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James Mullaney on The New Destroyer: Dead Reckoning

The New Destroyer: Dead Reckoning, is the latest in a series of adventure novels by James Mullaney and Warren Murphy. Mullaney describes the setting for John J. Miller: “the twentieth highjacker from 9/11 . . . has somehow smuggled into his prison cell a weapon of great destructive power. . . . Following his escape from prison all hell breaks loose, and everybody is after this weapon.”

Mary Lefkowitz on History Lesson

In History Lesson: A Race Odyssey, classics professor Mary Lefkowitz describes how she spoke out against professors who taught that Greek culture “was stolen from Africa and that Jews were responsible for the slave trade.” She tells John J. Miller, “We really just need to try and talk about history as if it had some relationship to evidence.”

Michael Connelly on The Blue Religion

Michael Connelly, editor of The Blue Religion: New Stories about Cops, Criminals, and the Chase, explains for John J. Miller that “if you do not walk in the cop's shoes it’s hard to understand” what it’s like to be a cop. Thus, to be a cop is to be part of “a cult, a blue cult,” or a “blue religion.”

Arthur Herman on Gandhi & Churchill

Arthur Herman, author most recently of Gandhi & Churchill: The Epic Rivalry that Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, tells John J. Miller that despite the great differences between his subjects, “they are really very much alike. And they really provide for us, I think, two very contrasting models of how democratic leadership can work in the modern age and the post-modern age.”

Ursula K. Le Guin on Lavinia

Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin describes for John J. Miller her latest effort, Lavinia. Who is Lavinia? In Virgil’s Aeneid, she is the second wife of Aeneas, and is barely mentioned. But Le Guin says, “Because Aeneas struck me as almost more of a novel character than an epic hero, a story began to go in my mind . . . What happens after the Aeneid ends, when they do get married?”

Arthur Brooks on Gross National Happiness

Arthur Brooks, author of Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America—and How We Can Get More of It, offers John J. Miller a revelation: “People who call themselves conservative or very conservative are about twice as likely to say they are very happy people, as are those who say they are liberal or very liberal.”

Richard A. Posner on How Judges Think

Richard A. Posner, who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals, has a unique insight into the topic of his book, How Judges Think. He tells John J. Miller that thinking like a judge is a lot different than, say, thinking like an umpire, where it’s three strikes you’re out: “The problem with the courts, in especially the United States, is that the rules are often extremely fuzzy.”

Andrew C. McCarthy on Willful Blindness

Andrew C. McCarthy, NRO regular and author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, tells John J. Miller that “the theory of the book is that the war actually started with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. . . . Everything we’ve been arguing about from 9/11 forward really is a repetition . . . of the same arguments we were having in the wake of that [earlier] event.”

Steve Teles on The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement

Steven M. Teles, author of The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, tells John J. Miller that “the conservative legal movement was a response to the liberal legal movement — or what I call in the book the liberal legal network . . . that was in large part created in the end of the ’60s and the beginning of the ’70s.”

William Safire on Safire’s Political Dictionary

New York Times columnist William Safire has completed his first update of Safire’s Political Dictionary in decades. The latest version contains 1,800 terms, and Safire tells John J. Miller how entries make the cut: “First it’s got to be a political term. Second it’s got to be in the … public discourse.” Hillary gets credit for keeping “vast right-wing conspiracy” relevant. But “vast wasteland,” used a generation ago, is still in there, since the term occasionally pops up.

Joel Rosenberg on Dead Heat

Joel Rosenberg hopes the premise of his Dead Heat, the fifth and final entry in a series of political thrillers, never comes true. He tells John J. Miller, “My novels have had an uncanny way of seeming to foreshadow coming events . . . and I really don’t want this to happen this time.”

Roy Spencer on Climate Confusion

Climatologist Roy Spencer, author of Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor, tells John J. Miller that while global warming is real, its causes are not known. “The truth is that we don’t have the right observations, in let’s say the last thirty or forty years, to know whether our most recent warming is natural or manmade.”

Neil DeMause on Field of Schemes

Neil deMause, co-author with Joanna Cagan of Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit, explains for John J. Miller the crime behind the title: “You’ve got sport stadiums/arenas going up all over this country, involving mostly public money, and . . . the return on all this money is all going to private hands. So you basically got taxpayers paying for buildings that are benefiting the owners of sports teams.”

Gordon Wood on The Purpose of the Past

Gordon S. Wood, author of The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History, confirms for John J. Miller that the gap between academic and popular history has indeed widened. Says Woods, “I think now the academics have surrendered the field of history to outsiders, who are very good: David McCullough, Thomas Fleming, Stacy Schiff, and Walter Isaacson.”

April DeConick on The Thirteenth Apostle

The Gospel of Judas, written in the mid-2nd century and discovered in the 1970s, was recently reconstructed into a full text that has been popularly translated to describe Judas as “a friend and soul mate” of Jesus. Not so, according to April D. Deconick, author of The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says. “I started to question whether Judas really was a good guy in this text,” says Deconick, and in the course of her own scholarly translation she found that Judas “was as evil as ever.”

Walter A. McDougall on Throes of Democracy

Walter McDougall, author of Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era — 1829–1877, tells John J. Miller what got him to add yet another Civil War volume to an inventory that is already quiet extensive: “Harper Collins wanted someone to write [about the war with a] moderate, and scholarly, and balanced approach that also took into account all of the latest literature that’s been done on American history. . . . I finally decided that there were so many interesting things I wanted to learn about American history, much less tell other people, that I finally agreed.”

Robert Bryce on Gusher of Lies

Robert Bryce, author of Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence, tells John J. Miller that the notion of U.S. energy independence is itself fantastical, and perilous, too. Says Bryce, “The idea that the U.S., the world’s single-biggest energy consumer, can be independent of the world’s single-biggest industry — the $5 trillion a year global energy sector — is ludicrous on its face.”

Grover Norquist on Leave Us Alone

Grover Norquist, author of Leave Us Alone: Getting the Government’s Hands Off Our Money, Our Guns, Our Lives, defines what he believes is the central vote-moving issue of the Reagan Republicans: They want to be left alone. He tells John J. Miller, “Some people want to be left alone with their income. Some people want to be left alone with their homes. Some people want to be left alone with their guns. . . . Some people want to be left alone with their faith and their family,” and on and on.

Thomas Hibbs on Arts of Darkness

Thomas Hibbs, author of Arts of Darkness: American Noir and the Quest for Redemption, explains for John J. Miller that he was drawn to “a strain of film noir classics, and [even] more contemporary [noir films], that focuses upon characters who engage in a kind of quest to recover something . . . the recovery in the characters of some sense of proper orientation; of not losing oneself.”

Brian Fagan on The Great Warming

Brian Fagan, author of The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, tells John J. Miller that the warming period of 800-1200 A.D. had its good and bad sides. In Europe, Fagan says, “There was more food. The growing seasons lengthened. You got people growing cereal crops in Norway . . . They were growing wine in central England.” However, “I was shocked to find that over enormous areas of the world, there were prolonged, even epochal, droughts, particularly in the American west and over much of the Pacific.”

Joseph Wheelan on Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade

Joseph Wheelan, author of Mr. Adams’s Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams’s Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress, describes for John J. Miller a very busy ex-president: Adams “battled slavery . . . fought the annexation of Texas . . . defended the right of women to participate in [the] political process … defended the African mutineers on the Amistad . . . and he almost single-handedly preserved James Smithson’s bequeath to America, which, as you know, became the Smithsonian Institution.”

Mark Moyar on Phoenix and the Birds of Prey

Mark Moyar, author Phoenix and the Birds of Prey: Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorism in Vietnam, debunks the myth that the Phoenix program was an assassination program, explaining that it was in fact an intelligence-collection effort. Where did the myth start? Moyar tells John J. Miller that it came “largely from the anti-war movement; [from] people who were looking to find things wrong with American involvement” in Vietnam.

Scott Baron on The Navy Cross

Scott Baron, co-author with James E. Wise of The Navy Cross: Extraordinary Heroism in Iraq, Afghanistan and Other Conflicts, tells John J. Miller that the heroes in this book show “valor not so much [in killing] the enemy, but [in coming] to the aid of their comrades . . . these guys are just not going to leave their buddies behind.”

Robert S. Bennett on In the Ring

Bob Bennett, author of In the Ring: The Trials of a Washington Lawyer, tells John J. Miller that he never intended to publish this memoir: “My daughter Peggy asked me in 2002 to start putting things down on paper because she thought I had an interesting life. And then … my other daughter Catherine, who works for the William Morris Agency, encouraged me to show it to one of their agents,” and the rest, as they say, is history. Miller notes the Forest Gump–like quality of the book; if it happened in the D.C. legal world, Bennett seems to have been there.

