Archive for John Chamberlain
A Reviewers Notebook: Intellectuals
The title of Paul Johnson’s new book, Intellectuals (New York: Harper and Row, 385 pp., $22.50), is a catch- all that promises a history of those who live by their brains. But what we get is highly selective. Though he ends his series of entertaining short biographies with a glance at Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, [...]
1Sep1989 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Religious Thought and Economic Society
When Jacob Viner of the University of Chicago and Princeton University died, he left four chapters of an unfinished work called Religious Thought and Economic Society. Two scholars, Jacques Melitz and Donald Winch, have pieced together the Viner work for publication by the Duke University Press of Durham, North Carolina (211 pages, $21.95). What strikes [...]
1Aug1989 | John Chamberlain | 1 comment | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: The Poverty of Communism
Nick Eberstadt calls his challenging book The Poverty of Communism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 315 pages, $29.95 cloth). For the most part he trains his spotlight on China, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the satellite countries of eastern Europe, all of which have been under Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist rule for decades. There are, however, plenty of [...]
1Jul1989 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: The Other Path
In two trips to post-Allende Chile I skipped over Peru without a decent sight of Lima. -But I’ve seen the shacks of squatters on the hillsides in back of Caracas in Venezuela and in the land around Santiago in Chile, and it is easy to visualize the same ring of unfinished tin and cardboard huts [...]
1Jun1989 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Passage to a Human World
In spite of its occasional hop-skip-and-jump presentation and its reliance on abstractions, Max Singer’s Passage to a Human World: The Dynamics of Creating Global Wealth (Indianapolis: Hudson Institute, 390 pp., $21.95) is a most comforting book to read. Its broad thesis is that the human race, barring the possibility of destruction by collision with a [...]
1May1989 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Faith and Freedom
Ben Hart, the son of Dartmouth’s Professor Jeffrey Hart, is one of those editors who got theft training on the off-campus Dartmouth Review, a conservative publication that has turned out more good newspapermen in recent years than any of our graduate schools of journalism. He is also an indefatigable scholar in the off-hours when he [...]
1Apr1989 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: The Velvet Prison
From Hungary, in a sometimes difficult prose text, there comes an enigmatic book about the fate of literature under totalitarian governments. It is called The Velvet Prison: Artists Under State Socialism, and is by Miklos Haraszti, a dissident who is introduced to us by a fellow dissident, George Konrad, and translated from the Hungarian by [...]
1Mar1989 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: The Life of Herbert Hoover
“Food will win the war.” So we were told in 1917 by Herbert Hoover, who was just home after a three-year period of feeding Belgian and French civilians who were trapped in back of the contending Allied and German armies. Accordingly I signed up to work on a school farm in Windsor, Connecticut, where I [...]
1Feb1989 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Basic Economics
If there is a puzzle to Clarence Carson’s Basic Economics (American Textbook Committee, P.O. Box 8, Wadley, Alabama 36276, 390 pp., $12.00 paperback), it is that the author skips about when visualizing his audience. Much of the book is addressed to students who have barely learned in high school or freshman year in college to [...]
1Jan1989 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: The American Conservative Movement
Before he was elected to the U.S. Senate, the late John P. East of North Carolina was a professor of political science. A man of great scholarly attainments, he took time out from active politicking to produce a book, The American Conservative Movement (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 279 pp., $18.95), about the seminal thinkers he considered [...]
1Dec1988 | John Chamberlain | 1 comment | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Educating for Virtue
People who talk about educating for virtue are prone to be didactic and preachy. One distrusts them as being Holier Than Thou. Fortunately, Joseph Baldacchino in his Economics and the Moral Order (National Humanities Institute, 426 C Street NE, Washington, DC 20002, 43 pp., $4.00) and the contributors he has assembled for another book, Educating [...]
1Nov1988 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: The Myth of the Common School
Charles Leslie Glenn, Jr., in his The Myth of the Common School (The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, Massachusetts, 369 pp., $37.50 cloth, $13.95 paper), does not use the word “myth” in its ordinary sense as implying something that is untrue. He uses it as a synonym for “idea.” The “common,” or State-funded, school does [...]
1Oct1988 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Revolution
Martin anderson, who is now a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution in California, worked for Ronald Reagan for more than seven years. He went through three presidential campaigns with Reagan, traveled with him to two Republican conventions, and spent considerable time in the White House helping to formulate the policy that has resulted in [...]
1Sep1988 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: All It Takes Is Guts
Walter Williams, who teaches at Virginia’s George Mason University and writes a syndicated newspaper column on the side, is usually referred to as a black economist. I would prefer it if he were called a good economist who happens to be black. He is “free market” to his bone marrow, a devotee of Hayek and [...]
1Aug1988 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Privatization
Privatization goes slowly in America, but it is undeniably a world issue. E. S. Savas sums the story up ably in his Privatization: The Key to Better Government (Chatham House Publishers, Chatham, New Jersey, 308 pp., $14.95 paper, $25.00 cloth). Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has led the way by her divestiture of either all [...]
1Jun1988 | John Chamberlain | 3 comments | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Entrepreneurs vs. The State
Burton W. Folsom, Jr.’s Entrepreneurs vs. The State (Young America’s Foundation, Suite 808, 11800 Sunrise Valley Drive, Reston, VA 22091, 144 pp., $16.95 cloth) is about as neat a job as one could wish. To be sure, the overall thesis of the book is not new. We have had those who, like Matthew Josephson, have [...]
1May1988 | John Chamberlain | 1 comment | ContinuedA Reviewers Notebook: Wedemeyer on War and Peace
When General George Marshall, a good judge of character, was looking around in the summer of 1941 for a Victory Plan in case we got into war with the Axis powers, he asked Albert C. Wedemeyer, then a major with experience as an exchange student at the German War College in 1936-38, to draft one [...]
1Apr1988 | John Chamberlain | 0 comments | Continued-
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Bubbles, Malinvestment, and Higher Education
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JPMorgan’s Blunder Is No Market Failure
I am not going to try to defend JPMorgan Chase for its recent, widely reported financial blunders. ... Read More
For Equality; Against Privilege
This TGIF originally ran July 7, 2006. The freedom philosophy can be boiled down to two phrases: for... Read More
