Men read far fewer books than women today. That’s a documented fact, and the gap is becoming bigger. Particularly weak is men’s reading of fiction. It’s pretty much women’s domain these days, while men, when they do read, gravitate toward history and biography. Why this is, nobody seems to know. Men used to read books, but today we are unusually reluctant to do so.
If you think it’s just a coincidence that all of the myriad of problems identified by the statist politicians and "thinkers" whom our contemporary media love so well can be solved only by more government and less freedom, then you’ll find Al Gore’s forthcoming book very convincing, I’m sure. Judging by his publisher’s statements, The Path to Survival will show exactly what the environmental movement means in practice: bigger government, less freedom. The book will be released as a paperback original in April 2008, and offers "a visionary blueprint for the changes we should make as a world community," according to publisher Rodale Books in a statement issued yesterday:
As promised earlier today, here is my review of Alan Reynolds’s book, Income and Wealth, which appeared in the June 2007 issue of Budget and Tax News: Income and Wealth By Alan Reynolds Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006 231 pages, $55.00, ISBN 0-313-33688-1 The past decade has brought a tsunami of complaints about increasing economic inequality in the United States, a "vanishing middle class," and a huge and increasing concentration of wealth among the top 1 percent of wage earners. As Alan Reynolds points out in his superb new book Income and Wealth, those claims are false. Every one of them.
In his syndicated column, William F. Buckley pays tribute today to Alan Reynolds, the Cato Institute economist who has defended free markets for nearly four decades. Reynolds has published hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines, notably in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Reason, National Review,and in national syndication. His devotion to facts instead of ideology has made him a huge thorn in the statists’ side during his entire career. He is also an immensely cheerful and personable gentleman. (And he once played guitar in rock star Little Richard’s band. How many economists have done that?) Recently Reynolds wrote his first full-length book, Income and Wealth, in which, in his usual way, he demolishes the great statist myths of our time. As Buckey notes:
I’ve seen a multitude of interpretations of the Harry Potter book series, and for me the most interesting ones emphasize the ideas in the narratives, instead of arguing over the books’ literary quality. (The latter seems to me a moot point.) One of the best brief summaries I’ve seen is Jerry Bowyer’s, published today. An excerpt: Jo Rowling has a wonderful talent for tapping into Biblical and literary symbolism. From the very beginning, I’ve believed that Hogwarts is the literary representation of the Christian Church. Towered over by stone spires, filled with living icons of great men and women from the past, Hogwarts is a place where ancient books are studied to relearn great wisdom from the past. Hogwarts was founded by four great wizards over a thousand years ago who were united in the belief that their knowledge should be passed on. Like the four evangelists in early church literature, each has its own seals and symbol and its own special focus of virtue. Many of those wonderful names, such as Godric Gryffindor, Rowling revealed in a recent interview were, taken from medieval Christian saints. The full article is available here.
Normally I hate revisionism, but this looks like it just might work: Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow Pictures are teaming on "Oz," a revisionist take on the L. Frank Baum books that hatched "The Wizard of Oz." . . . "The appealing thing about the Baum books to me is how wildly imaginative they are. There are crazy characters from amazing places. I want this to be ‘Harry Potter’ dark, not ‘Seven’ dark." . . . "A lot of the plot is mine, but the characters are all Baum." —from Variety The film’s prospective director, Todd McFarlane, wants it to appeal to the same audiences that enjoyed the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. If the authors continue to respect the source material, the film could conceivably serve, as they say they intend, as an effective sequel to the original, rather than a remake. We’ll see.
J. K. Rowling, author of the mega-bestselling Harry Potter books, is writing a detective novel, according to the Sunday Times of London. AP reports: The Sunday Times newspaper quoted Ian Rankin, a fellow author and neighbor of Rowling’s, as saying the creator of the "Harry Potter" books is turning to crime fiction. "My wife spotted her writing her Edinburgh criminal detective novel," the newspaper, which was available late Saturday, quoted Rankin as telling a reporter at an Edinburgh literary festival. A mystery series selling in the hundreds of millions, as the Harry Potter series did, would certainly be good for the genre’s overall popularity—but is exceedingly unlikely. However, Rowling’s ability to bring imagination and some interesting ideas to genre fiction has been fully proven, and her effort could indeed be refreshing for a form of fiction that has become rather dreary in recent years.
Our friend Mike Tooney called our attention to the following passage in William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film in which the author discusses the four 1930s Nancy Drew films produced by Warner Brothers and starring Bonita Granville as the title character. It’s a good capsule description of the series:
Kathryn Lopez, editor of National Review Online, is one of the very best interviewers around. Her conversation with former Wall Street Journal writer-editor Amity Shlaes is a fine example of Kathryn’s work. Shlaes’s new book, The Forgotten Man: A History of the Great Depression, published just yesterday, "serves up the Great Depression as you’ve never known it — challenging conventional wisdom, telling a gripping story of the triumph of the American spirit and the folly of big government," as Lopez smartly describes it. It’s a fascinating interview, and one part of it is especially interesting.
My fellow Golden Age of Detective Mysteries afficionado Mike Tooney has written an excellent review and summary of The Dead Sleep Lightly, a terrific collection of radio mystery scripts by the great detective story writer John Dickson Carr. Carr was the master of the "impossible crime," the murder that seems as if it cannot have been committed by a human being, and his narratives usually had a appeallingly creepy atmosphere and strong intimations of the preternatural. The Dead Sleep Lightly is out of print, but copies are available in used bookstores and through online search engines. It is well worth seeking out. With Mike’s kind permission, I am reprinting his review here for your enjoyment and edification:
My essay on the Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek in the April 20 print edition of National Review (not available online) considers the essentials of classical liberalism—and finds that a crucial element of classical liberalism is the moral philosophy developed by thinkers such as Edmund Burke and Adam Smith and dervived from Christian principles. What distinguishes classical liberalism—and modern Reaganite conservatism—from libertarianism is exactly this concern for preserving and strengthening the moral structures that make freedom possible. Click here to read on….
Science writer Ronald Bailey has put together a very informative and insightful review of Michael Crichton’s latest novel, Next, for National Review Online. Bailey points out that the depiction of science as basically scary—as is Crichton’s usual approach and is the case with Next—is entirely in conflict with reality: Frankensteinian concerns persist in the modern age because of humanity’s inborn suspicion of the new. Happily, over the past few centuries the West has established firm linkages between scientific and economic actors — launching the industrial/technological revolution that has lifted billions of people out of humanity’s natural state of abject poverty. But such transformations of economic and social institutions remain scary. Frankenstein was essentially a reactionary response to that revolution. But there are other ways to craft narratives about humanity’s growing technological prowess — telling stories that are more hopeful and liberating. Bailey suggests an alternative approach that could be just as entertaining and more edifying, using Crichton’s Jurassic Park as an example: I have often wanted to suggest to Crichton that he could have gotten the same narrative bang for his buck if he had instead celebrated the achievement of bringing dinosaurs back to life. In my alternative plot, a
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