-looking figure,” whose vision of the future was modeled on conditions quite different from any that prevail today: The view of Marx as a contemporary whose ideas are shaping the modern world has run its course and it is time for a new understanding of him as a figure of a past historical epoch, one increasingly distant from our own: the age of the French Revolution, of Hegel’s philosophy, of the early years of English industrialization and the political economy stemming from it. Sperber’s aim is to present Marx as he...

I have friends and relatives in Germany that just do not know the true story of Barack Hussein Obama. I go on Amazon.de and the only books about the guy are all lavish encomiums, books from the left, or his own two books written by Bill Ayres. Are there any conservative books written in German that anyone knows about? Is there a German version of Dinesh d"Souza's film or book? Appreciate your help. Thanks

Probably the most bracing aspect of Ira Katznelson's new history of the New Deal, Fear Itself, is his portrait of the marriage of progressive domestic policy and white supremacy. I knew the outlines of this stuff, but for a flaming commie like me, the extent of the embrace is hard to take: Far more enduring was the New Deal's intimate partnership with those in the South who preached white supremacy. For this whole period -- the last in American history when public racism was legitimate in speech and action -- southern representatives acted not on the fringes but as an...

In May 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the White House. It was 17 months after Pearl Harbor and a little more than a year before D-Day. The two Allied leaders reviewed the war effort to date and exchanged thoughts on their plans for the postwar era. At one point in the discussion, FDR offered what he called "the best way to settle the Jewish question." Vice President Henry Wallace, who noted the conversation in his diary, said Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan (recommended by geographer and Johns Hopkins University President Isaiah Bowman)...

The co-author of a book on partisan science recently examined by Pacific Standard argues that our reviewer was a little too partisan himself. Any book that touches upon politics almost automatically angers half of the American public, regardless of what is written inside of it. It takes a special person—an objective, open-minded and self-critical one—to read and learn from a science book that criticizes people with whom the reader likes and agrees with politically.Recently, Pacific Standard published a review (“Red Science, Blue Science,” January/February 2013) by Wray Herbert, a pop psychology writer,of political writer Chris Mooney’s book The Republican Brain...

Today it is more clear than ever why Niles doubted FDR genuinely supported Zionism. President Barack Obama has spoken of his deep admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his desire to emulate FDR’s leadership style. But in the wake of the discovery of new documents detailing FDR’s behind-the-scenes coldness regarding the creation of a Jewish state, many Israelis will be hoping that sentiment does not extend to Roosevelt’s views on Zionism.

On April 12, 1945, my grandfather approached me as I played outside and asked where my mother was. He looked stricken, and so I quickly followed him inside and heard him say words that made my mother burst into tears: President Roosevelt had died. My mother’s grief and panic were so palpable — her brother was fighting in the Pacific, her brother-in-law was fighting in Europe — that it scared me. In our house, FDR was not merely the President. He was a god. He is a god no more. His New Deal is no longer solely credited with ending...

Historian Rafael Medoff says Franklin Delano Roosevelt failed to take relatively simple measures that would have saved significant numbers of Jews during the Holocaust, because his vision for America only encompassed having a small number of Jews. “In his private, unguarded moments, FDR repeatedly made unfriendly remarks about Jews, especially his belief that Jews were overrepresented in many professions and exercised too much influence and control on society,” Medoff told The Daily Caller in an email about his new book, “FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith.” “This prejudice helped shape his overall vision of what America should look...

Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed the overwhelming support of American Jews during his presidency, and the reasons are clear. In his three-plus terms from 1933 to 1945, he led the war against Hitler, supported a Jewish homeland in Palestine... Starting in the 1960s, a flood of books appeared with self-evident titles like “No Haven for the Oppressed” and “While Six Million Died.” But the most influential account by far was David S. Wyman’s “Abandonment of the Jews,” published in 1984. Wyman considered numerous parties responsible for America’s tepid response to the Holocaust, including a badly divided Jewish community, a nest of virulent...

