Customer Reviews

American Spectator

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The American Spectator offers an eloquent and often humorous conservative viewpoint on the more pressing political and cultural issues facing the world today. The emphasis here is "conservatism", not "Republicanism" as TAS is often highly critical of GOP politics and policies that stray from conservative ideals.

Publications like TAS counter the insidious, tendentious underpinings of the mainstream media, hollywood, and the mistake that is the United Nations. I recommend you at least give it a look. Samples of its content can be found at www.spectator.org

The American Spectator is a must read for anyone considering themselves an intellectual. Not only are the articles witty and well-researched, they also provide well-articulated arguments to the most pressing (if sometimes slighlty out of date) controversies of the times. Well worth the subscription price, or even the cover price.

I have been reading this magazine for the past year. This is a great magazine through and through. Their contributors are as good as those who do contribute to first rate Conservative magazines like the NR and WS. I like the simplicity of the articles and it is not so philosophical or hard to understand. A great read if you're interested in learning the points of views of the Conservatives. Moreover, their book reviews and recommendations are awesome. I always open this magazine where they have book reviews first and then I read other stuff. It's a good read!

This magazine contains common sense in an age(and country) that is dire need of it. A stark contrast to the socialist tracts put out by the mainstream press.

I used to subscribe to TAS, back in the 1980s and 90s when it was a lively Journal that had a good deal of exciting writing and reporting. Granted it was, and continues to be, much more socalially conservative than I ever was, but I do try to read a wide spectrum of publications; I'm not one who reads just to reinforce my own prejudices. And there was plenty I did like- P.J. O'Rourke on Washington, DC; the annual Christmas book recommendations; and Ben Stein's whiny, self-pitying column from Hollywood.

Some years ago TAS fell under new ownership and new editorship and rapidly became a dull and uninteresting magazine that devoted increasing amounts of space to some rather bizarre pseudo-scientific areas- the kids of things you'd expect to see in a Lyndon LaRouche magazine. I not only quit subscribing, I quit looking through it on newsstands.

In recent years the new editors have made a real effort to restore the magazine that R. Emmet Tyrell made into the most talked-about (and hated) of the Clinton years, but the spark is no longer there, perhaps becasue the Clintons aren't either; time seems to have left TAS in its wake.

The American Spectator is the most interesting, informative and entertaining journal in existence today.

I have just read an interview on 'The American Spectator 'in which the journalist Charley Levine interviews Jonathan Pollard. Polland explains the unusual harshness of his jail sentence, and its injustice.
I think it is quite commendable that the 'Spectator' prints such an interview.
The Spectator counts among its contributors P.David Hornik one of the finest political writers working today.
It has a political line which I generally sympathize with.
It is a friend, and even if at times is not at the highest of highest quality it is certainly superior to most of the opposition.

Our library has just finished its magazine usage count, and to my surprise the American Spectator came dribbling in with only a couple of hits, measured by current copies left on the table and check outs of older issues. And yet our patronage here is very conservative. Perhaps people who once read this sort of thing no longer read at all, or maybe, as a couple of reviewers suggested, with Bill Clinton out of office, it no longer has the same appeal.
You can change my rating to five stars if you like, for the sake of ideology, but you still won't read the thing. Just like I don't read the Nation anymore.
***Postscript of July 2008:
looks like usage has continued to decline among our readers; no check-outs of Am Spectator and found it lying ONCE on the table rather than collecting dust in its niche. Maybe the library patron who disturbed it thought it was something else. Also, National Review seems to be declining in popularity here out in the outer reaches of Chicagoland. I expect that the people who used to read these things now watch Fox or surf the Internet.
Publications like this can thank their lucky stars that public libraries exist, socialistic though they appear to be. Who else would buy it?