I had to read a lot of Carson's books for school. I enjoyed reading this history in particular. Everything is clearly spelled out, understandable, and makes perfect sense. Carson's tells the history that you won't find in most history books, which is very welcome.

By the late 1970s, conservative historian Clarence B. Carson was known as the author of several volumes on American intellectual, political and economic history, including *The Fateful Turn*, which chronicled America's abandonment of individualism in favour of collectivism in the years 1880-1960 and *The War on the Poor*, an examination of the disastrous effects of government programs to "help the poor".

But Carson felt that a much longer work was needed to fulfil his intellectual mission: a complete history of the United States that would correct the errors and distorsions of those available on the market. For Carson was very dissatisfied with the existing histories of the U.S.. As he wrote in The Review of the News in December 1982: "For years I have cursed the darkness, so to speak, as I have examined and reviewed history book after history book. On rare occasions, I would examine one with rising expectations as I made my way through the early part of the text... But, from the Civil War onward, even the best of them tend to go downhill into the miasma of leaden accounts of industrialization, mass production, the class struggle, the magnification of the alleged injustices of the American system, until by the time they reach the New Deal, they read as if they were written by press agents of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, some have been".

What he wanted was to avoid the biases of "Marxists, socialists, anti-Americans, skeptics, humanists, and many, many others with axes to grind", by committing himself to telling "as faithful an account as I could make it of what had actually taken place."

This effort was to have been published by a private foundation, Western Goals, whose purpose was "to build and strengthen the political, economic and social structure of the United States and Western Civilization so as to make any merger with totalitarians impossible". But Carson's supporter in the foundation, U.S. Congressman Larry Mc Donald, was killed before the first volume had even been published: in an ironic twist of history, he died on board the Korean airliner that was shot down by the Soviets in 1983, along with 268 other innocent civilians.

Undaunted, Carson the academic turned into a businessman, creating the American Textbook Committee, and went on to publish the rest of his work independently, relying mostly on word of mouth and the eventual promotion of his writings by conservative or libertarian bookclubs.

The resulting history of the United States is definitely my favorite. While most modern historians assume that what the Founders created was a "democracy" which protected "civil rights", and that their efforts were finally crowned by the establishment of the welfare state in the last century, Carson does understand that the United States are a constitutional federated republic based on the classical doctrine of individual rights.

For this reason, among many others, as Carson hoped it would, *Basic American History* succeeds in "arousing anew that sense of mission and purpose which brought these United States into being".

"Those who have gone far toward deifying majority rule and popular government as ends in themselves may think they have found allies in the Founders... [They are] wrong." - Clarence B. Carson

Clarence Carson's *The American Tradition* is an attempt by the author to counteract the efforts made by modern intellectuals to innoculate American students against an understanding of their country's true essence. For the basic ideas of the Founding Fathers, Carson argues, "did not just slip away because of defective memory", but as a result of the concerted efforts of modern liberals at "undermining, distorting, obscuring and defaming the American tradition".

By "tradition" Carson means "a body of beliefs, customs, habits, ways of doing things which are handed down from generation to generation" (p22), originating in the convergence of popular practices, just as a trail in a forest is shaped by repeated use. This he contrasts with ideologies, which are exhaustive models of reality, originated by intellectuals and generally imposed by force on the rest of the population.

Using these two concepts, the author divides America's history into three stages: the colonial era, during which an authoritarian tradition prevailed; the late 18th and 19th centuries, which were characterized by the emergence and preservation of a tradition of freedom; and the late 19th and 20th centuries, during which collectivists ideologies systematically displaced the specifically American ideals, resulting in the statist onslaughts of the thirties and sixties, and the modern socio-democratic status quo.

"Lest we forget", Carson attempts to salvage the original American tradition of freedom, discarding the anti-concept of "democracy" and the treacherous identification of Americanism with "pragmatism", and reviving such crucial notions as the Higher Law; Republican government; federalism; individualism; political equality; individual rights; voluntarism; and internationalism - all of which together represent the core of the American tradition.

