A doctoral student at a major university who I've been communicating with emails me today about a very silly sounding book by Straussian Lincoln Cultist Thomas Krannawitter entitled "Lincoln and His Critics: Vindicating the Statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln." Well, it's not actually a real book: It's for sale online at Amazon.com because Krannawitter could not find a publisher. It's worse than a vanity press book, in other words. It is his doctoral dissertation at Claremont Graduate School, which got him a job at Hillsdale College, now run by the former director of the Claremont Institute, Larry Arnn.
Here's what my doctoral student friend says of the book so far:
"It's shocking to me what they'll evidently accept out there [Claremont] as a disserttion. The whole thing looks like a polemic rather than anything scholarly. The title says it all: His agenda is to "vindicate" Abraham Lincoln.
"Chapter 3 is a response to 'libertarian economists' [including myself, Walter Williams, Mark Thornton, Bob Ekelund, and Charles Adams] who criticize Lincoln. It appears to be devoid of scholarly analysis . . . . He opens his third chapter by likening this realm of criticism to John Wilkes Booth! It gets worse from there . . . . Every treatment of an economist is replete with snide, condescending remarks . . . the fact that this sort of rant was sufficient to get Krannawitter a degree from Claremont makes me want to vomit."
"There is virtually no new scholarly contribution I can find . . . it has typos galore and is preoccupied with polemical rantings, rather than analysis. The most common citations are appeals to the authority of Jaffa, who incidentally chaired the thing [the dissertation committee]."
Sounds like a good candidate for review on LewRockwell.com by my favorite book reviewer, David Gordon.
