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If Barack Obama is the most admired black man in America right now, it may be no exaggeration to say that John McWhorter is a candidate for the unpopularity prize. Which is an odd thing to say about a courteous academic from the arcane realm of linguistics. Yet by venturing onto the mean streets of hiphop with a dispassionate critique of a multimillion-dollar industry, he risks becoming a target of drive-by shootings by enraged academics, book reviewers and bloggers. McWhorter is not all that surprised that critics have given him a pummelling. He lets out a sigh of resignation: “By...

As a Los Angeles county prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi batted a thousand in murder cases: 21 trials, 21 convictions, including the Charles Manson case in 1971. As an author, Mr. Bugliosi has written three No. 1 best sellers and won three Edgar Allan Poe awards, the top honor for crime writers. More than 30 years ago he co-wrote the best seller “Helter Skelter,” about the Manson case. So Mr. Bugliosi could be forgiven for perhaps thinking that a new book would generate considerable interest, among reviewers and on the broadcast talk-show circuit. But if he thought that, he would have been...

I was drinking at a bar the other night with an ex-Marine named Patrick. We were talking about music while getting our asses kicked at darts by a girl who looked a hell of a lot like Sarah Chalke from Scrubs (she’s the blonde one who’s really hot, but in an über-dorky way). Patrick spent some time in Iraq before being honorably discharged from the Marine Corps, and now he’s in college, studying sound engineering and growing his hair out. His goal is to become a roadie. “All I want to do is make the music I love even better,”...

Two white people walk into a bar, a badly lit Culver City saloon called the Backstage whose interior design could be summed up as one pool table, a no-frills photo booth and some scattered neon. Blondie and the Rolling Stones belt out of the stereo, $3 Newcastle comes on tap and sticky laminated menus offer up garlic fries, chili cheese fries and buffalo wings. In other words, welcome to No. 148 of 150 things white people like: dive bars. "If you want to say I was planning that far ahead, that's great," said Christian Lander, resident white person behind the...

Wars of Ideas and THE War of Ideas Authored by Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria, II. Added June 12, 2008 Type: Monograph 62 Pages   Cost: Free The author discusses several types of wars of ideas in an effort to achieve a better understanding of what wars of ideas are. That knowledge, in turn, can help inform strategy. It is important to note, for instance, that because ideas are interpreted subjectively, it is not likely that opposing parties will "win" each other over by means of an ideational campaign alone. Hence, physical events, whether intended or incidental, typically play determining...

America’s longing for an empire has a long history NEARLY 50 years ago, when William Appleman Williams, one of the 20th century’s most important historians of diplomacy, drew attention to America’s persistent search for an empire, he was denounced for being pro-communist. To challenge deeply held beliefs about American innocence was shocking enough. To contradict cold-war propaganda was worse. Recently, however, such ideological conformism has been disappearing. It has become acceptable to speak of empire, both among those who defend American foreign policy and those who condemn it. “If people want to say we’re an imperial power—fine,” says William Kristol,...

Several years ago my husband borrowed a Shania Twain CD from the library. When my then 5-year-old daughter saw me roll my eyes at the barely dressed singer's provocative poses on the liner notes, she was smitten. She played the CD over and over, tossing her hair and wiggling her hips in imitation of those photos, oblivious to the innuendo but aware that she was doing something daring and rebellious. What, I thought, am I going to do when she's 13? Reading The Lolita Effect five years later, I wonder why that episode even stands out in my memory. To...

**This thread has been relaunched, so we can spread the word about this book.** Link to original thread: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2033075/posts Link to buy the book: http://www.amazon.com/Bathsheba-Deadline-Original-Novel/dp/0595470793/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213839458&sr=1-1 LEFTISTS WANT TO SUPPRESS THIS BOOK by John Cassell Paraphrasing one of Western culture's more infamous 19th Century authors There is a Spirit abroad in the land...neither president nor prime minister...neither pope nor parliament can exorcise it... In its face, the great civilizations of the Western World cower, for they can prevail not against it... ...like the California education official that forces Christian and Jewish children to take Moslem names and bow down on prayer...

Book to 'dish dirt' on Obama From correspondents in Washington June 24, 2008 05:30am Article from: Agence France-Presse THE same publisher who helped to sink John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign plans a follow-up effort to dish dirt on this year's Democratic hopeful, Barack Obama. The Case Against Barack Obama by conservative journalist David Freddoso will offer an alternative to the media's "whitewashed" view of the Illinois senator, Regnery Publishing president Marjory Ross told Politico.com overnight. Ms Ross said the book was due out on August 4 - the same month in 2004 that he published Unfit for Command, a scathing...

What is Casanova's biographer to do? The retired libertine did the job so well himself in his Histoire de ma vie that no one could possibly improve on his story, just as no one setting out to describe his extraordinarily restless life could have read, travelled or written more than Casanova, or thought more about the business of living than he did, or lived as bravely or as excessively. The Histoire, which Casanova wrote at the end of his days when he was working as a librarian at Dux Castle in Bohemia, details with such wit, candour and style his...

LEFTISTS WANT TO SUPPRESS THIS BOOK by John Cassell Paraphrasing one of Western culture's more infamous 19th Century authors There is a Spirit abroad in the land...neither president nor prime minister...neither pope nor parliament can exorcise it... In its face, the great civilizations of the Western World cower, for they can prevail not against it... ...like the California education official that forces Christian and Jewish children to take Moslem names and bow down on prayer rugs... ...like the UK Minister of Education who sees to it that British children do not know of the Holocaust...because it offends people who were...

As the twig is bent, so bends the bough. For the Nazis it was important to educate little children in performing the supreme gesture of submission to Adolf Hitler's "Thousand-Year Reich." German sociologist Tilman Allert cites a postmistress who chided two little girls, come to mail a letter, for greeting her with "guten tag." Instruction improving on correction, she led them outside to practice the "heil Hitler" along with the arm lift. To perfect the lift, one kindergarten teacher had the children elevate their right hands to loop their lunch bags over her raised arm. A fairy-tale illustration shows the...

The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who died in 2003, was often depicted as hostile to the Scots (or 'Scotch', as he insisted on calling them). Yet, as he would sometimes remark, he had a long association with Scotland and its people. He was brought up in Northumberland, only 20 miles or so from the border. As a boy he had been cared for by a Scots nanny, before attending a preparatory school in Dunbar. After an interval, he married a Scots wife, and together they bought a home near Melrose, where he lived during the university vacations for almost 30 years....

Tuesday, 3 June 2008 Book review: Slavery within the Islamic world - the forbidden truth (L’ esclavage en Terre d’Islam: un tabou bien gardé) Now this looks interesting. A review by Elie Smith, an African journalist living and working in Paris, of the latest  book by Malek Chebal  - L’ esclavage en Terre d’Islam: un tabou bien gardé which he translates as Slavery within the Islamic world -- the forbidden truth. I have taken the review from the website African Path but it is also features on his own blog. The book itself is in French but this particular review is...

In 2005, President Bush articulated a national strategy for Iraq that hinged on successfully advising Iraqi security forces. "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," he said. The critical piece of this strategy was the adviser capability itself. Although the military's special operations community had long nurtured the capability to conduct "foreign internal defense," the Army and Marine Corps had largely marginalized this capability by the time of the Iraq war, disdaining it in favor of conventional combat operations. To achieve the president's vision for Iraq, the Army and Marines would need to build this capability from scratch, tearing...

For more than 40 years, author Tom Wolfe has challenged the way Americans look at themselves. His unconventional style of mixing literary techniques with factual reporting became known as the "new journalism." His novels include the bestsellers "Bonfire of The Vanities," "A Man in Full," and "I Am Charlotte Simmons." TCS contributor Ben Wattenberg sat down with Tom Wolfe in New York following a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Derriere Garde, a loosely organized group of artists and composers working to rediscover and reinvent traditional forms and techniques. The full video of this interview can...

