http://radio.nationalreview.com/betweenthecovers/ en-us Copyright 2008 National Review Online National Review's John J. Miller talks books with influential conservative authors. John J. Miller National Review's John J. Miller talks books with influential conservative authors. John J. Miller betweenthecovers@nationalreview.com John J. Miller William "Chip" Mellor, co-author with Robert Levy of The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom, tells John J. Miller that the twelve cases chosen "each play a critical and tragic roll in effectively amending the Constitution, to take away what the Founding Fathers intended." Tue 13 May, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Thu 8 May, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Tue 6 May, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Thu 1 May, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Tue 29 Apr, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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?" Thu 24 Apr, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Tue 22 Apr, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Thu 17 Apr, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Tue 15 Apr, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Thu 10 Apr, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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. Tue 8 Apr, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Thu 3 Apr, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Tue 1 Apr, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Thu 27 Mar, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Tue 25 Mar, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Thu 20 Mar, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Tue 18 Mar, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Thu 13 Mar, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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. Tue 11 Mar, 2008 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller 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." Thu 6 Mar, 2008 09:00:00 EST