Free Republic

President George W. Bush took Queen Elizabeth to her first ever baseball game in 1991 - and the excursion only lasted two innings. A new book, penned by the late Bush's longtime chief of staff Jean Becker, sheds light on the exact moment the then-president realized the Queen wasn't enthralled by the game. But her reaction was full of grace. In Becker's book, Character Matters: And Other Life Lessons from George H. W. Bush, she features a number of political heavy hitters including President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Vice President Dan Quayle, as well as...

HOUSTON — Few people outside of the family knew President George H.W. Bush as well as Jean Becker, his longtime chief of staff. She is sharing stories from her new book, "Character Matters," calling it a roadmap to civility in our polarizing political climate. Becker is a journalist who became deputy press secretary for Barbara Bush in the White House, then was asked by the president to become his chief of staff once he left office ."I told him I didn't know how to be a chief of staff," Becker said. "I didn't know how to be a boss, do...

Sometimes you can feel like you can get more out of reading a single book then you have an entire semester of college. Some of these books might be surprisingly simple to read. Which three books made you feel much more educated and enriched after reading them?

Hugh Gallagher explored what he called FDR’s Splendid Deception in his 1985 book of that title. In the title Gallagher was referring to FDR’s concealment of the polio-related paralysis that struck him in 1921. Gallagher was also a polio victim who understood the pain underlying Roosevelt’s efforts. Researching the book, Gallagher found that among the 35,000 photographs of Roosevelt at his presidential library, only two featured him in his wheelchair. Media of the day cooperated by ignoring his polio. Roosevelt himself went to extraordinary lengths to convey the impression that he could walk. “[T]he overwhelming fact about [FDR] is that...

The Life of Frederick William Von Steuben: Major General in the Revolutionary Army - tells the story of Baron Steuben, who had been an officer in the Prussian army. Considered one of the fathers of the United States Army, he had a leading role in improving the Continental Army during the American Revolution and turning them into a professional fighting force. https://librivox.org/the-life-of-frederick-william-von-steuben-by-friedrich-kapp/

For any American curious about the full extent to which cultural Marxism and left-wing political dogma have infected the intelligence community, J. Michael Waller’s new book, Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went from Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains, is a good place to start. Big Intel is part spy thriller, part historical account, and part political clarion call, all wrapped up in a horrifying true story. No one could be a more perfect fit to tell this story than Waller, who has devoted his life to studying foreign propaganda, political warfare, psychological warfare, and subversion. He...

That mean old clock on the wall doesn't tend to be particularly kind to leaders and entrepreneurs, so big surprise, companies that offer cliffs notes, abridged or otherwise easy-to-digest versions of books are soaring in popularity. These certainly aren't all bad, since they can help you quickly understand what the main point of a text is or let you jog your memory about it. They have their place. But if you're going to read a book, please just read the real, whole book already, at least most of the time. There are valuable reasons not to skip even one...

On Friday night at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the conservative educational foundation ISI awarded Christopher Rufo with their 2024 Conservative Book of the Year Award for his America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Rufo’s book is certainly deserving of the honor because it gives the reader a cogent history of the main players and mechanisms by which America’s left conquered almost all our institutions. More importantly, in its closing chapters, it outlines the weaknesses of the “Revolution of 1968” and outlines some ways by which those who favor the “Revolution of 1776” can fight...

The American edition, published in 1956, 468 pages, Translated by A.P. Maudsley The Diaz account is the best history book that I have read. It has all the advantage of a first person account and reads like a well written adventure novel. The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico by Bernal Diaz del Castillo is the only extant first person account of the campaign under the command of Hernando Cortez from 1519 to 1520. The campaign resulted in the discovery and conquest of the Aztec civilization in Mexico. Cortez himself wrote five long letters to Carlos V in Spain. Parts...

New light is being brought to a 46-year-old cold case commonly referred to as the “Yuba County Five.” Inspired by a series of true crime podcasts, author Tony Wright has dedicated the last four years to research, interviews, and documentation, compiling his findings into his new book “Things Aren’t Right: The Disappearance of the Yuba County Five.” “I came across the Yuba County case for the first time around 2018,” said Wright. “The story was just coming back into the news for whatever reason because of true crime and other unsolved mystery podcasting. It just seemed to catch fire and...

