Break It Up; by Richard Kreitner; Little, Brown and Company; 497 pp., $30.00 Stamped on the United States’ three-dollar Continental bill in 1783 was the phrase, “The Outcome Is in Doubt.” A more appropriate phrase for our own time could hardly be found. It also serves as the subtext of journalist Richard Kreitner’s fascinating new book, which chronicles the...
First the crazies tore down statues they deemed offensive. Next they vandalized churches. Then they demanded trigger warnings on classic movies like Gone with the Wind and Blazing Saddles. If these monsters ever discover libraries, books will be next. Let me suggest you hoard copies of William McNeill’s The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963) before...
George Carey arrived at Georgetown University in 1961, the same year that I did. He was a young professor teaching courses on American government when I was a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he taught. My first experience with him as a student was notably unpleasant. Taking his first exam, I went...
The Crusader Strategy: Defending the Holy Land, by Steve Tibble (Yale University Press; 376 pp., $35.00). If one gets his Crusades history from Karen Armstrong or the History Channel, one is likely to think that nasty and brutish Franks went off half-cocked to the Holy Land to rape, pillage, and enslave peaceful Muslims. This is an ignorant...
In this issue we present two views of the “conservative” news media giant Fox News. The essay by Douglas Burton verges on the celebratory and recounts the merits of the Fox News enterprise and the bold vision of Rupert Murdoch, the Australian press baron, who launched this 24-hours-a-day American news service on Oct. 7, 1996. Murdoch...
So many Americans, particularly on the right, have taken Fox News for granted over the past 20 years. It has become a fixture as an alternative to what is known as the mainstream media. In confirmation of the old saying, “You never know what you’ve got til it’s gone,” Fox’s abrupt change during the era of Donald...
Notre-Dame: The Soul of France; by Agnès Poirier; One World Publications; 256 pp., $26.95 Kneeling in public remains rare in France. Even though Muslim crowds in the banlieues (suburbs) have recently taken to praying in the streets, religious display still shocks the country’s secular ethos, which prefers to severely confine religion to the private sphere. So, when a motley lot of...
Dante’s Bones: How a Poet Invented Italy; by Guy P. Raffa; Harvard University Press; 384 pp., $35.00 The bones and dust of the Roman poet Virgil were jealously guarded by the people of Naples. In the Middle Ages they refused the request of an English scholar to allow the poet’s bones and dust to leave their resting place. The...
The American electorate split strongly along class lines in the 2020 election, as revealed by a Bloomberg News data chart that correlated campaign donors with their professions. This data map looks like an inverted triangle made up of circles in varying shades of blue and red. At the top are large circles in deep blue, denoting...
And the woman answered him, saying: Of the fruit of the trees that are in paradise we do eat: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of paradise, God hath commanded us that we should not eat; and that we should not touch it, lest perhaps we die. And the...
