Books

Besides absolutists of the right (the tsar and his adherents) and left (Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks), the Russian political landscape in 1917 featured moderates seeking liberal reform and a rapid evolution toward towards a constitutional monarchy. Vasily Maklakov, a lawyer, legislator and public intellectual, was among the most prominent of these, and the most articulate and sophisticated advocate of the rule of law, the linchpin of liberalism.

Climate change was political long before Al Gore first started talking about it. In the 1970s, the Swedish Social Democrats used global warming to get political support for building a string of nuclear power stations. It was the second phase of their war on coal, which began with the acid rain scare and the first big UN environment conference in Stockholm in 1969.

The War on Cops exposes the truth about officer use of force and explodes the conceit of “mass incarceration.” A rigorous analysis of data shows that crime, not race, drives police actions and prison rates. The growth of proactive policing in the 1990s, along with lengthened sentences for violent crime, saved thousands of minority lives. In fact, Mac Donald argues, no government agency is more dedicated to the proposition that “black lives matter” than today’s data-driven, accountable police department.

Threats to international peace and security include the proliferation of weapons of mass destructions, rogue nations, and international terrorism. The United States must respond to these challenges by embracing new military technologies.

Reckoning with Race confronts America’s most intractable problem – race. The book outlines in a provocative, novel manner American racial issues from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. It explodes myths about the South as America’s exclusive racial scapegoat. The book moves to the Great Migration north and the urban ghettos which still plague America.

American seapower has not been as small as it is today since before World War I. Unless reversed, U.S. seapower will continue its decline into the indefinite future as politicians ignore the widening gulf between the cost of modernizing and expanding American seapower, and the resources devoted to this most strategic arm of the nation’s defense.

America is a nation founded on justice and the rule of law. But our laws are too complex, and legal advice too expensive, for poor and even middle-class Americans to get help and vindicate their rights.

The Challenge of Modernizing Islam is the first major effort to provide a foundation of understanding and a vision of Islam that is consistent with human rights, equal rights and modernity. Veteran journalist Christine Douglass-Williams interviews the foremost moderate and reformist Muslims in the Western world, including Zuhdi Jasser, Tawfik Hamid, Sheikh Dr. Subhy Mansour, Raheel Raza, Salim Mansur, Qanta Ahmed, and others. She asks them tough questions about how they deal with problematic Qur’an passages, how they intend to get their message across to the Muslim world, and more.

This book is about how the Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages became the leading forum for the discussion of political and economic policies in the US. This book goes back to the original editorials of Charles Dow and his beliefs in political and economic freedom, to explain how the Journal attained such prominence and influence.

America in the Age of Trump is a bracing, essential look at the failure of a great nation to meet the needs of its people and the challenges of the age—and the resulting collapse of public trust in government, as well as a pervasive crisis of national values, from broken families to a loss of faith in the American idea itself.

Technology continues to unlock new ways for Americans to live and work. To illustrate these changes, this book explores the promise of online platforms such as Uber and Airbnb. Unfortunately, instead of embracing innovation, many cities insist on applying antiquated regulations or completely banning these new services to protect special interests—at the expense of workers and consumers.

In The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, Michael Walsh describes how Critical Theory released a horde of demons into the American psyche. When everything could be questioned, nothing could be real, and the muscular, confident empiricism that had just won the war gave way, in less than a generation, to a central-European nihilism celebrated on college campuses across the United States.

A compelling case can be made that violent crime, especially after the 1960s, was one of the most significant domestic issues in the United States. Indeed, few issues had as profound an effect on American life in the last third of the twentieth century.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner. In Past and Present, an eminent American historian and cultural critic shows the truth of that statement. The common theme of the twenty essays gathered here is the intriguing, often unexpected ways in which the past continues to illuminate the present.

How bad is the problem of media bias? The answer can be summed up in a few words: President Donald J. Trump. Whether you love or hate him, there’s no question that Trump gained a huge amount of support for his willingness to criticize the media in harsh and unsparing terms. Yet, the media seem baffled by the fact they’ve lost the trust of the American people.