If I were to title this review article, it would be: Churchill, Buchannan, and a Pleading for a Purge, for this review is surely not about Hitler, and not about World War II. Unlike the author of the book I am reviewing, I feel no temptation to wonder if perhaps Hitler was trustworthy or not. I do not believe England was unwise and stubborn to resist Hitler's offer to leave them alone if they would just let him take over Europe. There is no attraction to the novel idiocy of wondering if World War II needed to be fought or not. Additionally, I have long passed the historical ignorance that says only England's commitment to defending Poland caused the great war. Hitler need not be mentioned in this review, because the facts about Hitler are incontestable. He was maniacal. He was as immoral as any man the planet earth as ever seen. And those who opposed him saved the world. If I were to write a book about that era, I would be writing one that condemned Hitler, and...

 

Of all the issues that hold ideological significance in my life, none reach the level of gravity that the subject of faith and capitalism do.  I am convinced that there are more souls to be won by demonstrating the compatibility of free market economics with the Judeo-Christian worldview than any other mechanism on the planet.  Likewise, I am convinced that there are more societies and nations that can be won over to prosperity and freedom, if but only for the faith community's stubborn inability to embrace such.  Dr. John Schneider's remarkable work, The Good of Affluence: Seeking God in a Culture of Wealth, is a huge first step in seeing this dream become reality. 

 

I do not know what impact the book will end up having, as I do not believe it has...

 

The 21st century has begun, and few could argue that it has launched with a bang, not a whimper. Less than one decade into the third millennium, and nearly all of the events, values, and patterns that dictated the direction of history over the last three centuries are being called into question. Francis Fukuyama has posited that we are living in the "end of history." Historians wonder if the age of Anglo-Saxon preeminence has come to and end. Economists and clergy alike interact with the relationship between faith and prosperity. Sociologists examine the impact globalization is having on social ills like poverty and disease. Western Europe is frequently described as a "post-Christian" culture, with America said to be not far behind. The role of faith in the institutions of society (the academy, the workplace, politics, the arts) is scrutinized routinely, and aggressively. The impact the American experiment has had on the human condition is debated passionately, with varying conclusions offered from all sides of the economic, religious, and political spectrums. The era of the "American...

Heather Mac Donald describes how an epidemic of crime, gangs, and illegitimacy is creating a new Hispanic underclass, and how the Mexican government aids and abets illegal immigration to the United States and thwarts state and local attempts to resist it. Steven Malanga shows how, despite much argument to the contrary, Hispanic immigrants produce a net cost to the American economy, not a net benefit, and he goes on to outline the kind of immigration policy that would be both liberal and in America's interest. Victor Davis Hanson writes about his own experience growing up in California's farm country and watching the Hispanic immigrant influx transform his state for the worse. The Immigration Solution proposes the same kind of policy in place in other advanced nations, one that admits skilled and educated people on the basis of what they can do for the country, not what the country can do for them.


EDITORIAL REVIEWS

From the Publisher
Heather Mac Donald describes how an epidemic of crime, gangs, and illegitimacy is creating a new Hispanic underclass, and how the Mexican government aids and abets illegal immigration to the United States and thwarts state and local...

Based on exclusive interviews with the Supreme Court Justices themselves and other insiders, The Nine is a timely and provocative "state of the union" about America's most elite legal institution. From Anthony Kennedy's self-importance, to Antonin Scalia's combativeness, to David Souter's eccentricity, and even Sandra Day O'Connor's fateful breach with President George W. Bush, this book offers a rare, personal look at how the individual style of each justice affects the way in which they wield their considerable power.

With the whip-smart analysis for which he is known, Toobin shows how-since Reagan-conservatives were long-thwarted in their attempts to control the Court by some of the very justices they pressured Presidents to appoint. That struggle ended with the recent appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Court, and Toobin relays the behind-the-scenes drama in fascinating detail, as well as the ensuing 2007 Court term.

As the Court continues to rule on important issues that will frame the debates in the 2008 elections, it is essential for every American to better understand how the Court operates. And as a CNN senior legal analyst, New Yorker staff writer, and bestselling author, no one is more superbly qualified to bring...

Radical Islam has long desired to seize Jerusalem and cut it off to Christian and Jewish believers. In his revealing new book, The Fight for Jerusalem, bestselling author and former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold explains why the battle for Jerusalem is intensifying today. Gold shows why only Israel can preserve its holy places for Christians, Jews, and even Muslims, and why uncovering Jerusalem's past-and the truth of biblical history-can be the key to saving its future.


EDITORIAL REVIEWS

Publishers Weekly
This exhaustively researched book by a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. (Hatred's Kingdom) reads like an informed diatribe recounting the 3,000-year history of Jerusalem, from its origins in Davidic Israel through the Islamic conquests and Crusades, to its central place in Arab-Israeli peace negotiations and global religious consciousness. While meticulously detailing the role of the Holy City in the evolution of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and the modern diplomatic battle for its custody, Gold is far from impartial. He displays an intense repudiation of fundamentalist Islam, and the perceived ineptitude and ingratitude of the West toward Israel, which he considers the only legitimate savior of the city. Warning of...

