Free Republic

Thomas Sowell is an icon. And, now, he has a biographer. While Sowell himself has written, by my count, 43 books, Jason Riley’s 2021 Maverick seems remarkably to be the first-ever major press biography of the heterodox African-American giant. Riley’s book sums up most of the key themes of Sowell’s thought, including the Anointed and Constrained visions of human behavior, the fact that the plain existence of racism does not explain most differences in group performance, and the idea of quantitative culturalism as an alternative to both “critical race theory” and genetic determinism. Sowell’s biographer also sums up two factual...

Finally got to watch the final episode of Showtime's documentary on The Reagans. This time he's presented as a man who used the fools of the religious right as a voting and fundraising scheme by lying to them about wanting to repeal Roe v Wade. Not sure if that was a strategy he thought up on his own or if it was orchestrated by Nancy's astrologer, who also figures prominently in this episode. We also found out that he only approved of the Strategic Defense Initiative because it reminded him of a movie he was in and how one sentence...

An eye-opening four-part series reexamining one of the most powerful and polarizing political couples of our time. Award winning documentarian and journalist Matt Tyrnauer combines archival footage, exhaustive research and first-person accounts from the couple's inner circle to craft a revealing portrait of their unlikely rise from Hollywood to the presidency - and Nancy Reagan's powerful position at the helm of their unprecedented partnership. A story of power, its legacy and a political performance few knew until now.

Michelle movie biography gets panned by critics

Standing five feet and five inches tall with her signature ruby red lips, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, now the youngest woman in Congress and leader of The Squad, was once known as Sandy, the dorky kid with big front teeth living in the working class Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx. 'I was born in a place where my zip code determined my destiny,' she says in biography AOC: The Fearless Rise and Powerful Resonance of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by Lynda Lopez, out June 2. 'My parents did everything in their power to move me out of that zip code'. From scrubbing toilets...

You may ask yourself, is it worth one of the best American non-fiction writers producing a book of just under 600 pages on an arrogant and abrasive egotist whose highest sustained rank in the State Department was that of a lowly assistant secretary? The answer is unabashedly yes. This is a remarkable work about a remarkable, if deeply flawed, statesman whose career was intimately intertwined with the 50 years of American decline from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Nearly all biographies have long, boring stretches you want to skip. This one has none. The access to Richard Holbrooke’s papers and to the...

The Rev. Al Sharpton has found an eager buyer for the rights to his life story — his own charity. The National Action Network agreed to pay the activist preacher $531,000 for his “life story rights for a 10-year period,” according to the non-profit’s latest tax filing, which was obtained by The Post. . . The document does not indicate when Sharpton, who is president of NAN, gets the cash, which is above and beyond the $244,661 he already pulled down in compensation from the group in 2017.

Claremont Review of Books, the brainiest and best publication in the conservative world, published my review of a new biography of America's first progressive president, Woodrow Wilson. He was an unreconstructed defender of slavery and a rancorous apologist for the Confederacy. His whole academic and political life was devoted to tearing up the Constitution and replacing it with a progressive dictatorship. This resentment against a Union that had crushed his native south in the Civil War drove his obsession with a world government with power to issue orders to the United States of America. The constitution in Wilson’s reading had...

The reputations of politicians go through distinct phases. First comes the real time of campaigning, public pronouncement and journalism, a mixture of confetti, gravitas and sleet-storm. Retirement brings the memoirs of subject, colleagues, relatives and eye-witnesses. Only after death does biography sculpt its first substantial image, which can last a long time. Later historians will argue and chisel, but they will work on that initial posthumous statue. “Reagan: An American Journey” by Bob Spitz aims to create such an image. The cover says it all: a shining black-and-white shot of a handsome man, his face simultaneously genial and serious, his...

I've been reading Conrad Black's Donald J. Trump--A president like no other. I strongly recommend it. If you're like me, from time to time you enjoy watching youtube's of the Trump campaign, the debates, the press conferences and of course the rallys. Some of the documentaries are fun too. Conrad Black's book is an enjoyment as he takes you into the Trump's past, present and the future. He likens him to many of our most foremost leaders, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Halsey, Patton, Kennedy, Reagan etc. He shows us, (what many here already know), that Trump's upbringing and ability to succeed...

