Christmas Book Recommendations
"Christmas Book Recommendations" And there was Nick's wife, a fragile woman, barely tall enough to see over the bar and garbed Italian mamma-fashion in black. She scurried the length of the bar back and again, carrying the...
...Lewis...
...A unique and enormously useful reference volume for the writer, thinker, student, or fact-nut...
...The biography is finely written, it has plenty of wit and funny anecdotes, and very few lapses of taste...
...ROGER ROSENBLATT Literary editor, The New Republic...
...A Fine and Private Place by Joan Bakewell and John Drummond, with photographs by Andrew Lawson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, L3.95...
...The new illustrations in this new college edition are all in the margins...
...Unfortunately, it is not sold separately at a reduced price...
...WALTER GOODMAN Member of the editorial board of the New York Times...
...Having few ideas, I enjoy amassing facts...
...But "I say that our New World democracy...is, so far, an almost complete failure in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary and aesthetic results...
...I understood one out of 50 pages, and enjoyed every hour of it...
...A blueprint for accelerating the destruction of American medicine by allying it still more closely with the omnicompetent state...
...Still, Professor Nahum Sarna's Understanding Genesis (McGraw-Hill, 1966) shows, from a Judaic point of view that should appeal to a broader audience, how modern criticism can be used to enrich the homiletic purposes of the narrative...
...In doing so, we hope to provide not only useful advice, but also some insight into the workings and frolics of nineteen extraordinary minds...
...76-64115...
...Father of Rachel and Benjamin Auspitz, aged 10 and 4. Telling Bible stories to one's children has several advantages for parents who do their homework...
...Some preliminary calculations (by an intergovernmental agency, Paris, September 1976, classified), indicate that world industrial output would have to rise steadily by 11 percent a year in order to reach this target without dislocation or redistribution...
...That's my name, Joe...
...SN 003-000-00518-6...
...Miss Dora, can't you tell me a little about Nick and the old days...
...Nabokov's Lolita stands as evidence that sexual desire need not be treated as pornography, and Henry Miller's "Tropics" stand as proof that pornography can be literature...
...If I did not I would go crazy.' Inasmuch as he made this remark about himself one need not feel that it is indecent to agree with him....If he had not been able to make his daily submissions to God, he might indeed have taken refuge in paranoia and developed a `persecution mania...
...A first-rate history...
...SN 003-000-00520-8...
...Or a hilarious, X-rated dialogue between Sir Walter Raleigh and his fractious son...
...This book is 261 pages long...
...Thomas Woodrow Wilson by Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt...
...for pleasure, and I read my friends...
...ANDREW M. GREELEY Director of the Center for the Study of American Pluralism at the University of Chicago...
...NELSON W. POLSBY Professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley...
...I guarantee it will cure Americans of all persuasions of their desire to rediscover their—or anybody else's—roots...
...it preserves some of the majesty and earthiness of the King James and Hebrew originals...
...I have been working through (one does not read these documents) the nine volumes of The Information Economy, prepared by a research team of the Office of Telecommunications, of the U.S...
...You should pray every day to St...
...Wilson was no exception to this rule...
...The drinks were powerful and tasty, and Miss Dora regaled us with stories...
...Don't miss the memorable scene with the literal-minded J. Edgar Hoover...
...Author of The Myth of Mental Illness...
...For those who want to peruse or browse in these volumes, the relevant numbers for the Government Printing Office are: SN 003-000-00512-7...
...The best and funniest novel which has appeared in the English language this year...
...Dissertations on diligence, thrift, affluence, the free market, and other evils of individualism, by one of the leading anti-capitalist capitalists...
...It tells who was doing what at any given age in history...
...It is not in the Balzac-Stendhal class and it deals, of course, with a world that no longer exists—being mainly preoccupied with current affairs, mostly unpleasant or depressing, this is probably why I liked it...
...The St...
...it appeared in English translation in the 1870s and there is an opera by Mascagni based on it...
...From 1947 to 1973, the best and longest economic boom in world economic history, the average output increased by five percent a year...
