Marc Wortman’s Admiral Hyman Rickover (Yale University Press, 2022) is a tightly-written biography of brilliance: Rickover at age six came to the U.S. from Poland, gained an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, and set a record by serving in the Navy for 63 years. He oversaw the invention of the world’s first practical nuclear power reactor by essentially abolishing rank Read More ›
A long time ago one little-known band claimed we all live in a yellow submarine. Now, Elon Musk and others have said we probably live in a simulation — an environment constructed by our far-distant descendants using ultra-powerful computers, or maybe by aliens. Wired columnist Meghan O’Gieblyn reports in her new book, God, Human, Animal, Machine (Doubleday, 2021), that “the theory’s popularity Read More ›
Before I became a Christian at age 26 I would have protested the title of John Dickson’s Bullies and Saints: An Honest Look at the Good and Evil of Christian History (Zondervan, 2021). I would have told evangelicals, “You’re a bunch of bullies.” A decade ago I might have complained the other way: “We’re flawed saints battling against the left, Read More ›
Welcome to the first issue of Olasky Books: Not “great books” or “best books,” but a monthly list of new, well-written books (often histories) that taught me things I didn’t know or had forgotten. For example, since “liberal” is now a curse word among many conservatives, I had forgotten how in the 1950s “liberal” wasn’t a euphemism for big government’s authoritarian Read More ›