A Kindle biography of Henry Livingston, the author of "The Night Before Christmas" based on statistical analysis by Emeritus Professor Mac Jackson. I'm making it free for the full 5 days they let me. Reviews would be GREATLY appreciated. From Bartleby's 5 star review: Very nice, concise treatment of the Livingston/Moore authorship question. The author does not hide the fact that she is a Livingston descendant. She is able to marshal a compelling collection of Livingston family archives to tell an engaging story, and then present the facts of the two scientific studies conducted to date on this question. Of...

Rose Marie is quick to tell you that she was a star before Madonna was even born. The 94-year-old was the very first celebrity to lop off her last name — and don’t you forget it. When a Hollywood agent asked her what she went by after she moved to California in the 1950s, she told him that she had always been simply Rose Marie, and she didn’t see any reason to change things up just because she was going to be on television. Born Rose Marie Mazetta in New York City in 1923, Rose Marie was already famous on...

An excerpt from one of former President Barack Obama's previously unpublished law school papers revealed he believed the American dream was to be like Donald Trump, although he called such a goal "unfounded optimism." At age 29, Obama wrote a paper with friend Robert Fischer titled "Race and Rights Rhetoric" in his last year at Harvard Law School. An excerpt of the paper was published in a biography of Obama's early life, titled Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, Vice reported Friday. Obama had written that the average American mindset can be summed up in one sentence: "I may...

David Garrow, the award-winning biographer of Martin Luther King, has written a biography of Barack Obama. It’s called Rising Star. Carlos Lozada, a liberal who reviews books for the Washington Post, considers Garrow’s biography of Obama here. According to Lozada: Garrow. . .concludes his massive new work with a damning verdict on Obama’s determination: “While the crucible of self-creation had produced an ironclad will, the vessel was hollow at its core.” Based on Lozada’s review, it appears that Garrow supports this conclusion in part by examining Obama’s relationship with his long-time girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. The two nearly married, but...

Throughout the late 1980s, Barack Obama dated a half-Dutch, half-Japanese woman two years his junior named Sheila Jager. During a weekend away, his friends caught a glimpse of how passionate a person young Obama could be - and how that passion could get out of hand. The couple "went back and forth, having sex, screaming yelling, having sex, screaming yelling," to the point where those nearby had to move "to the other side of the porch just to be able to talk," according to "Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama," by David J. Garrow, out Tuesday. "Rising Star"...

The sex secrets of the young Barack Obama have been revealed in an authoritative new biography of the ex-president. Obama slept with his girlfriend Genevieve Cook on their first date, before she wrote him a poem about their 'f***ing' and called their sex 'passionate', the book about the former president reveals. They also did cocaine together - and after they split she slept with his best friend. Obama also considered a gay relationship while at college, twice proposed to another white girlfriend, and cheated on Michelle with his ex during the first year of their relationship. His past is revealed...

A famous author, who penned biographies for Bobby Kennedy and Edie Sedgwick, leaped to her death from a Manhattan high rise on Sunday. Jean Stein, 83, plunged from the 15th story of 10 Gracie Square on the Upper East Side, in New York at 10.35am. She landed on the an eighth-floor balcony below and paramedics say she died at the scene, New York Daily News.

President Barack Obama considered being homosexual as a young man, according to a forthcoming biography of the president. The biography by David Garrow, “Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama,” is set to come out on May 9. Garrow wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr., and is a regular contributor to The New York Times and The Washington Post. In a chapter about the former president’s two years at Occidental College, Garrow reveals a close relationship Obama had with an openly gay assistant professor named Lawrence Goldyn. ------------------------------------------------- “Three years later, Obama wrote somewhat elusively to...

Growing up, Madonna always wanted to be in the spotlight. She got her wish after releasing her first, self-titled, album in 1983. Hit songs such as “Lucky Star,” “Burning Up,” “Borderline” and “Holiday” sent her soaring to worldwide fame. The beautiful blonde named Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, originally from Bay City, Michigan, was born on August 16, 1958 as one of seven kids from a strict Catholic family but tragically lost her mother to cancer when she was only seven years old. She overcame hardship and thrived to reach her goal of conquering the world by the age of 24....