Donald Critchlow on The Conservative Ascendancy

Donald T. Critchlow, author of The Conservative Ascendancy, says ideas, organization, and leadership were crucial to the 20th century rise of the GOP Right. He tells John J. Miller that “the conservatives found leaders such as Barry Goldwater and, especially, Ronald Reagan who were able to articulate conservative ideas to the mass electorate. I should say . . . that the National Review was very important in articulating these ideas as well.”

Allen Guelzo on Lincoln and Douglas

Allen C. Guelzo, author of Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Defined America, explains for John J. Miller how the seven senatorial debates of his topic hung on the question of the extension of slavery, and thus “became more than just an Illinois event; the debates and debate text were picked up by the [national] newspapers … largely because people understood that this was a referendum on the policy solutions being offered by Stephen A. Douglas.”

David Anderegg on Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them

David Anderegg, author of Nerds: Who They Are and Why We Need More of Them, tells John J. Miller that the nerds in his study are the nerds of the stereotype: They are “people who are good at math and science; who are said to be sometimes a little awkward or socially unskilled; who are deeply absorbed in things that are sometimes boring to other people; who are technologically sophisticated.” Why do we need more of them? Anderegg has the answers.

Robert Ferrigno on Sins of the Assassin

Robert Ferrigno’s Sins of the Assassin is set in the year 2043, after New York and Washington have been nuked and much of the U.S. has become an Islamic republic. Ferrigno tells John J. Miller that the underlying theory of the novel “is that in a long war, it’s not the technology or weaponry that counts; it’s the will and conviction of the participants — who can last the longest.” But a polemic this is not. If Sins “doesn’t work as an edge-of-the-seat thriller,” Ferrigno says, “then I’ve failed as a writer.”

Bradley J. Birzer on Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson

Bradley J. Birzer, author of Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, explains his subject to John J. Miller: “Christopher Dawson was one of the most famous historians of the 20th century . . . Prior to Vatican II he was really regarded as the historian in the Catholic Church, and he was accepted by those outside of the Catholic Church. In America, he was best known in the 1950s because of his theories on the liberal arts.”

Thomas Sowell on Economic Facts and Fallacies

John J. Miller asks Thomas Sowell, author most recently of Economic Facts and Fallacies, if Americans are economically illiterate. Sowell replies, “Oh yes, good heavens, yes. There need to be at least ten more books like this because I’m too old to think about writing them all by myself.”

John Rateliff on The History of the Hobbit

John D. Rateliff, author of The History of the Hobbit, explains to John J. Miller that The Hobbit represents “the first time that Tolkien had written a whole book-length work of fiction; his earlier pieces were much shorter than The Hobbit. So it was a sort of ambitious undertaking for him. He got ideas, and then as the story went along, he would reject them. Originally, Bilbo would kill the dragon. . . . ”

David Levering Lewis on God’s Crucible

David Levering Lewis, author of God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215, describes for John J. Miller how a seven-century interplay of Christian and Muslim cultures in the Iberian Peninsula “was benign, productive, and profound.”

John Kistler on War Elephants

John M. Kistler is the author of War Elephants. That’s right, war elephants. Kistler tells John J. Miller, “I’ve always loved elephants, but I also love ancient history. And when I found out that elephants were used for thousands of years in armies around the world, I couldn’t help but wonder why no one had written a book about it. So I did.”

M. Stanton Evans on Blacklisted by History

M. Stanton Evans, author of Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies, says inaccuracies infect many of the books on this topic. He tells John J. Miller: “The basic inaccuracy is the suggestion in most of the books that McCarthy was making stuff up; that he was lying. . . . What we now know is that he wasn’t lying. . . . He was correct both as to the larger picture of communist penetration in the government and as to many specific cases [of this].”

Robert P. George on Embryo

Robert P. George, co-author with Christopher Tollefsen of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, describes for John J. Miller how “at all stages of our lives — from the embryonic through the fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages and into adulthood — we are human beings with dignity and the right to life. Our dignity does not come from having achieved a certain level of intellectual proficiency or even conscious awareness. … We have our dignity in virtue of the kind of entity we are: that is human being, a creature with a rational nature. And we became that when we came to be.”

Jonah Goldberg on Liberal Fascism

Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review Online and author of Liberal Fascism, tells John J. Miller that politics in this nation has been skewed around the false observation “that fascism is a thing of the right,” an idea that “is a vestigial remnant of essentially communist propaganda.”

David Frum on Comeback

David Frum, author of Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, tells John J. Miller that the Right has fallen victim to its own success: “Once you succeed people don’t want you to continue to do the same things over and over again because you can only solve their problems once. Yet we continue to offer the same policies for the problems of 2008 that we used to solve the problems of 1978. And that’s the core of our dilemma.”

