Books for Christmas
Books for Christmas Our annual list of holiday gift suggestions from distinguished readers and writers. Fred Barnes I recommend two political books for different reasons. One is, at once, the...
...Common sense has rarely been so exhilarating...
...Cannon traces Gerald Ford's early political career in Michigan, his impressive rise in the U.S...
...This is the famous, inexhaustible little talmudic treatise on ethics...
...The Private Life of Chairman Mao, by Dr...
...Harriman while in Washington, D.C...
...House of Representatives, his selection as vice president, and finally his assumption of the presidency...
...Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette whose column is distributed by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate...
...Three new ones: The Bird Artist, by Howard Norman...
...Herbert Stein is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...The chapters on the U.S...
...The funniest novel ever written by a Canadian...
...G. Gordon Liddy is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host as well as writer, lecturer, actor, and businessman...
...Li Zhisui...
...But it still manages to paint a convincing, authoritative picture of a rudderless administration devoid of values or strategy...
...and why to be HIV positive is far from being the death sentence conventional wisdom would have us believe—because HIV does not cause AIDS...
...Christopher Hitchens I thank providence that, because of a mediocre television series, I was in effect actually paid to reread Middlemarch...
...How did she know so much...
...I'll not miss the opportunity in this space to suggest you reread William Manchester's One Brief Shining Moment, a recollection of John Kennedy's presidency...
...Our French visitor came, saw, and perceived...
...President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a fellow Kansan, has served as a role model throughout my career...
...He can't make decisions, thus leaving himself vulnerable to whoever pressures him most intensely, usually liberals...
...The best but most underpublicized book of 1994 is Bruce Porter's War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics...
...Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Savior, 1920-1937: Keynes had more influence and led a more colorful life than any other economist of this century...
...The most deeply felt book by a woman who defined style as "lucidity, perspicuousness," and who had it in every word, including "and" and "the...
...Commissioned by the late Jackie Kennedy Onassis, it will be interesting to see if Bill Clinton can commission someone to write such a glowing tome after he leaves office...
...Not Tina's or Graydon's, but Thackeray's...
...The funniest novel ever written by an American, I think it's the closest we've come to The Great American Novel...
...40 The American Spectator December 1994 Robert P. Casey First Things: An Inquiry into the First Principles of Morals and Justice...
...In a completely different category of books, I'd recommend James Cannon's Time and Chance...
...Shane, a Moscow correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, tells the fascinating story of how the Soviet system was undermined by the new information technologies and the growing press freedom the Gorbachev regime was prompted to tolerate...
...As the 1975 introductory note says, "In Trout, waters will forever run pure and sparkling and fish will rise in clear, untrammeled streams...
...No, it's not the chaos that sometimes strikes White House operations...
...A modern-day Common Sense, painfully detailing the extent to which our economic and individual liberties are being eroded away by an arrogant and unconstrained Leviathan...
...Merle Miller's marvelous portrait of an American original and a forgotten art...
...G. Gordon Liddy The Jerome Biblical Commentary...
...The best commentary will be your own...
...It was Killer Angels by Michael Shaara...
...This book is so good—so original, so necessary to read to understand our times—that I simply cannot understand why Postman is not so wildly famous that his phone is ringing off the wall...
...Help was a two-way street...
...Herbert Stein Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations: I'm not showing off...
...Not only was George Orwell wrong in 1984, he was spectacularly wrong...
...This handy reference book might save the life of someone in your family...
...The growing consensus that our welfare system has imploded should rekindle interest in one of the best public policy books I've ever read: The Tragedy of American Compassion, by Marvin Olasky, a fascinating discussion of how early social workers combated poverty until the Progressive Era...
...Murray, the author of Losing Ground, which revolutionized the debate about welfare, turns to the even more controversial matters of genes and intelligence, arguing that those who don't succeed in the American meritocracy fail largely because they are not bright enough...
...Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, byJames Bovard...
...The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers...
...A succinct, thoughtful presentation of where we are and how we got here...
...To date, this book is my favorite source of Ike inspiration, The American Red Cross First Aid and Safety Handbook...
...Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero, by Charles Sprawson...
...Ojars Kalnins is Latvia's ambassador to the United States...
...Coase's style is delightful, saving his fiercest jabs for "blackboard economics" and the central planner's mentality...
...Thatcher's Minister: The Private Diaries of Alan Clark...
...Here are some books that help us hasten the collapse of liberalism's Berlin Wall: Imperium, by Ryszard Kapuscinski...
...A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway...
...It's an interesting argument, one conservatives need to hear, then reject...
...This may be a warning to some and a lesson to others...
...The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray...
...I would like to recommend the following titles: Beyond Peace, by Richard Nixon...
...Malcolm Muggeridge's brilliant memoir...
...David Frum Demosclerosis by Jonathan Rauch searingly condemns a political system paralyzed by greedy, short-sighted gimme groups...
...Finally, conservatives who hope that the next Republican White House will avoid the debacles of the last one must commit to memory John Podhoretz's Hell of a Ride—a brilliant and hilarious portrayal of abject political failure...
...While a glimpse at the distant past helps put the present into a more comfortable context, recent history, as brilliantly analyzed by Zbigniew Brzezinski in Out of Control, has a more sobering and instructive effect, especially useful to those who are thinking about where we should be in the future...
...As a policy wonk, my recommended reading list, not surprisingly, is wonkish...
...Finally, I recommend a real treat to remind us of how fascinating British politics can be for an outsider—combining as it does high moral purpose and sordid behavior...
...Bob Dole is the Republican leader in the United States Senate...
...The 50th anniversary of Normandy provided a fitting occasion to review some of the most recent books on World War II...
...stick to the slim text, and avoid the more modern translations...
...George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State: This is an eye-opening account of what it means to be a model secretary of state—trying to develop strategy, negotiating with foreign counterparts, coping with a constant firehose of information from every corner of the world, contending with the White House and the Department of Defense, and managing a large bureaucracy...
...Modern Times (revised edition), by Paul Johnson...
...Finally, being a lifelong fly-fisherman, I console myself when not actually fly-fishing by reading about it...
...Creepy, spare, and sometimes slightly ridiculous, this novel about murder and redemption in 1911 Newfoundland certainly "has something," as they say, even if, in this case, it's hard to say just what...
...If there is one book to read on "Bosnia," which is becoming the archetypal tragedy of the post–Cold War syndrome, it should be this one...
...This is a fine introduction to, and summary of, a heroic mind and his road not taken by the world...
...Ancient Futures, by Helena Norberg-Hodge...
...Clark is no more capable of self-censorship than Boswell or Pepys, and he makes "the Lady" seem, finally, a good deal more terrifying than "P...
...Salman Rushdie's collection of stories, East West, is the latest refutation of Orwell's deceptive dictum that the imagination, like certain wild creatures, will not breed in captivity...
...When Policy Review profiled seven Western leaders who did the most to win the Cold War, we featured Harry Truman, along with Ronald Reagan, Winston Churchill, Pope John Paul II, Konrad Adenauer, George Meany, and Whittaker Chambers...
...Truman, by David McCullough...
...Bob Woodward insists he's not a liberal, and this book strengthens his case...
...For some reason, I loved this fascinating biography about a no-nonsense straight-talking senator from the Midwest who became president...
...Don't even try to raise a child without it...
...Mao's doctor for twenty-two years reveals that the Great Helmsman was actually just a minor-league Stalin, but with even fewer friends...
...Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse, by Hugh Trevor-Roper...
...David Frum is author of Dead Right (New Republic Books...
...A book that might be subtitled, "Lies, Damned Lies, and the EPA" dealing with the horrendous misuse of science and statistics by environmentalists over the last two decades...
...James Davison Hunter's account of the current struggle for the soul of America...
...But he was a total genius at making his ideas and prescriptions the standard thinking and policy for a generation after his death...
...None of us starved...
...He dislikes that new breed, the "big government conservative...
...The Oxbridge Conspiracy, by Walter Ellis...
