Carolina Critic | 2012 Archive

A film that's supposed to be an unblinking exposé of K-12 public schools ducks key questions and refuses to advocate scrapping a failed system.

A film that's supposed to be an unblinking exposé of K-12 public schools ducks key questions and refuses to advocate scrapping a failed system.

David Frisk's detailed biography of William Rusher recounts the unlikely crew of intellectuals and attorneys who brought the modern conservative movement into the mainstream.

Walter Cronkite emerged at just the right time for what the British call "news readers" to become stars.

Former BB&T chairman and CEO John Allison has put together a fascinating new book explaining what he learned about government and financial regulation over 20 years inside the system.

David Frisk's detailed biography of William Rusher recounts the unlikely crew of intellectuals and attorneys who brought the modern conservative movement into the mainstream.

Walter Cronkite emerged at just the right time for what the British call "news readers" to become stars.

From the start of Rational Individualism, Beitler engages readers in an intimate conversation, guiding us through the history of philosophy, politics, and economics from the Greeks through modern day. His instructive prose provides an easily understood explanation of the diverging principles (individualism; libertarianism; capitalism; collectivism; statism; socialism) that form the landscape of politics and economics in the 21st century. Citing many influential thinkers, Beitler juxtaposes the principles of socialism and capitalism, determining that "socialism is immoral [while] capitalism is the only moral political-economic system."

Political Woman may prompt some to study totalitarianism and its current variations for themselves. Since many campuses barred Jeane from speaking, the book should prove particularly useful for students of history and political science, and for aspiring diplomats.

“Our nation is coming apart at the seams — not ethnic seams, but the seams of class.” At first glance, a casual reader could mistake that sentence as originating from the pen of a class-warfare liberal. Instead, it reflects the thesis of libertarian scholar Charles Murray’s new treatise on the economic and cultural decline of whites in the United States, titled Coming Apart. ... Although the book can be “wonkish” and heavy on Census data — so much so that it’s easy to get lost in the weeds — Murray’s latest offering makes a critical point. It’s a must-read for any serious observer of contemporary American culture.

I was totally unprepared and shocked when I read Ying Ma's autobiography, Chinese Girl in the Ghetto.

John Blundell’s book Ladies for Liberty is a strong antidote to the notion that women are prone to mushy, collectivistic thinking and are hostile to individualism.

Goldberg, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has compiled an enlightening and often mischievous collection of examples showing how the American Left has grown sloppy over time, leaning on trite phrases rather than logic to defend its views.

Treasure Islands is an investigation of the many ways that criminals and multinationals contrive to evade taxes by setting up “special purpose vehicles” and other kinds of shell entities in lenient tax jurisdictions... The book exemplifies views of bien pensants Europeans. Taxes are good and government is always beneficent.

Before Twilight or “True Blood,” Lestat or Angel (but not before Dracula), there was “Dark Shadows” and its enigmatic undead protagonist Barnabas Collins. As you may know, the iconic daytime soap of the 1960s will be revived in film this summer by director Tim Burton, with his favorite collaborator Johnny Depp bringing Barnabas back to life, as it were, on the silver screen.

As punishment for an attempted revolution many years before, the tyrannical government of post-apocalyptic nation Panem hosts the annual Hunger Games, a nationally-televised spectacle pitting 24 teenagers in combat to the death for the entertainment of the jaded denizens of the Capitol.

The Morality of Capitalism is aimed especially at young people who have gotten a negative impression of capitalism — as the subtitle accurately suggests, college students are likely to hear little that’s good or accurate about it in their courses — but even veterans of the battle for liberty will find a lot of fresh, intriguing material here.

In this relatively short but highly illuminating book, economics professors Philipp Bagus and David Howden (both of whom are schooled in Austrian theory) explain the collapse of Iceland’s economy in 2008. Why bother with the difficulties of that little nation (population 313,000) in the remote North Atlantic? The reason is that the Icelandic debacle stemmed from exactly the same governmental blunders that have caused so many other boom and bust cycles around the globe. Iceland’s horrible recent experience has important lessons for Americans — indeed for people everywhere.

For the reader looking for a tell-all book by a Secret Service agent assigned to the White House, Within Arm’s Length: The Extraordinary Life and Career of a Special Agent in the United States Secret Service, will be disappointment. However, the reader who wants to read a great autobiography will be delighted.

Reminiscent of the classic horror films of Hollywood’s golden era — when the production code prohibited gratuitous violence, and moviemakers relied on the harrowing nature of the unseen and imagined — “The Woman in Black” is refreshing. Created by Hammer Film Productions (the popular production company from the 1950s and 1960s), the film expertly relies on that most powerful medium of horror: What the human mind can conjure.

I realize this will come as a shock to most of you, but here goes: The so-called Political Class in Washington is out of touch with the rest of us. I’ll admit that most of us rely on anecdotal evidence to make that case. However Scott Rasmussen provides us with concrete evidence in his book The People’s Money: How Voters Will Balance the Budget and Eliminate the Debt. Rasmussen was chairman of the John Locke Foundation and JLF’s first contract pollster before he founded Rasmussen Reports, one of the nation’s most respected opinion polling firms. Rasmussen uses polls he’s gathered through the years to craft a plan, as the title states, to balance the budget and eliminate the debt. It’s a crucial read heading into the November election, when the country’s massive debt and runaway spending will be the overriding campaign issue.

Levin’s purpose is to contrast the visions of the most influential utopians thinkers with those philosophers whose concepts of liberty and individualism inspired the American Founders and later, our republican form of government.

For non-lawyers, the “Lochner” in this book’s title refers to the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in Lochner v. New York, which author David Bernstein (of George Mason University Law School) argues has been misrepresented terribly by “progressive” intellectuals. Among lawyers, the standard view of Lochner is that it was a perverse triumph of ideological judicial activism over a statute meant to protect workers. Bernstein shows that view to be mistaken, as his subtitle — “defending individual rights against progressive reform” — indicates. Instead of being demonized, the court’s decision should be extolled for its shielding of individual liberty against authoritarianism.

He’s known as the Father of the Constitution, despite the fact that he didn’t much like the product that emerged from the secretive convention that created that document. He served as the fourth American president under the Constitution. Few at the time would have disputed his job qualifications, even after such Revolutionary Era titans as Washington, Adams, and Jefferson had elevated the executive office’s status...

Hillsdale College history professor Burton Folsom and his wife Anita have given a much-needed counterweight to the standard view that Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the greatest American presidents. After reading FDR Goes to War (and I also recommend Folsom’s earlier book New Deal or Raw Deal?), anyone who isn’t an utter zealot for our welfare-warfare state will have to conclude that FDR’s years of control over the nation were nothing short of cataclysmic.

The premise of the book is that Republicanism = small-government conservatism = racism, and that the South became the perfect petri dish to incubate that filthy virus.

When it was announced that Condoleezza Rice was writing her memoirs and that she would take two books to do it, I thought that it might be overkill. I was wrong. Two books are needed to chronicle the life of this extraordinary woman... [S]he opens her second book, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington, on her last day as Secretary of State. As she walks down a hall to meet with the Israeli foreign minister one last time, she is thinking, “My, you’ve lived a lot of history.” At that point, the book returns to 9/11, which becomes the cornerstone of her tenure as national security adviser... However, Rice’s book is not just about 9/11. She also provides readers with insight into the eight years of the Bush administration. Rice does more than talk about being national security adviser and secretary of state; in addition, she provides a job description.