In September, Dissident Books is bringing out a new edition of Mencken’s classic Notes on Democracy:
H. L. Mencken, America’s greatest journalist and critic, wrote Notes on Democracy more than eighty years ago. His era—the years of World War I, Prohibition, and the Scopes trial—was strikingly like our own. Notes isn’t just a provocative and funny [...]
LRC links to this worthy review of The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal. Like reviewer Louis Bayard, I too prefer Vidal’s essays to his novels, as good as the latter are (in fact, I’ve been meaning for a few days now to hit Barnes and Noble and pick up a copy of Washington DC). I [...]
The Good Hitchens, Peter, has already weighed in on Pat Buchanan’s new book, Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”, and now the Bad Hitchens, Christopher, takes his turn. There’s much tripe in his review of the book for Newsweek, but this bit of offal is especially nauseous:
he commits important sins of omission that can [...]
Coming from ISI Books in September: Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin. Martin, a Maryland delegate to and “the bitterest states’ rightser at the [Constitutional] Convention,” was a great Anti-Federalist whose detestation of Thomas Jefferson drove him, ironically enough, into the Federalist Party. I’ve just had a glance at the galleys of [...]
Cory Robin has some curious ideas about conservatism — apparently it’s a straight line of exploiters and insiders with persecution complexes from Burke and Maistre to Barry Goldwater — but his Nation review of several recent books about conservatism is worth reading for his exposure of Jacob Heilbrunn’s quote borrowing (some might say “plagiarism”), if [...]
Good guests on the Colbert Report this week.
I’m leaning towards voting for Barr come November. But if Obama picks Virginia Sen. Jim Webb as his running mate, I might have to vote Democratic. Browsing through Webb’s new book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, I see that Webb has a reasonably sound view on the drug war. After [...]
My review of Pure Goldwater, a volume of Barry Goldwater’s journals (and some other odds and ends), is now up on Reason’s website.
I’m reading Bill Buckley’s posthumous Goldwater memoir, Flying High, right now. Here’s one striking anecdote I hadn’t heard before:
… at this dinner [for the 1950s Freeman], Rand contradicted Mises on some doctrinal point, [...]
From Victor Navasky’s NYT review of two books by or about William F. Buckley (thanks to Scott Lahti for an early link to the piece):
It is probably no accident, as the old-left journals used to say, that both Buckley and Carey McWilliams, The Nation’s longtime editor, were fans of Albert Jay Nock, who after briefly [...]
One more review to plug today: my take on Daniel Flynn’s A Conservative History of the American Left, which is now up (and going on the main page tomorrow, I think) at the American Spectator’s website.