Almost everyone knows how his elder brother Christopher Hitchens feels, but less well known are the views of Peter Hitchens, a conservative columnist for the The Mail on Sunday in London, who was inspired to write his latest book, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith, because of the "dangerous" teachings of men like his brother. It is not a faith book, at least not in the conventional sense of defending doctrine or even making a philosophical case for God. The book is devoid of "faith talk"; the name Jesus does not appear once in the book. "Remember, I'm an ex-Trotskyite, so I'm quite suspicious of the man of total conviction and certainty. What I did not want, coming away from Marxist utopianism, was to find another mirror image of utopianism," he said. "The argument I'm making for religion is largely a negative one: if you get rid of [God] you will be in a tremendous fix."

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Philip Potempa -- Northwest Indiana Times

Did you hear the one about when Bozo ran for president? Or how two assassination attempts were made on his life? How about the time that Bozo flew into the jungles of New Guinea to see if he could bond with dangerous cannibal tribes? Well then, you must know about the time his size 83 AAA shoes saved him from being swallowed whole by a giant, murderous python in Thailand, right? These are just a few of the "prizes" plucked from "The Man Behind the Nose: Assassins, Astronauts, Cannibals, and Other Stupendous Tales," (HarperCollins $25.99) a new 256-page hardcover by Susan Harmon, widow of Larry Harmon, the man credited with creating "the world's most famous clown. The book, released in time for Bozo's 50th anniversary, was co-authored by Thomas Scott McKenzie. The late Larry Harmon reportedly drafted most of the book before his death.

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Doug MacCash -- Times-Picayune

 AND TEXT. "George Herriman's Krazy Kat, A Celebration of Sundays" is a dynamite introduction to one of the most dysfunctional duos ever found on the funny pages. It's also a book-shelf must-have for anyone devoted to jazz-era expression. But beneath the quirky comedy of the antique cartoon, Herriman's real life story is a disquieting detour through the bad ol' days of American race relations that begins in the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans. Starting exactly 100 years ago (July 26, 1910), Ignatz the cartoon mouse began hurling bricks at the head of his Coconino County neighbor, Krazy Kat. Zip! Pow! It's no wonder that a mouse, given the chance, would torment a cat. Here's the weird thing: For the next 34 years, Krazy Kat fell more deeply in love with Ignatz with each beaning. Try as he might, police officer Pupp could do nothing to dampen either Ignatz's violent obsession or Krazy's misplaced ardor for the mouse that he or she (we're never quite sure of Krazy's sex) called "L'il Anjil."

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Bob Smietana -- The Tennessean

Rachel Held Evans had a choice while growing up in Dayton, Tenn., site of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial. Believe the Bible or believe evolution. "I was taught that if you don't interpret Genesis 1 and 2 literally, then you don't take the Bible seriously," said Evans, 29. "I held on tightly to that for a long time." Evans says creationism -- the belief that God created the Earth around 6,000 years ago in six days -- was commonplace in her town. Unable to reconcile science with her faith, Evans embraced evolution. "I learned you don't have to choose between loving and following Jesus and believing in evolution," she said. She chronicled her personal journey in a new memoir, Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions.

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John Kappenman, author of Aftermath: A Guide to Preparing For and Surviving Apocalypse 2012, an obscure electrical engineer from Duluth, Minnesota, is determined to save civilization from the mother of all blackouts. If he succeeds, the daily life of billions around the world will continue undisrupted. But if he fails, we may well suffer on a scale that makes even World Wars seem trivial in comparison. Over the past thirty years, Kappenman has accumulated a vast and compelling body of evidence indicating that sooner or later a major blast of EMP (electromagnetic pulse) from the Sun, a space weather Katrina, will knock out the electrical power grid and bring society to its knees. "Historically large storms have a potential to cause power grid blackouts and transformer damage of unprecedented proportions. An event that could incapacitate the network for a long time could be one of the largest natural disasters we could face," he declares.

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Reviewed by Wes Vernon -- Washington Times

In "The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists ," we have a compendium of the result (to date) of the left's mission - started in the 1930s, accelerated in the '60s and realized in the '70s. In the ensuing decades, those who wished our country no good forged ahead full bore, or, as one of them (a mainstream-media journalist) is quoted as saying out loud: "I'm going to bore from within." The real-life "Manchurian" story is "that of a powerful politician whose true past has been intentionally obscured, and who has become a vehicle for implementing a hidden radical agenda." All of that is to be found in these pages, precisely and painstakingly documented.

