The Bookmonger with John J. Miller

Thesis #12: “God is a Jerk.” That’s a provocative line from Quin Hillyer‘s satiric novel, Mad Jones, Heretic. In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Hillyer explains why his main character is mad at God, how Martin Luther inspires him, and why the media turns him into a star.

We’re still feeling a fateful year’s repercussions a century later, writes Arthur Herman in 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder. In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Herman explains why 1917 was such a big deal, how Vladimir Lenin and Woodrow Wilson were alike, and how the election of President Trump may mark the […]

Americans who fly the Confederate flag don’t understand the nature of tyranny in the antebellum South, writes Forrest A. Naborsin From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction. In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Nabors explains the goals of Reconstruction, why so few people truly understand its era, and whether we should regard it as a […]

Hendrik “Hank” Meijer writes about a forgotten giant of the Senate in Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century. In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Meijer tells the story of this Michigan Republican and how he moved from being an anti-New Deal isolationist in the 1930s to a world statesmen […]

A 21st-century Manhattan Project lies at the heart of The Quantum Spy, the new espionage novel by David Ignatius. In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Ignatius explains the potential of quantum computing, the rivalry between the CIA and the intelligence services of China, and why spies enclose the truth in”a carapace of deceit.”

The explosion was so enormous, it killed 2,000 people and erupted into a mushroom cloud long before the Manhattan Project–and John U. Bacon writes about how and why it happened in The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism. In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Bacon describes the horrible events of […]

Happy Halloween! This episode of The Bookmonger features a 10-minute conversation with Leslie S. Klinger, editor of The New Annotated Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Why has Shelley’s novel endured for two centuries? What does its fame owe to Boris Karloff and the movies? Does it hold any special lessons in our age of rapid scientific and technological advances?

Antonin Scalia was not merely a great legal mind, he was also a great writer–as Christopher J. Scalia reveals in Scalia Speaks: Reflections on Law, Faith, and Life Well Lived, a collection of speeches by his late father (and co-edited with Edward Whelan). In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Scalia describes assembling this book from his father’s papers, how the elder Scalia learned to […]

World War II was in fact many wars, writes Victor Davis Hanson in The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Hanson describes why he avoided writing yet another chronological or operational history of World War II, how the Allies were able to suffer so many casualties […]

Understanding Ukraine today is impossible without also understanding what the Soviet Union did to it in the 1930, says Anne Applebaum, author of Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Applebaum describes Stalin’s act of mass murder against the Ukrainian people, how knowledge of this enormity slowly seeped into the West, and […]

Ep. 162: Art and Myth of the Ancient Maya

Ep. 161: The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America’s Enemies

Ep. 160: Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II

Ep. 159: Blythe

Ep. 158: Last of the Tsars: Nicholas II and the Russian Revolution