Even though I do not completely agree with the author's analysis (I think that he underestimates the role of intellectuals in shaping the classical liberal tradition, for instance; and I found his discussions on "rights and responsibilities" dangerously close to justifying conscription), I believe this book should be read by all Americans today, especially those who have not yet realized how far their country's founding principles have been betrayed by its intellectuals and political leaders for several generations. To quote Carson, what such people "do not perceive is the illusory character of what is said to be preserved and the very real uses of power which have been introduced."

Virtually all the chapters abound in penetrating insights, but I particularly loved the last one, where Carson tries to identify the mistakes that were made by the Founders when drafting the Constitution, reminding me of the similar work being done by Judge Narragansett at the end of *Atlas Shrugged*. But while Ayn Rand's fictional character identified contradictions in the document and added at least one crucial clause, the flaws Carson points out are mostly errors in formulation, which left the Constitution open to subversion by misinterpretation.

The similarities between Carson's and Ayn Rand's views are striking, all the more so as Carson is a Protestant with a rather negative opinion of Rand as a philosopher. I wonder just how much influence she had on him. In his *Swimming Against the Tide*, his volume of "Memoirs and Selected Writings", he expressed his opinion of Rand as a "great artist" and an able defender of the Free Market, but rejected both her atheism and her defense of rational egoism (which he misconstrued.) But whatever their differences in metaphysics and ethics, their analyses of political, economic and intellectual trends are extraordinarily convergent, making Carson's books a welcome addition to any Objectivist library.

Now out of print and available only as a series of audiotapes, « Basic American Government » was initially published as a massive 480-page volume, not counting the notes, glossary, index, and the 60 pages of firsthand documents such as the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist N°10 or the Constitution itself. Its author, Clarence Carson, is the author of more than 500 articles and about 15 fifteen books, including a six-volume history of the United States.

The book is divided into four sections : - Section 1 (35p) deals with the basic principles of the American system of government. It starts by reminding the reader that the United States, contrary to the platitudes that are mouthed by today's journalists and politicians, « is not a democracy. It is a Constitutional Federated Republic. » Carson then goes on to explain what these concepts of « constitution », « republic » and « federalism » mean exactly, thus presenting the « sum and substance » of American govenment. - Section 2 (150p) delves into the intellectual background of the American political system, from authorities such as Aristotle to the English heritage of the 17th and 18th century, including 12 pages on John Locke, Trenchard and Gordon, William Blackstone and Adam Smith alone. The American colonial experience, the American Revolution and the Constitutional Convention are then summarized, but of course with much less detail than in Carson's « Basic History of the United States » or his « Rebirth of Liberty ». - Section 3 (130p) traces the evolution of the American system of government in the 19th century, from the establishment of the Federal Government after the ratification of the Constitution through the major decisions of the Supreme Court and the upheaval of the Civil War and Recontruction. - Section 4 (135p) deals with the 20th century and the advent of Leviathan (or big government), examining how socialism, by deliberately refusing to call itself by that name, entered the American mainstream ; and how Franklin D. Roosevelt « broke the constitutional dam » with his New Deal and the Court Packing Plan of 1937- a process culminating in a government that has become « out of control ».

First published in 1993, Clarence Carson's masterful volume « Basic American Government » ranks among his best, and is to my knowledge the most profound, principled and systematic treatment of the subject ever printed- far better than R.V. Denenberg's « Understanding American Politics », and incomparably superior to David Cushman Coyle's pitiful « The United States Political System and How it Works».

True to the founding principles of the Founding Fathers, enlightened by a genuine understanding of economic principles (Carson is well-read in both the classical economists and the Austrians, and is the author of a helpful treatise on « Basic Economics »), it opens with what I consider to be the most powerful statement ever printed on the current condition of the US government : « It would be considerable fraud to do a book on American government which talked as if the Constitution were still being substantially observed, that pretended that when Presidents took the oath of office they intended to observe the bounds set by the Constitution, that Congressmen recited their pledges with the same intent, and that Federal judges were still construing the Constitution as it was written. In sum, any book on American government worthy of the name ought to make clear how remote from the Constitution the government has become. »

Carson's own suggestions as to how to restore the integrity of the US political system are extremely simple. As he says, the text of the Constitution itself is still intact, so what is necessary is merely to make US government officials obey it. Did you know for instance that, in the Constitution, « there is no authority granted to levy taxes or to contract debts to provide for any foreign country » and that « the United States is specified alone as the beneficiary for all tax collections » ? (p445) More specifically, Carson suggests repealing the 17th Amendment (which undermined the federal system by reducing the power of the states to check the central government) and making it a treason for any US government official to betray the Constitution.

