Applebaum’s Gulag
by Sean Hackbarth
There have been some really interesting new books to come out already this year. There’s Bernard Lewis’ The Crisis of Islam which is living up to my expectations. There’s Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom, which could be the most thought provoking foreign policy book since The End of History. Yale University Press has come out with an edition of John Stewart Mill’s On Liberty. Mill’s essay along with the companion commentary finally got me to read the libertarian classic. Now out is Gulag: A History, a book David Frum calls “the first book in English to compile the whole mass of knowledge about the Soviet prison-camp system.” All these books, and we’re not even to May.
“A Must-Read” [via Power Line]
There’s another new book that you should add to your list: Noah Feldman’s “After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy.” It offers a very convincing argument that democracy can thrive within Islamic societies.