Keyword: bookreview
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Dennis Prager is probably known for his 1998 book “Happiness is a Serious Problem” and similar titles, if not for his talk show. However, Dennis Prager's book “Still the Best Hope” can be described as an exploration of the world views literally fighting for dominance in the world.
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Clinton Cash is a 2016 graphic novel about Hillary Clinton’s use and abuse of the Clinton Foundation, her political positions since Bill Clinton left office and other scandals. This book is unique for taking the form of a graphic novel while tackling multiple scandals and controversies in less than 150 pages. It is a shorter companion piece to longer book “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich”. What are the pros and cons of this political “comic” book?
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William Shetterley is an open communist and science fiction fan. He is unusual for criticizing social justice from the LEFT and reporting the early "cancel culture" trends in sci-fi and popular culture since the early 2000s.
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The book Retire Inspired builds on Dave Ramsey’s 7 Baby Steps. Dave Ramsey’s advice is to pay off debt except for the house and start saving 15% of your income until retirement. But how much do you need to retire? How much do you need to retire with the lifestyle you want, which may require more based on desires or catch-up savings? Retire Inspired answers those questions. The author’s tagline is “it’s not an age, it’s a financial number.” The financial number you need to retire inspired, the amount of money you need in your retirement nest egg to retire...
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“Economic Facts and Fallacies” by Thomas Sowell came out in 2008, but like many of Thomas Sowell’s other books on economics, it remains a classic. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this book? How does it compare to his other major works?
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“Discrimination and Disparities” is a 2018 book by Thomas Sowell. While it addresses racism and class bias, it delves into many other disparities and forms of discrimination. It discusses the literal social and economic costs of disparities and actual discrimination while explaining how most disparities are not due to actual discrimination. What are the points in favor and against this Thomas Sowell book? What can you learn from this book that hasn’t been addressed in his many other works?
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Michael Savage has used the catchphrase “borders, language, culture” to define how a nation is defined. Savage says that borders, language and culture are what must be protected for a nation to survive. Michael Savage’s book title “Government Zero” refers to the government that has given up its most basic obligation to protect the borders, language and culture of the people. His premise is that it has in fact betrayed that obligation.
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"Forbidden Thoughts" contains a number of science fiction and horror stories challenging the concept of political correctness and right-think.
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"What's So Great About Christianity" by Dinesh D'Souza is a look at the reasons why Christianity is responsible for the success of the Judeo-Christian West and the positives Christianity has wrought around the world. What are the strengths of Dinesh D'Souza's book? And what are the weaknesses of D'Souza's Christian apologetic work?
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Countdown to Mecca by Michael Savage is the third and final book in the Jack Hatfield series. The book "Countdown to Mecca" is a spectacular conclusion to a character's novels that rival Jack Bauer of "24" or Tom Clancy's novels.
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In Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton address the economic forces affecting less-educated American whites. Their analysis admirably deviates from academic consensus by acknowledging the substantive demands underlying today’s populist movements. The authors attempt, moreover, to present both sides of economic arguments. What’s missing, though, is recognition that the Trump administration, in many respects, is implementing meaningful policy solutions to address these issues. (I should note here that Professor Case taught one of my favorite courses in college.) As Case and Deaton note, the white working class has had a tough...
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America’s system of education has failed in one of its most important goals: forming future generations of American citizens. This is particularly true in higher education, where students are encouraged to become “global citizens” instead of Americans. At many of our institutions of higher learning, character education has been replaced by moral relativism at the same time that rigorous academic standards have given way to a mentality of “college for all.” We are seeing the results of our education deficit now, as rioters tear down statues that commemorate not only the former Confederacy, but America’s founding fathers, abolitionists, and former...
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What are the odds? It’s a favorite expression. You will find it in my previous columns. My youngest daughter gave me a copy of Mike Lindell’s new book for Father’s Day. A fabulous gift. The book is hard to put down. I prefer biographies, stories about ordinary people who have done extraordinary things. Novels are not my cup of tea. Most autobiographies are written by fairly famous people who want to set the record straight about their lives and their actions. Attempting to rewrite history, they tend to downplay their failures and accentuate their accomplishments. Mike Lindell turns that model...
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A writer friend of mine once told me “writing is therapeutic.†As one of the more than 11 million residents locked down in Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, Chinese writer Fang Fang probably felt the same way when she decided to record her experiences online daily during the lockdown.She started posting entries on Jan. 25, two days after the Chinese government quarantined Wuhan and several nearby cities with a total population of 60 million. She entered her last entry on April 8, when the lockdown was formally lifted. These entries have now become a new book, titled...
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Bolton is a thin-skinned and snarky figure who succeeded in convincing a surprising number of smart people in Washington that he is somehow serious and statesmanlike. In the good old days of the internet blogosphere, there was a running bit at Jeff Goldstein’s blog Protein Wisdom which provided a name for John Bolton’s prominent mustache – “Regis”, a globe-trotting nuke-loving Hamas-bashing sexually aggressive bon-vivant with lush whiskey-tinged follicles. The image is ridiculous of course, but it is not far from the image the real John Bolton paints of himself in the absurdly entertaining pages of his book, the inaptly named...
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Jeanine Cummins’ bestselling novel 'American Dirt' has elicited protests over the author's lack of Latinx credentials, but the bigger problem is that the book is plodding moralistic melodrama. In Jeanine Cummins’ novel American Dirt, main character Lydia Pérez is a middle class, college-educated bookstore owner in Acapulco. She has a nine-year-old son with her husband Sebastián who is an investigative reporter at the local newspaper. She is bored by her clientele, who mostly consist of tourists and buyers of knickknacks, until one day a man with huge soul and an exquisite taste that nearly matches her own enters her shop...
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A question of power is at the heart of the new and interesting book by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. The Anglo-American liberal duo did a tremendous service to the academy in 2018 by hoaxing several “grievance studies” journals that publish shoddy activist scholarship. Their book, “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—And Why This Harms Everybody,” explains the theoretical foundations of activist disciplines in the academy and warns policymakers about the threats they pose. The central thesis is thus: Our institutions of higher education are under attack from the virus of post-modernism, along with...
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I remember as a twenty-two-year-old being excited when I saw a new book called the The Mists of Avalon by an author called Marion Zimmer Bradley. Mists was presented as the retelling of the Arthurian legend from the point of view of the women of Camelot, which I thought was a thrilling idea. However, I found the book heavy on paganism and morbid, explicit sex scenes, but light on romance, heroism, chivalry, mystery, faith and all the qualities I had come to love in the Camelot stories. I never read any of the author's other books and did not care...
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... In Debunking Howard Zinn, Mary Grabar has performed the absolutely necessary task that her title promises, and has done so with admirable energy, persistence, and relentless attention to detail, leaving Zinn’s already shaky credibility in utter ruins. She brings the intensive scrutiny of a jeweler’s eye to Zinn’s work, topic by topic, and shows in no uncertain terms how flawed and unreliable it is. But that is not all. She also shows us Zinn the man: An utter charlatan and naked partisan, an admirer of Stalin and Mao, a relentless self-promoter and self-mythologizer, and a media-savvy celebrity of the...
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College sports are a gigantic entertainment business that have nothing to do with the missions of the schools. Frequently, the highest-paid employee of a school is the football or basketball coach, and the athletics budget is hugely subsidized by fees paid by financially strapped students. Players who read and write at a middle-school level (if even that) are recruited to help teams win, but the academic work they do is laughable. Schools rack up big debts trying to win glory on the gridiron or court, even if it means scrimping on faculty salaries and building maintenance. How did this lamentable...
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