John R. Coyne, Jr.
Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right By Thomas Frank(Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Co., 225 pages, $25) Thomas Frank, who for a time filled the Al Hunt token-liberal slot at the Wall Street Journal,…
Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit By Joseph Epstein (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 242 pages, $25) First impressions: A small book, hard cover but quality paperback size, with bibliographic apparatus stretching it out to just beyond 200 pages, packaged in a pink dust…
Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh MohammedBy William Shawcross(PublicAffairs, 256 pages, $26.99) STRANGE, how little real discussion there has been of foreign policy in the current presidential campaign. Four years ago, with George W….
A Matter of PrincipleBy Conrad Black(McClelland & Stewart, 581 pages, $35) A big book by a big man, in many ways a man from another age–think of a character in Trollope’s parliamentary series or a John Buchan novel, a man…
On China, by Henry Kissinger (Penguin Press, 586 pages, $36) Henry Kissinger, Bill Buckley once observed, taught a course at Harvard in the 1950s “taken only by students who intended to become prime minister or emperor.” But such students being…
The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American CultureBy David Mamet(Sentinel, 241 pages, $27.95) “The struggle of the Left to rationalize its positions is an intolerable, Sisyphean burden. I speak as reformed Liberal.” The initial impulse was to give this…
Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College By Andrew Ferguson (Simon & Schuster/228 pp/$25) In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic By Professor X (Viking, 258 pages, $25.95) Andrew Ferguson,…
Farnsworth’s Classical English RhetoricBy Ward Farnsworth(David R. Godine, 254 pages, $26.95) “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” That’s Humphrey Bogart (Rick) in Casablanca, reacting to Ingrid Bergman’s (Ilsa) appearance…
Humorists: From Hogarth to Noël CowardBy Paul Johnson(Harper, 228 pages, $25.99) In this eclectic collection of highly readable essays held loosely together by a couple of common thematic threads, Paul Johnson, one of the foremost historians and men of letters…
Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788By Pauline Maier (Simon & Schuster, 589 pages, $30) This solid and splendidly organized and written block of a book, carved largely from the wealth of material collected in The Documentary History of the…
