Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, but he wasn’t the first Republican presidential candidate. That honor belongs to the subject of John Bicknell‘s biography, Lincoln’s Pathfinder: John C. Fremont and the Violent Election of 1856.

In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Bicknell describes how Fremont turned his fame as an explorer into a political opportunity, why he would have made a better president than the victorious James Buchanan, and whether Lincoln owed his triumph in 1860 to Fremont’s defeat four years earlier.

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As a journalist, Jay Nordlinger covers a lot of ground: people, human rights, language, music, golf and more. His best articles and essays from the last decade now appear on the pages of Digging In: Further Collected Writings of Jay Nordlinger.

In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Nordlinger describes how he comes up with story ideas, the importance of writing about people rather than concepts, and how William F. Buckley Jr. influenced him.

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We know what the Founding Fathers said, but what did they mean? That’s the question Thomas G. Westasks, then answers, in The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom.

In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, West interprets the phrase “all men are created,” explains how a slaveholder such as Thomas Jefferson could have written those words, and speculates on what the Founders would think of 21st-century America.

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Fifty years ago, the New York Review of Books savaged Making It, the 1967 memoir by Norman Podhoretz–and now, amazingly, the New York Review’s book imprint is bringing out a new edition.

In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Podhoretz explains what his half-century-old book has to say to readers now, whether he was surprised by the offer to republish it, and how he became a neoconservative. He also discusses Commentary magazine, which he edited for many years, and reveals what he thinks of the performance of its current editor: his son, John Podhoretz.

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What does Herbert Hoover have to say to 21st-century conservatives? Quite a bit, according to George Nash, who has written an introduction to a new edition of American Individualism, first published almost a century ago.

In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Nash describes how Hoover became a believer in American exceptionalism and why so many historians regard his presidency as a failure. Toward the end, Nash–who also wrote The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America–explains what Trumpism means for the conservative movement.

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How can orthodox Christians flourish in a hostile modern world? Rod Dreher proposes a way in The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation.

In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Dreher pitches his idea, explains its inspiration, and insists that he doesn’t mean conservatives should flock to monasteries. He also tells us whether he still considers himself a “crunchy con”–the subject of his first book.

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This big book of nearly 1,200 pages includes everything from Beowulf’s time–and that’s why they call it The Complete Old English Poems, translated by Craig Williamson and with an introduction by Tom Shippey.

In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Shippey explains why this old literature is still worth reading and how it influenced J.R.R. Tolkien. He also discusses the Anglo-Saxon fondness for riddles and describes the paradox of how he became both a scholar of these aged works as well as the Wall Street Journal’s science-fiction book critic.

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