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Reviewed by Kevin Gutzman -- Campaign For Liberty

Under today's constitutional law, the "Federal" (really now national) Government can do anything it wants. The speaker of the House literally laughs at the implication that it cannot. For anyone who knows history and loves liberty, this is a worrisome situation. What to do? In "Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century," Thomas E. Woods, Jr.'s answer is to dust off the Jeffersonian tradition of nullification. Nullification lays out the argument for nullification's constitutionality, describes historic and contemporary instances in which the doctrine has been and is being employed, and advocates that it be used more widely today. Finally, in a very useful appendix, Woods provides some of the classic nullification documents from days gone by. The appendix serves both to arm the reader with pro-nullification arguments and to illustrate the variety of circumstances to which it has been applied.

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evolutionnews.org

Intelligent Design Uncensored: An Easy- To-understand Guide to the Controversy is a book I've long hoped that someone would write. Don't get me wrong -- there are other good books out there that explain the fundamentals of intelligent design (ID) in plain language. But with clarity, elegance, and accuracy, Intelligent Design Uncensored fills this niche better than most. The authors, Dr. William Dembski (an expert in the technical arguments for ID) and Dr. Jonathan Witt (a writer with a strong grasp of the relevant science) -- both Discovery Institute senior fellows -- make an ideal team. This is a book for any reader -- student or otherwise -- who seeks a compelling, accurate, accessible case for intelligent design.

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Rob Port -- Say Anything Blog

Unlike his previous books, The Overton Window is a fictional story about the son of an influential PR magnate bent on re-making America and the world in his vision falling in love with a tea party/patriot movement leader who wants a return to the principles of the founding fathers. As a social political commentary, it hit on a lot of the hot political topics of the day: Bailouts, Excessive government grown beyond its constitutional restraints, Nanny statism.

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Thomas Sowell -- Townhall.com

Sometimes you can read a book that will change your mind on some fundamental issue. Rarely, however, is there just one page that can undermine or destroy a widely-held belief. But there is such a page-- page 77 of the book "Out of Work" by Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway. What is on that one page in "Out of Work: Unemployment and Government in Twentieth-Century America" that could change people's minds? Just a simple table, giving unemployment rates for every month during the entire decade of the 1930s. Those who think that the stock market crash in October 1929 is what caused the huge unemployment rates of the 1930s will have a hard time reconciling that belief with the data in that table.

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 Best selling novelist John Grisham has released his first children's book, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, about a 13 year old son of a lawyer who finds himself in the mids of the town's murder trial.

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Jon Hamilton -- National Public Radio

 AND TEXT. In the 55 years since Albert Einstein's death, many scientists have tried to figure out what made him so smart. But no one tried harder than a pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who lost his job and his reputation in a quest to unlock the secrets of Einstein's genius. Harvey never found the answer. But through an unlikely sequence of events, his search helped transform our understanding of how the brain works. How that happened is a bizarre story that involves a dead genius, a stolen brain, a rogue scientist and a crazy idea that turned out not to be so crazy. Michael Paterniti describes it all in his book, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain.

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Reviewed by J. Michael Cole -- Taipei Times (TW)

After nearly half a century of Chine occupation of Tibet, riots on an unprecedented scale occurred not only in the Tibetan Administrative Region (TAR), but also in parts of China with substantial Tibetan populations. Prior to what has come to be known as the March Incident of 2008, Tibetan protests had largely been limited to areas within TAR proper. How can we explain the spontaneous -- and violent -- uprising that shocked the world months before the Beijing Olympics and invited an ironfisted crackdown by the Chinese authorities? The answer is the culminating The Struggle for Tibet, a collection of articles written by Tibetan academic Tsering Shakya and the Chinese intellectual Wang Lixiong. In what often reads like a dialogue between the two authors, the book explores the question of Tibetan identity, religion, assimilation and resistance from the perspective of Tibetans.

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Reviewed by Jeremy Bernstein -- New York Review of Books

A great deal has been written about Pakistani metallurgist A.Q. Khan and his collaborators, but I have never found an account as detailed as the one in "Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America's Enemies," by the nuclear armaments expert David Albright. Albright holds master's degrees in physics and mathematics and has taught physics. For five years-between 1992 and 1997-he was part of the International Atomic Energy Agency's Action Team and in that capacity he spent time as a weapons inspector in Iraq. In 1993, he founded the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington, D.C., of which he is president. In short, Albright is a perfect person to write a book like this.

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Art Winslow -- Los Angeles Times

A bestselling author reconstructs an assassin's life and the events leading up to the killing of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. James Earl Ray, the dodgy career criminal and escaped convict who murdered King and helped turn 1968 into the sad, tumultuous year that it was, is the man with the gun in Hampton Sides' Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin. And yet there are hellhounds aplenty in Sides' book, notable among them George Wallace and J. Edgar Hoover.

