Introducing RealClearBooks, a Great New Site for All Things Bibliographical!
Reason contributor (and former intern) Jeremy Lott is heading up RealClearBooks, the newest addition the excellent suite of "RealClear" sites (including ones dedicated to politics, science, religion, sports, and more).
The humble book has sustained religions and started revolutions personal and political. As Joe Queenan observed in his masterful memoir Closing Time, "Books are without question the wealth of the poor's children. Books are a guiding light out of the underworld, a secret passageway, an escape hatch. To the affluent, books are ornaments. To the poor, books are siege weapons."
Thus, RealClearBooks. This site will be about books: their history, manufacture, sale, future, and revolutionary potential. It will cover a host of related issues, including literacy, copyright, and censorship. It will also, inevitably, be about my lifelong love affair with books.
To give you a sense of the links and material gathered at the site, check out its Tuesday Morning offerings:
What Is Operation Horse Blanket? – Daniel Byman, New York Times
Justice Roger Taney's Rotten Ruling – Adrian Vermeule, The New Republic
Titan Gives Hard Case Crime New Shot – Gabe Habash, Publishers Weekly
Annihilating Contempt for the Sacred – Stephen Goode, Washington Times
Twilight: Romantic Fantasy or Religious Parable? – Diana Sheets, CSM
Fifty Years of Science Fiction From Gollancz – Ben East, The National
Meet the Fonzie of Free Markets – James Antle, American Spectator
After the Unthinkable: How 9/11 Changed Fiction – The Economist
In the Beginning Is the Word – Matthew Parris, The Spectator
The World That Books Made – Jeremy Lott, RealClearBooks
Matt Welch will be weighing in on the link fourth from the bottom, an American Spectator article which reviews a little tome that he and I co-authored that goes by the name The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong with America (order online by clicking here). I can tell you this much: I'd rather be the Fonzie of Free Markets than the Potsie of Progressivism, the Chachi of Communism, or the Ralph Malph of Radical Syndicalism. As I believe Leather Tuscadero once said, we make our own history, though not under circumstances of our own choosing.
Reason.tv interviewed Lott about his most recent book, a biography of William F. Buckley. Take a look: