Free Republic

Much of Howard’s "magic" came from his ability to create emotional sincerity through the hatreds and bloodlust of characters like Conan the Barbarian.In an introduction to Frank Miller’s groundbreaking run on Batman, the nastiest version yet and the inspiration behind Christian Bale’s demonic portrayal, comic legend Alan Moore noted how new sensibilities exposed the politically incorrect flaws of superheroes. James Bond, Moore wrote, was an alcoholic burn-out and obvious hater of women despite, or maybe because of, his bed-hopping. Tarzan, according to Moore, was a white supremacist and by realistic standards would have no compunction about engaging in cannibalism. Given...

Seventy years after its first publication, C.S. Lewis's classic 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' remains resonant with readers young and old. Since its publication 70 years ago today, C.S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” has been translated into 47 foreign languages, made into a movie series that grossed more than $700 million at the box office, and was included in Time magazine’s list of the top 100 novels published since 1923.Featuring a land of magic, evil witches, and otherworldly creatures, the world of Narnia introduces millions of children to the fantasy genre every year. It’s...

Jen Gerson knows that any positive mention of Debra Soh’s The End of Gender: Debunking Myths About Sex and Identity has a strong resemblance to square-dancing in a minefield. Cancellations may fall like raindrops on the career of anyone so unenlightened as to even acknowledge the existence of such a work:

Until recently, Kosoko Jackson was considered an expert in the trapdoors of identity-related rhetoric. Jackson worked as a “sensitivity reader” for major publishers of YA fiction, a job that entails reading manuscripts and flagging them for problematic content. His own debut novel, A Place for Wolves, was promoted as an “#ownvoices” book, a hashtag attached approvingly to books in which the author shares a particular marginalized identity with his subject. (Jackson is black and queer.) He believed that, for example, women shouldn’t “profit” from writing gay men’s stories, as he tweeted last year. And he was part of a small...

Amazon frightened many conservative authors this week in a mass deletion of reviews. Some authors lost almost 100 reviews on their published works. Others lost all the reviews they had ever written on Amazon. Some lost both. Information about the purge began to trickle out in the closed Conservative Libertarian Fiction Alliance (CLFA) Facebook group. Member after member began reporting the losses at the same time. Marina Fontaine, whose credits include the dystopian Chasing Freedom, the pro-Trump fiction anthology MAGA 2020, and moderating the CLFA page, reported many members experiencing losses. A coordinated effort was launched to contact Amazon for...

By Philip Cottraux When I reviewed 1984, at least a dozen people told me that I should read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World next. The two novels apparently serve as twin companion pieces in the “negative utopia” genre, where the ideal of a hopeful future for man is turned on its head into a dark dystopian warning for us all. 1984 was published in 1949 as the world was still reeling from the Second World War. Orwell’s totalitarianism was a combination of Soviet Russia mixed with the fear of the kind of power emerging technology would bring. Brave New World...

In June 1942, Thomas Mann, who was living in exile in California, delivered a commentary on a German-language BBC radio program that decried the sanguinary actions of the Third Reich in avenging the assassination of the leading SS official Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. After Heydrich’s elaborate funeral ceremony at the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Hitler screamed at the Czech president, Emil Hacha, “Nothing can prevent me from deporting millions of Czechs if they do not wish for peaceful coexistence.” It wasn’t an idle threat. “Since the violent death of Heydrich,” Mann lamented, “terror is raging everywhere, in a more...

Perhaps the most anticipated popular fiction offering of the year for readers of this column is Heart of the Assassin, (Scribner, $25.95) Robert Ferrigno's final volume in his trilogy about a future America split by civil war and dominated by Islamic rule. http://frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=36278#disqus_thread

Karl Marx Is 'Back in Vogue,' NYT Book Reviewer Enthuses By Scott Whitlock (Bio | Archive) August 19, 2009 - 17:35 ET     New York Times book critic Dwight Garner on Wednesday enthused over a new biography of Friedrich Engels, cooing that Marxism is "back in vogue" and adding that the founding communist comes across as a "jovial man of outsize appetites" in Tristram Hunt’s new biography "Marx’s General." Garner opened the review by insisting that decrying capitalism is now hip again: "Thanks to globalism’s discontents and the financial crisis that has spread across the planet, Karl Marx...