Back in January, I posted a thread about Reading Any Good Books and it got over 200 responses. It's been two months. What have you been reading?

I first encountered Shirley Jackson through a single short story, “The Daemon Lover”, which I read when I was 12 without knowing any of her other work. Later, I rediscovered the story, along with the rest of Jackson’s writing, and became a fervent admirer of this brilliant and (at that time) much underrated American author. In some ways, “The Daemon Lover”, from a 1949 collection is a typical Jackson story. An unnamed woman of 34 (though only 30 on her marriage certificate) wakes up on the day of her wedding to a man called James Harris. Impatiently the woman waits...

Literary fiction, the two most depressing words in the English language, leaves very little space for horror. It’s a claustrophobic, dusty attic in a mansion peopled by “serious” writers. Sure, the holy trinity of Poe, Stoker and Lovecraft is held in high regard, but with the passage of time horror writing stopped being taken seriously. By horror I don’t mean just ghosts and witches, but all that frightens us–loss, deprivation, loneliness, mental instability, self-loathing and personal dissatisfaction. That’s where the writing of Shirley Jackson makes a powerful case for the kind of horror that doesn’t depend on jump scares. Her...

Miss Harper was going home, although the night was wet and nasty. Miss Harper disliked traveling at any time, and she particularly disliked traveling on this dirty small bus, which was her only way of getting home; she had frequently complained to the bus company about their service, because it seemed that no matter where she wanted to go, they had no respectable bus to carry her. Getting away from home was bad enough, Miss Harper was fond of pointing out to the bus company, but getting home seemed very close to impossible. Tonight Miss Harper had no choice: If...

“Centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of value,” Winston Smith discovers in George Orwell’s 1984. “One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Streets, inscriptions memorial stones, the names of streets – anything that might throw light on the past had been systematically altered.” In other words, “history has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” For all but the willfully blind, the parallels are apparent on every hand. For the Biden Junta, America is nothing more than a bastion of racist...

Conservatives have failed to see that arguments do not matter. My whole career in the classroom has been guided by one principle. Namely, that it is my job is to introduce young people to the goodness, the beauty, and the wisdom of excellent works of literature, art, and human thought, without regard to any political use to which knowledge of these works might be put. I detest when literature is wrenched away from its essence, which is to delight us in its teaching us about ourselves and the world, and is commandeered for one or another kind of gain. It...

Acclaimed historian and Ronald Reagan biographer Craig Shirley still hasn't found what he's looking for. Citizens across the United States keep looking, too — for a new leader to draw the curtains on a new "Morning in America." They're getting closer to unraveling the mystery behind the Reagan mystique. "The Search for Reagan: The Appealing Intellectual Conservatism of Ronald Reagan," with a Feb. 13 publication, is Shirley's newest biography of the 40th president of the United States of America.

"Paranoia" is a short story by Shirley Jackson first published on August 5, 2013 in The New Yorker, long after the author's death in 1965. Jackson's children found the story in her papers in the Library of Congress. According to Jackson's son, the story was most likely written in the early 1940s, during World War II. So there would have been a constant sense of danger and distrust in the air, both in relation to foreign countries and in relation to the U.S. government's attempts to uncover espionage at home."Paranoia" (audio) - A slowly building short story of horror by...

A long time ago, there was a Free Republic Book Club ... mostly because I opened my mouth and a bunch of people told me to organize one. I haven't pinged it in a long time. (Actually, another book club started, so I stopped.) Any way, has anyone read any good books lately. Fiction, non-fiction, genre, mainstream. Anything you want to share? Has anyone WRITTEN any good books that the rest of us should check out?

WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) — The author of “Little Women” may have been even more productive and sensational than previously thought. Max Chapnick, a postdoctoral teaching associate at Northeastern University, believes he found about 20 stories and poems written by Louisa May Alcott under her own name as well as pseudonyms for local newspapers in Massachusetts in the late 1850s and early 1860s. One of the pseudonyms is believed to be E. H. Gould, including a story about her house in Concord, Massachusetts, and a ghost story along the lines of the Charles Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol.” He also found...