If Seymour Hersh received a report card in kindergarten, I’d be willing to bet that he flunked “plays well with other children.” He is by his own admission egotistical, arrogant and not a team player. He has left almost every publication, including one he founded, under some kind of a cloud of controversy. Consequently, his memoir “Reporter” makes very interesting reading, and I found it compelling.
U.S.-Canada relations are at a low point, due to the ongoing trade war which has engulfed our two nations. Nevertheless, we’ve been close friends, allies and trading partners for over a century in spite of our differences, both subtle and profound.
Fredrik Backman's "Beartown" was widely hailed as one of the best books of 2017. "Us Against You" is its sequel.
Save for a zest for dictatorial power, is there an ideological motivation for Russian President Vladimir Putin's rise to dominance in Russia?
President Vladimir Putin perhaps had good reason to view Michael McFaul with a tad of suspicion when he arrived in Moscow as American ambassador in 2008.
If, as France's fiery World War I Prime Minister Georges "The Tiger" Clemenceau famously observed, "War is too important to be left to the generals," perhaps history is too important to be left to the historians.
The Cold War, that period following World War II in 1947 until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, saw the attempted expansion of communism by the Soviet Union and other communist countries, and the attempted containment of communism by the U.S. and other Western democracies.
The conflicting views of the ethics of intelligence, as seen by professionals of the trade, were put into sharp contrast in testimony before the Church Committee in the 1970s.
"Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot," said Margaret Thatcher of one of the most singular accomplishments in contemporary history, analyzed in this highly readable, perceptive and deeply researched study by Bret Baier, chief political news anchor for Fox News.
In their last book, "Presidencies Derailed: Why University Leaders Fail and How To Prevent It," Stephen Joel Trachtenberg and Gerald B. Kauvar, along with E. Grady Bogue, wrote a critical study of unsuccessful college presidencies.
We are into the summer reading season: the time when we choose books to take to the beach or the lake, or to while away the misery of planes and airports. Publishers see this as a chance to promote feel-pretty-good family sagas or romances, or mysteries that nudge the inner detective rather than threaten anything more serious.
Yascha Mounk is a good writer and a bright Harvard University political scientist. While this sounds impressive, one should bear in mind that politics is not really a science. Instead, it is a bubbling cauldron of individual and group prejudices, loyalties, traditions, sentiments, interests and cultural forces that defies a purely scientific analysis.
