Below The Beltway

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln is, on it’s face, an ambitious undertaking.
Not only does it tell the story of America’s 16th President, it also tells the story of the men who were his main political rivals for the Republican nomination in 1860 and later became the core of […]

Remembering the great Arthur C. Clarke:
Arthur C. Clarke, a writer whose seamless blend of scientific expertise and poetic imagination helped usher in the space age, died early Wednesday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was 90.
Rohan de Silva, an aide to Mr. Clarke, said the author died after experiencing breathing […]

The last of the great triumvirate of Science Fiction authors has died:
Science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke has died aged 90, it was confirmed tonight.
The visionary author was most famous for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, and for his collaboration with director Stanley Kubrick on the film of the same name.
Clarke was the last […]

For the most part, the biographies that have been written about Ronald Reagan in the years since he left office have suffered from one of two defects. Either they have been overly critical and dismissive and failed to grasp the truly revolutionary aspects of the Reagan Presidency, or they have been overly worshipful, something more […]

The Election of 1920 is unique in American history. Never before had so many men who either had been, or one day would be, President vied for the office at the same time.
But for an untimely death, Theodore Roosevelt would have been the presumptive Republican nominee and, given the political conditions of the time, probably […]

Recent American history has seen some fairly contested, highly partisan Presidential elections. In 1992 we saw the most successful run by a third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1916 1912. In 1996, we saw Republicans fresh off an historic take-over of Congress convinced they could defeat a sitting President. In 2004, the race between Bush […]

You don’t have to love Shakespeare’s plays to find Clare Asquith’s Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs And Coded Politics of William Shakespeare both interesting and enjoyable. In fact, it almost helps if you come to the book with little more than a passing familiarity with the plays themselves and, certainly, no familiarity with the countless books, […]

Back in October, I reviewed Justice Clarence Thomas’s autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son and said the following:
Clarence Thomas’s story is one that should be an inspiration to all Americans regardless of race, religion, or gender. Here is a man, a black man, who was born in the poorest part of Georgia in an era when Jim […]

Senator Ted Kennedy is getting a huge amount of money to write his memoirs.

You might think that a biography of Albert Einstein would be a tough read; full of discussions of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Unified Field Theories that, for the average person at least, would be incomprehensible. In Einstein: His Life And Universe, though, Walter Isaacson takes the life, ideas, and career of one of the most […]