On an elevator in the lobby of the Gaylord National Convention Center during CPAC, I spotted a smiling girl wearing a T-shirt that indicated she was a volunteer for the event. She was carrying a stack of books, and when I commented about this, she explained that she had received them as freebies, distributed in the volunteer room. “Would you like one?” And how could I possibly refuse?
This explains how I got a copy of the 2010 essay collection, Proud to Be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generation, edited and with an introduction by Jonah Goldberg. It includes 22 essays by young writers, some of whom you likely already know — e.g., Bretbart.com editor Joel Pollak and documentary filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney — and others you probably don’t. Nathan Harden is author of God & Sex at Yale and editor of The College Fix, and his essay in Proud to Be Right is entitled “The Girls I Knew at Yale”:
Sex in college exists apart from and, occasionally, as a prelude to love. Many girls engage in sex with the hope that it will lead to “something more.”
At Yale, a guy shows up at a party and meets a new girl. They have a few drinks, nod to the music, ask each other, “What’s your major?” and “What college are you from?” (At Yale, dorms are referred to as “residential colleges.”) Maybe they dance. At this point, if the two are getting along, it is not considered unreasonable for the guy to expect oral sex at the end of the night.
Men, I would argue, do not benefit spiritually or morally from such a promiscuous culture. But women receive the worst end of the bargain. . . .
At Yale, caring about love is a weakness. If a girl resists, doesn’t get with the program and get into bed, another girl will take her place. Expectations are so slanted toward casual hook-ups that any girl who holds out for a meaningful relationship is in danger of being left out altogether. It’s either “friends with benefits” or another Friday night spent alone. As a result, many girls go further and faster sexually than they really want to go. . . .
You can buy the book and read the whole thing, but you see the point: This is not “empowerment.” This is not “autonomy.”
This is desperation, loneliness and peer pressure. And rather than address the underlying personal problems involved in what Nathan Harden calls the “promiscuous culture” on campus, the intellectual class instead offers lectures against “slut-shaming.”
But sluts should be ashamed, because their promiscuity doesn’t only harm them, it also harms other girls by encouraging boys’ expectations of casual drunken hook-ups and “friends with benefits.”
In such a toxic environment, it’s hard to blame college girls who become LUGs (Lesbians Until Graduation) simply to avoid creeps who expect a blow job from any girl who talks to them at a party.
BTW, the girl on the elevator who gave me the book wasn’t from Yale. She was a nice girl from Oregon. Nice girls don’t go to Yale.
Or Cornell, for that matter. And certainly not Duke.
. For those of you that don’t recognize the name, Dr. Knuth is one of the foremost computer scientists; he holds a doctorate in mathematics, is a professor emeritus at Stanford, and has a list of accomplishments as long as both my arms. He is not, by any sensible definition of the word, stupid; rather, the man is a genius, and a humble, humorous one at that. He is also a Wisconsin Synod Lutheran, which came as a shock to me since the Wisconsin Synod Lutherans are more than slightly hardcore, and precisely the sort of people the atheists tend to mock as being dumb Christer sheeples.
) sent me a review copy of his fantasy novel 
, a nice coming-of-age story involving a young magician’s apprentice, the best thief in the local guild, and the epic theft that brings them together only to realize they’ve opened an ENORMOUS can of worms. Not just your average derivative elf & dwarf crap; this is an original combination of picaresque tale and Bildungsroman. Worth your time.
, recommended by Schlock Mercenary creator Howard Tayler 
. Mr. Tayler is right – McClellan’s writing chops are excellent, and the story is compelling. Also, it’s only $1.99 on the Kindle.