George Weigel on Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism

George Weigel, author of Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism: A Call to Action, gets right to the point with John J. Miller: “What I’m trying to explore in this small book . . . is the frankly religious roots of jihadist ideology. It is certainly true that not all Muslims are jihadists. It is equally true that jihadism draws on what it understands to be Islamic religious authorizations for conducting a war against the West, a war that includes the use of mass violence against enemies. To deny that this is religiously grounded . . . is to deny reality.”

Otto Penzler on The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

Otto Penzler, editor of The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps, describes “pulps” for John J. Miller as “the primary source of entertainment for the vast number of Americans who read in the 1920s and 30s … They were called pulps because of the paper — cheap pulp paper — and the covers were garishly colored bright. Usually if they were crime pulps … there was usually a woman in jeopardy — you know, half-torn-off blouse and some evil looking character threatening her. And this appealed to a large number of readers — mostly male.”

Dean Koontz on The Darkest Evening of the Year

The prolific Dean Koontz, author most recently of The Darkest Evening of the Year, discusses with John J. Miller the importance of faith in his writing: “the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve realized that life has purpose and meaning and deep mystery. … The older I get the more wondrous I find life to be. … I couldn’t write about life if it didn’t have that spiritual element in it. … I’m not proselytizing; I’m just saying, this is the way to look at life.”

Jay Nordlinger on Here, There & Everywhere

National Review senior editor Jay Nordlinger discusses Here, There & Everywhere, a collection of his essays and articles which span the categories society, politics, people, the world, Cuba, China, golf, music, and more. He tells John J. Miller, “I wanted a sampler; I’ve written on a lot of topics . . . and I just wanted to gather some pieces I thought might last, that might be interesting to read years or months after they were written.”

Timothy Naftali on George H. W. Bush

Timothy Naftali, author of George H. W. Bush (The American Presidents Series), tells John J. Miller that although his presidency was a mixed, “without George H. W. Bush the Cold War would not have had its soft landing, and I believe [he] deserves most of the credit for building the coalition that made the invasion and liberation of Kuwait much easier.”

Shelby Steele on A Bound Man

Shelby Steele, author of A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, explains the “magic” to John J. Miller: “Obama’s what I call a bargainer. He’s someone who . . . says ‘I will never rub the shameful history of America’s racism in your face if you will not hold my race against me.’ And white Americans love that thought.”

Francis Fukuyama on Blindside

Francis Fukuyama, editor of Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild Cards in Global Politics, tells John J. Miller that the idea for this book came “as a result of observing the politics of the last couple of decades, where we have been blindsided by any number of events: the collapse of communism, September 11, Asian financial crisis.” But can these events be anticipated? Fukuyama and the authors of this collection believe (to varying degrees) that they can.

Christopher Coyne on After War

Christopher Coyne, author of After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy, tells John J. Miller that reconstruction is all about incentives: “what occupiers are attempting to do is establish a set of rules that create incentives for people to prefer a liberal democracy as compared to any of the available alternatives.”

Paul M. Sammon on Conan: The Phenomenon

John J. Miller asks Paul M. Sammon, author of Conan: The Phenomenon, just why Conan is still a phenomenon after so very long. Sammon responds that these stories, which date back to the 1930s, “featured vivid storytelling, compelling characters, exotic locales, horrible creatures, delectable damsels; and all of this was wrapped up in propulsive prose and a consistent worldview.”

George R.R. Martin on Dreamsongs

George R.R. Martin, author of Dreamsongs (Vols. I and II), has been called the “American Tolkien.” But he tells John J. Miller that science fiction, horror fiction, and fantasy were all his first loves, and that he his written in each of these genres. “It was all ‘weird stuff’ as my father liked to call it; imaginative literature as opposed to realistic literature — just different flavors thereof.”

Aida Donald on Lion in the White House

Aida Donald, author of Lion in the White House: A Life of Theodore Roosevelt, tells John J. Miller that TR probably “made as much of a difference being president as Lincoln did, who saved the union, and later FDR did, who . . . I think domestically certainly saved the union.”

Christopher Hull on Grassroots Rules

John J. Miller asks Christopher Hull to back up the subtitle of his book, Grassroots Rules: How the Iowa Caucus Helps Elect American Presidents. Is this really so? Hull argues that while the New Hampshire primary might appear to do this best, that “the field in Iowa tends to be much broader [than New Hampshire], and Iowa tends to weed out a lot of lower-tier candidates rather than selecting the winner.”

