politics

Assassination Vacation

04.09.2011 books

This is yet another book I discovered via Nick Hornby and his fine book-about-books entitled Housekeeping vs. The Dirt. At the end of that post, back in March of 2006, I mentioned that I wanted to read Assassination Vacation. It’s amazing that a book I read five years ago is still influencing my reading life. [...]

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Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto

06.05.2009 books

I said after finishing The Conscience of a Liberal, if you recall, that I’m committed to getting the other side of the story. So that brought me to this book by Mark Levin – radio personality, lawyer, and politician. I figured that Levin’s manifesto would be comparable to Krugman’s conscience, just from another standpoint. And [...]

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The Conscience of a Liberal

05.15.2009 books

How opportune that I’m reading this book right on the heels of The Given Day. Early on Krugman mentions the Palmer Raids, which were an integral part of the The Given Day. Lehane used them to highlight a point in America’s history where tensions between the political establishment and those disenfranchised in society reached a [...]

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The Audacity of Hope

01.19.2009 books

I’ve been dreading this book. Loaned to me by a friend, it sat on my bookshelf for months. Each glimpse of it brought feelings of inadequacy. Inadequacy that results when something potentially educational or informative sits on my bookshelf while I continue reading works of fiction or books about sports. Fiction=escape. Sports=leisure. Politics=work. Then I [...]

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Of Paradise and Power

01.30.2008 books

This is more like a long political essay rather than a book. The title is kind of innocuous; it’s the subtitle that grabbed me, AMERICA AND EUROPE IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER. I’m going to start near the end of the book with a few quotes from Kagan that I think sum up the main [...]

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