, and there’s a reason 
is currently #2 on the Kindle War & Military Fiction list. Our hero Andrew Grayson is back, having moved from shipboard neural net manager to forward observer for the drop teams the North American Confederacy is sending to hit back at the implacable Lankies – the aliens that have so far wrecked every human colony outside the “30 line” without a still-divided humanity being able to even slow them up. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Grayson finds out during an all-too-brief shore leave on Earth that things dirtside are exponentially worse than they were when he enlisted, with many cities so close to rebellion as makes no difference. The real meat of the novel begins when Grayson’s leave ends and he finds himself assigned to a task force constituted mostly of old starships seconds away from the scrapyard and staffed with a brigade of mutinous Homeland Defense (was Territorial Army) troops. Some of the Amazon reviewers think this may be a better and tighter novel than 
, which I’d been agonizing over buying when a friend dropped the ARC in my lap. This is, of course, the sequel to 
, which shows you the end of the world up close and personal as a virulent genengineered flu converts most of humanity into highly-infectious zombies. Among the few survivors are Steven Smith, a/k/a “Commodore Wolf”, who sets out with his family to rescue as many people from boats and ships adrift in the Atlantic as they can, rebuilding civilization one life raft at a time. The sequel mainly continues the story, with the added amusement of surviving Marines, sailors and Coast Guardsmen trying to help make Smith’s teenage daughters Faith and Sophia (Shewolf and Seawolf, respectively) into leaders de jure as well as de facto. As you may recall, the zombie horror subgenre bores me to tears – but for some reason, Ringo manages to hold my interest while dancing from greasy organizational stuff to a bit of the old ultra-violence to turning none-too-bright security guards and support staff into zombie killers to slams at chairborne officers who know a lot about management but damn little about leadership. A fun read, and highly recommended.
, starring former New York assistant DA Richard Incles as a newly minted private eye, hired by Mary Bailey to clear her husband George. It seems the man everybody loves to hate, Old Man Potter, has been found dead in his office, his mouth stuffed full of money. Everyone’s a suspect – everyone had the motive and a lot of folks had the opportunity to off the old banker, but George Bailey is the #1 suspect. E.N. McMahon’s short novel plays with all the noir movie tropes in an amusing way, and is well worth your time and money. It’s free to Amazon Prime users under the Lending Library program.
.
) or contemporary versions of the Mythos such as Tim Powers’ 
or Charles Stross’ 
and its sequels. Correia does a good job of telling a classic tale of werewolf horror set in rural Michigan, one with its roots in the past but with plenty of contemporary complications to make a bad situation worse. I liked this enough to make me seriously think about checking out the rest of this series, and in the meantime I checked out his holiday novel, The Christmas (Noun) (and its two sequels) 
, a grim and very personal history of the U-boat war in the Atlantic that goes very well with the more famous movie 
, which is available free on Amazon Instant Video to Prime members.
(no, that’s not a joke) through my links last month. It was very much appreciated!
by Mark Wayne McGinnis came to me free through the Amazon Prime Lending Library program, and after getting a few chapters into it I have to say it’s worth about what I paid for it. As noted by some of the commenters on Amazon, McGinnis doesn’t seem to know much about the military except what he’s seen on TV, thinks you can land a 200-yard-long starship in the courtyard of the Pentagon, and has a real problem with consistency. Yes, this is a fast-paced adventure with Earth’s bravest and toughest soldiers – er, SEALs – off to save the galaxy from the insectile alien hordes, but what might have worked as a movie (preferably with an actual military adviser to clean out some of the obvious BS) fails as a novel, at least if you have any actual exposure to (or knowledge about) the military. Not recommended.
, which is a coming of age story built around the notion that one of Crassus’ lost legions was sold as slaves to aliens. Which brings us around to the stuff I actually checked out of the local library, since one of those books was Drake’s anthology 
, which, contra Amazon, is not actually a 
anthology (how’s that for recursion?) which is essentially the sequel to 
and its sequels. He has since moved on to greater renown as the author of The Lost Fleet, a series of books about two human civilizations (the Alliance and the Syndicate) locked in a century-long interstellar war. Long-lost Alliance hero, Black Jack Geary, is found in a survival pod decades after his presumed death, and succeeds to fleet command after an act of Syndic treachery kills the admiral in command. Geary has to contend with his own legend, a decay in fleet discipline, tactics and training, and scheming subordinates along with a desperate supply situation as he tries to bring the fleet home from deep in Syndicate territory. Unfortunately for me, I started with the second book, 
, in which his task is complicated by another legend, Captain “Fighting” Falco, lately rescued with POWs from a Syndic labor camp. Unlike Geary, Falco has political ambitions, and is willing to split the fleet to pursue them. This is a tense thriller of a space opera, which in different ways reminds me of Keith Laumer’s 
for its tight descriptions of space combat and also of the Bolo shared-world anthology 
, which describes the horrific Last War; the haunting descriptions of things lost by the Alliance in the course of its long war against the Syndicate Worlds is very reminiscent of that fictional war. Campbell writes a gripping tale, and I can’t recommend it enough.
