Books, Culture & the Arts

The Plan: Big Ideas for America by Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed (Public Affairs, 224 pages, $19.95) Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea by George Lakoff (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 277 pages, $23.00) Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn from Conservative Success by Paul Waldman (John Wiley and Sons, […]

Ethical Realism by Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman (Pantheon, 224 pages, $22.00) The American Way of Strategy by Michael Lind (Oxford University Press, 304 pages, $24.00) Anyone who doubts that the Bush Revolution in foreign policy has ended should check the shelves at a bookstore. Hagiographies about the man from Midland are out. Impassioned critiques […]

When the Nielsen ratings for the second quarter of 2006 came in, FOX News Channel got some bad news. The network’s entire weekday lineup — every show — had lost viewers from the first quarter of the year. Special Report with Brit Hume, down 19 percent. The Big Story with John Gibson, down 13 percent. […]

Reaching for Power: The Shi’a in the Modern Arab World by Yitzhak Nakash (Princeton University Press, 226 pages, $19.95) The Shia Revival: How conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future by Vali Nasr (W.W. Norton, 287 pages, $25.95) The rise of Shia political parties in U.S.-occupied Iraq, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s violent verbal attacks on […]

Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg (W.W.Norton, 224 pages, $23.95) Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis by Jimmy Carter (Simon & Schuster, 224 pages, $25.00) The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David l. Holmes (Oxford University Press, 240 pages, $20.00) American Theocracy: The Peril […]

By the time you read this, The West Wing will have ended weeks ago. Matt Santos will have picked out his Oval Office rug, and Josiah Bartlett will be boring building contractors with rapid-fire trivia as they haggle over the final details of his library. The Sunday nights of liberals, once occupied, will now be […]

Kristin Luker’s useful history of sex education hits the right notes, until she tries too hard to please all sides.

Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush by Eric Boehlert (Free Press, 352 pages, $25.00) It will come as no surprise to readers of these pages that the galloping pack of Washington journalists has spent much of the last five and a half years rolling over for an alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) […]

The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism by John C. Bogle (Yale University Press, 260 pages, $25.00) The stock market collapse of 2000-2001 was the most serious since the crash of 1929. But unlike the earlier Great Crash, the recent one led neither to a general depression nor to a wider indictment of […]

Had they been born and raised on this side of the Atlantic, they might have turned up as characters in a Bruce Springsteen ballad. They are the sort Springsteen tends to memorialize: Their roots are in a faded manufacturing neighborhood; their brushes with the law were petty scrapes that did not keep them from retaining […]