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People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn, W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.  Love After Death It has been widely discussed in recent years that today’s antisemites make a distinction between Jews who are Zionists and Jews who are not Zionists, favoring the latter. Horn points out that today’s antisemites also make a distinction between Jews who are alive and Jews who are dead, favoring the latter. She also tells two fascinating and little known stories a

Counting Backwards: A Doctor's Notes on Anesthesia  by Henry Jay Przybylo, W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.  The author is a pediatric anesthesiologist. You learn a lot about anesthesiology as he discusses many interesting cases of children undergoing surgery. The main components of putting someone under are: Sedative to relieve anxiety Medications to induce amnesia Analgesics for the pain Sevoflurane gas to cause loss of consciousness Muscle relaxants, so the patient doesn’t mo

Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War  by Svetlana Alexievich, Introduction by Larry Heinemann. Norton, 1992.  The Invasion of Afghanistan Starting in 1979 and continuing during the 1980s, the Soviet Union invaded the country of Afghanistan. It was a war of aggression and expansion; Afghanistan had done nothing to harm the Soviet Union. The rulers of the Soviet Union tried to keep the war a secret from their own people. The government-controlled news services did

Breakdown of Higher Education  by John M. Ellis. Encounter Books, 2021.  College professors and public intellectuals who have been...

The Forgotten Highlander: An Incredible WWII Story of Survival in the Pacific  by Alistair Urquhart , Skyhorse, 2011. Scotland The author begins with his innocent childhood in Scotland. He was a soldier in Singapore when the Japanese took the city. Singapore When the Japanese took the city in 1942, they killed 50 thousand Chinese civilians in what is called the Sook Ching massacre.  Burma-Siam Railroad Besides performing slave labor building the Burma-Siam Railroad, the priso

The UN Gang: A Memoir of Incompetence, Corruption, Espionage, Anti-Semitism and Islamic Extremism at the UN Secretariat  by Pedro A. Sanjuan, Doubleday, 2005.  Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s Spy Pedro Arroyo Sanjuan was born in Havana, Cuba in 1930. He became a citizen of the United States in 1947. Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, chose him to be her spy inside the United Nations. He has written an amusing memoir of his time there. Many United Natio

White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era  by Shelby Steele, Harper Perennial, 2007.  Moral Authority Mainstream America lost moral authority during the 1960s. The cause of its loss was of its history of abuse against black Americans. The consequence of its lolls of moral authority was an inability to enforce personal responsibility on Americans in general, but especially on black Americans. If any one criticized black Americans

Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense  by Gad Saad. Regnery Publishing; (2021)  Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome People infected with a social mind virus deny realities that they can see with their own eyes. For example, the fact that Islam is an unusually violent religion.  Collective Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome Analogous to the psychological disorder, Munchausen by Proxy, Left-wing advocates for minorities the receiving attention by pointing at people who

Bury the Chains: Prophets & Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves  by Adam Hochschild, Mariner Books, Reprint, 2006. The movement to abolish slavery was started by the Quaker Sect (Society of Friends) of  Great Britain. When Parliament signed onto this agenda, it used the Royal Navy to enforce the abolition of the slave trade. Not only the slave trade to British colonies, but also the slave trade to all European colonies.

Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City  by Robin Nagle, Farrar, Straus and Giroux,...

In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence  by Russell T. Warne. Cambridge University Press (2020)  Intelligence The author describes the current consensus of cognitive psychologists regarding intelligence:  There is such a thing as general intelligence General intelligence can be measured General intelligence is mostly hereditary There are no known educational methods for substantially changing a student’s intelligence General intelligence correlates positively

The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014  by Carlotta Gall, Mariner Books Reprint, Paperback (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) 2015.  Inter-Service Intelligence The real enemy is Pakistan, whose I.S.I. (Directorate for Inter-Service Intelligence) is behind the Taliban proxy force in Afghanistan. Baluchistan The author visited Quetta, the capital of the Baluchistan province of Pakistan, which is in the West,  near the border with Iran. The Baluchis don't have a country of

In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, a Cover-Up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press  by Katherine Corcoran, Bloomsbury Publishing (2022)  Assassinated Journalist Exposing government corruption has gotten a number of Mexican journalists into trouble. Regina Martínez was a correspondent for Proceso  magazine. On 28 April 2012 Regina Martínez was found strangled to death in her home in Veracruz. There is no smoking gun to prove who assassinated her, but since her reporting

Leaving Mother Lake by Yang Erche Namu and Christine Mathieu, Hachette Book Group, 2007.  This book by a Moso woman living near the border between Sichuan and Yunnan is the most beautiful memoir that I have ever read.

Race & Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination?  by Walter E. Williams, Hoover Institution Press, 2011.  In 1931 the Davis-Bacon Act (named for Senator James J. Davis and Representative Robert L. Bacon) was passed. It required that employees of firms that received federal government contracts should receive wages no lower than the prevailing market wage. It was passed with the support of white union officials with the purpose of excluding black people who were wil

Enemy of the State  by Tommy Robinson. The Press News Ltd (2015)  Tommy Robinson has spent many years in British prisons for minor offenses. Why? The only logical conclusion is that British government authorities are trying to shut him up. Tommy has been publicizing the fact that traditional English culture, without which there would be no freedom on the world, is being swamped by a huge influx of savage, misogynist male, Muslim immigrants. The spineless appeasers in the Brit

The Myth of the Robber Barons: A New Look at the Rise of Big Business in America  by Burton W. Folsom,   Jr. Forrest McDonald (Foreword), Young America's Foundation, Paperback, 2018. Market versus Political (Crony) The author makes a distinction between market entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs. Market entrepreneurs make money by producing a better product or service at a cheaper price. Political entrepreneurs make money by bribing politicians. Only the latter kind sho

The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir  by Kao Kalia Yang, Coffee House Press, 2010.  The Hmong are a minority people without a country of their own. They live in the mountains of Laos. The United States received help from Hmong General Vang Po in fighting the Communists, and so felt obligated to take in Hmong refugees. This is a memoir of a Hmong girl who fled the Communist Pathet Lao, and lived in refugee camps (Nong Khai, Ban Vinai, and Phanat Nikhom) in Thailand. She ev

The Ice Road: An Epic Journey from the Stalinist Labor Camps to Freedom  by Stefan Waydenfeld, Foreword by Norman Davies. Aquila Polonica (2010).  The author grew up in Poland in a small town south of Warsaw. In 1939, during World War II, he and his family were sent East by the Soviet Red Army. At first they went by train to the Pripyat marshes in Belarus. Then, in 1940, the NKVD sent them by train to Kasha, in Siberia. They became slave labor for building a road out of ice.

Galileo's Middle Finger  by Alice Domurat Dreger, Penguin Press, 2015.  Intersex The author is a sociologist involved in the movement to protect intersex children, that is, children born with ambiguous genitalia, from being surgically transformed, without their consent, into either male or female. Transexuals The author became involved in a related issue, namely transsexuals. Transsexuals are adults who want to change their bodies to the other sex.  Gender Dysphoria The trans