Free Republic

Peter Matthiessen, a roving author and naturalist whose impassioned nonfiction explored the remote endangered wilds of the world and whose prize-winning fiction often placed his mysterious protagonists in the heart of them, died on Saturday at his home in Sagaponack, N.Y. He was 86... Mr. Matthiessen was one of the last survivors of a generation of American writers who came of age after World War II and who all seemed to know one another, socializing in New York and on Long Island’s East End as a kind of movable literary salon peopled by the likes of William Styron, James Jones,...

For the past 200 years in both North America and Europe, the Judeo-Christian worldview has been specifically targeted by modern environmental thinkers for being anti-natural. Much of this green opposition originally came forth from the dark and chilly northern forests of Germany and New England ...

The original Lord of the Rings trilogy delivered an epic series that took the world by storm creating legions of fans and movie history. With their success and the love fans have for them it comes as no surprise that Peter Jackson decided to travel back to Middle-Earth to take on the prequel book The Hobbit. Instead of making one film, he has opted to spread it out into an all-new trilogy featuring a more expanded edition of the original book. The latest installment The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug continues the new trilogy with word that it may be...

The morning I met Elaine Rich, she was sitting at the kitchen table of her small town home in suburban Maryland trying to estimate refugee flows in Syria.It wasn't the only question she was considering; there were others:Will North Korea launch a new multistage missile before May 10, 2014?Will Russian armed forces enter Kharkiv, Ukraine, by May 10? Rich's answers to these questions would eventually be evaluated by the intelligence community, but she didn't feel much pressure because this wasn't her full-time gig."I'm just a pharmacist," she said. "Nobody cares about me, nobody knows my name, I don't have a...

This month marks the fifth anniversary of the current bull market on Wall Street, making it one of the longest and strongest in history. Yet U.S. stock ownership is at a record low and less than half of Americans trust banks and financial services. And in the last two weeks, the New York attorney general and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission in Washington have both launched investigations into high-frequency computerized stock trading that now controls more than half the market. The probes were announced just ahead of a much anticipated book on the subject by best-selling author Michael Lewis called...

I have been a Freeper for 12 years and a teacher for 10. I work in Los Angeles, in a public school, and I teach English. I want to say something about Common Core, although my observations will be strictly limited to my particular domain: English. I cannot comment on the Math portion. I will begin bluntly: I do not understand the conservative outcry about Common Core. Perhaps it’s only because I teach in California, but to me it is an improvement, at least in some ways. If you aren’t a teacher (and most conservatives aren’t, which is a pity)...

When Bill and Melinda Gates go to Africa and see healthy people and sick people, they presumably have a single thought: what can we do to make everyone healthy? The problems are easily understood; goals can be clearly stated. Given a big commitment, there’s a high chance of success. ~snip~ What fascinates Bill Gates is something else entirely: namely, the variety and incoherence from school to school, city to city, and state to state. It looks so messy and inefficient. And he thinks: a guy with my money and management skills should be able to organize all this disorder, turn...

British writer Robert Miller's expose´of religion's founder L. Rob Hubbard finds US publisherA British book the Church of Scientology managed to block in America is finally on sale in the US 27 years after it was published elsewhere in the world. The book, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard, written by Russell Miller, a British journalist, and originally published in 1987, appeared in print and tablet editions in the US earlier this month. The book exposes many of the boasts of Mr Hubbard, the late founder of Scientology, about his early life and achievements as outright lies....

According to the Tolkien Society and confirmed by Amazon UK a 60th Anniversary hard copy edition box set of "The Lord of the Rings" to be published in the United Kingdom (probably in the US soon afterward) on June 18th, 2014. It is not cheap. Right now it is listed at £80 ($133). This year, new editions of other Tolkien novels will be released including a new illustrated copy of The Hobbit for children and adults of all ages and new edition of The Simarillion and Unfinished Tales.

A young pretender raises an army to take the throne. Having recently learnt of his father’s beheading, the adolescent — dashing and charismatic and descended from the old kings of the north — vows to avenge him. Despite his youth, he has already won in the field and commands the loyalty of many of the leading families of the realm; he is supported in this war by his mother, who has spirited away her two younger boys to safety. Pitted against them is the Queen, proud and strong-willed, and more of a man than anyone around her, battling for the...