In other words, the way for Americans to bring the government back to its function of protecting their rights to « life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness » is simply to make their servants obey the charter which was initially adopted to limit their powers.

"Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as paper money, any more than there is such a thing as a paper horse, paper potato ... paper man or any other commodity, except paper paper, which is clearly a redundancy." - Clarence B. Carson

The author of several "basic" volumes (*Basic History of the United States*, *Basic Communism* and *Basic American Government*), historian Clarence Carson steps out of his own discipline with *Basic Economics*, a well-structured introduction to economics that should be of particular interest to students of history.

Organized in three parts, this 390-page volume begins with something one rarely finds in an economic textbook: what Carson calls the "framework of economics", or the metaphysical, ethical and political preconditions for the existence of economic activity and economic science. One of these, contrary to what anarcho-capitalists claim, is government. Indeed, Carson explains, the functions of government, by their very nature, cannot be performed by private firms, mostly because they do not involve the provision of goods or services, but of products which according to him might better be called "bads".

Part II is devoted to economics per se, i.e. the production and distribution of goods and services. Beginning with the concept of scarcity and a refutation of the fallacy of abundance, it examines the four ways of "getting what we want" (i.e. gifts, production, exchange and force), and then covers such fundamental issues as the origin and functions of money, the determination of prices on the free market, competition and monopoly, the three elements of production (land, labour and capital), entrepreneurship, the various sources of revenue and international trade.

Finally, Part III consists in an examination of the six major politico-economic systems: feudalism, mercantilism, free enterprise, capitalism, welfarism and communism. Contrary to Ludwig Von Mises and Ayn Rand, as this classification suggests, Carson consistently refuses to use the term "capitalism" to denote the free economy, because this would suggest that the latter favors capital over the other factors of production, and that the opposite system, communism, is somehow "anti-capital", which Carson demonstrates it is not.

The book also contains an appendix with a glossary of economic concepts, biographical sketches and an index.

Even though there are many excellent introductions to economics on the market (from Carl Menger's *Principles of Economics* to George Reisman's *The Government Against the Economy* or Henry Hazlitt's *Economics in One Lesson*), Carson's is the one I would recommend more specifically to students of history, who are prone to absorbing erroneous economic notions from the Keynesian or Marxist assumptions of history textbooks. Here, economics is laid flat, so to speak, so that its internal structure and its basic arguments can be examined rationally and explicitly, within the context of numerous historical examples, mostly borrowed from US history.

Some of the author's positions are invalid (he would probably have retracted his criticism of speculation if he had simply read Reisman on "The Specific Productive Role of the Stock Market", pp466-7 of his magnum opus, *Capitalism*), and I am still uncertain about some of the issues he raises (such as fractional reserve banking and limited liability companies). However, I found much of interest in this book, and apart from George Reisman's aforementioned *Capitalism* (a massive volume which definitely requires much more time and effort), I cannot think of a single work on the subject I would recommend more enthusiastically to the uninitiated.

The tales of King Arthur and of the knights of the Round Table are well-known and have been the subject of many books, poems (Tennyson), at least two musical works (Purcell's "King Arthur", and the famous Broadway musical, "Camelot"), and films ("Camelot", based on the musical, and "Excalibur"). The most famous English-language book version of these tales is this version by Sir Thomas Malory, yet this is not easily readable, even in modern prose. The modern English rendition by Keith Baines is excellent, for it allows those of us who do not have Ph.D's in English literature to get an idea of what the original was like, but the book itself is tedious in its very nature.

What you should expect with this book is a very good beginning and ending, and a "will it ever end ?" middle. Arthur himself cannot be called the central character, for he is virtually absent, except in the first tale of the book, which deals with his coming to power, and the last one, about his death. The rest of this book is concerned with jousting and tournaments, so much that in the end one gets bored with this never-ending succession of fights with knights whose names you'll only read once and which have no consequence on what is supposed to be the larger plot (such as the quest for the Holy Grail, or the famous Tristram and Iseult tale). Of course, the better-known knights of the Round Table, such as Launcelot, Tristram, and Percivale, are present, but only from time to time, and narration often shifts from one to the other for no reason.