...Sample opinions: "Health policy is pathological because we are neurotic and insist on making our government psychotic...
...Professor of government at Harvard...
...There's so many stories about this place," Miss Dora resumed...
...In a many-culted country one hesitates to suggest "background reading" or specific editions to a general audience...
...Your query startled me into the realization that I read a lot of biography—both fact and fiction—for fun...
...Sample opinions: "It is possible that people need to believe that they are unmanaged if they are to be managed effectively...
...Author of Political Man, The First New Nation, The Politics of Unreason (with Earl Raab), Revolution and Counterrevolution, The Divided Academy (with Everett Ladd), and Rebellion in the University...
...Kant's Critique of Pure Reason...
...At some stage of the game, pretty soon I hope, Catholics are going to discover that James' pragmatism, pluralism, and empiricism are far more compatible with their world-view than that of virtually any other contemporary (or near-contemporary) American philosopher...
...The most pleasant book I read lately is Cole Lesley's Remembered Laughter: The Life of Noel Coward (Knopf...
...The trinitarian Christian A Child's Bible (Wolfe Publishing Limited, 10 Earlham Street, London W.C...
...I now regret that I had read but one of N.C.'s autobiographical books and none of The American Spectator December 1977 27 his short stories and I now intend to read them all...
...That in the Soviet-type economies, the control of lots of other things besides prices is also a function of the state disturbs Galbraith very little...
...A book I constantly go back to is Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, especially Book V, with its extraordinary insights into the sociology of law, defense, education, and religion...
...I asked...
...Retelling them (or even selecting editions from which to read them aloud) requires thought, discrimination, timing, and a knowledge of one's child...
...On a totally different track, more right brain than left, John Woolman's Journal illuminates the sources of human sensitivity in language that makes it, wholly unintentionally, one of the great American works of literature...
...Elegantly-written essays which arc even more relevant today than when they were written forty years ago...
...Books I've reread in the past year, and mean to again, not a bad criterion: Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, of course...
...SN 003-000-00515-1...
...Generally favorable to democratic theory but replete with early warnings (Jacksonian period) about "the mutability and the ignorance of democracy...
...Yet politics, we learn, was not the sole motivation, for Nixon administration officials did have a legitimate and genuine concern about drug addiction...
...Eating in America by Waverley Root and Richard de Rochmont (Wm...
...Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant: This is the only good novel de Maupassant ever wrote, but it is dazzling...
...More emphasis should be placed on commitment to human service in the selection of medical students than on good academic credentials alone...
...The Crime of Punishment by Karl Menninger...
...The most instructive book I read is The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective by Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr...
...has seized the torch dropped by the late H.L...
...John Stuart Mill: Representative Government...
...SN 003-000-00517-8...
...This would have constituted a coup d' kat, Epstein writes, because it would have "radically changed the balance of power" by depriving the bureaucracy of its usual independence of the White House...
...this time, to reflect on the acute observations and the shrewd judgments of Mrs...
...Skinner...
...Montaigne's Selected Essays (Modern Library...
...The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James...
...He poured freehand like he always does...
...He asserts that only the U.S...
...if we judge by the dissatisfaction with which its innumerable critics leave us, we may be confident that no one has reached its peak...
...The theme can be simply stated: "Under the aegis of a 'war on heroin,' " Epstein tells us in his preface, President Nixon attempted "an American coup d'etat...
...We assented...
...One of the few unmitigated tragedies we are fortunate to possess, on the level with those of Aeschylus and Sophocles...
...If you want to see what may be coming, forget Franz Fanon and "read" The Dimensions of the Required Restructuring of World Manufacturing Output and Trade in order to reach the Lima Target, report by the UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) secretariat, Nairobi, May 1976, GE...
...It has the same trade-off between economy and detail that characterizes his best short stories...
...It was like my grandmother back from the grave...
...Morrow, 1976...
...FELIX MORLEY Former president of Haverford College...
...John Dean, Blind Ambition: For students of entomology, to show them that no insect can be as much an insect as a human being can be...
