Category — Book Review

The Age of Wonder is an aptly named chronicle of enlightenment era scientific discovery, when natural philosophers, rather than scientists, dominated the study of nature.

In his new book, Mr. President How and Why the Founders Created a Chief Executive, Ray Raphael investigates the roots and evolution of the Executive Branch. For anyone wishing to understand how the presidency came to be what it is, this is the book to read.

Ameritopia has been at the top of the NY Times Best Seller List for about 6 weeks. It’s not accidental. It is a fine, non-polemical history, written with care, by a fine mind.

Andrew Klavan writes in an engaging and interesting style that keeps the reader wanting to finish the story. Hunting Down Amanda is another Klavan book that makes for pretty good airplane reading. It is just about the perfect length for the 5 hour flight from JFK to PHX.

True Crime is a fiction noir, in which the main character is a smart, but none too savory newspaper reporter with a proclivity for cheating on his wife and skeptical mind. True Crime is written in a very believable and straight at you kind of style. The preface at the beginning leaves the reader thinking that the story might actually be true and really sets the stage for suspending disbelief.

The Tehran Initiative is Christian fiction just shy of the mode in the popular (but terribly written) Left Behind series. Rosenberg makes no apologies for his religious perspective, but largely avoids hitting his reader over the head with it. Nonetheless, some readers will no doubt be turned off by the religious implications and views espoused in the book. For all that, it is incredibly timely, and really does seem to have been ripped directly from today’s headlines.

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.