In the March 25 issue of The Weekly Standard, the lead article entitled "The Heretic" deals with philosopher Thomas Nagel, who has abandoned his long-held perspective on philosophy and religion. This has caused consternation and alarm among contemporary philosophy professors, the great majority of whom are strongly committed to an atheistic world-view. A recurring assertion by members of that profession is that they are being very scientific, because science disproves religion. The question arises, "Where did the idea come from that science disproves religion?" It didn't come from within science; rather, it's the province of non-scientists making statements about science....

s there a greater gesture of intellectual contempt than the notion that a tweet constitutes an adequate intervention in a serious discussion? But when Thomas Nagel’s formidable book Mind and Cosmos recently appeared, in which he has the impudence to suggest that “the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false,” and to offer thoughtful reasons to believe that the non-material dimensions of life—consciousness, reason, moral value, subjective experience—cannot be reduced to, or explained as having evolved tidily from, its material dimensions, Steven Pinker took to Twitter and haughtily ruled that it was “the shoddy reasoning of a once-great...

Frank Newport, author of the recently published book, “God is Alive and Well,” made a timely appearance this past week at a forum hosted by Concordia University in Southern California. It followed the much-hyped release of a new survey by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Duke University that stated, “Americans and religion increasingly parting ways.” Deliberately misinterpreting data culled from the General Social Survey, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, the researchers claimed that the percentage of Americans “preferring no religion” had risen to 20 percent in 2012, down 12 percentage points from 1990. “We...

At InfoDocket there is a story describing the project to digitize the Vatican Library.Get this! EMC Corporation has today announced that it is providing 2.8 petabytes of storage to help the Vatican Apostolic Library digitize its entire catalogue of historic manuscripts and incunabula (a book or pamphlet printed before 1501). One of the oldest libraries in the world, the Vatican Apostolic Library holds many of the rarest and most valuable documents in existence including the 42 line Latin Bible of Gutenberg, the first book printed with movable type and dating between 1451 and 1455. Do you remember “Doc’s� reaction to...

The Vatican Library is losing its walls. Its 89,000 historic manuscripts are being made available online for access by scholars world-wide courtesy of EMC. The library, properly known as the Vatican Apostolic Library, is located in the Vatican City and is one of the oldest libraries in the world, established formally in 1475 but thought to have functioned for a long time before that. The library's function is to be a resource for scholars researching history, law, philosophy, science and theology.The Abyss of Hell by Sandro Botticelli in the Vatican Library It stores some 89,000 manuscripts, including 8,900 incunabula, manuscripts...

This is the most important book you’ll buy this year: To Set The Record Straight, How Swift Boat Veterans, POWs and the New Media Defeated John Kerry, by Scott Swett and Tim Ziegler, with Forward by John O'Neill. Not only will you learn the inside details of the only book – Unfit For Command -- that ever decided a presidential election but, especially for those who have any doubts, you will learn about how the peoples' democracy can still work in the United States. For those inclined toward political science, the book is an important contribution to understanding how political...

So much of science fiction's core topics intersect with war, one way or the other. Rapid social change and technological innovation both get supercharged during wartime, and some of our greatest explorers are also warriors. So it's not surprising that many of science fiction's most well-known authors served in the military at some point — especially during the era when we had a compulsory draft. But how did serving in the military shape these writers' books? Here's a look at 15 of the authors who served in the armed forces, and how their work reflects that experience.

The works of Shakespeare and Wordsworth are "rocket-boosters" to the brain and better therapy than self-help books, researchers have claimed. Scientists, psychologists and English academics at Liverpool University have found that reading the works of the Bard and other classical writers has a beneficial effect on the mind, catches the reader's attention and triggers moments of self-reflection, the Telegraph reported. Using scanners, they monitored the brain activity of volunteers as they read works by William ShakespeareWilliam Wordsworth, T.S Eliot and others. They then "translated" the texts into more "straightforward", modern language and again monitored the readers' brains as they read...

Lovers of ink and paper, take heart. Reports of the death of the printed book may be exaggerated. Ever since Amazon introduced its popular Kindle e-reader five years ago, pundits have assumed that the future of book publishing is digital. Opinions about the speed of the shift from page to screen have varied. But the consensus has been that digitization, having had its way with music and photographs and maps, would in due course have its way with books as well. By 2015, one media maven predicted a few years back, traditional books would be gone. Half a decade into...

