Stealing the West s Cultural Heritage, CLICK HERE.
Foreword It has become fashionable of late among the leftist elites to accuse the West of pilfering its treasures both physical resources and intellectual innovations from native and minority cultures. The clear moral lesson, we are to understand, is that there is nothing particularly noteworthy or exceptional about Western culture and by extension about America. Instead, we should feel deep shame that our ancestors expropriated the physical and intellectual capital of the peoples we conquered. In this timely and illuminating new pamphlet, “Stealing the West’s Cultural Heritage,” Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer addresses this lie head-on, first debunking the work of “Middle East expert” Diana Darke who claims in a recent book that some of Christian Europe’s most exquisite structures including Notre-Dame and St. Mark’s were inspired by Islamic mosques. Spencer eviscerates Darke’s claims, showing how
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Shabtai Shavit worked for the Mossad, Israel’s vaunted external intelligence agency, for 32 years. From 1973 to 1976, he was head of operations. And in the homestretch of his career, from 1989 to 1996, he was its director.
Appointed to his post by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, he was the first director of the Mossad who had not fought in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence.
New Yorker writer Bill Barich is best known for his horse racing book
Laughing in the Hills, published 25 years ago now. For his latest book, Barich has again written about horses, but this time added Ireland as a topic as well in
A Fine Place to Daydream: Racehorses, Romance and the Irish. Barich fell in love, moved to Dublin and took quickly to the Irish love for the race track. As Barich explores Ireland, he also meets top trainers, horses and jockeys.
A Fine Place to Daydream builds up to the English Cheltenham Festival in March when Irish and British patriotism do battle on the track. Along the way, Barich paints a humorous picture of Ireland that will appeal to racing fans and non-fans alike. ($23 / 228 pages / Knopf)
Adams County was home to at least two historians of national eminence. One was Allan Nevins of Columbia University. Nevins was a Camp Point, Ill., native who twice won the Pulitzer Prize and wrote a multi-volume history of the Civil War and its prologue.
The other was Marshall Smelser, a graduate of Quincy High School and Quincy College. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard under the direction of Samuel Eliot Morison, a Pulitzer Prize historian of maritime and American history. Smelser taught at the University of Notre Dame for almost three decades.
Smelser belonged to the Quincy family known for its photography studio. His parents, Albert and Gladys Alma Smelser, established their business in 1923 in the 600 block of Hampshire Street where, The Herald-Whig reported on April 4, 1954, it was still operated by his brother, Howard. Marshall married Anna Padberg of Quincy and was an assistant field director for the Red Cross during World War II. By 1947, The Herald-Whig reported on Sept. 21
Solzhenitsyn, Russia, and America Print this article
When I was stationed in Germany years ago, some of my fellow soldiers would get bored and pick fights with young Russian men in the local clubs. The German locals never seemed to have the heart to duke it out, and the Russians were not only eager and willing to trade blows, they were an even match. On particularly debauched nights, the club floor would suddenly transition from dancing to punching, a roiling frenzy in the loud dark of Schweinfurt’s Rockfabrik club. What stood out the most to me in those moments wasn’t the violence itself young soldiers abroad get restless, after all but how similar the Americans and Russians appeared. Both “sides” were tattooed and weighted down by jewelry, with close-cropped hair and tank tops. Sometimes, you couldn’t tell who was who. In those moments, I couldn’t help but feel a resonance between our two cultures, deeply buried, perhaps, and difficult to articulate, but there al