Now that it's June, it's officially summer reading time. Those who have the luxury curl up by the beach engrossed in the latest faddish novel. This summer, publisher W.W. Norton is pushing "The Garden of Last Days," by Andre Dubus III, an Oprah Book Club fave. The book sympathizes with the 9/11 terrorists. As I've written before, Dubus' "House of Sand and Fog"--an Oprah selection--was a hideously anti-American tale, where the Americans are losers and evil-doers, and Iranian Muslim immigrants are the good, hard-working people, done wrong and caused to lose everything including their lives, thanks to these loser and...

In my opinion, Scott McClellan was one of the worst White House press secretaries ever. He was often short with reporters and refused to say anything about anything that was not in his talking points. He did not seem to know what role the White House press corps played in the functioning of the government. When McClellan did not want to answer a question, he would “refer” you to other agencies or to the vice president's office. In fact, McClellan had three standard evasive practices. One was the referral, which he learned from his predecessor Ari Fleischer. The second was...

Here’s how you sell a book. It’s easy. First, get a job in the administration of George W. Bush. You have to keep it for awhile – I mean, certainly more than a week or two – so you can claim some degree of credibility. Then get out of Dodge (getting fired for being ineffectual is not a problem), turn around and write a book that parrots everything Bush’s critics say about him. Welcome to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. It’s not even hard. The mainstream media and the Democrats pretty much write the book for...

Unique Book Dedicated to Trial against Templars on Display in Sofia 30 May 2008, Friday A copy of the unique book dedicated to the trial against templars, issued by Secret Vatican City archive, was presented Friday in Sofia's National Archeological Museum. Photo by Yuliana Nikolova (Sofia Photo Agency) The unique book dedicated to the trial against templars issued by Secret Vatican City archive was presented Friday in Sofia's National Archeological Museum. The publication, called "Processus Conta Templarios", is an expensive limited edition of the proceedings of the 1307-1312 papal trial of the mysterious medieval crusading order of warrior-monks who were...

May 30, 2008Berkeley, CaliforniaThis week ex-Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan's tell-all book "What Happened" was released to huge fanfare. Scooter came over Wednesday morning with a copy and breathlessly exclaimed this was his "ticket to the easy life." Sometimes Scooter gets like this when he's had too many Mountain Dews for breakfast. When he finally calmed down, he explained that the whole country was talking about this book and it was selling like Love Lube at a Gay Pride parade.It took me a bit to finally understand that Scooter wasn't excited about the dirt this book dished on Chimpy McHitler, but rather the...

The former Bush administration pitchman making explosive election-year charges about how the White House handled the Valerie Plame case and built the case for invading Iraq said Thursday that he went to Washington to change it and became “disillusioned” when he realized he was just a pawn in the never-ending political game.

BOISE - Outgoing Sen. Larry Craig revealed tonight that he is writing a book. In a live interview on NewsChannel 7 Tuesday night – Craig, 62 - told Dee Sarton that he is in the process of writing a book on energy - that will also talk about his time in Congress – and the events of the past year. "There will be a bit of what's happened in the last year, and the way it evolved,� Craig said. “I think that's important for Idaho and those outside Idaho who are interested to know." He hopes the book will be...

Is Osama bin Laden a rebel against the Saudi Arabian ruling class or a model member of it? That question lurks behind “The Bin Ladens,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker writer Steve Coll. The world’s most famous terrorist owes his fortune and his standing to a family business that Coll calls “the kingdom’s Halliburton.” Like Halliburton, the Saudi Binladin Group specializes in gigantic infrastructure projects. Government connections are the key to the family’s wealth. So you would assume they would react with unmixed horror to a radical son, like the duchess in the Noël Coward song: You could have...

The success of the surge in Iraq was entirely predictable; so too are the tough times ahead. Should we choose to stay in that war-torn land, our professional military will face new and horrible challenges from the enemy, adjust and achieve new successes that will force the terrorists to changes their tactics again. We will defeat those too. So the process will continue, as Iraq moves in fits and starts toward its own version of democratic governance that, with our ongoing assistance, will be tolerably stable. That has been the pattern from the beginning in Iraq, where our fighting men...