Old truths decay and new ones are born at an astonishing rate.Dinosaurs were cold-blooded. Increased K-12 spending and lower pupil/teacher ratios boost public school student outcomes. Most of the DNA in the human genome is junk. Saccharin causes cancer and a high fiber diet prevents it. Stars cannot be bigger than 150 solar masses.In the past half-century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong. In the modern world facts change all of the time, according to Samuel Arbesman, author of the new book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date (Current). Fact-making...

I started reading my kindle edition of "The Man in the High Castle" yesterday and I am already about half-way through and I was wondering who else has read this and I am interested in other Freeper's feedback (without giving anything away).

A review of The Case for Polarized Politics: Why America Needs Social Conservatism, by Jeffrey Bell By Ramesh Ponnuru Posted November 5, 2012 Jeffrey Bell, a longtime conservative activist and former president of the Manhattan Institute, has written a book that attempts a novel reinterpretation of American social conservatism and of American exceptionalism. His thesis is that what distinguishes the U.S. from Europe, socially and politically, is the social conservative movement, a claim in which this movement's friends and foes alike may find merit. The distinctive characteristic of this movement, according to Bell, is literal belief in the most-quoted sentence of the...

Thanks to Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, Ann Coulter is now the author of nine consecutive New York Times bestsellers. And if that's not some kind of record, I don't know what is. Moreover, unlike the Clintons, the erudite author has written all of her books without a team of ghost-writers. In Mugged, we learn that Republicans fight racism and Democrats fight imaginary racism after the real battles have been won. For Coulter reminds us that: Republicans opposed slavery, Democrats protected slave owners; Republicans supported anti-lynching laws, Democrats protected lynching mobs, and so on. Or basically, key...

The reason it is so depressing to read Alone, the middle volume of William Manchester's biography of Winston Churchill, is not because the British government was so obtuse in failing to listen to Churchill's constant warnings about the rising menace of Adolf Hitler. Why should that be depressing? After all, when Hitler finally got the war he had wanted for so long, Churchill was elevated at last to be prime minister of Britain, and in that position he saved Britain and, by the way, the world. So this is the prelude to a tale of triumph. It is sad to...

At Writer’s Bloc, I often talk about the marketing of books, because it seems so many authors still don’t understand the importance of it. That’s why, this week, I am going to touch on a couple points made by Michael Hyatt in his new book, “Platform.” To be fair, I’ve also reviewed it, but in this space, its contents are relevant. I wouldn’t agree with Hyatt about everything, of course, but frankly, his publishing knowledge is a resource that writers should use until there’s nothing left to wring-out. “Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World,” is a true insider’s account...

Thomas Cahill's "How the Irish Saved Civilization" was a surprise best-seller in the mid-1990s. Since then he has released three other highly regarded books in a planned seven-part work he calls the "Hinges of History" that chronicle the origins of the modern world. "They are The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels" (1998); "Desire of the Everlasting Hills: the World Before and After Jesus" (1999); and most recently "Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter" (2003) all published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. Cahill was recently in Denver and...

The Obama administration is opposing a Jewish group’s bid to have civil fines levied against Russia for failing to obey a court order to return its historic books and documents — a dispute that has halted the loan of Russian art works for exhibit in the United States. WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is opposing a Jewish group’s bid to have civil fines levied against Russia for failing to obey a court order to return its historic books and documents — a dispute that has halted the loan of Russian art works for exhibit in the United States. In a...

A narrative has developed over the past several years that the Republican Party is anti-science. Recently, thanks to the ignorant remarks about rape made by Rep. Todd Akin, the Democrats have seized the opportunity to remind us that they are the true champions of science in America. But is it really true? No. As we thoroughly detail in our new book, "Science Left Behind," Democrats are willing to throw science under the bus for any number of pet ideological causes – including anything from genetic modification to vaccines. Consider California’s Proposition 37, which would require genetically modified food to carry...

