[2] His father had trained as a chemist in Hungary, but without English skills he found work in New York as a diamond setter; his mother took business courses and became an accountant.
[2] He has also written columns for "The Wall Street Journal, Reason, National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Christian Science Monitor, The Jerusalem Post, The Globe and Mail, The Hill", and he "worked for more than a decade as an editor, reporter and producer at media outlets such as the Associated Press, (and) the New York Daily News".
According to Michael Roberts of Westword, "Taxidermic threats are new for Harsanyi, whose pre-Post columns generally ran in publications that tilted to the right.
At the Post, however, he's been positively bombarded with negative missives during his first few weeks on the job, with many correspondents making sweeping generalizations about him based on perceptions of his politics."
Moreover, Harsanyi barely considers business's role, as these dangerous do-gooders fight fast food and tobacco companies armed with hundreds of millions of marketing dollars.
I argued — and will continue to argue — with some of its premises, and I disliked the way the book ended, with no real solution, but Harsanyi's critique did cause me to reconsider the idea of democracy, which we have so eagerly tried to export into places like Iraq and Afghanistan..."[11]Of First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, Duke University's Michael C. Munger wrote, "It is not a legalistic argument about the importance of the Second Amendment, but rather a description of the place of guns in American history and culture.
"[12] According to David French, First Freedom "simultaneously serves as a technical, legal, and cultural history — an ambitious effort that could easily bog down in any given American period.