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Jeremy Olshan -- New York Post

Oprah Winfrey -- who built a billion-dollar empire persuading everyone from celebs to average Joes to reveal the truth about themselves -- is a big phony when it comes to her own past, an explosive new book charges. Winfrey's relationship with longtime "love" Stedman Graham, her reputed dirt-poor upbringing in rural Mississippi, her rumored lesbian crushes on women such as Diane Sawyer -- all are stories she has manipulated for decades in the name of sensational ratings, according to writer Kitty Kelley's latest unauthorized biography "Oprah: A Biography." "Where Oprah got that nonsense about growing up in filth and roaches I have no idea," said a relative, Katherine Carr Esters. "I've confronted her and asked, 'Why do you tell such lies?' Oprah told me, 'That's what people want to hear. The truth is boring.'

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Richard A. Clarke -- Network World

"The entire phenomenon is shrouded in such government secrecy that it makes the Cold War look like a time of openness and transparency. The biggest secret in the world about cyber war may be that at the very same time the U.S. prepares for offensive cyber war, it is continuing policies that make it impossible to defend the nation effectively from cyber attack." click for an excerpt from Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It, a new book by ex-Presidential adviser Richard Clarke that explores the growing cyberwar threat and raises ideas about how to deal with it.

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 69-year-old veteran movie star Raquel Welch has written a new book about her life called "Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage," and dropped by to talk about her career and why she wrote the book.

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Lisa Miller -- Newsweek

There are those who believe that science will eventually explain everything -- including our enduring belief in heaven. The thesis here is very simple: heaven is not a real place, or even a process or a supernatural event. It's something that happens in your brain as you die. The author of this article first encountered this idea when she was researching her new book, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife.

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Simon Rothstein -- Sun (UK)

Hulk was once the man who had everything: a glittering grappling and TV career, gorgeous blonde wife and two kids who worshipped him. But in his new book, My Life Outside the Ring, the 56-year-old reveals how his world was turned upside down. Wife Linda, 50, divorced him after 23 years of marriage. Daughter Brooke, now 21, was refusing to speak to him, believing her mum's claims that he had cheated throughout the marriage. And worst of all son Nick, 19, was facing jail after leaving his best friend in a vegetative state in a car crash, for which some blamed Hulk's parenting.

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The Food and Drug Administration is reviewing data suggesting a possible link between the diabetes medication Actos and bladder cancer. The agency says five-year results from an ongoing study show patients taking Actos the longest had higher risk of bladder cancer. ...

Much in the same way that troubled companies change names to improve their reputations, the Corn Refiners Assn. is trying to do away with high-fructose corn syrup. Not the product. Just its moniker. The trade group said that it was petitioning the Food and Drug Administration to replace the phrase "high-fructose corn syrup" with "corn sugar." "I'm not excited about the name 'corn sugar,' " said Michael Jacobson, the Center for Science in the Public Interest's executive director. "That implies that it's squeezed out of corn, and it's not." ...

Obama's Science Czar John Holdren is worried about global warming. Having noticed that there hasn't actually been any global warming since 1998, he feels it ought to be called "global climate disruption" instead. That way whether it gets warmer or colder, wetter or drier, less climatically eventful or more climatically eventful, the result will be the same: it can all be put down to "global climate disruption." And that will be good, because it will give Holdren the excuse to introduce all the draconian measures he has long believed necessary if "global climate disruption" is to be averted: viz, state-enforced population control; a rewriting of the legal code so that trees are able to sue people; and the wholesale destruction of the US economy ("de-development" as he put it in the 1973 eco-fascist textbook he co-wrote Paul and Anne Ehrlich Human Ecology: Global Problems And Solutions). ...

 On Friday, August 27th, 2010, Sean Hannity aired a report on Fox News titled "The Green $windle," about how concern for the environment turned into global warming hysteria and a multi-billion dollar industry that capitalizes on that fear. ...

The Lamb graph (a graph of northern hemisphere temperatures produced by Hubert Lamb) and its source were problematic for the people at the CRU who were also on the IPCC. It showed the 20th century was not the warmest temperatures ever and triggered the email Professor Deming received from a CRU member saying, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period." It appears Michael Mann's research with the complicity of others was designed to achieve that goal. They launched a campaign to discredit extensive evidence from a multitude of sources of the existence of the MWP. This included deliberate efforts by John Holdren, Obama's current Science Czar. ...

Especially interesting it the sudden disappearance of Obama's plan to commit $150 billion on clean energy research and development. Also gone is any clear pledge to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions via his formerly touted cap and trade legislative efforts. For instance, the section once titled "Closing the Carbon Loophole and Cracking Down on Polluters" is now vanished down the memory hole. ...

The United Nations' climate change organisation faces a warning over how it uses scientific facts in its influential reports, following the discovery of a series of embarrassing errors in its work. ...