John Bolton on Surrender Is Not An Option

John Bolton, author of Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad, tells John J. Miller that the stakes relative to surrender right now are very high: “I hope the voters decide they want an adult in charge of foreign policy, and I hope my book, by describing what happened during the Bush administration, is a contribution to that objective.”

David Baldacci on Stone Cold

David Baldacci discusses his latest novel, Stone Cold, a sequel to his novel of 2006, The Collectors. As he tells John J. Miller, the Camel Club is back, along with its leader, Oliver Stone. A naming coincidence? Baldacci says, “No.” It’s a “tip of the hat” to the conspiracy-theorist extraordinaire.

Paul Kengor on The Judge

Paul Kengor, the author with Patricia Clark Doerner of The Judge: William P. Clark, Ronald Reagan’s Top Hand, informs John J. Miller that his subject is a true Californian, a rancher with deep roots in the West, whose life was transformed when he met Reagan in 1965 — the start of “a long process of [Clark] wanting to live at the ranch, wanting to work on the ranch, but Ronald Reagan constantly beckoning and calling him into different jobs.”

Edward Steers Jr. on Lincoln Legends

Edward Steers Jr., who sets the record straight in Lincoln Legends: Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated with Our Greatest President, tells John J. Miller that “the historical landscape is just littered with myths and hoaxes and misinformation, which become a part of our history.”

Dinesh D'Souza on What's So Great About Christianity

Dinesh D’Souza, author of What’s So Great About Christianity, explains to John J. Miller that “Christianity has been responsible for what we call Western Civilization. Many of the core institutions and values of America and the West were shaped by Christianity — even the values that secular people cherish.”

Lynne Cheney on Blue Skies, No Fences

Lynne Cheney, author of Blue Skies, No Fences, tells John J. Miller that the title of her memoir suggests “a time of remarkable optimism and buoyancy in our national life [the period immediately after WWII], and I think that was perhaps even more the case in Wyoming — growing up under blue skies that stretched from horizon to horizon; growing up in a situation where the possibilities of life seemed unlimited.”

Melvyn Leffler on For the Soul of Mankind

Melvyn Leffler, author of For the Soul of Mankind, says it was Reagan’s commitment to both strength and engagement that was critical to the peaceful end of the Cold War. “And what is not terribly well known in the literature,” he tells John J. Miller, “is the degree to which Reagan reached out to Soviet leaders long before Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union.”

Professor George McKenna on The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism

Professor George McKenna, author of The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism, tells John J. Miller that Puritan patriotism is “a social ideology, or more broadly a way of looking at the world, that sees America as having a divinely ordained mission in the world.”

Jagdish Bhagwati on In Defense of Globalization

John J. Miller asks Jagdish Bhagwati, author of In Defense of Globalization, why globalization even needs a defense. The answer: Large numbers of people believe “globalization is actually setting us back in terms of our social agendas, like women’s issues, democracy, [and] mainstream culture,” while others say it drains us economically, in terms of workers wages, total GDP, and the general welfare.

Jon Lauck on Daschle vs. Thune

Jon Lauck, author of Daschle vs. Thune: Anatomy of a High-Plains Senate Race, tells John J. Miller that the “experience in South Dakota should be a model for Republicans to use in other states in terms of scrutinizing the media.”

Steve Laffey on Primary Mistake

Why did Steve Laffey write Primary Mistake: How the Washington Republican Establishment Lost Everything in 2006 (and Sabotaged My Senatorial Campaign)? As he tells John J. Miller, “I thought my race was a good metaphor for all that had gone wrong in the leadership of the national Republican party.”

Jay Winik on The Great Upheaval

Author Jay Winik tells John J. Miller that “The Great Upheaval refers to the decade of the 1790s which is arguably not only the most important decade in America’s history, but in the world’s history. It gave birth to the modern world . . . ”

Congressman Steve Israel on Charge: History’s Greatest Military Speeches

Congressman Steve Israel, editor of Charge: History’s Greatest Military Speeches, tells John J. Miller that willpower equals firepower: “It’s not what we fight with, it’s why we fight. And I decided to kinda sweep through history and find moments where the power of the spoken word helped turn the tide of history, and the result was this book.”

Laura Ingraham talks Power to the People

Discussing her latest book with host John J. Miller, Laura Ingraham explains: “When I talk about ‘power to the people,’ it’s the people who are too busy working to show up at these protests and who really want some guidance on how to navigate through this strange cultural and political world we are living in today.”

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