Archive for John Chamberlain

A Reviewers Notebook: Stalins Apologist

Stalin’s Apologist is an apt title for S. J. Taylor’s absorbing story of Walter Duranty (Oxford University Press, 404 pages, $24.95 cloth), But whether Taylor’s subtitle of Walter Duranty, the New York Times’s Man in Moscow holds up in all its implications depends entirely on whom the reader chooses to question. The Times certainly used [...]

1Apr1991 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: Dubcek

William Shawcross, the author of Dubcek (Simon and Schuster, 244 pages, $22.95 cloth, $10.95 paper), has seen it all in central Europe. In the summer of 1968, a 22-year-old graduate of Oxford, he traveled with his sister on a student train to Prague. He had lucked in on what would soon be known as the [...]

1Mar1991 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: Population Matters

“Life on earth is getting better, not worse.” So proclaims Julian L. Simon of the University of Maryland in a book called Population Matters: People, Resources, Environment, and Immigration (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, N.J., 577 pages, $34.95 cloth). This sounds like Emile Coué speaking back in the Twenties, but Simon depends on much more than [...]

1Feb1991 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: Basic Communism

To be confronted with the task of reviewing Clarence B. Carson’s monumental Basic Communism (American Textbook Committee, P.O. Box 8, Wadley, AL 36276, 570 pages, $29.95 cloth) for a fixed deadline certainly causes mixed feelings. Each section provides pleasurable reading. But to be forced to gulp everything down in a few days is a cruel [...]

1Dec1990 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: The Politics of Plunder

Doug Bandow, who has collected his columns and articles in The Politics of Plunder: Misgovernment in Washington (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, N.J., 507 pages, $34.95 cloth) is about as total an anti- Statist as one could find. He positively resents politicians, or anyone else for that matter, who use other people’s money for their own [...]

1Nov1990 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: The War of Ideas

John C. Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, in company with Ramona Marotz-Baden of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, are doing their best to keep up with changing ideas as they affect Latin America. They continue to have theft troubles. As their new book, Fighting the War of Ideas [...]

1Oct1990 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: Breaking With Communism

Like Whittaker Chambers, Bertram D. Wolfe, when he broke finally with the Communist Party, did not return from hell empty handed. He and Jay Lovestone, as leaders of American Communism in the Twenties, spent years trying to convert Stalin to their idea that America was “different.” All they had to show for theft many trips [...]

1Sep1990 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: The Quest for Community

The Quest for Community, subtitled “A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom,” was written in the 1950s by Robert Nisbet, a professor of sociology at Columbia University. Originally published by the Oxford University Press, it has now become part of the “ICS series in self-governance” published by the Institute for Contemporary Studies (243 [...]

1Aug1990 | John Chamberlain | 1 comment | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: Israels Dilemma

Israel’s Dilemma: Why Israel is Falling Apart and How to Put it Back Together by Ezra Sohar (Shapolsky Publishers, 136 W. 22rid Street, New York, NY 10011, 263 pages, $15.95) tells the same sort of story about the strangulation of industry in Israel by socialist monopolies that made Alvin Rabushka’s and Steve Han-ke’s Toward Growth: [...]

1Jul1990 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: Religion, Wealth and Poverty

Gilbert Chesterton, who is the mentor of Jesuit Father James Vincent Schall, the author of Religion, Wealth and Poverty (Vancouver, B.C.: Fraser Institute, 202 pages), was a distributist. But this doesn’t mean that he wanted to divide the wealth into equal shares. He wanted everybody to own property, to have land, a home, and tools. [...]

1Jun1990 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: The Examined Life

Here’s a funny one. After carrying his readers to the very end of his book of meditations called The Examined Life, philosopher Robert Nozick asks that “no reader summarize this book’s contents or present slogans or catchwords from it.” He warns that the trickled-down philosophy “is not worth following.” But how in Heaven’s name can [...]

1May1990 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: The Vermont Papers

Frank Bryan and John McClaughry, two resident Vermonters, call their book The Vermont Papers: Recreating Democracy on a Human Scale (Chelsea Green Publishing Company, Chelsea, Vermont 05038, 308 pages, $18.95). It is a many-faceted book that will repay several readings. The best of it is its Vermont history, which goes deeply into Vermont’s Dark Age [...]

1Apr1990 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: Africas Hope

The Reverend Ndabaningi Sithole is founder and president of the Zimbabwe African National Union, and he personally appointed Robert Mugabe, the present Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, to be his secretary general. He spent ten years without trial in prison under the Rhodesian government, using his time to write books and articles that have been translated [...]

1Feb1990 | John Chamberlain | 1 comment | Continued

A Reviewer’s Notebook: The Midnight Economist

Professor William R. Allen, who for ten years has been giving economic instruction to thousands of listeners over 200 radio stations, calls himself the Midnight Economist. He has collected his broadcasts, along with some other essays, in a book called The Midnight Economist: Meditations on Truth and Public Policy (San Francisco: ICS Press, 332 pages, [...]

1Jan1990 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: The Survival of the Adversary Culture

Paul Hollander was Hungarian-born, but educated in sociology in a “somewhat casual and unpremeditated manner” in England, in Illinois, and at Princeton. He is less interested, he says in The Survival of the Adversary Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 299 pp., $27.95), in exploring the injustices and defects of American society than he is [...]

1Dec1989 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: The Wealth Creators

There is a widely disseminated complaint that our college faculties are still living in the Sixties. Maybe the secret opinions of the tenured Left remain what they were. But when Ben Hart, a founding editor of the conservative Dartmouth Review, says the campuses are moving to the Right, we must believe him. Hart gets his [...]

1Nov1989 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued

A Reviewers Notebook: A Critical Examination of Socialism

“All through our childhood they hung around the houses of our minds, the Four Uncles: Uncle Shaw, Uncle Wells, Uncle Galsworthy, and Uncle Bennett.” The quotation, which is from memory, is from Rebecca West’s essay on the Four Uncles, written for the old New York Herald-Tribune. I cite it here because it did much to [...]

1Oct1989 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued
Newer Entries • Older Entries

    • © Copyright 2011 Freeman - Ideas on Liberty. All rights reserved.

    42 queries. 2.497 seconds