What this book lacks most is continuity. Apart from the first and last tales, everything in between is not in chronological order, which gets confusing. In one tale one character is dead and another is well-known; in the next tale the first character is living and the second one is unknown (just take the example of King Pellinore and Sir Percivale). All tales were obviously separate ones, and the reader, at some point, will simply stop trying to understand how Malory ever came up with such an order for his tales. If Malory (or his original publishers) had any idea in mind when they chose this setup of the tales, it will appear unclear to most readers.

One of the few good points of this book is that, since it was written in the late Middle Ages, it avoids to a certain extent the over-romanticization of the Middle Ages, which is what later authors, such as Sir Walter Scott, did to such an extent that even today we cannot think of the Middle Ages without having in mind the picture-perfect version of it (which I will not delve into -- I'm sure you know what I have in mind). Even though chivalry as described in the book has some romantic elements attached to it, it is never fully exploited, and "Le Morte d'Arthur" certainly does not fit the requirements to be classified into the romantic genre (which was not fully described until the nineteenth century). This book therefore does not use romanticism as we now know it. But this good point may also be one of the book's weaknesses, because the topic is a legend, and not fact. Because this subject is not historically accurate (and some parts of the book are hilariously improbable), Malory could not use realism to replace romanticism, and I believe that if he had used more romanticism in his book it would only have made it better. In the end, Malory used neither style, and this makes his writing style very dry. His characters are mere fighting machines with no emotional depth, his narration is action, action, and action: no description, either of his own characters or of the scenery (a castle is a castle, nothing more). The scenes he depicts cannot be located, for the setting is never described. Malory, above all, was an awful storyteller. He could only describe his characters jousting and fighting, and since this had nothing to do with the larger plot, this only lengthens the book for no reason. (If you want a modern comparison, just think of a public orator who just tells personal anecdotes that are not related to his topic.)

Furthermore, anyone interested in the Middle Ages has nothing to gain from reading this book. It holds no historical interest (apart from a study of the English language, but then I would not go for this modern rendition) for the reason that its subject is not based on fact and its description of society in the early Middle Ages is simplistic. This book is certainly no "Canterbury Tales", in which a lot can be learned about what was life during the Middle Ages. So if you are mainly interested in history I'd skip "Le Morte d'Arthur" and I'd go for "The Canterbury Tales" instead.

In conclusion, "Le Morte d'Arthur" is worth reading only if you have the patience to go through it, for this book is overlong and repetitive. Keith Baines's rendition makes this task easier, and his appendix on the main characters is very helpful if you intend to skip parts (which you should not do because the whole is chronologically inaccurate).

This modern prose rendition of Le Morte D'Arthur by Keith Baines is a surprising (and surprisingly well-done) help when first getting aquainted with Malory's work. It's not a retelling for children that waters anything down nor is it an abridgement of the original. Everything from the original is included only pared down (for instance, endless descriptions of minor duels and battles are just simply mentioned or listed). It's all based on the Winchester Manuscript edited by Vinaver which is divided into eight books: The Tale of King Arthur; The Tale of King Arthur and the Emperor Lucius; The Tale of Sir Launcelot Du Lake; The Tale of Sir Gareth; The Book of Sir Tristram of Lyoness; The Tale of the Sangreal; The Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Gwynevere; and, Le Morte D'Arthur. If Caxton's edition of LE MORTE D'ARTHUR has ever seemed overwhelming (or just a bit confusing and repetitive) to you but you want to experience this great work with all its charm and wonder and metaphor then this retelling by Keith Baines might be a find for you. To give you an idea that it leaves nothing out this rendition is over 500 pages. It also has, as an appendix, a synopsis of principal characters. The poetry doesn't seem to be lost in this retelling, and even if some of the poetry is lost you can always go back to the Caxton or original Vinaver after reading Baines but at least have a much clearer grasp of the territory and what's happening. In the Baines retelling I noticed the scenes with the women (and some of those intrigues set more in the court and private realm) come more to the fore whereas in Caxton they sort of seem lost here and there in the background.