...This oral history of the Vietnam War is a riveting portrait of a generation of troops who proudly served our nation in Southeast Asia and then—upon returning to this country— passed through one of the most difficult times for our armed forces...
...Or the sections on the role in American life of private associations, of lawyers, and so relevantly on...
...This tour de siecle by one of England's preeminent journalists is still the finest single volume political history of Planet Earth in the twentieth century, a period in which "The power of the State to do evil expanded with awesome speed" while "its power to do good grew slowly and ambiguously...
...McCullough's biography masterfully tells the story not only of Truman's political career, but also of an education and upbringing in small town Missouri that was right out of Bill Bennett's Book of Virtues...
...Although I've plowed through several new titles this year, the classic in the field remains Ray Bergman's Trout...
...Guns, Crime and Freedom, by Wayne LaPierre...
...Having met Mrs...
...A Polish foreign correspondent, Kapuscinski gives a surprisingly witty and insightful perspective on the collapse of the Soviet Empire...
...A frightening study of the rise of the post-Communist Russian Mafia, the fastest-growing, most violent organized-crime group in the world, whose tentacles are spreading west in a way that makes it almost as big of a threat as Marxism, especially since, as Sterling shows, the Russian Mob is linking up with other organized crime groups to form a global network...
...Before the Shooting Begins: Searching for Democracy in America's Cultural War...
...Andrew Neil The Economist on America: 150 Years of Intelligent British Commentary on America by the World's Most Influential News Magazine...
...Brown is an Arkansas State Trooper...
...None of us wrote anything worth a damn...
...This long, long ride will exhaust and refresh and bring moments of unbearable revelation and recognition that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up prickly as a dog's...
...See the perfect description of Political Correctness in Volume II, Chapter VI, "What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear...
...Christopher Hitchens writes the "Cultural Elite" column for Vanity Fair and the "Minority Report" column for the Nation...
...Ever...
...Although found in the "science fiction" section of most book stores, Morgan Llwelyn's fascinating novels about the ancient Celts (I have so far read The Druids and The Bard) offer a beguiling mix of history, spirituality, and adventure...
...There are as many "characters" in this book as in a Dickens novel...
...Arthur Cooper is editor-in-chief of GQ...
...You can never read this book too many times...
...I wish I'd never heard of it...
...Fred L. Smith, Jr...
...Truman, who had the moral courage to save millions of lives by dropping the atom bomb, and who built the Cold War alliance against Soviet Communism, was the last Democratic president who knew how to handle foreign policy...
...Tower of Secrets, by Victor Sheymov...
...Another important book is Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse, by Ronald Bailey, who was CEI's 1993 Warren Brookes fellow...
...Thank goodness...
...Yet he served in the White House honorably and with great distinction and bravely led our nation through one of its most turbulent times...
...Vanity Fair...
...Dick Cheney Over the years, my favorite books have been about American history—and in particular, military history...
...A provocative analysis of how graduates of Oxford and Cambridge have kept their stranglehold on the British Establishment 46 The American Spectator December 1994 and because of the anti-business snobbery these universities impart how this has contributed to Britain's decline...
...Eisenhower, by Stephen Ambrose...
...Brown Not being one to miss anything related to Bill Clinton, however remote, I recommend Life of the Party: The Biography of Pamela Digby Churchill Hayward Harriman by Christopher Ogden...
...This book is likely to dominate intelligent discourse this winter: read it if you want to participate in the debate...
...Modern Times, by Paul Johnson...
...is president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute...
...President Nixon's last book was also his best—a compelling analysis of world affairs, common sense solutions for America's domestic problems, and a call for a return to American leadership...
...Unless Newt Gingrich gets the bomb...
...Shane...
...Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, by Mary McCarthy...
...Arthur Cooper Henry and Clara, by Thomas Mallon...
...is president and chief executive officer and editor-in-chief of Forbes Magazine...
...After reading this book, I concluded that conservatives have very little to fear from the activities of Christians in politics, and they should be thankful to have someone of Reed's organizational skills in their corner...
...Now he has the most comprehensive and perceptive biography ever written of an economist...
...Paul Greenberg Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville...
