Bloody Spring is a valuable addition to the Civil War compendium. One reviewer said that the book reads like a novel and that is correct. Except, of course, readers already know how this story ends. Bloody Spring is well written and engrossing. But it is not a book that can be read with equanimity.   Read the rest of this entry »

Another stunning example of how the president intends to "fundamentally transform America." The fact that he gets to stick it to our home state (Arizona) only makes it that much better for him.   Read the rest of this entry »

Diana West, author of American Betrayal, graciously consented to an interview with Marcia. Ms. West has been excoriated by some members of the conservative media, accused of being a crackpot and closet John Birch Society member. Apparently many of her critics never bothered to read her book, though, or check her voluminous research. This reviewer has read her book and the subsequent rebuttal against her attackers.   Read the rest of this entry »

West of the Revolution provides readers with an enlarged perspective of that seminal year in American history and the illustrations help to locate the reader in the political geography of the time. I suspect most readers, like this reviewer, did not know what they didn’t know before reading West of the Revolution.   Read the rest of this entry »

Herman Melville’s novels are familiar to most high school students (or they used to be) but his poetry is another matter. I am guessing that, outside the literary world, most people are not aware he wrote poetry. This blogger made …

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Martin recently informed this reviewer that Diana West has written a book-length Rebuttal to negative reviews of American Betrayal. That being unusual, it was necessary to read the reviews to discover what all the fuss was about. Fuss is not the proper word. That’s like saying ingesting hemlock causes a tummy ache. For sheer vitriol, invective and downright nastiness these reviews would be a challenge to match.   Read the rest of this entry »

In this exhaustively researched book, Diana West reveals how critical information has been withheld from the American public, how Americans have been misled and systematically lied to by the U.S. government and how, with the aid of a complicit press corps, public opinion has been deliberately manipulated to replace facts with false narratives.   Read the rest of this entry »

Inventing Freedom elaborates on the themes in Daniel Hannan’s “The New Road to Serfdom.” The earlier book, subtitled “A Letter of Warning to America,” is exactly that. In it Hannan sounded the alarm against forsaking our political inheritance and following Europe into “uniformity, socialism and insolvency: “The New Road to Serfdom. Inventing Freedom identifies the pilots who would take us there, but not until the closing chapters.   Read the rest of this entry »

A totem is an emblem or revered symbol. Hitler had the swastika, Stalin the hammer and sickle. American leftists have the Obama logo and the statists’ claim to possess “the truth,” as in “the science is settled.”   Read the rest of this entry »

Jane Robbins, author of “Uncommonly Bad” (Academic Questions, Spring 2013), reveals that one of the stated goals of the federally funded consortia creating Common Core-aligned tests and of the National Governors Association–which owns the standards– is for colleges and universities to accept a core-based test as sufficient for college entrance, no remediation required.   Read the rest of this entry »