http://radio.nationalreview.com/betweenthecovers/ en-us Copyright 2009 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 "What's really fascinating about this period...is that there's so much uncertainty. There were fears that Virginians would [cross] the...Potomac River and invade...[T]here were rumors of assassination plots, of conspiracies...So it was a very harrowing moment in the city's existence and in the Lincoln administration...There were legitmate concerns about the President's security," says John J. Miller, author of The First Assassin. Thu, 19 Nov, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "I think that conservatism is very much alive but it is facing some challenges, particularly in the long term...[I] certainly do not agree with the facile notion, the dismissive notion, really, that because conservatives lost an election, that they were somehow permanently marginalized," says George H. Nash, author of Reappraising the Right: The Past & Future of American Conservatism. Tue, 17 Nov, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "The larger matter is whether or not email is killing writing, period, let alone killing letter writing. We write with such haste now, such stylelessness, such overstatement. One of the things that most distresses me about writing on the web...is the premium on overstatement and shrillness," says Thomas Mallon, author of Yours Ever: People and Their Letters. Tue, 10 Nov, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "Most of these [rules of English] probably describe the speech habits of of some class of people, once upon a time. It will tend to be the upper class of people a generation or two ago. And that's what many people decided proper English is," says Jack Lynch author of The Lexicographer's Dilemma: The Evolution of 'Proper' English, from Shakespeare to South Park. Tue, 3 Nov, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "Look, most teenage boys now hang out at the mall, they're a bunch of losers...with their baseball caps on backward. [The vampire hero of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series] is cool. The girls are gonna love him. Why wouldn't they? He just has this one little quirky thing which is that he happens to be a vampire," says Otto Penzler, author of The Vampire Archives: The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published. Fri, 30 Oct, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "Opportunisitc elites are not going to take your side if they think you are losing militarily...the idea that you can win [Afghans] over without the military aspect I think is a delusion we've got to avoid," says Mark Moyar, author of A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq. Mon, 26 Oct, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "We run our companies...like Stalinist organizations. We control the flow of information, we control the lines of authority, we constrain what our employees can do and the result is that we are missing out on the dispersed knowledge of all of the people that work for us," says Brian M. Carney, author of Freedom, Inc.: Free Your Employees and Let Them Lead Your Business to Higher Productivity, Profits, and Growth. Tue, 20 Oct, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "One thing I would have never believed is that [eight years after 9/11, we] name Dianne Feinstein as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, one of the most liberal, anti-intelligence senators in the history of the United States Senate. And now we are right back to where we were before 9/11," says Vince Flynn, author of Pursuit of Honor. Tue, 13 Oct, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "I think that the Americans who went from the Revolution to the early 19th century went through a transformation in their culture and their way of life that was more significant and more extraordinary than the one we've gone through [in the last 50 years]," says Gordon Wood, author of Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815. Tue, 6 Oct, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "We're gonna have an orgy of prosecutions...[T]he government, which...is going to take no responsibility whatsoever for facilitating any of the disasters that attended the economy...they're going to be blaming individual businessmen, for one type of quote fraud, or another," says Harvey Silverglate, author of Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. Tue, 29 Sep, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "[Nitze] was a hawk. He was always saying, 'We should build more wepaons'...but his biggest enemies were often on the right. His biggest enemy in the eighties was probably Richard Perle...Kennan is even less of a liberal than Nitze was a conservative...but socially Kennan was a serious conservative," says Nicholas Thompson, author of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War. Tue, 22 Sep, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "I think the education schools...since the early part of  the 20th century have uniformly worked against a solid curriculum in the early grades," says E. D. Hirsch, Jr., author of The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools. Tue, 15 Sep, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "Conservative Christians have done everything humanly possible to persuade Jews that they are friends. They are probably...more pro-Israel even than the Jewish community and yet it's proved difficult or almost impossible to convince many American Jews that these Christians...have now become their biggest friends," says the author of Why Are Jews Liberals?, Norman Podhoretz. Tue, 8 Sep, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "I would say that in the history of America, the man least equipped to be President of this great nation is Barack Obama...he's very much like a 21 year old college student," says Martin L. Gross, author of National Suicide: How Washington Is Destroying the American Dream from A to Z. Tue, 1 Sep, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "Reagan  really was an American conservative, which is distinct in important ways from a European or Burkean conservatism. He really embraced the dynamism of the country, which, from certain conservative points of view, has always been problematic," says Steven F. Hayward, author of  The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980-1989. Tue, 25 Aug, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "It's clear that we're looking at the dramatic expansion of Federal Reserve power and of the tax code, and so that we'll probably have to endure another supply-side revolution," says Brian Domitrovic, author of Econoclasts: The Rebels Who Sparked the Supply-Side Revolution and Restored American Prosperity. Tue, 18 Aug, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "The detriment for a nation like ours is in a long war -- and this is going to be a long war-- in a generations long war, it's not the power of the weapons, it's the power of the faithful that matters, and who loses will first," says Robert Ferrigno, author of Heart of the Assassin. Tue, 11 Aug, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "Wealth is created in a market economy, it's not just a static amount that gets divided up and transferred.  Once I understood that, frankly from reading people like Thomas Sowell, I realized that socialism rests on a series of really basic economic fallacies," says Jay Richards, author of Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem. Tue, 4 Aug, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "There is a sort of sad sack, hang dog attitude towards European culture, a kind of loss of confidence. You can say it's understandable, but it's there...I would say the Europeans are totally to blame for what problems they have," says Christopher Caldwell, author of Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West. Tue, 28 Jul, 2009 09:00:00 EST John J. Miller "[Evangelicals] have embraced Bono not because he necessarily speaks their language about redemption and salvation, but because he has been able to come in and challenge the American church to be the church, to do the work that it's called to," says Greg Garrett, author of We Get to Carry Each Other: The Gospel according to U2. Thu, 23 Jul, 2009 09:00:00 EST