...By focusing on the individual troops in the field—from the enlisted men to the generals—Ambrose allows the reader to witness the bravery and strength of our armed forces under the most demanding wartime environment...
...Or the description of the true power of American women in Volume II, Chapter XII, "How the Americans Understand the Equality of the Sexes...
...Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan...
...I don't know of any other picture of government in action at its best that can match it...
...The University of Chicago Press has a fine edition with type large enough for aging eyes...
...John H. Fund In this time of revolutionary political change in America, my suggestions for Christmas gift books focus on the lessons we can learn from the demise of Communism...
...Adam Meyerson Escalante: The Best Teacher in America, by Jay Mathews...
...The American Spectator December 1994 47...
...When Harriman got cold feet on the project and bailed out, Ogden continued on and produced a timely exposé of her life from her childhood through her celebrated marriages to Randolph Churchill, Leland Hayward, and Averell Harriman and on to being the real "first lady of the Democratic party...
...Readers of Vico will realize that all the trouble goes back to the Renaissance, to Descartes...
...are superb...
...As a citizen of a Warsaw Pact nation, he was allowed far greater access to Communist countries than any Westerner...
...As well as any reporter I've read, Atkinson moves seamlessly between interagency meetings in Washington and the decision-making and actual fighting in the desert...
...military and led the way toward restoring the dignity and professionalism of our armed forces...
...The Ethics of Culture by Professor Samuel Fleischacker attacks a liberal philosophical tradition stretching back to Kant to argue that ethics must nearly always originate in religious orthodoxy...
...he never sought the vice presidency much less the presidency...
...A series of essays by an under-read author who dares suggest that mankind can actually be a positive force in an evolving earth...
...Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union, by Scott Shane...
...People will be reading it in 2094...
...I believe Bill Clinton will be to welfare-state liberalism what Mikhail Gorbachev was to the Soviet Union—a transitional figure who tried to keep a failing system alive but actually accelerated its collapse...
...Colin Powell, Barry McCaffrey, Freddie Franks—remained committed to the U.S...
...L.D...
...Thanks a lot...
...The life of this theologian and anti-theologian, poet and teacher, seeker and finder who died young of Lou Gehrig's Disease is only a little more inspiring than the simple, shattering, inundating light of his words...
...A Piece of the Action, by Joseph Nocera...
...This is the latest collection of essays by one of the few Nobel Prize economists whose work is actually relevant to the real world...
...One of the best American novels of the past decade, this is an endearing story of a young man growing up and a grandfather growing young in rural turn-of-the-century Georgia...
...they will move you to speak your own truth unadorned—which is to ask for trouble...
...The other outstanding political book of the year was also penned by a conservative...
...If you are a swimmer, or even if you simply think there is nothing quite so beautiful on God's earth as rivers, bays, oceans, seas, and even swimming pools, this book takes you back through history and into the lives of all the great people who loved swimming...
...Forget the volumes of commentaries...
...Leaping forward a few decades one gets to Al Santoli's Leading the Way...
...The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R...
...In between all this, I find myself returning to Goethe's Faust about once a year, just to be reminded that "freedom and life belong to that man solely who must reconquer them each day...
...This book offers a scholarly and critical analysis, with suggestions as to what to do about it...
...Commentary of the First Ten Books of the Roman Historian Titus Livius, by Niccol?Machiavelli...
...These splendid memoirs by Britain's former minister of defense will never be read by an American politician...
...Take a piece of advice from the book itself: Provide thyself with a teacher and find a companion for study...
...This is a clear, restrained telling of his life that lets its power come through, together with a finely chosen selection of his words...
...In magnificent detail, Ambrose recounts the battles at Omaha and Utah beaches...
...As this book becomes more widely read, Americans are very likely to rise up in anger, making the current political turmoil seem but a tempest in a teapot...
...Written and edited by Sir Alastair Burnet, who edited the Economist for ten years, then went on to become Britain's Walter Cronkite...
...And you will no longer be the same, or you'll be a lot samer...
...Hall takes the reader by the hand, introduces him to these tragic worlds-within-worlds with their orchestrated hatreds...
...Other worthy reads include Cal Thomas's The Things That Matter Most, Frederick W. Marks's excellent set of essays, Velvet on Iron: The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt, David Halberstam's October 1964, Bob Woodward's Agenda, and for all its flaws, Peter Schweitzer's Victory, which properly credits the Reagan administration's critical role in winning the Cold War...
...Fourteen-yearold Will Tweedy is a marvelous boyhood hero in the tradition of Tom Sawyer, a mischievous rebel who steadily grows in maturity as the teachings of experience and his elders reinforce his natural kindness and moral principles...
...Cocksure, by Mordecai Richler...
...To appreciate just what a magnificent force we could field after this period of rebuilding, one can turn to Washington Post reporter Rick Atkinson's Crusade—one of the best accounts of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm...
...Absolutely brilliant...
...Not only was Eisenhower an admirable chief executive, but he also was a great commander of those he led in the Army...
...Malcolm S. Forbes, Jr...
...The trouble, it seems, began with the French Revolution, as Edmund Burke knew it would...
...My idea wasn't big spenders, but those who'd rather slow the growth of spending than break their pick in search of spending cuts in Social Security, Medicare, etc., that never materialize...
...Joanna Trollope's The Men and the Girls caught me in its snare of humane wit...
...Thomas Mallon's most recent book is Henry and Clara (Ticknor & Fields...
...Michael Barone's magisterial rendering of modern American political history...
...The subject is Gettysburg, and Shaara sides with Longstreet against Lee...
...L.D...
...Absolutely riveting, the best (though maybe the only) historical novel I've read since I went through those books by Kenneth Roberts as a teenager...
...I read few novels, but I grabbed a paperback my 12-yearold nephew left behind...
...With these letters a reader can take Keats's great, gutsy journey with him...
...Jack Schaeffer's timeless western about a reluctant but deadly gunslinger saving a group of struggling farmers...
...The Book of Virtues, compiled by William Bennett...
...All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy...
...Still, among all those dusty, boring books that make up this body of writing, there are a few gems that make it all worthwhile: Searching for Safety, by Aaron Wildaysky...
...We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the Author...
...Science Under Siege: Balancing Technology and the Environment, by Michael Fumento...
...Adam Meyerson is vice president for educational affairs at the Heritage Foundation, and editor of Policy Review...
...Most unfortunately but not surprisingly, nothing has changed since this book was published in 1992...
...Of course, one shouldn't ignore American politics completely...
...Hemingway's most appealing book...
...A lucid, impeccably researched history of personal finance that is exquisitely reader-friendly...
...Cannon reminds us that Ford's greatest professional ambition was to become House Republican leader...
...Hannah Arendt demonstrated the root of fascism, Nazism, and Communism in her Origins of Totalitarianism...
...His collection, For the Sake of Argument, is freshly out in paperback...
...His character does not come through as admirable and his economics may be questionable...
...Case Closed, by Gerald Posner...
...The author rides a leaf-blower across the grassy knoll, scattering every kook, auteur, and quick-buck artist who ever addled the nation's brains over the Kennedy assassination...
...At times it is far too "inside the Beltway" and some of its sourcing is suspect...
...Still the most modern work on politics available to us...
...Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...No, the problem isn't staff...
...The biggest problem facing the future of this country is the failure of the public education system...
...This Transaction Publishers book is a paean to Professor Horowitz, the prestigious professor of sociology at Rutgers University—and he well deserves one, for he is one of the few true searchers after truth still in the academy, a man who portrays things the way they are and not the way the political correctors insist they be...
...Actually, Richler has also written the second, third, and fourth funniest novels ever written by a Canadian...
...The only dead immortal writer one would truly like to have met...
...The Democratic Imagination: Dialogues on the Work of Irving Louis Horowitz...
...It is unique in telling us the dismal story of why Hollywood insiders do truly hate the America they supposedly represent...
...Thomas Mallon Three old ones: Letters of John Keats...
...Frum argues, from a libertarian argument, for breaking your pick...