We had the pleasure to interview J. Neil Schulman last week. He is the author of the Novel Alongside Night and has twice won the Prometheus award for his work. Currently Mr. Schulman is working on a movie based on Alongside Night.

Larry Niven is one of the old guard of hard science fiction writers. His ringworld Novels are some of the most widely read science fiction novels of all time. It was our pleasure to interview him for the site.

Bars and clubs often are drug marketplaces for organized crime in many cities throughout the world, and woe to the owners who do not allow the illicit trade be conducted at their premises. The 'Ndrangheta or Calabrian Mafia brutally beat Rosy Canale after she refused to capitulate to their demands to allow party treats to be sold out of her disco in Reggio Calabria, and now that she's releasing a book about her experiences the thugs once again are targeting her as reported by John Hooper for The Guardian. However, the courageous mother insists "I'm not the sort of person...

When David Petraeus visited the Harvard Kennedy School in 2009, one of the meetings he requested was with author Doris Kearns Goodwin. Petraeus, who holds a PhD in International Relations from Princeton, is a fan of Team of Rivals and wanted time to speak to the famed historian about her work. Apparently, the great general (and current CIA Director) is something of a bibliophile. He's increasingly an outlier. Even as global literacy rates are high (84%), people are reading less and less deeply. The National Endowment for the Arts (PDF) has found that "[r]eading has declined among every group of...

'Tis education forms the common mind Just as the twig is bent the tree's inclined - Alexander Pope Progressive education.... what is it? Where does it come from? Is America the only place it's ever been tried? I've made my own attempts to dig into progressive education, but I can only use the internet for my queries. This book titled "Bending the twig; the revolution in education and its effect on our children" is a genuine inquiry based on thoughtful research into the topic using sources I'd probably never have access to. The review for this book comes from a...

(video at link) - Happy 100 to Milton Friedman

<p>The political direction of the country may be up for grabs until November, but the right has scored an interim victory — if that’s the word — in a weeklong contest to determine “the least credible history book in print” just concluded by the History News Network.</p>

Jonah Goldberg’s “Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas” provides a quick, enjoyable, highly readable analysis of the memes employed by progressive argumentation. Repeated often enough, these clichés seemingly have a ring of what faux conservative comic Stephen Colbert would call “truthiness.” Therefore, a field guide such as Goldberg’s is in order to better enable those who would identify and refute such liberal claims that either stall or prevent completely honest and open public policy discourse. Liberals or progressives or what-have-you aren’t the only portion of the political spectrum subjected to Goldberg’s opprobrium. Conservatives also take...

A former Democratic senator and presidential candidate is proposing a controversial fix to the nation's economic woes: raise taxes, and not just on millionaires. "No one is saying that right now, and someone has to say it," Bill Bradley said on CNN's "State of the Union." "If we're going to succeed, we have to face our problems squarely. The deficit is one problem, and that requires taxes on a lot of people, not just the wealthy," Mr. Bradley said. The former NBA star, who mounted a 2000 presidential bid but ultimately lost to Al Gore, appeared on CNN on Sunday...

A turquoise ring which once belonged to Jane Austen is up for auction at Sotheby's next week. But fans of the romantic novelist will need deep pockets if they are to win the rare piece of jewellery, which has a guide price of £20,000 to £30,000. The turquoise and gold ring came to Sotheby's from Austen's family, complete with a note sent by Jane's sister-in-law, Eleanor Austen, in November 1863, to Jane's niece, Caroline Austen. "My dear Caroline," wrote Eleanor. "The enclosed ring once belonged to your Aunt Jane. It was given to me by your Aunt Cassandra as soon...

All 47 endings to Ernest Hemingway's 1929 masterpiece A Farewell To Arms will be published in a new edition next week.All 47 endings to Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell To Arms will be included in a new edition of his 1929 masterpiece published by Scribner next week. The Nobel Prize-winning American author, talking to The Paris Review in 1958, two years before he shot himself at the age of 61, admitted that the final words of A Farewell to Arms, his semi-autobiographical novel about events during the Italian campaigns of World War I in the ambulance corps, had been rewritten “39...