A few days ago I had an opportunity to discuss the pithy but engagingly written book War and Decision with its author, Douglas Feith. The book is lengthy -- with endnotes it runs to 653 pages -- but has the virtue the other books about the internal processes on the Iraq war decision-making lack. It is well-detailed and superbly documented rather than the on-the-fly and off-the top-of-the-head self-serving and extensively reviewed accounts written by the other authors. Feith's version of events is drawn from memos, briefings and his personal contemporaneous notes which, to the extent that they've been declassified, you...

Michael has posted the first chapter of his book online in PDF. You can download a copy at the link.

We hear much from Michelle Obama about how unfair life can be for her and by extension all black people. Speaking of unfairness, Robert Stacy McCain has a complaint of his own. How on earth did Barack Obama merit the kind of treatment he got from the publishing world when he was still a law student? Writers of the world, UNITE! We are being oppressed, and it's people like Obama, his agent and his publishers who are oppressing us. A 28-year-old law student gets written up in the newspapers, then gets a call from a literary agent? She calls him?...

That’s because it’s a country striving for normality, whose normal aspects rarely make their way into media reports that highlight violence, mayhem, and failure. On TV, Iraq looks like a nation of masked, gun-toting fanatics, but in person, one finds friendliness, solidarity, and reasonableness amid the chaos. “Just because Iraqis have ‘Allahu Akbar’ on their flag,” Yon writes, “doesn’t mean they’re going to blow up the World Trade Center any more than ‘In God We Trust’ means we’re going to attack Communist China.” “Iraq does not hate America,” he insists. “If they hated us, I’d be urging an immediate troop...

When Heidi Holland welcomed Robert Mugabe to her home over 30 years ago, she “had never had a black man to dinner before.” Such was not an uncommon state of affairs among whites living in what was then Rhodesia, a rebel British colony—the “Jewel of Africa”—that had declared independence from the British Commonwealth rather than accept majority rule. Meeting with Mugabe, an exiled guerrilla leader fighting the minority white regime, could have meant a long jail sentence for Holland if the authorities had learned of it. Indeed, Holland, who today runs a Johannesburg guesthouse popular among journalists visiting the region...

There are children's books that explain our digestive system, and others that explore grief and jealousy. These important works help kids to understand complex truths and difficult emotions, and also pooping. But there has always been a gulf in this field of literature, a topic unexplored. No longer. Now, at long last, we finally have a book written for the confused children of mommies who abruptly come home one day with huge fake boobs. My Beautiful Mommy, written by a Florida plastic surgeon who fancies himself a leading expert in breast implants (closest known rival: Charlie Sheen), chronicles the inspiring...

Michael Yon is one of those unusual Americans who emerge in wartime to do the jobs that need to be done. The job he is doing is covering combat in Iraq at the gritty, confusing and valiant level of close combat, and doing so with honesty, passion and professional expertise. His new book, "Moment of Truth in Iraq," testifies to that. Yon isn't World War II's Ernie Pyle, he's the Global War on Terror's Michael Yon. This is a different war with a very different media environment. Yon "self-embedded" with U.S. combat units in 2005 -- paying his own way...

Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise tells the story of what happened to Western classical music in the twentieth century. We all know that the invention of recorded sound around 1900 made possible an extraordinary dissemination of the riches of the classical repertoire – largely composed for the rich and powerful – to the mass of ordinary people. On the gramophone, the radio, television and, subliminally and hence more powerfully, through the movies, the classical sound in all its variants (even the supposedly rebarbative confections of the Second Viennese School) has insinuated itself into the culture at large. Never before...

