Free Republic

I then asked him if he also read the Hardy Boys as a kid, and he certainly did. He then asked me how many of these books were published, and when I researched this, I discovered that the first Hardy Boys books came out in 1927, and ended their run after 190 titles in 2005.

Former State Department official Victoria Nuland, who reportedly connected FBI officials to the former British spy who wrote the infamous anti-Trump dossier, will testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee next week. Ms. Nuland, a longtime State Department official who served in the George W. Bush administration as the U.S. Ambassador to NATO, served during the Obama administration as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs. In that capacity, according to the book “Russian Roulette,” she played an instrumental role in the evolution of Christopher Steele’s negative campaign research on then-presidential candidate Donald Trump in 2016 by giving permission...

The shocking indictments against the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI in New York raise many dark questions.In the course of writing two books on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia, the same question occurred to me again and again: How is it possible that I knew all sorts of stuff about Donald Trump, and the FBI didn’t seem to have a clue? Or if they did, why weren’t they doing anything with it? Specifically, I knew that: -Starting in 1980, an alleged “spotter agent” for the KGB began cultivating Trump as a new asset for Soviet intelligence. -The Russian...

Terrible news from The Associated Press. Media Nation correspondent J.A. passes along this note from Anthony McCartney, the AP’s global entertainment and lifestyle editor. AP to end its weekly book reviews Dear AP book reviewers, I am writing to share that the AP is ending its weekly book reviews, beginning Sept. 1. This was a difficult decision but one made after a thorough review of AP’s story offerings and what is being most read on our website and mobile apps as well as what customers are using. Unfortunately, the audience for book reviews is relatively low and we can no...

The August 1942 landing on Guadalcanal was a colossal improvisation, concocted on the fly to take advantage of a recent dramatic turn in the Pacific war. We’ve all heard the sayings: “Haste makes waste,” “Look before you leap,” “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” They all make the same point: Be careful, especially when undertaking a difficult task. Prepare yourself. Think about the things that can go wrong, and have a plan ready when they do.However, sometimes you have no choice. An opportunity arises, you decide to respond, and you go ahead with whatever plans and resources you...

It was one of the most erotic things I ever heard. A man I know said he was reading all the novels of Jane Austen in one summer. At first, I figured he was pretending to like things that women like to seem simpatico, a feminist hustle. But no, this guy really wanted to read “Northanger Abbey.” Men are reading less. Women make up 80 percent of fiction sales. “Young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally,” David J. Morris wrote in a Times essay titled “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.”

While America grapples with its own dark past of slavery, a massive chapter of history gets buried by academics who fixate on Western guilt. Justin Marozzi’s eye-opening book, Captives and Companions, shines a light on the Islamic world’s slave trade, spanning over a millennium with unmatched scale and savagery. This isn’t ancient news, but it is a wake-up call for historians. Marozzi estimates that from the 7th century to the 20th, up to 17 million Africans and Europeans were enslaved in Muslim lands, dwarfing the transatlantic trade’s 11-15 million.

Internet Archive — the no-cost, nonprofit digital library that has become embroiled in the nationwide battle over copyrights and free speech — is now an official source for government documents. According to a new designation announced by California Senator Alex Padilla, the website will join a network of more than 1,000 libraries around the country tasked with archiving government documents for public view. Unlike other designated federal depository libraries, as they are known, the Archive is entirely online. The news was first reported by San Francisco's KQED, who spoke to both Padilla and Archive founder Brewster Kahle about supporting the...

The Left is America’s oldest enemy.It was here long before the 1960s, calling for the execution of George Washington, plotting to stop the ratification of the Constitution, and collaborating with foreign enemies. Stolen elections, fake news, race riots, globalism, and socialism aren’t new problems; Americans faced them from the very beginning. Domestic Enemies reveals the true origins of the Democratic Party and its radicals, who―even two centuries ago―were calling for the redistribution of wealth, the end of marriage, and the use of schools for political indoctrination. From political battles to street fights, Domestic Enemies takes you into the heart of...

Angelo Codevilla was a giant of the conservative movement ... Codevilla’s posthumous book (he died in an auto accident September 20, 2021) .. The man did not have good things to say about the pretentious Henry Kissinger ... Angelo Codevilla .. served in the Navy as an intelligence officer, then did stints as a Foreign Service officer and later as an aide to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence .... a prominent role at the Claremont Review of Books .. author of more than a dozen books on international relations and politics that were leavened with is deep knowledge of...