The Samson Effect - a novel by Tony Eldridge Book Description Since discovering an ancient scroll in a cave in Hebron, Israel, American biblical archeologist Thomas Hamilton and his trusted friend and colleague, Israeli biblical linguist Michael Sieff, have been consumed with the notion of the Samson Effect - the idea that a long-lost elixir can allow an ordinary person to perform superhuman feats. When they happen upon a worn Hebrew parchment that not only confirms the existence of the Samson Effect but could potentially lead them to its source, the scholars embark on an impassioned crusade for the truth...

"It's a cliché because it's true" goes a cliché. Yet as National Review powerhouse and American Enterprise Institute fellow Jonah Goldberg demonstrates in his new book The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, many of the oft-repeated phrases and dicta utilized by the left are grounded in myth or complete falsehood, which is very appropriate given how the left uses them. For instance, did you know that Marie Antoinette never said, "Let them eat cake"? Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/06/review_the_tyranny_of_cliches_how_liberals_cheat_in_the_war_of_ideas.html#ixzz1zHc85vXY

Jonah Goldberg’s first book was called “Liberal Fascism.” It was a screed, of course, but a clever one. He argued that liberals who routinely denounce extreme conservatives as fascists should take a look in their own backyard, and he wasn’t fooling around: “It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion.” Goldberg has read around a bit, and he was able to lace his thesis with embarrassing quotations from progressives past who expressed admiration for Italian Fascism, eugenics and other assorted statist atrocities. But his essential point was a simple one: fascists believe in state control of...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Let's see. David Maraniss. David Maraniss has this book on Obama, and he's upset. Maraniss is not happy over how the right wing is using his book. What Maraniss is doing -- and I don't think he realizes it because he's angry at what's happening. He's angry at the reaction to his book. What he's doing is pointing out all the things in Obama's autobiographies which are not true. He talked about Obama's great basketball talents in high school yesterday that Obama wrote about in his book. It turns out he wasn't a special player. Maraniss is...

Rielle Hunter, in a gossipy new memoir, calls the cancer-stricken wife of her lover, former presidential candidate John Edwards, a "witch on wheels" and claims that while they were furtively seeing each other he lied about having three other mistresses at the same time, according to a new report. Hunter, who has a four-year-old daughter with Edwards, says she wrote the book, "What Really Happened," to give young Frances Quinn "one entirely truthful public account of how she came into the world. After all, this is her story too." ABC News reported Monday that it had obtained a copy of...

They've been called “Courtiers of the Marble Palace” and “Sorcerers' Apprentices.” But to the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, their law clerks are much more: sparring partners, workhorses and, often, extended family. Each of the court's nine justices hires several law clerks for yearlong stints, newly minted lawyers from top law schools who have impeccable credentials. The role of a clerk includes assisting the justices in determining what cases to take, preparing them for the oral arguments and helping write opinions. Now a new collection of essays, “In Chambers: Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices” (University...

Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything by Margaret Wertheim Walker, 323 pp., $27.00                                                   Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource An engraving by William Blake from The Song of Los, 1795 Physics on the Fringe describes work done by amateurs, people rejected by the academic establishment and rejecting orthodox academic beliefs. They are often self-taught and ignorant of higher mathematics. Mathematics is the language spoken by the professionals. The amateurs offer an...

My dear friends I just finished Michael Savage’s new book “Trickle Down Tyranny: Crushing Obama's Dream of the Socialist States of America” and you will NOT be disappointed with this read. First of all let me state that I love Dr. Savage’s energy and passion for speaking out against the secular progressive Marxist movement of our day. No one is more blunt and honest in his evaluation of our nation and our day. Michael is a great light for freedom and a voice of reason in a day when our nation is in its very death throes. Dr. Savage’s insight,...

From the time of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C.E., Jews lived in a world in which Greek culture carried a certain prestige and offered a route to political influence, first within the Hellenistic kingdoms that succeeded Alexander in the third to first centuries B.C.E., and thereafter within the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. During this period -- when Alexander's empire was divided between the Seleucids and the Ptolemies, and later when the Romans dominated both the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East -- Greek was the language of government and administration. Native...