...this is one of the penalties of advancing middle age...
...Therese Raquin by Emile Zola: I defy anyone to put this book down until two-thirds the way through...
...That hamburger really had been too much for her...
...If you The American Spectator December 1977 25 want to understand the major structural changes taking place in American society, this burrowing is a necessary task...
...Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History: A book to read and reread for its understanding of the disintegration of the modern soul...
...There used to be rooms upstairs...
...This is not an easy book to read but its underlying argument—which I wish Edgerton would develop philosophically one day—is that not only artistic representation but the very act of seeing changes in history, reflecting certain profound mutations in consciousness...
...One suggestion would be a requirement for one to two years of service (the equivalent of a domestic Peace Corps) in an urban ghetto or remote rural area...
...Bible stories thus force parents to enter into the minds of their children, as well as into perennial problems of scholarship and morals...
...Herbert Spencer, Whistler, Gauguin, Pissarro, died...
...The "Communist Manifesto" for the next hundred years is not written any longer in flaming apocalyptic prose, but in clotted bureaucratic prose...
...Our visit to Nick's was nearly a year ago, and Eric writes me now to say that Nick is back on his feet again...
...Her son, she told us, was both an M.D...
...A promise of paradise by leading man "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" (a la B.F...
...Agatha Christie, Sleeping Murder: The author's superficial knowledge of human beings goes deeper than depth psychology...
...The Age of Arthur, by John Morris, not another Camelot-quickie, but a spirited and philosophical book by a scholar on the origins of the consensual polities of Britain...
...Mencken and applied it smartly to every progressive backside in sight...
...and the speed limit on automobiles in Great Britain was 20 miles per hour...
...A distillation of the wisdom, eloquence, and wit of the greatest minds in western history—all in one hefty volume...
...Miss Dora peered through her ancient rimless glasses...
...With sweat, persistence, and plenty of commentaries, this book can be more or less understood...
...Basic Books...
...To start receiving your copy of The American Spectator, use this handy order form and subscribe today...
...The first, which begins on the front cover, is called Agency of Fear...
...Slouching Towards Bethlehem...
...Henry James wrote The Ambassadors...
...Simons, Henry C. Economic Policy for a Free Society...
...It made me, I think, both a world citizen and ultimately an American...
...But in '57 the hurricane tore the second floor off...
...The Bathroom by Alexander Kira (Pan...
...She stepped away a moment to make change at the cash register and as I followed her movements I saw mounted in a slot on the register what looked like a holy card—the kind you get at Catholic wakes or that the nuns gave you when you behaved in school...
...ROBERT CONQUEST Historian and poet...
...The most illuminating books I read are the numerous (there are more than two dozen) collections of essays written by the American essayist Agnes Repplier (18551950), all out of print long ago...
...It should be reprinted, annotated by a committee of good historians...
...Joseph's Guild comes around every year for a collection and they gave us that...
...one always finds something new—model literary criticism (of the poet Claudian), a note on homosexuality (from which, though almost universally found, he believes, and hopes, that the Negro in his own lands is exempt...
...I have read, too, Diana Trilling's We Must March My Darlings...
...Chapter Notes," it must be said, is not only shorter, but more persuasive...
...I don't know where Edgerton dwells, and I hope that he knows something of the works of Owen Barfield, another solitary and deep-going student of the evolving history of human consciousness...
...I lay awake for hours thinking about some of the modern consequences of Professor Edgerton's argument...
...The books I'd give—or keep—need no advertisement...
...SN 003-000-00516-0...
...Skipping the dull stories within the story, Cervantes will lead the reader to discern two types of men that transcend age and culture, and are to be found even , in Madison Avenue and Wall Street, lands inwhich Sancho might mistakenly be thought to be as much at home as in La Mancha...
...Yes, after all that, I do read, occasionally (I have to...
...She pulled a one-ounce pousse-café glass to the counter...
...J. J. Rousseau: The Social Contract...
