Unsurprisingly, Jack Abramoff’s Capitol Punishment is a thoroughly political book, and much of the book’s interest comes from figuring out the author’s political purposes.
The Captive is the most disturbing of all the volumes in Remembrance of Things Past. It weirded me out when I first read it as a teenager, and it weirds me out even more now.
Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988, but it might be said that his supreme accolade came in 1994, when Islamic extremists attempted to assassinate him.
I cannot remember when I read a public policy book that has made more of an impression on me than Minxin Pei’s China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy.
After I expressed some grumbling dissatisfaction with the audiobook version of the first volume of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War, a number of friends urged me to press on to the second, The Civil War: Fredericksburg to Meridian.
In his new book arguing the case for America’s coming decline as a world power, Fareed Zakaria makes much of the fact that many of the world’s most grandiose pieces of Americana are no longer located in the United States.