...Rethinking AIDS: The Tragic Cost of Premature Consensus, by Robert Root-Bernstein...
...Beware the sound of these Texican words...
...The best English novel...
...The other is Dead Right, by David Frum...
...Fumento, CEI's 1994 Warren Brookes fellow, is perhaps the only journalist in the world able to write about epidemiology without making a fool of himself...
...Returned to after all these years...
...James M. McPherson's epic account of America's defining moment...
...42 The American Spectator December 1994 Georgie Anne Geyer Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman, professor of communications at New York University...
...Vico's Science of Imagination, by Donald Philip Verene...
...You see ultimate romanticist Byron swimming in the Hellespont and the drunken Jack London floating out to sea while roaring death chants at the stars—altogether a perfectly wonderful little book...
...In fiction I was much taken by The End of the Hunt, Thomas Flanagan's rounding of his trilogy about Irish history...
...Hadley Arkes' clear, provocative, and witty treatise on moral reasoning...
...Sayers at the very top of their game...
...Bob Dole Aside from wading through the 1,342 pages of the Clinton health care plan this year, I have recently had the pleasure of turning the pages of several good books...
...The novel of the year is Chris Buckley's Thank You for Smoking, with Michael Crichton's Disclosure, a close second...
...Essays on Economics and Economists, by Ronald Coase...
...A Rebirth of Values, by Frederick Turner...
...Dick Cheney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the former secretary of defense...
...True story of the conversion and brilliantly executed (and highly dangerous) defection of the most important member of the KGB ever to come over to the side of freedom...
...The American Spectator December 1994 45 Essential to an understanding of the meaning of the Second Amendment and how it undergirds all our freedoms and obligations under the United States Constitution...
...The unfortunate corollary, at least as it seems to me: "there's no going back...
...Sir James Goldsmith is a businessman and member of the European Parliament...
...They are far too frank and literate...
...It's the most complete text on trout fishing available both for the experienced angler and the novice...
...The poor were expected to improve their lot, or in dire cases do something, anything, that contributed to society and allowed them to keep their dignity...
...Ponder each perek, or chapter...
...The Impossible Country: A Journey through the Last Days of Yugoslavia, by Brian Hall, an excellent political travel writer living now in Ithaca, New York...
...He gives me credit for coining the phrase...
...A wonderful story teller and brilliant thinker, Wildaysky in these rabbinical tutorials on modern foolishness does much to explain the ongoing inquisition against technological and economic growth...
...One is, at once, the best book I've read on President Clinton, the best piece of reporting in recent years, and the best page-turner in non-fiction: The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House...
...Smith reminds us of his analytic power, literary skill, and erudition...
...The great English mystery...
...Chronicles of Wasted Time: An Autobiography...
...The author painstakingly explains why there is no heterosexual AIDS epidemic and never will be...
...Biographer Ogden takes hours of conversations with Harriman, who at the time was collaborating with him on a memoir of her life, and transforms it into a hefty volume exposing her remarkable life for all to see...
...And his later book, Technopoly, is good, too...
...He traces for us the way that the human personality has actually changed as we passed from the print age to the television age...
...Lord Peter Wimsey and Ms...
...Haldeman's Diaries make the clearest connection yet between small-time crookery and big-time, serious crime...
...The best novel of 1994...
...Even the master Manchester may not be able to pull this one off...
...Thieves' World: The Threat of the New Global Network of Organized Crime, by Claire Sterling...
...A group of his multitude of friends write about his "other" way of thinking...
...Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Christian Coalition, provides a fascinating overview of what ails America and how ordinary citizens are taking their country back in Politically Incorrect: The Emerging Faith Factor in American Politics (published by Word Publishing, Dallas...
...One of the best is D-Day: June 6, 1944, by the historian Stephen Ambrose...
...Read this book before signing on to Charles Murray's argument that IQ is the best determinant of academic and economic achievement...
...Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, by Nahum N. Glatzer...
...The most authoritative debunking of the many American myths about AIDS peddled by an unquestioning media in the pockets of the AIDS Establishment...
...The definitive account of the young soldiers who put their lives on the line to ensure the survival of democracy...