sure looked interesting…so when I saw it at the local library, I had to pick it up. Turned out it was well worth it. Unlike the pneumonic plague that devastates the world in Ringo’s 
, the plague that turns most of humanity into zombies here is man-made, and while a vaccine can be made, it seems there aren’t nearly enough monkeys to go around. So the Smith family leaves New York in their sailboat, only to find that there’s a lot of zombies at sea as well – and people that need help. So the Smiths and some of the folks they rescue become Wolf’s Floating Circus, a band of seafaring freebooters hoping to save what – and who – they can, while putting down every zombie they can find afloat. Because you can’t save the survivors if the zombies are still around. Parts of the novel are extremely creepy if not downright horrific, arguably worse than anything in Ringo’s Posleen War novels, and that includes 
. Other parts (such as the last concert in New York City), you won’t know whether to laugh or cry. If you’re a fan of John Ringo, you probably already have this, but if not, you should definitely get it. For Trixie, if nothing else.
, the tale of a UN supply sergeant who flees to the libertarian world of Grainne to escape a frame, only to discover she’s jumped from the frying pan into the fire when the UN invades to reduce the rebellious “colony” to obedience. Freehold was followed by 
and 
, which showed different aspects (and the aftermath) of the UN/Grainne war, and these in turn were followed by a First Contact novel, 
. Other books set in the same universe include the Ripple Creek series, starting with 
, in which a Grainne-based bodyguard outfit takes on the protection of various notables, sometimes with the “help” of UN security forces. In a stark contrast to portrayals of the UN in SF from the 1950s, Williamson’s UN is an extrapolation of the present highly dysfunctional organization into an even more dysfunctional world government, where effectiveness doesn’t count nearly as much as connections and appearance. The UN colonies depicted in the Ripple Creek stories are all Third World hellholes, dumping grounds for the troublesome and annoying minorities who couldn’t afford the ticket to Grainne or couldn’t stand the idea of not being able to oppress their neighbors. Despite all this, Williamson doesn’t lecture you about how awesome libertarianism is; he just lays out the background and tells a damn good action story. I recommend all of the preceding most enthusiastically.
after reading sample chapters and finding it more of a polemical technothriller than I wanted to deal with, and the same was true of his collaboration with John Ringo, 
, a Posleen War side novel showing a Germany so desperate for (effective) troops that they combed the old soldiers’ homes and hospices for SS veterans to put through rejuv. This time the polemic came with a side order of (what I felt at the time was) gratuitous gore and horror, but at least I finished it – and revised my opinion later. The breakthrough came with 
, a brutal novel that could have been written by Bruce Bawer or Mark Steyn but wasn’t.* Caliphate is the world we get after 
(or Steyn’s 
, if you prefer) becomes our future, where an America that has become an empire faces off against a Muslim Eurasia. Most of the story revolves around a German girl sold as a slave to pay her family’s jizya and her brother, taken to serve as a Janissary, and what happens to them as an American spy on a mission lands in what used to be Germany. After that, I picked up 
, in which the specter of global jihad stalks a new Earth light-years away – and one man, whose wife and children were slain in that world’s equivalent to 9/11, finds himself with the means to exact an epic revenge, despite the interference of the UN. Kratman has some things to say in this series about the feminization of the US military (see 
) and the general uselessness of the EU militaries (
) but by and large the Carrera novels are much in the style of Caliphate: brutal, unsparing looks at wars and what it takes to win them. Recommended.
. Can’t tell you what I think because I haven’t read it or its sequels. Yet. 