Book Reviews

AJC: In his latest book, Obamanomics: How Barack Obama is Bankrupting You and Enriching his Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses, journalist Tim Carney analyzes the influence that large business corporations have on the current presidential administration.

America-bashers are working overtime these days to divide our nation into enemy camps. One way to describe it is a war between the country that you and I love vs. Howard Zinn’s America.

A new political science textbook, American Democracy Now, actually makes a stab at balance and, to a surprising degree, can claim some success.

A new book on Education And The Cold War: The Battle For The American School attempts to downplay the dominance of the Left in schools.

In his acceptance speech, Virginia’s governor-elect, Bob McDonnell, may have quoted the founding fathers more extensively than the last four U. S. presidents combined have in their entire political careers. But then, he also may have made more such references than many teachers do in their working lifetimes.

Every chief executive in the past 20 years has vowed to be, as one of them put it, “the education president.” All have failed for the same reason: as with most aspects of life, top-down government solutions to education just don’t work.

American presidents of both parties, all too often, need to be appreciated at a distance. Of the 20th Century chief executives, perhaps only Ronald Reagan holds up well under scrutiny.

Rafe Esquith is a one-in-a-million teacher: he truly believes that each of his students can be extraordinary, with proper coaching.

The distance between Left and Right in America seems greater now than at any time during the past forty years, and we are waging a fierce debate over the size, scope, and role of government in our lives.

In his 2006 book, In Our Hands, Charles Murray proposed overarching changes in the governmental system, which he conveniently titled “The Plan.”

When international test scores came out showing that American students scored lower on standardized math tests than Koreans but felt better about themselves, statisticians scratched their heads. It turns out that the Yanks may actually have been living up to what they were trained for.

Parents continue to voice their alarm over the manner in which California public schools teach seventh-graders about Islam compared to other faiths.