It was not one of the celebrated moments of what the Israelis call the War of Independence and the Palestinians call Al Nakba, the Catastrophe. But it is one of the more arresting ones. In late August 1948, during a United Nations-sanctioned truce, Israeli soldiers conducting what they called Mivtza Nikayon — Operation Cleaning — encountered some Palestinian refugees just north of the Egyptian lines. The Palestinians had returned to their village, now in Israeli hands, because their animals were there, and because there were crops to harvest and because they were hungry. But to the Israelis, they were potential...

Book about Eliot Spitzer to be published by PenguinThe Associated Press Posted on Fri, May. 02, 2008 In this March 31, 2007 file photo, former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer is shown at the Capitol in Albany, N.Y., A book about the rise and stunning decline of Eliot Spitzer, co-authored by the makers of a book and film about the fall of Enron, is being published by Penguin Group (USA), Penguin imprint Portfolio announced Wednesday, April 30, 2008. AP Photo NEW YORK --A book about the rise and stunning decline of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, co-authored by the...

With the fall of communism and the rise of globalisation in the 1990s, the West believed democracy had won. How wrong it was, says the neocon and foreign policy adviser to John McCain. He warns the forces of freedom are losing ground as the autocracies of Russia and China reassert themselves as world powers In recent years, as the great autocracies of Russia and China have risen and the radical Islamists have waged their struggle, the liberal world has been divided and distracted by issues both profound and petty. The great democracies have squabbled and jostled for the moral high...

However high-minded their courses may sound – "Mirror of Princes," say, or "The Political Philosophy of Aristotle" – college students today enter a low hook-up culture when they leave the classroom. In case you don't know, a hook-up is a brief sexual encounter between two partners who don't necessarily know each other before and who don't necessarily want to know each other after. And it's free. The sort of transient sex that once was available to men only for money can now be had, without paying, from college women – as long as the man is a fellow student and...

Melanie McGrath reviews The Sexual Paradox: Troubled Boys, Gifted Girls and the Real Difference Between the Sexes by Susan Pinker Why is it that some boys who fail at school or university - Albert Einstein and Bill Gates come to mind - go on to forge spectacular careers while many talented girls never reach the top of the career ladder? Here, in a nutshell, is the paradox explored in the developmental psychologist Susan Pinker's new book. It is time, says Pinker, to stop thinking of men as the 'default' setting and women as variants of the norm, when advances in...

Pope's cat writes purrfect book BY STEPHANIE GASKELL DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER Sunday, April 20th 2008, 4:00 AM There's one very unusual biography of Pope Benedict - a children's book, supposedly written by his cat."Joseph and Chico: The Life of Pope Benedict XVI as Told by a Cat" is a 36-page illustrated book that chronicles the life of Benedict through the words of his cat, Chico. "I'm meeting you in the pages of this book to tell you a story about my very best friend, a wonderful man with whom I've shared so many happy times," Chico says. "I...

Noah Feldman is one of the leading public intellectuals in America today. A Harvard Law School professor, Feldman is the author of a trio of stimulating books on democracy and religion: "Divided by God: America's Church-State Problem – And What We Should Do About It"; "What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building"; and "After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy." Feldman's new book, The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, is a thoughtful meditation on the history, ideals, and revival of sharia – the divine law governing Muslim society. "This movement toward the...

Book Review: Aspire Higher: Winning on and off the Court with Determination, Discipline, and Decisions. Written by Avery Johnson with Roy S. Johnson. Published by HarperCollins, 2008. On page four of his book, Avery Johnson tells the story of a young player that he recently had in training camp that was very good at numbers, but not so good at basketball. Avery's assessment was that the guy “needed to be on Wall Street, not in the NBA.” He summed up his assessment of the potential player by saying that “Basketball wasn't his gift – numbers were.” Unfortunately, a similar assessment...

Douglas Feith has been much maligned by Iraq war opponents. In advance of his book release last Tuesday, 60 Minutes ran an interview with Feith, one of the architects of the Iraq War, last Sunday. I was at a weekend festival and missed it; but thanks to the wonders of the internet as well as CBS 60 Minutes now making their video archives embeddable, here is the interview: **Video on site** This is the only time that I can recall 60 Minutes conducting a book-release interview that was not by an anti-Administration author or by someone who appears to be...

