Stinque Book Club

Teabagger Dome.Title: “Coolidge”

Author: Amity Shlaes

Rank: 71

Blurb: “A brilliant and provocative reexamination of America’s thirtieth president, Calvin Coolidge, and the decade of unparalleled growth that the nation enjoyed under his leadership.”

Review: “His humble persistence and his faith in the people restored economic history.”

Customers Also Bought: “Trickle Down Theory and Tax Cuts for the Rich” by Thomas Sowell

Footnote: Gee, when’s the last time we endured a spate of Coolidge revisionism in service of a President whose hands-off financial policies led to economic collapse? Oh. Right.

Coolidge [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

Hippitus Hoppitus Reus Domine.Title: “Petrus Romanus: The Final Pope Is Here”

Authors: Thomas Horn and Cris D. Putnam

Rank: 53

Blurb: “For more than 800 years scholars have pointed to the dark augury having to do with ‘the last Pope.’ The prophecy, taken from St. Malachy’s ‘Prophecy of the Popes,’ is among a list of verses predicting each of the Roman Catholic popes from Pope Celestine II to the final pope, ‘Peter the Roman,’ whose reign would end in the destruction of Rome… According to the prophecy, the next pope (following Benedict XVI) is to be the final pontiff.”

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Title: “The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter than You Think”

Authors: Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods

Rank: 72

Blurb: “Brian Hare’s stunning discovery is that when dogs domesticated themselves as early as 40,000 years ago they became far more like human infants than their wolf ancestors.”

Review: “I really don’t get ‘cat’ people.”

Customers Also Bought: “12 Piece Total Furniture Repair System”

Footnote: The infantilization of domesticated critters is not a new discovery. That said, cats have managed the transition while maintaining some degree of dignity. Or, depending how you regard it, spite.

The Genius of Dogs [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

Title: “The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics”

Authors: Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky

Rank: 44

Blurb: “A book for anyone who has ever regretted not taking physics in college.”

Review: “NOT a ‘popular’ physics book with a bunch of fluffy, non substantial speculation about membranes, strings, fractals, superpositioned states and multiple universes! Has real, tough, solid content with a LOT of advanced formulas, including tensors and many partial derivatives… There also is an appendix on Central Forces and Planetary Orbits and ‘math interludes’ on Trig, Vectors, Integrals and PDE’s.”

Customers Also Bought: “Fighting Chess: Move by Move”

Footnote: Now that you mention it, we’ve never regretted not taking physics in college.

The Theoretical Minimum [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

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Title: “Beating Obamacare: Your Handbook for the New Healthcare Law”

Author: Betsy McCaughey

Rank: 20

Blurb: “Beating Obamacare is the essential consumer guide to understanding and preparing for one of the biggest changes about to take over Americans’ health care and family budgets.”

Review: “McCaughey is the nation’s expert on the topic.”

Customers Also Bought: “Atlas Shrugged” — both DVDs

Footnote: Sarah Palin gets credit for the line, but it was McCaughey who ginned up an anodyne detail about funding optional end-of-life counseling into mandatory euthanasia advice.

Somehow, this and her past membership on two medical-company boards aren’t included in the book’s publicity.

Beating Obamacare [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

Title: “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans”

Author: Ben Shapiro

Rank: 59

Blurb, helpfully highlighted by The Management…

From the editor-at-large of Breitbart.com comes a galvanizing and alarming look at the strategy and tactics of leftist thuggery.

While President Obama and the left like to pretend that they oppose bullying with all their hearts and souls, the truth is far darker: the left is the greatest purveyor of bullying in modern American history. Bullying has morphed into the left’s go-to tactic, as they attempt to quash their opponents through fear, threat of force, violence, and rhetorical intimidation on every major issue facing America today.

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