... First, the sheer adventure. Gant is a mountain man, circa 1840. He is Jeremiah Johnson, living in the wrong century. Despite his heavy drinking, volcanic mood swings and numerous wounds, he survived more than 40 months of combat. In 2003 and again in 2011, he and a dozen Special Forces soldiers lived in a mountain village in eastern Afghanistan, adjacent to the Pakistan border. When I visited that village, both the elders and the soldiers from the 1st Battalion of the 32nd Infantry told tales about Gant’s exploits. He captured one insurgent after a two-day chase. Another time, he...

Anyone who grew up playing the beloved editions of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons will remember the detailed medieval fantasy artwork that made the role-playing games creatures and characters come to life. Artist David A. Trampier was the man who drew those illustrations. An Illinois newspaper is reporting that he passed away this week at the age of 59. Trampier's renderings of wizards, giant spiders and lizardmen helped electrify the rules, storytelling and play experience of Dungeons & Dragons. But his whereabouts were a mystery for years because the artist faded into obscurity after D&D lodged itself into the consciousness of...

"It is the greatest deception in history and the extent of the damage has yet to be exposed and measured," says Dr. Tim Ball in his new book, "The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science."

W. C. Harris is a radical gay activist and Professor of Queer Studies and Early American Literature. He says that homosexuals are still cruelly oppressed in America, even though some of them may end up with very comfortable jobs as university professors.... He is particularly angry with the Christian right for oppressing him.... So he would like to abolish Christianity altogether....and replace it with that he wittily calls “Gaytheism,” i.e., homosexual atheism. Unlike beastly old Christianity, this new religion will meet our spiritual needs with “new forms of community that do not harass and malign gay and lesbian Americans or...

Now this is precious. $6.2 billion and counting. That's how much films based on J. R. R. Tolkien's books have made in all at the box office so far. And there's still one part of The Hobbit trilogy to come. The Lord Of The Rings (LOTR) and The Hobbit are also on the list of Top 10 best selling books of all time - LOTR at No. 2 with 150 million copies sold. The Hobbit is No. 6 with 100 million copies sold.

March 25 is officially Tolkien Reading Day. Yes you heard us! In 2002 a New York journalist inquired with the Tolkien Society if there was such a thing and low and behold they set it up. So why March 25? Well it's Tolkien’s birthday Jan 3 and Bilbo & Frodo’s birthday on Sept 22nd but March 25 is the perfect day as it's the date of the downfall of Sauron! To honor the Tolkien Reading Day we thought it apt to look at the fact that his world of Middle Earth is based on the Burren, in County Clare.

The attempt to create a colony in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 got off to a catastrophic start. After just the first year, only 38 of the original 108 colonists remained alive. And death rates over the first two decades continued to be staggeringly high. Despite this disastrous beginning, the United States is now a nation of more than 300 million people with a GDP of more than $16 trillion. How this happened is one of the most remarkable stories in human history.Below, I've selected 10 books that help us better understand this unlikely transformation. Each of them is highly readable...

Susan Patton, aka “The Princeton Mom” has finally released her book, Marry Smart, based on the controversial letter she published last year in The Daily Princetonian, which advised young women to focus on finding a husband while in college. Liberal feminists hate the book. I mean, they just hate it. Which makes me want to read it, actually. Anyway, Patton generates so much wrath because she points out one of the big lies behind modern feminism. The lie is this: that to be successful and happy you need to focus on your career and not marriage or children throughout your...

Almost 90 years after JRR Tolkien translated the 11th-century poem Beowulf, The Lord of the Rings author's version of the epic story is to be published for the first time in an edition which his son Christopher Tolkien says sees his father "enter[ing] into the imagined past" of the heroes. Telling of how the Geatish prince Beowulf comes to the aid of Danish king Hroðgar, slaying the monster Grendel and his mother before - spoiler alert - being mortally wounded by a dragon years later, Beowulf is is the longest epic poem in Old English, and is dated to the...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0Ib9SwC7EI