Book Reviews

We have written about film studies and English professors who come up with novel theories about cinematic masterpieces without bothering to check the archived papers of the directors, writers and producers of those films to see if their hypotheses were the filmmakers’ original intentions.

Stephen Meyer’s book, Signature in the Cell does not attempt to unravel the age-old mystery of the origin of life.

Ever wonder what Constitutional law will look like in 2020? While President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court raises the question of just how much judicial activism the administration intends to foster, writings from some of his nominees also demonstrate how the President prefers progressive jurisprudence.

As the debate on healthcare reform heats up in Congress, many pundits from both sides are barraging the American people with seemingly contradictory statistics and evidence.

In the face of legislation to create a public option in health care, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) recently convened a panel of experts to discuss the prospects of reforming the existing institution of Medicaid—a proposition which economists Thomas Granneman and Mark Pauly aim to defend in their newly released book “Reform Medicaid First: Laying the Foundation for National Health Care Reform.”

Abigail Thernstrom makes the argument that, in the aftermath of the election of Barack Obama, the Voting Rights Act has actually begun hampering and damaging the very racial group it was originally intended to protect.

Supporters of government-run medical care frequently point to the “affordability” of this type of system, but such terms are inherently misleading.

When education reformers say they have new ideas, look at the vintage of their sources.

Although the hundreds of Middle East studies courses in universities nationwide portend to treat the region exhaustively, there is a key component of the conflict that most ignore.

As self-proclaimed intellectuals get embarassingly excited over the prospect of a new, New Deal, the rest of us would do well to take every opportunity to examine how the first one turned out.

Next to the peerless Tom Wolfe,
perhaps the most brilliantly gifted living American writer is Garry Wills.

The new book, Spies, The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev (Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2009) provides us with valuable new information about how the KGB penetrated the United States government in the 1930s and 40s.