Very few history books considered the impact of weather, before it became a political issue. One was Barbara Tuchman's 1978 book "A Distant Mirror; The Calamitous Fourteenth Century." It used the life of nobleman Enguerrand VII de Courcy, whose life spanned the entire century, to compare the 14th century with late-20th century Europe. Weather wise it was a transitional century as the world cooled from the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) to the Little Ice Age (LIA). As the average location of the Arctic air front moved inexorably toward the Equator the Jet Stream meandered further north and south so temperature and precipitation fluctuated widely from year to year. It also resulted in more blocking systems so that instead of weather patterns changing on a 4 to 6 week cycle in the middle latitudes they became prolonged to 12 weeks and longer. This meant in many years it became difficult to tell summers from winters. ...

In conversations with a physicist involved in studying the effect of nuclear explosions on the upper atmosphere I was amazed to learn he did not know the tropopause was at different altitudes between the poles and the equator. This is so fundamental that it is impossible to imagine him finding out anything meaningful about radiation distribution in the atmosphere. Some have a better understanding of the structure of the atmosphere, but it is still inadequate to draw any conclusions about what is happening to temperatures, gases, energy distributions or anything else fundamental to understanding climate change. It is also inadequate as the basis for building computer models used to predict future climate. ...

In a forthcoming issue of the journal Global and Planetary Change, researchers from the University of Auckland in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji documented changes in 27 vulnerable, low-lying reef islands in the Central Pacific. Using aerial photographs taken as early as 1944, the areas were carefully mapped and compared with modern satellite images. It turns out that the islands did, in fact, change over time, but they are hardly sinking. Overall, 20 grew or remained stable. The island of Funamanu, for example, expanded from 7.4 acres to 9.5 acres in size -- a 28 percent growth. Only seven islands shrunk, with the biggest percentage change occurring on Tengasu, which dropped from a tiny 1.7 acres to 1.5 acres -- a diminishment of 9,670 square feet, the size of Mr. Gore's Tennessee mansion. ...

"Global warming is over-at least for a few decades," geologist Don Easterbrook, professor emeritus from Western Washington University told the Heartland Institute's Fourth International Conference on Climate Change on May 19. He warned, however, us not to rejoice. Colder winters kill twice as many people as hot weather while crop production suffers from shorter growing seasons and weather-disrupted harvests. Current data seem to support Easterbrook's prediction of an end to global warming, at least for the next three decades. Since 1998, atmospheric CO2 has continued to increase-but total solar activity, as measured by satellites, has declined sharply after trending strongly, but erratically, upward for 150 years. ...

The vast difference between the maximum heat and minimum ice age weather cycles on the surface of the earth cannot be accounted for by any solar or atmospheric variables. In fact, there is another force that renders even short-term climate forecasts inaccurate. That force is the enormous Geo-Nuclear, heat producing fission reactions of the heavy elements that form the earth's core. Mankind can neither predict nor control this force and is just as powerless to control the volcanoes, earthquakes and ice ages that are the results of variations in this geo-nuclear force. The 11,000 degree F temperature at the earth's core is not caused by gravity, by solar radiation or by atmospheric insulation. Legislative efforts to modify weather with miniscule changes of parts per million of carbon dioxide, a benign, life giving molecule, will soon be recognized as the most naïve misinterpretation of earth science since the world was flat. ...

Gore has spent "$8,875,000 on an ocean-view villa on 1.5 acres with a swimming pool, spa and fountains... The Italian-style house has six fireplaces, five bedrooms and nine bathrooms." This is in addition to the 10,000 square-foot mansion that he and Tipper own in Tennessee. A few years ago, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research reported that Gore's home burned more electricity in one month than the average Nashville home uses in a year. ...

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory. "I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change," said Lovelock in his first in-depth interview since the theft of the UEA emails last November. "The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful." One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is "modern democracy", he added. "Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while." ...

The rapid loss of public credibility over all the errors has also accompanied numerous calls by prominent voices for official inquiries and even criminal investigations. Several universities involved have already launched reviews. And even previous IPCC chief Professor Robert Watson, for example, is calling for a probe to investigate "warming bias" by the UN panel. "The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact. That is worrying," he told the U.K. Times Online. "The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened." The UN will indeed launch an "independent" inquiry, but critics generally expect a coverup. U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) went further, proposing criminal investigations to determine if alarmists violated any laws. A Senate report produced for Inhofe's Environment and Public Works Committee concluded that, among other problems, "scientists involved in the CRU controversy violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, may have violated federal laws." Similarly, British authorities were investigating possible criminal activity by Climategate scientists who refused to provide documents and data under lawful Freedom of Information requests. The scientists may reportedly escape prosecution under the FOI law because of a six-month statute of limitations. ...