Wednesday, May 20, 2015
From Fear to Freedom By Gary Sumner
From Fear
to Freedom
WWII -
Never Forget - Never Again
By
Gary Sumner
"Compelling story, impeccable
research, excellent writing."
--Brian Sussman, KSFO
Radio Talk Show Host & bestselling author
In Gary Sumner's new book, From Fear to Freedom: WWII - Never Forget - Never
Again, he tells the story of a prisoner who tried to escape one of
Hitler's prison camps but disappeared. In both the Pacific and European theaters
in WWII, prisoners who tried to escape were sentenced to severe punishment -
even death. In From Fear to Freedom, his heroine, Nikki Brown, an
investigative reporter, went on a quest to Germany to find out what had happened
to a POW from WWII who her grandfather had told her about.
As history tells us, Adolf Hitler ruled with an iron
fist during his horrifying reign. When the war was coming to an end, the Nazis
in more than one case put POWs in barns and then set them on fire. The Nazis
wanted no witnesses to testify against them. The dead, however, spoke loud and
clear of the Nazis' barbarism.
Of the hundreds of Hitler's prison camps, Commandant
Schmidt was in charge of the camp where a young Army Air Corps pilot, Captain
James Hansen, was held. The Commandant had countless rules, each with its own
punishment. Escape attempts carried the death penalty. Captain Hansen
nevertheless tried to escape, and like the others before him, he failed. When he
was marched back into camp, the Commandant greeted him with: "Welcome back,
Captain. Care to take a walk?" The commandant gave those condemned to death a
choice: the firing squad or an unknown fate, deep in the woods. When they came
to a stop, Hansen realized the other choice was what he feared the most.
Nikki's grandfather Vince was also a POW in Commandant
Schmidt's camp, where he witnessed Captain Hansen being led into the woods. The
Captain was the only one who never returned to face the firing squad. Whatever
was in the woods, Hansen chose the unknown. What was in the woods? Only
Commandant Schmidt knew and he kept that a secret.
Many years later, Nikki's grandfather Vince shared his
war experiences with his young granddaughter, gradually revealing more and more
as she grew old enough to handle the truth and understand the valuable life
lessons that history teaches. When she finally learns the story of the
mysterious young Army Air Corp pilot, she sets out on a journey to find out who
he was and his fate. It is a journey that led her across the United States to
Germany where she discovered the terrifying power of fear, the inspirational
power of faith, and the he healing power of forgiveness.
About the Author:
Gary Sumner comes from a long line of patriots starting in the 1600s.
The most famous was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Senator Sumner was
nearly beaten to death for his stance against slavery. He and Lincoln, were such
good friends, when the President was shot, the Senator was allowed to stay with
him during the night while he lay dying. Gary has dedicated more than thirty
years of research on the courageous lives of dedicated Americans and pivotal
events of our country's history. Gary has uniquely woven history with a twist of
a mystery into an intriguing book, leaving the reader wanting to learn
more.
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Life Under Compulsion By Anthony Esolen
How to Raise Kids Who
Can Resist Today's
Life Under Compulsion
Life Under Compulsion
New Book Shows Parents
How to Give Children Solid Foundations in an Increasingly Hostile
Culture
"Esolen signals with this
book his presence in the top rank of authors of cultural criticism."
--The American Spectator
How do you raise a child who can
sit with a good book and read? ...who doesn't have to buy the latest
gadget? ...who is not bound to the instant urge, wherever it may be found?
Thoughtful parents everywhere ask these kinds of questions but struggle to find
answers. But now the acclaimed author Anthony Esolen shows the way in his new
book, the eagerly anticipated follow-up to his influential Ten Ways to
Destroy the Imagination of Your Child.
In Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the
Humanity of Your Child, Esolen targets how contemporary
life harms our children--Common Core, smartphones, video games, sex ed, travel
teams, Twitter, politicians, popular music, advertising, a world with more
genders than there are flavors of ice cream, and much more. We always talk about
"freedom," all the while we're raising children who are slaves to
compulsions.