...While Kung has a reputation for being a controversial radical, in fact On Being a Christian is the book of a devout, strongly believing, confirmed Christian...
...The next thing I knew she had clasped her hand in mine and given me the card...
...A clear and orderly presentation of all the remarkable machines that have kept civilization at a standstill...
...Many of the stories themselves appeal immediately to children...
...She scurried the length of the bar back and again, carrying the greenbacks she collected to the cash register...
...TD/185/Supp...
...Press...
...Bible stories deal compactly with an epic range of experience not to be found in contemporary books for juveniles...
...HERBERT STEIN A. Willis Robertson Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia...
...He's the greatest bartender that ever lived...
...The most enjoyable book I read during the last year was L'ami Fritz by ErckmannChatrian...
...I made introductions...
...A terrific history of graphology, especially useful for amateur detectives...
...Joseph is the patron saint of happy families and a happy marriage, and your patron too...
...Marc U. Porat...
...Department of Commerce, funded by the National Science Foundation's RANN/ Division of Advanced Productivity Research and Technology, and authored principally by Dr...
...The Onion Field by Joseph Wambaugh: Wambaugh opened up the police force—as opposed to the detective—as a literary terrain...
...Interpretation of Cultures by Clifford Geertz...
...She was as well-read as George Saintsbury (who respected her highly), as witty as Noel Coward, and as erudite as Professor Edgerton...
...The Inventing of America by Bruce 28 The American Spectator December 1977 Norman (Taplinger, 1976...
...But they may have some incidental uses today...
...The best analysis of the factors affecting political modernization which relates the past and present of developed polities to the tasks facing the emerging nations and explains many of the tensions of today...
...About Behaviorism and other works by B.F...
...Elementary nothing...
...Yes, with a "j" in my father's copy, which I still possess...
...My favorite is the Cimitero di Staglieno in Genoa...
...1. To translate: The "developing countries" are asking that 25 percent of the world's manufacturing output be shifted into their hands by the year 2000...
...and a Ph.D., and was she ever proud of him, and her granddaughters, were they ever beautiful...
...the Sixth Zionist Congress refused an offer for a homelandin South Africa...
...from Folkestone, Kent Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge (Duckworth Ltd., London, L3.95...
...I think that this theme is even more important than the aesthetic and perspectivist arguments propounded by eminent art historians such as Panofsky or Gombrich...
...she amounts to far more than the image that still lives in the minds of the very few literati who remember her name, that of a genteel Philadelphian bluestocking, a lady of belles-lettres of 1890 vintage...
...SN 003-000-00514-3...
...One twelve month's a wife...
...I tried again...
...Former editor of the Washington Post...
...Christmas Book Recommendations We offer here gift suggestions from some of the authors whose writings would top our own list of recommendations...
...A delight to see such craftsmanship...
...A book primarily for war nuts, but once you've read it nobody will stump you on the topic...
...As the newspaper ads for Agency of Fear put it, the book is an "explosive, fully documented report on Nixon's secret blueprint for seizing ultimate power...
...The Holmes-Laski Letters (edited by Mark Howe) have all sorts of good things in them for people who want to learn a little bit about England and America in the early 20th century, or about academic life, or the judiciary, or Harold Laski's book-buying habits...
...He seems to be off it now, but I bet you any money he'll be back on again...
...I can't seem...
...Author of The Rebirth of Europe...
...In "Chapter Notes" we 30 The American Spectator December 1977...
...It shows that a philosopher's life is not necessarily a dull one...
...For pleasure, I have been reading John Le Carre's The Honourable Schoolboy...
...On Being a Christian by Hans Kung...
...Gibbon's Decline and Fall provides insulation against those tendentious comparisons of Rome 1700 or so years ago and the United States in our own time...
...The "General Will," which it assumes, must in the last analysis be exercised by an absolute dictatorship, to which all opposition is treasonable...
...Author of The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and The Coming of Post-Industrial Society...
...Bicycles and Tricycles: An Elementary Treatise on their Design and Construction by Archibald Sharp (MIT Press, 1977...
