Category — Book Review

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an early adherent of Rahm Emanuel’s philosophy regarding crisis and opportunity. With unemployment at almost 20%, Roosevelt used fear and economic uncertainty to breach the Constitution with an alphabet soup of overlapping interventions in the economy.*

FDR Goes to War is a surprisingly short, but detailed account of a president, whose failed policies are still echoing through the present day.

Glenn Beck’s recent book on Washington is not a biography, a political rant, or even a history. Instead it is book designed to show the difference one man of character can make. It is a challenge to all Americans to be people of character.

With Musket and Tomahawk covers the Wilderness War of 1777 and is a great book to read in conjunction with several others reviewed here at WWTFT, particularly the Ethan Allen biography. Logusz provides a lot of interesting detail about the people and events leading up to Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga in October of 1777.

Reading Steyn’s latest book is painful but he leavens the pain with his irreverent humor. Prepare to groan while you giggle at his talent for skewering the ludicrous. The book is extensively footnoted, always on point, and all too frequently validated by events.

For a short course on what President George Bush called “the war on terror” you won’t find a better book. Twenty essays, by well-known experts at various points on the political spectrum, discuss enhanced interrogation, the Patriot Act, security policies, personal liberty, and other legal and policy issues under the Bush and Obama administrations.

Madison was involved in every major event of early American history, before, during and after the Founding. Richard Brookhiser’s serious, if too brief, biography of James Madison, is delightfully written, and replete with insights about the man and his time.

In order to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, we need to understand it. Luckily, there are some great learning tools available to every American. These include an online course at James Madison’s Montpelier Center for the Constitution, the webcast series Introduction to the Constitution from Hillsdale College, and several good books, including The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, Tempest at Dawn, and Decision in Philadelphia.

Nathaniel Philbrick’s book on Custer’s last stand is well-researched and very readable. This would be a great book to read prior to visiting the battlefield and taking the driving tour at the Little Big Horn.

Willard Sterne Randall’s new biography, Ethan Allen: His Life and Times, is fascinating not only for the connections that the author brings forward, the background information on the effect of various religious movements, the insights into the Revolution itself, but most of all for telling the story of a most interesting American icon.

While Britannica’s two book set on Western Ethics and Thinkers provides a great deal more than high school students are likely to learn in college, the authors attempt to do double duty, first to provide surveys of the history of Western ethics and thinkers and second to satisfy prevailing trends in education.