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Here’s a riveting interview with Richard Nash, formerly of Soft Skull Press, by Matt Runkle in the Boston Review. While I don’t sign off on everything Nash says about the future of publishing, he’s clearly onto something in the remarks below. I believe there’s some tradeoff between physical sales and giving material away on the [...]
Filed under: Books
That is, Whigs In Name Only: “My notion of a Whig, I mean of a real Whig (for the Nominal are worse than any Sort of Men) is That he is one who is exactly for keeping up to the Strictness of the true old Gothick Constitution.” – Sir Robert Molesworth, Preface to Francois Hotman, [...]
David Franke calls my attention to John Steele Gordon’s essay on the death of the book. Gordon is a sentimentalist; books will endure because “At their best, they are works of art and there is a tactile pleasure in books necessarily lost in e-book versions. The ability to quickly flip through pages is also lost. [...]
My note on @TAC about Reagan’s centenary already links to my review of William F. Buckley Jr.’s The Reagan I Knew. Here I’ll also tout my review of John Patrick Diggins’s Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, a piece that ran in Reason a few years back. Here’s a preview: There’s a [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Politics, World
Erik Kain, editor of the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, interviews me here. The discussion has been getting some good pick-up, including a link from Andrew Sullivan (who also links to Paul Gottfried‘s recent takedown of Rich Lowry). You can catch an earlier interview of mine with the Daily Bell here. There’s also this radio interview [...]
I’ve lately been reading Pierre Manent’s Intellectual History of Liberalism, a brief but dazzling book that I highly recommend — it’s the clearest and most persuasive account of the “Straussian” interpretation of liberalism that I’ve come across, with Manent’s Thomistic Catholicism compensating for the more dubious elements of Strauss. A 125-page book that covers Machiavelli, [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Philosophy
About two years ago I was asked to contribute to a volume of essays on seminal 20th-century American conservative thinkers. My assignment was Willmoore Kendall, the “wild Yale don” (as Dwight Macdonald called him) known, among other things, for his defiantly populist commitment to majority rule. When Bill Buckley quipped that he’d rather be ruled [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism, Liberty, Philosophy
The Guardian has a very interesting piece by Francis Spufford (from his book Red Plenty) on the now-unimaginable time when the Soviet Union seemed poised to overtake the prosperity of the West. Here’s a bite: Give your imagination permission to engage with some unlikely facts: in the 1950s, the USSR was one of the growth [...]
I’d heard about American Philanthropic‘s publishing arm, AmP Publishers Group, a while back. But just this past week I received their Fall/Winter catalog, and it’s superb. AmP isn’t a publisher itself so much as a distributor for several other small conservative presses, including the publishing divisions of the National Humanities Institute and Christendom Press. (Nor [...]
Filed under: Books, Conservatism
Tom Woods knows kind of reaction his new book, Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century, will elicit from the usual suspects. Rather than await the inevitable, he’s gone ahead and scheduled his own interview with an establishment zombie. (Who bears a passing resemblance to Robert P. Murphy…) See Jeff Taylor’s recent [...]
Filed under: Books