Esolen reveals ten ways to
destroy the humanity of your child:
- Keep children kenneled up in a school where they learn to be content with "life under compulsion"
- Ignore the true meaning of education and reduce it all to training children in meaningless "skills"
- Turn childhood into nothing more than preparation for a dull, limited adulthood focused only on work
- Reduce language to Orwellian doublespeak that keeps them from thinking
- In the name of "freedom" and "choice," celebrate lusts, not love
- Insist that we should not judge anyone--but then judge harshly anyone deemed "intolerant"
- Ignore history except to justify your favored cause as "inevitable"
- Sever ties to home and put as much distance as possible between parents and children
- Teach kids to be comfortable in the mob--to look, think, and act like everyone else
- Deny the transcendent
Life
Under Compulsion is an indispensable guide for any parent who wants
to help a child break free from the shackles and enjoy a truly free and full
life. It restores lost wisdom about education, parenting, literature, music,
art, philosophy, and leisure. Esolen draws on great thinkers of the Western
tradition, from Aristotle and Cicero to Dante and Shakespeare to John Adams and
C.S. Lewis - to remind us what human freedom truly means: truth, beauty,
goodness, love, faith, and virtue.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anthony Esolen is the author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination
of Your Child, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western
Civilization. He is also the translator and editor of the celebrated
three-volume Modern Library edition of Dante's Divine Comedy. He is a
professor of English at Providence College and a senior editor of
Touchstone magazine.
Thursday, May 7, 2015
By the People By Charles Murray
Halt the Growth of Oppressive
Government
BY THE PEOPLE
Rebuilding Liberty without
Permission
By Charles
Murray
"A
road map to recapture true American exceptionalism. With passion, brilliance,
and a keen sense of the radical essence of what America means, Charles Murray
dismisses what passes for political debate today and offers an audacious plan to
restore the liberty our founders bequeathed to us."
--Edward Crane, President Emeritus, Cato Institute
American
liberty is under assault. Whether we are trying to
run a business, practice a vocation, raise our families, cooperate with our
neighbors, or follow our religious beliefs, we run afoul of the government--not
because we are doing anything wrong but because the government has decided it
knows better. From The New York Times bestselling author of
Coming Apart comes a provocative manifesto on how to turn back the
assault on American liberties and rebuild our freedom from the ground up.
In BY THE PEOPLE:
Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, Charles Murray illustrates how the
federal government has unilaterally decided that it can and should tell us how
to live our lives. If we object, they threaten, "Fight this, and we'll ruin
you." Free-market economists, conservative intellectuals, Tea Party evangelists,
and libertarians alike extol the virtues of limited government. Never have so
many coalesced behind a set of ideas so widely accepted and been so staggeringly
far from political reality.
Political processes, meant to check federal power, have
been broken. The Constitution has been neutered by the courts and the
legislative process has become systemically corrupt, no matter which party is in
control. Meanwhile, the federal government has grown at a dizzying rate in the
last half-century, culminating in the current leviathan where federal spending
accounts for 24% of GDP, the government lists 20 million employees, and federal
funding comprises a quarter of all state and local revenues. Despite a
sympathetic Supreme Court majority and a Republican Congress, the American ideal
of limited government is on life support.
What has become clear to all supporters of the least
government necessary to support individual liberty and free speech is this: the
people must wrest back control of their own destinies or the American
Project will fail. Amid these signs of a decayed civil liberties system,
Murray has identified some good news from beyond the Beltway:
-
Technology is siphoning power from sclerotic government agencies and putting it in the hands of individuals and communities.
-
The re-diversification of American culture is making local freedom attractive to liberals as well as conservatives.
-
People across the political spectrum are increasingly alienated from a regulatory state that nakedly serves its own interests rather than those of ordinary Americans.
With
these strong signs of a shift in American socio-politics, Murray reveals an even
more shocking truth that he believes Americans are ready to exploit. Despite its
vast size, the federal government operates under a fatal assumption. For
all its legal power and claims to authority, its daily survival depends on our
voluntary assent to its laws.
Civil disobedience backstopped by legal defense funds can make
largeportions of the 180,000-page Federal Code of Regulations
unenforceable through a targeted program that identifies regulations that
arbitrarily and capriciously tell us what to do. Americans have it within their
power to make the federal government an insurable hazard, like hurricanes and
floods, leaving us once again free to live our lives as we see fit.
BY
THE PEOPLE does not require that only libertarians and
conservatives participate--Murray recognizes the need for varied perspectives in
reshaping the nation. The book's hopeful message is that rebuilding our
traditional freedoms does not require electing a right-thinking Congress or
president, nor does it require five right-thinking justices on the Supreme
Court. It can be done by "We the people," using America's unique civil society
to put government back in its proper box.
About the Author: Charles
Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He came
to national attention first in 1984 with Losing Ground and most recently
in 2012 with Coming Apart.
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