Right Reason‘s Maxwell Goss interviews with Roger Scruton on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the publication of his book The Meaning of Conservatism.

Catherine Seipp, who blogs on Cathy’s World, discusses the mysterious unfairness of the progress of the world by which some past authors remain famous and abundantly in-print, while other, like Ruth McKenney, Peg Bracken, Ernie Pyle, and others, are undeservedly discarded from the publishers’ lists and forgotten. Even today, it can be impossible to find, with all the book search utilities there are, titles which not necessarily rare, but which have merely escaped the antiquarian book dealers’ radar screens, usually simply as the result of not having been identified as desirable within a recognized category of book-collecting.

If any book dealer out there has a copy for sale, for example, of Heather Mixture by “Klaxon,” not listed anywhere as the result of not being understood to be a Game Shooting title, the owner of this blog is eager to purchase it.

reviewed by David Lipsky:

[Kaplan] chastises the ‘elite’ for casting Vietnam in a bad light; the soldiers consider that war ‘every bit as sanctified as the nation’s others.’.. we’ve been too thrifty with our troops; to prevail in the war on terror, he advises, we ought to become more tolerant of American casualties. So what’s the holdup? It was the elites that had a more difficult time with the deaths of soldiers and marines. ‘Their concern is misplaced. The grunts have an ‘unpretentious willingness to die,’ which is in part ‘the product of their working-class origins. The working classes had always been accustomed to rough, unfair lives and turns.’..

The elites, having become global citizens, represent a threat to ‘the age-old ability of individual democracies to persevere in a sustained and difficult war.’ For Kaplan, it comes down to interests and allegiances: ‘Journalists were global cosmopolitans. If they themselves did not own European and other foreign passports, their spouses or friends . . . did. Contrarily, the American troops I met saw themselves belonging to one country and one society only: that of the United States.’

Heinlein would be mad as hell that he can’t be there.