This review applies to the abridged audiocassette version. I have not read the book, but I will, after hearing this wonderful reading by Derek Jacobi. His immaculate British accent truly brings to life this epic tale of King Arthur and his knights' adventures. I highly recommend this version and also: 'Excalibur' the movie, T. H. Whites' 'The Once and Future King', and also Carl Orffs' 'Carmina Burana - Empress of the World' - music which was featured in 'Excalibur'. These four put together can give you a truly grand starting experience of the Arthurian Legends.

i was looking for a `basic' recounting of american history from colonial until the present -- carson's text does a credible job until reconstruction -- where he becomes polemical (vol. 3). vols. 4 & 5 surprisingly become harsh right- wing critiques of the failure of american government/the courts/media and so on. in vol. 4 he has an unnecessary extended debunking of darwin, for example. unless you share his passion, you will likely find the one-sidedness and unrelenting `tell it like it was' style overbearing and disspiriting. paul johnson, for example, i believe shares carson's conservatism, but does not let it overwhelm his compelling surveys of history. on the other hand, apart from the cursory review of nearly all history in vol. 1, the recounting of american history from colonial times up until the war between the states seemed balanced and to meet the books modest aims. the narrator, mary woods, i believe, reads the text well. as an alternative survey of american history, you might consider daniel boorstein's (i didn't get the spelling right, i'm afriad) multi-volume work, the american experience. it is full of insight detail, but it is hard to extract a barebone basic history of our country from it. even with carson's bias, his volumes provide a good sense of america's time-line. it is a pity he has allowed his passion to cloud his sense, and in that sense i don't regret the printed versions of his text being out of print.

Though a great admirer of Clarence Carson's works in general, I had found the first four volumes of his history of the United States slightly less interesting than more thematic essays like *The Fateful Turn* or *The Flight From Reality*. Maybe it is because Carson is more at home in pure intellectual history, or because I myself prefer concepts over facts and chronology.

However, Carson's *Basic History of the United States* remains in my opinion the most reliable on the market. As a professor of American history, it is the only one I personally recommend to my students, and the best of the six complete histories of the U.S. I have read so far.

The six-volume series is divided into the following periods: 1- The Colonial Experience 1607-1774; 2- The Beginning of the Republic 1775-1825; 3- The Sections and Civil War 1826-1877; 4- The Growth of America 1878-1928; 5- The Welfare State 1929-1985; 6- America in Gridlock 1985-1995.

The fifth volume itself is comprised of ten chapters: The Great Depression, The Thrust of the New Deal, Toward the Welfare State, The Coming of World War II, The United States in World War II, The Cold War, Welfarism at Home and Abroad, A Second Radical Reconstruction 1960-1975 and The Conservative Response.

To those of you who are sick of the deification of FDR and JFK and the vilification of Hoover and McCarthy, you will find a treatment of these key figures that radically departs from the established liberal gospel. Hoover's exceptional charity after World War I is brilliantly documented, and his refusal to enact welfare reforms on a large scale is attributed not to a lack of compassion but to the fact that "as President of the United States, he was the head of the government, not theretofore thought of as a charitable organization".

Roosevelt, on the other hand, is presented as "a candidate seeking votes, not losing them by presenting hard choices", who in his campaign speeches, dishonestly presented himself as an opponent of government expansion: "I accuse the present [Hoover] Administration of being the greatest spending Administration in peace times in all our history. It is an Administration that has piled bureau on bureau, commission on commission... I regard the reduction of Federal spending as one of the most important issues of his campaign."

Carson goes on to show how the Constitution was brutally abused by the New Deal, approvingly quoting from H. L. Mencken's hilarious "Constitution for the New Deal" and concluding with a chapter on "New Deal Hoopla and Harsh Reality".

Carson's characterizations of the major political figures of the era are masterpieces of concision and lucidity. Of Roosevelt's wife Eleanor, he says that "she never shook off the settlement house mentality. As a President's wife for many years, she was inclined to view the whole United States as a social work project". As for Eisenhower, Carson says that although "he referred to himself sometimes as being 'basically conservative'" and "favored a greater separation of powers than recent presidents had practiced", he soon abandoned all pretense to being an opponent of socialist legislation, as his administration "shifted away not only from any foray toward dismantling the Welfare State but also from vigorously restraining it. Indeed, Eisenhower was detectably moving toward modest extensions if not expansions of welfarism."