...Tolkien...
...Intelligence tests would never have predicted that Garfield High School in working-class, Mexican-American East Los Angeles would become one of the nation's ten top high schools for Advanced Placement Calculus...
...Everything The Haldeman Diaries are not: egotistical, judgmental, hilarious...
...Andrew Neil is editor of the Sunday Times of London and executive editor of Fox Television's "Full Disclosure...
...Originally published in 1938, Bergman's book has been reprinted thirteen times...
...Only prophetic when it was written in the 1830s, now it is relevant...
...Liberals won't be happy to learn how important war was as a catalyst for social reforms, and defense-minded conservatives will choke as they read how a strong military invariably means a powerful central government...
...Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era...
...It made my generation want to starve in Paris for art...
...As Ellis concludes, "Britain under Oxbridge is a failed experiment...
...Hollywood vs...
...Mrs...
...What made the difference were three math teachers, Jaime Escalante, Ben Jimenez, and Angelo Villavicencio, who set high expectations, taught math the way coaches teach football, and, fighting the designed-forfailure public school system all the way, inspired sullen teenagers with the ganas—desire—to learn and succeed...
...Public Education: An Autopsy, by Myron Lieberman...
...It was to have been titled The Heel of the Hunt, but 44 The American Spectator December 1994 some fool thought that all Americans both use and misunderstand Mickey Spillane vernacular...
...Read this book and learn why poorer is sicker and wealthier is healthier...
...More surprising, he shows a pragmatic attitude towards the role of government in the economy...
...A trilogy that does more than almost any work I know (save perhaps the Bible) to make the case as to why each of us must struggle against the Evil Empires here and abroad, even though there are no permanent victories (or defeats) in this eternal battle...
...John H. Fund is an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal...
...Robert P. Casey is the governor of Pennsylvania...
...The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House, by Bob Woodward...
...Georgie Ann Geyer is a columnist syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate and author of the new book Waiting for Winter to End: An Extraordinary Journey Through Central Asia (Brassey's...
...Truman, by David McCullough...
...America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values, by Michael Medved...
...Beginning with medieval Europe, the book chronicles how warfare reshaped the map and governments of Europe...
...Malcolm S. Forbes, Jr...
...In the political column, Noel Malcolm's Bosnia: A Short History was a great work of freelance advocacy and a surprising Tory growl against the foul (at least when Serbian) invocation of race, nation, and empire...
...Plain Speaking: An Oral History of Harry S. Truman...
...An extraordinary work of scholarship that puts together, at one's fingertips, all that scholars of various religions, archaeologists and so on have learned to date about each Book of the Old and New Testaments...
...my book discussion group made me do it...
...Pirke Avot: The Ethics of the Fathers...
...4 The American Spectator December 1994 41 D-Day: June 6, 1994, by Stephen Ambrose...
...The essay, "Towards a New Bioethics," extolling man as gardener rather than despoiler, is a much-needed antidote to the Blame-Mankind Firsters who dominate the green agenda...
...with then-Governor Bill Clinton, I think Ogden has truly captured the real Pamela Harriman, who reveals her thoughts at the time on the man who would eventually reward her with the ambassadorship to France...
...The problem is the chaos inside Clinton's head...
...He's got Clinton and his aides pegged...
...Ojars Kalnins William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire is wonderful to read and even better as a reminder that regardless of how difficult, confusing, irrational, and dangerous life seems to be today, it has been much worse...
...But the life of the reviewer is seldom so peachy, berry, and skittle, and anyway I'm not invited to recommend the classics, so let me just defend the idea of reading as hedonism against the notion of literature as social science...
...Fred L. Smith, Jr...
...Cold Sassy Tree, by Olive Ann Burns...
...Catch-22, by Joseph Heller...
...Thatcher's Minister, by Alan Clark...
...James Goldsmith African Genesis, by Robert Ardrey...
...Many of my good friends and colleagues from the Pentagon—Gens...
...I also followed Gore Vidal's advice and took in all of Dawn Powell, which is very good on women on men...
Vol. 27 • December 1994 • No. 12
