If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement, the acclaimed biography by David Frisk, Resident Fellow of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), was recently recommended for summer reading by talk-show host Chris McCarthy of WBSM radio (AM 1420) in New Bedford, Massachusetts.  McCarthy wrote that Frisk’s book “is instructive and inspirational and will be beneficial to anyone involved in politics regardless of their political philosophy.”

The other books on McCarthy’s list of “political books for summer reading” are Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus by Rick Perlstein (2001), Coolidge by Amity Schlaes (2013), and Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies by M. Stanton Evans (2007).

Listeners will find them all “interesting and informative,” said McCarthy.  “I put this group of books together because they overlap, and many of the people surface and resurface in the different works—except for the Coolidge biography.”

Dr. Frisk has worked at the AHI since 2013, teaching its adult education classes in history and political science.  He also taught a course on conservative politics at Hamilton College last fall. “It’s an honor,” said Frisk, “to appear on a short list with such high-profile books, all of which are quite significant and well-done. The late Stan Evans, a political comrade and friend of Rusher, would have been pleased to see my biography in company with his book. And Perlstein—a major scholar of American conservative history, and himself a man of the left—clearly understood Rusher’s significance in the story he told so well.”

The Rusher biography, published in 2012 by ISI Books, is now in 503 libraries around the world in either printed or electronic form, according to WorldCat.com. It was favorably reviewed in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Claremont Review of Books, The American Spectator, and The American Conservative, among other publications.