Reason Magazine | June 2012 Review of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, by Charles Murray, Crown Forum, 400 pages, $27 UNLESS you live in a cave, you know the controversial work and reputation of Charles Murray. Losing Ground, published in 1984, proposed eliminating welfare as we knew it and became the template for conservative welfare reform. The…
Democracy Journal | Summer 2009 Review of The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History, by Patrick Allitt • Yale University Press • 2009 • 336 pages • $35 IT IS the summer of 2008. I am watching the telecast of the Republican convention with a sinking feeling. Here is Mitt Romney. The former governor of Massachusetts (repeat: Massachusetts),…
New York Times Book Review | October 7, 2007 THE FUTURE OF CONSERVATISM: Conflict and Consensus in the Post-Reagan Era. Edited by Charles W. Dunn. ISI Books. Paper, $15. DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS. By Brian C. Anderson. ISI Books. $25. BEFORE there was a Heritage Foundation or a Federalist Society, or a Cato or Claremont or…
New York Times Book Review | September 3, 2006 MY friends Jenny and Greg were still digesting the news that Jenny was pregnant with triplets when, only moments later, their fertility doctor sat them down. After recounting the many things that might go wrong in a triple pregnancy, he said, “You really should consider reducing.” Overwhelmed…
Los Angeles Times Book Review | October 31, 1999 TO BE A HOMOSEXUAL in 1999 is to stand on the curb during the New York gay pride parade and feel your eyes water, faster than you can stop them, as row after row of openly homosexual police officers march by, in full uniform. Behind them, supporting…
Reason, January 1999 Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays, by Susan Haack, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 212 pages, $22.50 WHEN was the last time you heard from a professional philosopher who wanted to intervene in a public argument in order to say something sane? Today in Washington, where I live and work, it…