Free Republic

Critics have called Margalit Fox's new book, The Riddle of the Labyrinth, a paleographic detective procedural. It follows the story of the laborious quest to crack a mysterious script, unearthed in Crete in 1900, known by the sterile-sounding name Linear B. Fox, an obituary writer for The New York Times, is good at bringing the departed to life. In The Riddle of the Labyrinth, she tells the story of Alice Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College, who worked alone over decades and discovered the essential grammar of Linear B, only to die in 1950 before she could complete her...

Weighing the economics of Abraham Lincoln isn’t easy to do in today’s terms. Lincoln was pro-subsidy and pro-tariff, both of which stances tend to be assigned to the interventionist left in today’s discussions. But Lincoln’s infrastructurally and financially primitive economy was not ours, and it’s worth thinking about how he might govern today given that in his words there is an unshakeable faith in free enterprise. Lincoln was pro-business, laudatory of wealth creation (and the inequality that goes with it), against class warfare and in favor of exploiting natural resources. “Property,” he said in 1864, “is the fruit of labor...

Dr. Paul Kengor: Dinesh, your last book was What’s So Great About Christianity, which did quite well, and which we profiled in a series of Q&As last year ( Part I , Part II , Part III ). It led to, among other things, an ongoing fascinating series of public debates you’ve had with Christopher Hitchens. It appears that your latest book, "Life After Death: The Evidence," came from those experiences. Tell us what prompted this book-which, for the record, I recommend as a Christmas gift for both believers and (especially) non-believers.Dinesh D’Souza: Intellectually, yes, I was provoked by the...

Film to reveal heroine as a spy who helped JapanBy Jack Webster   American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, who was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, did not die at sea in 1937. Rather, she became a Japanese collaborator after being caught spying for the US during second world war. This and other amazing revelations are to be the basis of a Hollywood film that aims to uncover the strange truth behind her mysterious disappearance. Earhart was already an American heroine when, at midnight on July 2, 1937, she and navigator Fred Noonan took off from New...

“A confidential message from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, reproduced in [Diana] West’s new book, told [White House aide Harry] Hopkins that a ‘continuing’ investigation had discovered that Russian diplomat (and Comintern agent) Vasily Zarubin had made a payment to U.S. Communist Party official Steve Nelson to help place espionage agents ‘in industries engaged in secret war production … so that information could be obtained for transmittal to the Soviet Union.’ This information had come from a ‘bug’ at Nelson’s home in Oakland, California, through which the FBI first learned of the Soviet effort (code-named ‘Enormous’) to obtain the atomic...

A book called "American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character" (St. Martin's Press) shouldn't promise uplift and spiritual renewal. I know. I wrote it. That said, the story of "betrayal" that my new book lays out -- betrayal enabled by a de facto Communist occupation of Washington by American traitors loyal to Stalin, which would solidify in the 1930s under FDR and be covered up by successive U.S. administrations and elites -- is not without inspiration. I am talking about the inspiration of the truth-tellers. "American Betrayal" presents a rewrite of most of World War II and Cold...

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils.If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome. And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story...

Syndicated columnist Diana West says the ultimate conclusion of her new book shocked even her. “Americans have been betrayed … by our leaders going back to FDR’s administration in the 1930s because we were penetrated by Soviet agents to such an extent that our policies and, indeed I argue, our character as a nation was subverted,” she explained in an interview with The Daily Caller’s Ginni Thomas about her book, “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character.” “I don’t believe we won World War II,” West added. “I believe that we were actually carrying out Soviet strategy due...

May 25, 2013 What Is True Conservatism? Peter Wehner In a recent column, Michael Gerson wrote about modern conservatism’s “two distinct architectural styles.” One approach within conservatism, he said, celebrates those who seek to apply abstract principles in their purest form. The alternative approach is more disposed toward compromise, incremental progress and taking into account shifting circumstances.What’s worth noting, I think, is that many of those in the first camp consider themselves to be more principled and authentically conservative than those in the second, who are often derided as RINOs and “squishes,” as part of the much-derided “establishment” and who...

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...