Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, releases his new book The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise today. As you may have guessed from the title, the book is sort of the inverse version of The Road to Serfdom. Given all that is going on politically, the time is certainly right for an influential and intelligent conservative to lay out an optimistic agenda, which is what Brooks has done here. Brooks's last book, The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America's Future, discussed some of the same themes and was terrific. The Road to Freedom looks like it's terrific as well, and has already received glowing notices from George Will, P.J. O'Rourke, and Paul Ryan among others. To learn more, here's a video of Brooks discussing the book:
"It is with great sadness that I report the death of my dear friend and longtime colleague Hilton Kramer, who died early this morning, age 84 (his birthday was just two days ago).
The great novelist John Updike once said he’d gotten to know so many writers over his years in the literary world that it limited the books he agreed to review. He didn’t feel comfortable criticizing the books of friends or acquaintances. Updike said this, by the way, in a conversation with Nieman fellows at Harvard in 1978.
One of the features of a life in journalism is the casual assumption, expressed by nonjournalists at cocktail parties, that journalists “know” things: have the inside dope, heard the real version, predict the future. I have always defended myself by saying that, apart from being acquainted with public officials and the occasional celebrity, journalists know little more than the average reader. And as for predictions, your guess is as good as mine.
Since he began running for President, Barack Obama has made a full time job of pretending to battle against the special interests. Somehow, even after letting the drug industry write the health-care bill, supporting the Wall Street bailouts, ramping up corporate welfare of all stripes, and sending the government-lobbyist revolving door spinning, Obama gets away with it.
Is there anything more irritating than that predictable sigh, so often heard from the trendy anti-gentrification crowd, that New York was so much better, so much more authentic, when one couldn’t walk through Central Park without fear of sexual molestation; when Times Square was an outdoor brothel, controlled by illiterate gangsters who kept out both horrid corporations and those even more horrid (and uncool) tourists from Omaha?
One of these days when Hollywood needs a break from the superhero genre, they're going to make comic book movies out of Greg Rucka's fantastic Queen & Country books. Based on a small British MI6 team of agents, Queen & Country might be the most realistic spy series done in the last 20 years: The agents spend most of their time sitting around, waiting for something to happen.
Who doesn’t love an animal logo? Allen Lane knew that, in 1935, when he published the first 10 Penguin books in London. The six pence paperbacks arrived in bookshops sporting the avian logo and no other graphics, just broad bands of color at the top and bottom. General fiction had orange bands; crime fiction, green; biography, dark blue. The uniform cover font was Gill Sans-Serif.