People coming of political age in the last decade or so were no doubt shocked to learn of the Biden administration’s insane plan for saving the northern spotted owl from purported extinction. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for implementing the Endangered Species Act, preserving the owl requires slaughtering nearly half a million barred owls at a cost, opponents say, of $1.3 billion over the next 30 years. That is so, the FWS maintains, because the larger, aggressive barred owl is killing its cousin at a prodigious rate. Perhaps more stunning to these political newcomers is...

Collin Rugg @CollinRugg Two lesbians are appalled by the gay propaganda books in the children’s section at Barnes & Noble. “Okay, we're gay. But we're in Barnes and Noble and there's a gay kids book section. And this is crazy.” “It's pushing it. For a baby. This is pushing it.” Why are you promoting s*x to small children, @BNBuzz ? Video: nevernotcringe / tt

As a bookworm, I'm naturally the obsessive compulsive buyer that Barnes & Noble seeks to attract. But one of my recent trips to their Frederick, MD store showed me just how much the bookseller giant was willing to go to sneak anti-Trump agitprop into their customers’ information diet. As I was checking out some books for purchase last month, the cashier hawked his company’s “Monthly Pick” to me called Cultish published in 2021 by author Amanda Montell, who apparently became known in part for her third-wave feminist drivel Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language (2019). You...

Suzanne Massie first met President Reagan in January 1984, when US-Soviet relations were at their iciest: the previous year Reagan had labelled the Soviet Union the “evil empire”. Massie was not an academic, but she had written a book about Russian culture called Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia that had caught Reagan’s eye, and she was summoned to the Oval Office for a five-minute chat that lasted 25. She proceeded to tell him what his hardline, all-male, fervently anti-communist advisers had not: that there was a huge gulf between the Russian people and their Soviet rulers,...

A Houston mayoral appointee went ballistic by criticizing a Texas camp site where seven little girls perished in floodwaters - then blaming Donald Trump for the tragedy. In a series of cruel videos, Sade Perkins vented her frustrations, calling Camp Mystic 'whites only Christian camp' hours after a heavy deluge ripped through in Hunt on the Fourth of July. 'I know I'm going to get cancelled for this, but Camp Mystic is a white-only girls' Christian camp,' she raged on TikTok as girls were still missing. 'They don't even have a token Asian. They don't have a token black person....

Why young men don’t read — and publishing doesn’t care.A quiet crisis is consuming the world of literature, and no one seems to care.Male writers are vanishing — not by fluke or market whim, but by design, denial, and quiet cultural disdain. Fewer men are reading fiction, and fewer men are publishing novels. (RELATED: Male Novel Readers Are Not Fiction)Men are reading less because the literary world no longer offers them mirrors.This isn’t a lament for some patriarchal golden age, where men smoked pipes, quoted Hemingway, and felt vaguely superior just for owning hardcovers. It’s a warning. The decline of...

Okay Freepers, you are a magnificent resource to draw upon. I'm hoping that among you are some who have already broken the ground I now seek to tread, and maybe you can give me some advice. Perhaps even tell me if I'm doing something wrong and could change up my approach.A lot of people have told me over the years that they wanted me to write my life story. It took ten years of on and off labor (and there came to be even more things to write about in that time) but in the end this past November I...

Hadi Matar finally went on trial Tuesday for attempting to murder the novelist Salman Rushdie back in Aug. 2022. There is little, if any, doubt about Matar’s guilt .. for he stabbed Rushdie multiple times in full view of a shocked crowd at the Chautauqua festival. .. Barone managed to delay the trial for over a year. Now that it has begun, both Barone and his opposite number, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt, seem curiously intent on preventing any discussion of Matar’s motive. Matar tried to kill the man who, at the time of the stabbing had carried for...

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a group of Maryland parents who sued a school board over its refusal to allow elementary school children to be taken out of classes with LGBTQ-themed storybooks. In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines Friday, the justices overturned a lower court ruling that found the parents needed to show that their kids were being coerced to act differently than their religious beliefs. The high court concluded that the parents “have shown that they are entitled to a preliminary injunction” because they “are likely to succeed in their challenge to the Board’s policies. “The...

Protests against the arrest of a pro-Palestine Columbia graduate student are being organized by a Marxist revolutionary group that is pro-Communism, anti-Israel, and has potential links to the Chinese Communist Party. Mahmoud Khalil, a leader in the pro-Palestine and anti-Israel encampments at Columbia University, was detained earlier this month by the Trump administration, with the Department of Homeland Security arguing that he “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization.” The People’s Forum helped organize some of the campus chaos and is now organizing protests to free Khalil. Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) is the pro-Palestine and anti-Israel group...