AFF's Doublethink

My favorite living writer, Christopher Hitchens, has been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. I suppose, with his habits, some form of illness was inevitable. When we met two months ago at NYU, he came out of a lecture hall with a triple of Johnny Walker Black and a cigarette. However, Hitchens won’t be Hitchens [...]

It may be a pure myth that Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag at the request of George Washington. But it turns out that Ross was an actual flagmaker for the US military. Reviewing a new biography of Ross, the WSJ reports
Ross’s reputation for producing American flags lasted well beyond the Revolutionary [...]

Although one would generally describe The New Yorker as a progressive publication, it seems to slip into a reactionary mindset when the interests of the literary establishment are on the line. In this week’s issue, Ken Auletta takes a look at the Kindle, the iPad and the threat that e-books present to old school [...]

We’re snowed in here in Washington DC. The government will shut down tomorrow for a second consecutive day. Tomorrow night, we’re expecting another storm.
One of the nice things about being shut in is the chance to read, and I’ve finally started on Dreams From My Father. In a word, it’s superb. [...]

Military Times has posted a list of the 16 best military books of the decade. Regrettably, I can only say that I’ve read two-and-a-half of them. The first is The Unforgiving Minute, by my classmate and friend Craig Mullaney, which made the NYT bestseller list. Since I have a small cameo in [...]

Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, I finally had the chance to watch Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning film, The Pianist. It isn’t the story of Polanski’s own survival, although it seems natural to conclude that Polanski was able to evoke the Holocaust so effectively because he lived through it himself. He lost his mother [...]

If you thought five books was a lot to review, try seven. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz takes on that challenge in a cover story for The New Republic.
Wilentz begins by recounting a crude remark about “mulatters” (i.e. mulattos) that Lincoln made while stumping for Gen. Winfield Scott, his party’s presidential candidate in 1952. [...]

Craig Mullaney, my classmate from grad school, is at #10 on the NY Times bestseller list for hardcover non-fiction (for the second week in a row). His book, The Unforgiving Minute, is the story of his time at West Point, Oxford, and Afghanistan.
If you need some persuasion to party with your money, check out [...]

You’ve gotta love people who protest by reading a book (or at least buying a book or saying that they’ve read it). From the Telegraph:
Mr Sarkozy, a man often ridiculed in France for preferring fitness to literature, has frequently expressed his disdain for “La Princesse de Cleves” (The Princess of Cleves), a novel by Madame [...]

Up on the main page, we’ve got a monster of an article about David Riesman’s largely forgotten masterwork of sociology, The Lonely Crowd. You hear echoes of the book every so often if you read your Brooks carefully, but by and large, the book’s insights and descriptive vocabulary have largely been lost on our generation.
Douglas [...]