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–> Rand’s Atlas Is Shrugging With a Growing Load
Imagine a novel of more than a thousand pages, published half a century ago. The author doesn’t have a talk-radio show and has been dead for 27 years.
As for the storyline, it is beyond dated: Humorless executives fight with humorless public officials over an industry that is, today, almost irrelevant to the U.S. economy – - railroads. The prose itself is a disconcerting mixture of philosophy, industrial policy, and bodice-ripping: “The wind blew her hair to blend with his. She knew why he had wanted to walk through the mountains tonight.”
In short, you would think “Atlas Shrugged” might be long forgotten.
Instead, Ayn Rand’s novel is remembered more than ever. This year the book is selling at a faster rate than last year. Last year, sales were about 200,000, higher than any year before that, including 1957, when the book was published.
–> Get Off My (Intellectual) Property
No one should have had to write Digital Barbarism. It’s common sense that copyright laws are important: They protect the creators of art against theft, making it possible for writers, composers, filmmakers, and countless others to pursue their callings full-time. Without copyright protection, we could only enjoy works produced for free — by hobbyists, the very rich, those supported by charity, and those dedicated enough to starve for their crafts. Not to mention the obvious immorality of taking a work that someone labored to create, without permission and without payment, and not to mention that the Constitution explicitly encourages Congress to protect copyright.
But someone did need to write this book, because today there is a war on copyright. The music industry fought the opening battle against Napster (a web site full of copyrighted music available for free download) in the late 1990s. Napster lost, but infringers still won: Better piracy software soon came out, making it possible for users to download files from each other, rather than from a central website. Since then, the problem has spread to movies and books.
The surprising part isn’t that people like to take things without paying for them, but that they think they’re morally entitled to do so. An army of activists, ranging from bratty teenagers to tenured academics, has made the case that copyright itself is outdated or flat-out counterproductive. Some economists have even claimed (ridiculously) that piracy doesn’t hurt sales.
Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto charges fiercely into some of this war’s meanest fights, and the author, Mark Helprin, principally a novelist, is a terrific writer. He explains the history of copyright, offers interesting (if not always strictly relevant) anecdotes from his personal life, and bats down many of the anti-copyright mob’s arguments — even the silly ones he finds in Internet comment sections.
–> John J. Miller’s Between the Covers podcast has P.J. O’Rourke on Driving Like Crazy
“The car was a way for ordinary people to gain freedom and mobility…the like of which had really never been seen in the history of mankind,” says P.J. O’Rourke, author of Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending, Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed To Be — With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac Escalade in Every Carport, and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn.
–> Liberal Fascism 2.0 Back for seconds.
Following its release in January of 2008, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism rose to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Today the book hits shelves in its paperback version (with a new afterword on Barack Obama), which provides an excellent excuse to talk to the esteemed NRO editor-at-large, and to shine a spotlight on an important book, one more time:
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: So how does it feel to have written a number-one New York Times bestseller?
JONAH GOLDBERG: Better than having written a number-two New York Times bestseller, all things being equal.LOPEZ: I asked for that. But, seriously: The book was hugely successful. Maybe the most successful political, or at least conservative, book of 2008. That’s got to be cool.
GOLDBERG: Okay, well, yeah: It feels good. (Though it’d feel better if I sold half as many books as Mark Levin. Holy Frijoles.) I spent a long time working on Liberal Fascism, and a lot of things happened in the process — my daughter was born, my Dad died, just to name two — and this beast was a source of a lot of stress and worry on my part. Add to that all of the grief I got from the Left about it, years before it even came out, and, yeah, its success is a nice vindication.
What feels better than — or at least as good as — the commercial success of the book is the impact it’s clearly had. It’s very difficult to talk about fascism these days without at least acknowledging my argument. That’s progress. Also, I can’t begin to tell you how edifying it is to hear stories, almost on a daily basis, about how the book is being included in college courses. I’ve spoken to university seminars on it. College kids are constantly writing me for papers they’re doing, and civics teachers are incorporating stuff from the book. That feels so much more concrete to me than bestseller lists and blog spats.
Two recent books attempt to explain the relationship between the Vatican and the United States. Each has a different agenda, and thus they reach opposite conclusions. Common to both, however, is a primary focus on the debate over the legitimacy of America’s war in Iraq.
Parallel Empires: The Vatican and the United States—Two Centuries of Alliance and Conflict, by Italian journalist Massimo Franco, portrays the Vatican as an independent actor on the world stage, guiding and guarding the flock of Christ. The other work, Against the Grain: Christianity and Democracy, War and Peace, a collection of essays by American Catholic commentator and papal biographer George Weigel, sees a strong relationship between the Vatican and the U.S. based on a mutual concern for saving Western civilization and promoting democratic government around the world.
–> BOOKS: ‘Reagan’s Secret War’: Economic victory over Soviets led to end of Cold War
This is the definitive book on Mr. Reagan’s strategy for bringing the Cold War to a successful end. The Andersons are well-suited to the task of researching and writing it. Martin Anderson was an economic adviser to Mr. Reagan and a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. Annelise Anderson was associate director of the Reagan Office of Management and Budget. Both were Reagan presidential campaign advisers. They are the authors of two other important Reagan books, and both are senior fellows at the Hoover Institution.
