http://radio.nationalreview.com/betweenthecovers/ en-us Copyright 2012 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 "[I wanted to] show the reader what it's like to live this lonely life of a covert operative...And when something goes wrong...to show how the bureaucrats react, how the finger-pointing starts, and how quickly people will bail on that individual who's out there risking his life," says Vince Flynn, author of Kill Shot. Tue, 07 Feb 2012 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "[Sibling strife] tends to have its roots in favoritism by parents...This is the source of a lot of it. And when parents favor one child and really don't think about the other...it really marks people for life," says Jeanne Safer, author of Cain's Legacy: Liberating Siblings from a Lifetime of Rage, Shame, Secrecy, and Regret. Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "If you have a large chunk of the American population...who no longer have the cultural prerequisites for participating in a free society...it's very hard to maintain a republic as America has historically wanted itself to be," says Charles Murray, author of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Tue, 31 Jan 2012 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "[I]n the case of Europe you've got a lot of children of [Muslim] labor immigrants who come over....working factory jobs...The laborers would...import their own community....Those communities were often very isolated, and that goes back to Europe's...problem with immigration," says Robert Leiken, author of Europe's Angry Muslims. Tue, 24 Jan 2012 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "A lot of employers are going to say. '...[O]ur employees can get their insurance in these state-based exchanges.' This completely goes against what president Obama said over and over again: if you like your health insurance, and you like your doctor, nothing will change. Things are changing, and [Americans] are not liking it," says Sally Pipes, author of The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle Obamacare. Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "[Americans are] sort of pretending like the war on terror is over.... and everything is hunky-dory, but in fact, what we don't realize is the reason we've gone untouched the last several years is not because we're security geniuses but because we've been lucky as hell. We've managed to kill most of their smart guys, and now we're dealing with their dumb guys, but the one guy we haven't dealt with is the lucky guy," says Stephen Hunter, author of Soft Target. Tue, 10 Jan 2012 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "I live five blocks from Ground Zero and [9/11] shook me in a lot of ways...[I]t made me reassess what I wanted  to do with my career...Life is so fragile, it can be taken from us so swiftly by fanatics -- how should it be spent while we have it? I thought there are stories I could tell as a novelist that go beyond mere entertainment, and those two things fed very much into the stream that led to Narrows Gate," says Jim Fusilli. Tue, 03 Jan 2012 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "[Chesterton] was politically a Liberal, although in the end he had abandoned the Liberal Party precisely because of  it had become so illiberal, but he is is what we would today call a 'conservative' with small 'c'. Great protector of the family, the ordinary individual...and, of course, a great apologist for Christianity," says Ian Ker, author of G. K. Chesterton: A Biography. Tue, 27 Dec 2011 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "I was just intrigued by something I had read in the press about 15 years ago....Astronomers...discovered that the cores of the Earth...much faster than the rest of the planet...Where is all this energy being stored? And if it's being stored at the center of the Earth, is there a possibility that it could be released to the perimeter all at once?" says Charles McCarry, author of Ark. Tue, 20 Dec 2011 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "[Here] a good Catholic father is going out to find his son, who has really chosen a dark path for himself...In that sense, he's like the good shepard: he's going out to seek the lost. In another sense, he's the father of the prodigal son, because his heart remains open...It's really a test of...his own commitment to give his life for his own children. In other words, the essence of what a father is," says Michael O'Brien, author of The Father's Tale.  Tue, 13 Dec 2011 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "It's very hard to get our arms around the idea that in the nineteen thirties, Western civilization hung in the balance, and these two women were willing to sacrifice anything, anybody to speak truth to power. And, as a matter of fact, they could and they did," says Susan Hertog, author of Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson: New Women in Search of Love and Power. Thu, 08 Dec 2011 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "Part of the reason why these blue collar intellectuals...are so effective at speaking to a mass audience is because they come from the masses. A guy like Milton Friedman, who comes from a real working class background, and has had to work, I think that's going to inform his economics. He's not going to have some theory that's up in the ether," says Daniel J. Flynn, author of Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America. Tue, 06 Dec 2011 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "[A] private property system...will do better than any other system to meet the requisites of the rule of law because of the way in which it manages to eliminate political discretion, which I think turns out, in the end, to be the enemy of all stable social institutions," says Richard A. Epstein, author of Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law. Tue, 29 Nov 2011 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "[The Salman Rushdie fatwa] turned out to be the shot across the bow, the first time...that we saw the Muslim world...demand that the West start applying Islamic law on blasphemy to Western citizens within its borders...This was the first real, concerted effort to get the West to adopt these blasphemy laws," says Nina Shea, co-author of Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide. Tue, 22 Nov 2011 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "I knew Kennan well enough...I would tug his sleeve and I would say 'Look what's happening [with Reagan's foreign policy]. Finally, very late in life, after Reagan had left office, I got him grudingly to admit that Reagan had made a significant contribution to the end of the Cold War. But, boy, was it grudging," say John Lewis Gaddis, author of George F. Kennan: An American Life. Tue, 15 Nov 2011 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller [Barack Obama] is the first president you've had whom we [British] haven't felt we have a kind of natural understanding...This is the first time, as a Brit, that I look at the White House and I think, actually, you know, we could be anybody...Obama downgraded us to "one of our allies"...right out there with Honduras," says Daniel Hannan, author of The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America. Tue, 08 Nov 2011 04:00:00 -0500 John J. Miller "[Conservatism] is a stool that sits on three legs...neoconservatism, libertarianism, and social, or religious, conservatism. It wasn't that way in the early 1950s and earlier. It became that because Buckley was all three things...he really refashioned conservatism in his image," says Carl T. Bogus, author of Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism. Tue, 01 Nov 2011 04:00:00 -0400 John J. Miller "[Edinburgh] at that point was just coming to the tail-end...of it's greatest period in a lot of ways...It was one of the great centers in all of Europe for advancement in all sorts of fields -- science and philosophy and the arts and agriculture...but it was underpinned by this very dark, very gruesome sort of underbelly," says Brian Ruckley, author of The Edinburgh Dead. Mon, 31 Oct 2011 04:00:00 -0400 John J. Miller "The interesting thing to me is how still, particularly in America, the world is sharply divided between those who believe that through fiscal policy...you can interfere with an economy in order to get it out of the doldrums, and...the Tea Party movement...who came to their own view instinctively that this was a very bad thing to do," says Nicholas Wapshott, author of  Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics. Tue, 25 Oct 2011 04:00:00 -0400 John J. Miller "Hemingway himself never wanted his letters to be published and in 1958 he wrote out a note to his executors to that effect. But there was such intense interest and it was almost twenty years before his widow...decided to override [his] wishes and...authorize the selected letters, and then twenty more years after that when it was decided to have the complete letters," says Sandra Spanier, co-editor of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 1, 1907-1922.  Thu, 20 Oct 2011 04:00:00 -0400