James Srodes, an author and broadcaster, is a former Washington bureau chief for Forbes and Financial Worldmagazines. His latest book, On Dupont Circle: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Progressives Who Shaped Our World, is being published next week. His email address is srodesnews@msn.com.
The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Homes Changed His Mind—and Changed the History of Free Speech in AmericaBy Thomas Healy(Metropolitan Books, 336 pages, $14.99) Those of us who review books for fun and profit rarely go back to read a tome a second time. We give a review our best shot and then move on. […]
The Big Flatline: Oil and the No-Growth EconomyBy Jeff Rubin(Palgrave Macmillan, 272 pages pages, $27) In February 2010, this august journal published some musings of mine titled “The Great Recession of 2011–2012,” with a subhead, “And that’s only the beginning of a new Dark Age.” The article attracted a bit of attention. The ubiquitous tocsin […]
Taming Globalization: International Law, the U.S. Constitution, and the New World Order By John Yoo and Julian Ku (Oxford University Press, 274 Pages, $35) Two memories stand out about my brief foray at Duke University Law School in the early 1960s. One occurred when I was made my class’s representative to plan the dedication of […]
Will the continuing scandal over LIBOR insure Barack Obama’s re-election in November? It’s a distinct possibility. There is considerable irony in the controversy over the benchmark London Interbank Offered Rate, which cost Barclays Bank a $450 million fine for rigging between 2005 and 2008. Not the least of that irony is that regulators on both […]
Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick By Paul Dickson (Walker & Co., 418 pages, $29.50) I confess I don’t much like today’s major league baseball—or MLB, as it is branded—for the same reason I can’t understand why any sane person would go to Las Vegas for any but the most sordid reasons. So I was vastly […]
Banker to the World: Leadership Lessons from the Front Lines of Global FinanceBy William R. Rhodes(McGraw-Hill, 252 pages, $25) AS ANY tort lawyer will tell you, society has a habit of demanding an unrestricted supply of baked goods without any consequences — cake-wise, that is. And so it is with bankers of whom we demand, […]
The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism by Theodore Dalrymple (Encounter Books, 163 pages, $23.95) Among the features we savor most when reading our London cousins, The Spectator, are the acerbic observations of Theodore Dalrymple about his life as a prison and public hospital psychiatrist in the squalor of the East End. […]
Tories: Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War By Thomas B. Allen (Harper, 416 pages, $26.99) First of all, let’s get rid of the myth (blamed on John Adams) that during our War of Independence American opinion was neatly divided into thirds — one third Patriot, one third Loyalist, and one third who […]
As the current political brawl appears headed for resolution certainly the most interesting, and possibly most important, political campaign this season has been waged well under the radar of the establishment mass media and has created not a ripple in official Washington. A lot rides on whether Paul Volcker, the paterfamilias of the American financial […]
In Las Vegas casinos, gamblers at the blackjack tables are allowed to “double down.” After drawing their two cards they are allowed to double the size of their bet if they will take only one more card in their quest to get closer to 21 than the dealer. It is a high-risk bet that should […]
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