Governor Deval Patrick isn't merely penning his memoirs. The book proposal he submitted to publishers reads like the roadmap for a self-help manual, one in which he will celebrate optimism, rail against cynicism, and seek to inspire a nation with his own life story. The 65-page pitch letter that led to his $1.35 million advance last week from a Random House imprint reveals, in its overflowing optimism and aggressive marketing plan, just how high the freshman governor is aiming when the book is published in 2010. It details a strategy to sell at least 150,000 copies through a "vigorous media...

The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi By Aram Roston Nation Books $27.50, 369 pages What do the arch hawks of the Bush administration, such as Paul Wolfowitz, have in common with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard? Answer: they both fêted Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi banker who put “regime change” in Baghdad at the top of the US policy agenda. In this biography, American investigative reporter Aram Roston says Chalabi and his organisations took millions from the US government, even as he continued to talk to Iranian intelligence services. While it uncovers...

Top psychiatrist concludes liberals clinically nuts Eminent psychiatrist makes case ideology is mental disorder February 15, 2008 WASHINGTON – Just when liberals thought it was safe to start identifying themselves as such, an acclaimed, veteran psychiatrist is making the case that the ideology motivating them is actually a mental disorder. "Based on strikingly irrational beliefs and emotions, modern liberals relentlessly undermine the most important principles on which our freedoms were founded," says Dr. Lyle Rossiter, author of the new book, "The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness." "Like spoiled, angry children, they rebel against the normal responsibilities of...

"Superclass — The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 379 pages, $26), by David Rothkopf: It's not just trade and finance that's being globalized these days, it's sheer power — the power of about 6,000 distinguished people to get big things done across national frontiers, says author David Rothkopf. Trouble is, he complains, this "Superclass" isn't helping 2 billion powerless people who get along on $2 a day or less. He warns that unless those 2 billion get a voice, globalization will be in danger. The 6,000 are a scattered lot. Americans know...

Even a book as bad as "Human Smoke" (Simon and Schuster, 576 pages, $30), Nicholson Baker's perverse tract about the origins of World War II, helps to confirm the continuing centrality of that war in our moral lives. Myths call forth debunkers, and the myth of "the good war" — that complacent phrase that camouflages the most deadly conflict in human history — has provoked Mr. Baker to remind us of some of the ways in which World War II was not good. There is nothing to object to in this: On the contrary, no one is more alert than...

As dawn broke on March 22, 2004, an Israeli helicopter gunship hovered over the al-Mujama al-Islami mosque in Gaza City. Suddenly, the whoosh of missile rockets was heard, and then explosions. Shouts and screams filled the streets, followed by news bites from all over the world: Hamas's spiritual and political leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, had been killed as he was leaving the mosque to return to his nearby home. About three weeks later, on April 17, Gaza's­ newly chosen Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, was also assassinated from the air. Rantisi had taken extra precautions to protect himself--surrounding himself with...

To speak very generally, there are two kinds of left apostate: there are those who break with the left in order to move elsewhere (usually to the right, though not always) and there are those who repudiate certain beliefs or modes of thinking within the left in order to strengthen other competing traditions within the left, which they see as more authentic and valuable. Among the former, one can instance Norman Podhoretz, David Horowitz, Paul Johnson and, more recently, Christopher Hitchens. Among the latter, Rosa Luxemburg, Victor Serge, Arthur Koestler, C.L.R. James, and George Orwell are prominent. Since the terror...

We live in an age of cultural disorder, where to point a finger at the absurdities of radical Islam is to be branded a racist, a fascist or a bigot. This timely and important book would probably not have been published 10 years ago, but its relevance is bracing. Michael Burleigh's theme: the moral squalor, intellectual poverty and psychotic nature of terrorist organisations, from the Fenians of the mid-19th century to today's jihadists - the latter group, especially, being composed of unstable males of conspicuously limited abilities and imagination, and yet who pose "an existential threat to the whole of...