Kennedy is shown as a "somewhat inept, inexperienced and at best mediocre" president who was turned into a national hero by Johnson's politically motivated exploitation of his televised martyrdom.

As for "McCarthyism", instead of describing it as a paranoid and totalitarian witch-hunt, Carson shows how liberals managed to shift public indignation and fears from the very real threat of Communism to McCarthy's occasionally excessive methods, and have used what Ayn Rand called the pseudo-concept of McCarthyism as "a convenient weapon to beat anyone over the head with who begins to gain an audience for charges against" communists.

But the greatest treat in the book is Carson's chronicling of the intellectual and political rebirth of conservatism from the 1940s to the 1980s. Here you will find information on the pillars of modern conservatism, from Friedrich Hayek to Ludwig Von Mises, Ayn Rand, William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, Leonard Read and others I had never heard of, and the various books and reviews in which they defended their ideas. Carson's treatment of Rand is unfortunately unfair and not very well informed. He presents her as an emigrant "from Europe", for instance, instead of stressing her first-hand experience of Soviet tyranny. And like many critics, he fails to grasp the difference Objectivism makes between altruism and benevolence.

But such flaws as Carson's *Basic History of the United States* evinces are so minor in comparison with the massive distortions of liberal textbooks that this six-volume history stands high above any of its competitors.

A straight forward, easy to read and understand explanation and description of 20th century US history. Why this is not taught is state run schools is strange since it is the most honest, comprehensive analysis of the strange events of the US government during the 1900's. He is completely objective in his work. He does not go into controversies such as FDR setting up the Pearl Harbor Attack in order to intentioanlly drag the US into WWII. He simply states what the record indicates in an extremely well written style. Carson is probably most knowledgable historian of this generation. This and his other works are must reads.

"Weak governments do not make libery and property secure; that is the office of powerful governments internally restrained." - Clarence Carson.

In my humble opinion, Clarence Carson is the best intellectual historian of the United States, even though his simple style and gift for essentialization may make him appear less "serious" than the more scholarly authors who love to dazzle their restricted readership with an abundance of notes, sources, dates, statistics and minutely detailed anecdotes, but who tend to get all the crucial conclusions wrong.

Carson is a rare, reality-oriented historian who gets virtually all of his fundamentals right, from political philosophy to economics. And even when he errs - as when his deeply held religious beliefs make him disparage man's creative abilities or when he reads a Platonic dualism in the Declaration of Independence - his errors have a way of remaining localized, leaving the flow of his arguments uncorrupted.

Just as importantly, he is able to give you the substance of past thinkers without any distortion or gross misrepresentation, refusing for instance to label the US form of government a "democracy" ("the democratic features of the American political system are accidents... [Its] essence... is limited government" pp257-8) and providing a clear and accurate knowledge of the original intent of the Founders that puts to shame the more in-depth and usually more myopic scholarly studies.

Published in 1973, *The Rebirth of Liberty: the American Republic 1760-1800* covers about the same ground as the first volume and part of the second volume of Carson's *Basic History of the United States*, or section II of his *Basic American Government*, though with a more chronological approach. It deals with the influence of the English heritage, the colonial experience and the Enlightenment on the political ideas of the Founders; chronicles the failures of Great Britain's mercantilism and the consequent acts of rebellion of the colonies, culminating in the winning of the War of Independence; and finally moves on to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the ratification debates and the adoption of the Bill of Rights, ending with two short chapters on the important political decisions made during the first few presidencies, and slightly overstepping the bounds of the subtitle with such court decisions as Marbury vs. Madison and Fletcher vs. Peck.

Though he is at his most penetrating when dealing with intellectual history and tends to prove less brilliant and original as soon as he stoops to the more factual levels, Carson delivers here an excellent account of the founding of the US government which provides the reader with the essential context for understanding the beliefs and intentions of its creators- an effort that is all the more laudable as those beliefs and intentions have been drowned in the liberal misinterpretations of the twentieth century.

The book is complemented by 60 pages of landmark documents, from the Declaration of the Stamp Act Congress to Jefferson's Inaugural Address.