Ann Coulter's latest attack on liberalism and the people who practice it, Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and their Assault on America, currently sits at second place on the New York Times Best-Seller List, and deservedly so. One chapter alone, Coulter's searing appraisal of the destruction caused by liberals who have elevated single-motherhood into an acceptable and honorable personal choice in America, should be read by all who care about the future prosperity of this country. Coulter exposes various phony victims and the liberals who exploit them throughout the book, writing about those who "viciously attack everyone else, while wailing that they...

Grand New Party: How the Republicans Can Win the Working Class and save the American Dream By Ross Douthat and Reihan SalamDoubleday, 2008 244 Pages, US$23.95 ISBN 978-0-385-51943-4 Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam have perhaps already reached the stage among people who follow applied political science where they need no introduction, which doesn’t mean they don’t get one: Douhat /Dow-thut/ is now a senior editor at The Atlantic, for which Salam is an associate editor and also a Fellow of the New America Foundation; readers may have encountered them at the blog, The American Scene. For the purposes of this...

December 12, 2007 Books are good gifts to receive and even better gifts to give because you can get books without half the hassles involved in buying many other kinds of gifts. You can easily buy books from the Internet and avoid the mob scenes at the shopping malls. This has been a good year for books that shoot down false and nonsensical notions on major issues of our time. "The Immigration Solution" is an excellent new book that discusses illegal immigration without the political rhetoric, spin, demagoguery, and unsubstantiated claims that have become all too common in the media...

Read the reviews at the site. This book is now Amazon's No.1 in Canada. If anyone has read the book, please post a review here.

When Ann Coulter’s most recent book, Godless, came out, all anyone heard about it was her “attack” on the four women from New Jersey. But Coulter’s book, actually has very little to say about the Jersey Girls, and much to say about a number of other topics, including education. In chapter 6: The Liberal Priesthood: Spare the Rod, Spoil the Teacher, Coulter takes on teacher indoctrination, pay, qualifications, and crime. Coulter asserts that teachers are always presumed heroes, and are spoken of in “reverential terms,” but are busy “inculcating students in the precepts of the Socialist Party of America—as understood...

For more than a half a century, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It has been a widely used textbook in both college and high school advanced placement courses. For about the same time period, it has been misleading students everywhere. For example, the author of the book, Columbia professor Richard Hofstadter offered up a chapter on Abraham Lincoln that never mentioned the Gettysburg Address. In like fashion, he claimed that the authors of the constitution “wanted freedom from fiscal uncertainty and irregularities in the currency, from trade wars among the states, from economic discrimination by more...

I'm very angry because I'm sick and tired of what I see as deception and dishonesty within the literary community. It's been going on for far to long and nobody seems to want to pay attention to it or to care about it. I love my publisher which is Publishamerica and it's a first rate Publisher however I have seen firsthand with my own eyes individual authors that meet on discussion boards asking each other to do reviews of one anothers books that most always turn out to be four or five star reviews. These people then go on every...

Tower of Babble: How the United Nations Has Fueled Global ChaosBy Dore Gold (Crown Forum, 308 pages, $25.95) Hopes were high for the U.N. after the Cold War ended. People said what had hamstrung the organization was the U.S.-USSR deadlock in the Security Council, and, more broadly, the division of the world into opposed blocs. With the passing of that situation, the U.N. would regain its true role as a settler of conflicts and dispenser of justice. Indeed, when in 1990 the Security Council authorized force against Iraq after its unprovoked invasion of Kuwait, those hopes seemed -- for a...

To all who have read "Unfit for Command" and believe the contents, need to post their views and opinions on the website's of Barnes and Noble and Amazon. The book burning Libs are hijacking the sites intended for giving a thumbs up or down to make political statements and disenfranchising the reputation of the "Swifties" with rhetoric. I encourage all those out there that appreciate the courage of the Swifties to take a stand for truth check out the sites.

Positive reviews of Unfit for Command deleted from amazon.com

To begin with a small question that I trust is not a trivial or a petty one: how often have you met a self-described Kerry supporter? During the truncated and front-loaded Democratic primaries, it was relatively easy to encounter Dean enthusiasts, Gephardt union activists, Clark fans, Edwards converts, Kucinich militants and even dedicated Sharptonians. (My circle wasn't wide enough to encompass any Braun campaigners.) But a person who got up every morning and counted the day wasted if he or she hadn't made a Kerry convert? I've asked this question on radio and on television, and on campus and in...