A sweeping narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, a groundbreaking look at the people and ideas, the terrorist plans and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence Wright's remarkable book is based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews that he conducted in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sudan, England, France, Germany, Spain, and the United States.

The Looming Tower achieves an unprecedented level of intimacy and insight by telling the story through the interweaving lives of four men: the two leaders of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; the FBI's counterterrorism chief, John O'Neill; and the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal. As these lives unfold, we see revealed: the crosscurrents of modern Islam that helped to radicalize Zawahiri and bin Laden . . . the birth of al-Qaeda and its unsteady development into an organization capable of the American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the attack on the USS Cole . . . O'Neill's heroic efforts to track al-Qaeda before 9/11, and his tragic death in the World Trade towers . . . Prince Turki's transformation from bin Laden's ally to his enemy...

In this account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage, Stephen E. Ambrose offers a historical successor to his universally acclaimed Undaunted Courage, which recounted the explorations of the West by Lewis and Clark.

Nothing Like It in the World is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad -- the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks.

The Union had won the Civil War and slavery had been abolished, but Abraham Lincoln, who was an early and constant champion of railroads, would not live to see the great achievement. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat, comes to life.

The U.S. government pitted two companies -- the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads -- against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomo-tives, rails, and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America...

For those unfamiliar with Mark Steyn, he is the Canadian-born, New Hampshire-residing columnist who is likely the most popular editorial writer of any newspaper that syndicates him, yet he is mysteriously absent from CNN panels and Tim Russert forums.  Indeed, as far as polemical skills go, Mark is unmatched even by other brilliant writers in the conservative movement. He lacks the flowery elegance of a George Will, falls short of the intellectual prowess of a Thomas Sowell (who doesn't), and yet surpasses even them in his ability to captivate readers, and render absurd the error du jour of the far left (particularly as it pertains to the topic of this book).

Steyn's latest work, America Alone is the best apologetic I have read for a vigilant war on terror and jihadism, and yet it really does not even purport to be so. The explicit intent of Steyn's work is to demonstrate the utter disaster our European friends have created for themselves, and to lay out the case that only America can save the planet from global Islamo-fascism (a last hope that Steyn is only holding onto by a thin thread). In the course of persuasively proving said assertions...

2006 has been filled with some of the most wonderful book reading of my life, though I confess that a good portion of the 2006 book reading subject matter was determined by mental and ideological arm wrestling contests I have internally participated in for several years. I have been very public for years that my own commitment to a traditional understanding of "just war theory" was wavering, and that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have forced me to evaluate a holistic understanding of foreign policy. I do, of course, mean "Biblical" in saying "holistic", but I fear many professing Christians are dissatisfied (or not convinced) of an important criteria I include in the definition, and that is "something that makes sense in the modern world". If the application of an allegedly Biblical principle of foreign policy contradicts the entire essence of other parts of the Bible, I am not willing to call it Biblical, no matter how many colonial settlers believed it, or how many first millennium church fathers wrote about it. Fortunately, as I have wrestled with complicated and challenging issues pertaining to ethics and foreign policy, I have operated with the comfort that God is not a God...

The study of economics has been essentially abandoned at public high schools in America, and based on what they are teaching in the field at public universities, we can probably be grateful they have delayed the "instruction".  No social science or scholastic discipline is more woefully misunderstood in contemporary academia than economics, and all indicators are that this problem is getting progressively worse, not better.  Out of the library full of books on economics that I have read, and out of the dozens that I could heartily recommend, no book is more profoundly important than Henry Hazlitt's 1946 masterpiece, Economics in One Lesson.
 
What modern readers will immediately detect is that the book must have been written by someone with a crystal ball, if it were really written in 1946.  Indeed, while Hazlitt was busy critiquing the post-war economic nonsense coming from New Deal Democrats in the states and Keynesian elites across the Atlantic, the book reads as if it were written to address the needs of our generation.  How little we learn, and yet how accurate his treatise proved to be!
 
The underlying theme of the book is that all bad economics amounts to some version of...

The November 2006 mid-term elections represented one of the largest political setbacks for either political party in American history, as the Republican party, spoiled by possession of the White House, a majority in the House, a majority in the Senate, and a majority of the governorships, sadly forfeited three of the above possessions. Indeed, were the one element up for grabs that they did hold on to (The White House), there is little doubt that they would have lost that as well.
 
In the aftermath of this political bloodbath comes brilliant strategist and GOP operative, Frank Luntz, key player in the Newt Gingrich administration that led the last congressional reversal-of-power (the 1994 "Contract with America").  His landmark Words that Work argues persuasively that a good portion of the problems in 2006, and the solution into the future, lies with the choice of words the conservative movement uses.  Indeed, Luntz makes the case that it is our positioning of the issues that must be addressed.
 
There is little doubt that he has hit on some major issues in this fine work.  "Undocumented workers" does conjure up an image of people who can not find their paperwork, as opposed to...