...There are profoundly moving poems among those which are merely humorous or quaint: Sixteen years a maiden...
...Doing Better and Feeling Worse, edited by John H. Knowles, M.D...
...BOOK REVIEW Agency ofFear Edward Jay Epstein / G.P...
...Otherwise the bar would've been wrecked...
...Her mind and prose are complex, but not opaque...
...To that extent, they confirm the first estimates and forecasts of Fritz Machlup in his pioneering Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the U.S...
...Proust's Remembrance of Things Past demonstrates the benefits of staying in the closet...
...Resting on this solid foundation, the morally and politically impartial science of psychohistory has since supplied us with countless cases of men who seem to be politicians but are really psychotics...
...has countered "the fact that whenever government by the Many has been tried, it has ultimately produced monstrous and morbid forms of government by the One, or of government by the Few...
...The Nixon administration attempted, that is, to bring under direct White House control a powerful investigative agency, whose ostensible task would be to fight drug addicElliott Abrams is special counsel to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan of New York...
...Sir Henry S. Maine: Popular Government...
...Planning must replace the market...
...Here, we learn that the Nixon administration used fear of drugs for political purposes, in an effort to gain popularity and to win the 1972 election...
...SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET Professor of political science and sociology at Stanford University...
...I read her first nearly thirty years ago and I am now engaged in the modest task of attempting to contribute to the restoration of her reputation...
...He is, as far as I am 26 The American Spectator December 1977 concerned, the most original, illuminating, and stimulating social science scholar in America...
...Lear will help the reader who reads it for what is in it and not for the optimism he brings to it to discern that which we tend to turn our eyes from: the apoira at the heart of the cosmos...
...SN 003-000-00513-5...
...Putnam's Sons I $9.95 Elliott Abrams Readers who remember the children's storybooks in which one tale began on the front cover, and another on the back cover when the book was turned over, will find Edward Jay Epstein's new work especially rewarding...
...Author of Ethnicity in the United States, The Communal Catholic, and The American Catholic: A Social Portrait...
...The Dispossessed is a beautiful parody of earth in another physical setting...
...he could charm Hollywood, Broadway, Las Vegas, as well as all of the members of the British royal family by being simply true to himself...
...2, hardback and paper, 1971) provides an abridged text rewritten in simple language by Anne Edwards and illustrated by Charles Frontand David Christian...
...There was a "coup" attempt, or there was none, and in the latter case the Nixon administration was motivated by the usual Washington mix of policy goals and politics...
...The Unmaking of a President by Herbert Y. Schandler (Princeton Univ...
...Author of Political Promises and Community Power and Political Theory...
...Please check the appropriate boxes and mail this form to: The American Spectator, Subscription Department, P.O...
...Trilling on our disordered upper-middle-class world...
...Compared to Coward's light verse, even the best of Cole Porter (when read without the coruscating syncopated music) is merely patter...
...Author of A New History of the Cold War and The Last European War...
...Chief fiction reviewer for the London Evening Standard...
...Soon to be a collector's item since nobody writes anymore...
...Bowker Co...
...A collection of epitaphs taken from English churchyards with photographs of notable gravestones and monuments...
...I asked for the Bayou Bomb, made from whiskey imported from Evangeline's old digs, Acadia...
...They invite a wealth of interpretation, elaboration, legend, and lore...
...A well-known Berkeley physicist helps to narrow the chasm between religion and science by describing how new discoveries in molecular physics validate the ancient insights of Oriental and Christian mystics on the nature of the universe...
...For instance: John Aubrey's Brief Lives, which dignifies three-dot journalism by gossiping about some of Western civilization's all-time worthies...
...It is the story, as the book's subtitle explains, of "Opiates and Political Power in America...
...A prolonged ad for the phone company, with lots of pictures of Bell, Watson, and antique phones...
...They age well, giving young adults a necessary foundation for reclaiming their cultural birthright, while helping them to define aspects of it as religious, historical, ethical, or literary...
...Written c. 1880...
...Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...I do think, of course, that some of my own books are very good, but modesty forbids my mentioning them...
...HARVEY C. MANSFIELD, JR...
...I assume that the fundamental political issue now confronting the United States is whether or not Representative Government, which we call democracy, is likely to endure...
...equally true today...
...Madame Curie won a Nobel Prize...
...It gets a bit crazy after that...
...A truly superb reference book...
...Is that a picture of St...
...Don Quijote...
...and at least I can read them all...
...Honest and authentic both to the needs of the present time and the tradition of the past, he is also one of the few European theologians who currently has the courage to disagree with the fashionable warmed-over Marxism that is called "political theology...
...The Great Train Robbery became the longest film ever made (12 minutes...
...Here are the seven that I found profitable in 1977: Great Treasury of Western Thought (R.R...
...he might have become not the occupant of the White House but the inmate of an asylum...
...Note especially the well-reasoned argument that every recipient of "poor relief " meaning all forms of governmental welfare, must be excluded from the franchise if democracy is to be preserved...
...Samuel Huntington—Political Order in Changing Societies...
...Professor Edgerton seems to be an American scholar of the best kind: independent-minded, sensitive, and thorough...
...A theory of human behavior, by one of the leading psychologists and social commentators of the twentieth century, based on the proposition that human beings are not moral agents: "A person is not an originating agent...
...Tolstoi, Leo...
...But what, really, are psychohistorians ? "...the ebullient Mr...
...My friends had the house specialty, Nick's Golden Spike, of which the chief ingredients are scotch and Lochan Ora scotch liqueur...
...And when wecame back"—she pointed to a corner of the ceiling—"there was one Strega bottle_ holding up the ceiling...
...Miss Dora was tired on her feet...
...CLARE BOOTHE LUCE Editor, playwright, author, former congresswoman and ambassador...
...Epstein has provided us with a rare value in these inflationary days: two books for the price of one...
...It is worth the effort, since it is the turning point of modern philosophy—if philosophy, an absolutely indispensable activity for high civilization that is forever chasing its tail but getting nowhere, can be said to have a turning point...
...I think Pnin is the one, unless it was his identical twin, who once discovered as he was pulling out of the station on his way to a lecture that he had brought the wrong notes...
...I think the book which influenced me most in my life was H.G...
...Henry Ford raised $100,000 to start an automobile company...
...Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago: The book that will nag the Soviet Union to its grave and curse it ever after, written by a man who is a finer man, by his own testimony, than he ever would have been but for the vicious tyrannies he survived and overcame...
...Miss Dora choked...
...After the War he won first place in a contest in Rome pouring pousse-cafés against bartenders from all over Europe...
...King Lear...
...I have been too busy writing a book to read a book...
...One half hour a mother, And then I lost my life...
...He tells all you have never really wanted to know—but damned well should know—about America's disastrous involvement in Vietnam...
...They brought me a hamburger with onion on it for supper and I never should've eaten the whole thing...
...He even gets in back of the bar now and then, and his pouring arm is limber...
...What I would not give to have the four of them for dinner...
...THOMAS SZASZ Professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical Center...
...Rabelais' Works, in the Urquhart and Motteux translation, since few men, certainly not I, can read the old French of "the abyss of learning...
...maintained his admirable integrity in the midst of the often sleazy theatrical world...
...In the Soviet-type economies, the control of prices is a function of the state...
...What is happening is that the older divisions of agriculture, manufacturing, and services are no longer a useful way of mapping the sector arrangement and occupational trends in the economy...
...The Wines of the Cates du Rhone by Sheldon Wasserman (Stein and Day, 1977...
...These nine volumes (though based on data ten years old) tell us that more than half of GNP and more than half of the labor force are centered in information activities...
...Biology only hit me at the age of forty, largely through reading D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form, which persuaded me that there were general patterns in space and time...
...One reads it slowly, like sipping a good malt scotch whiskey, to savor the language, the description, and the artfulway the story is constructed...
...Author of The Fiscal Revolution in America...
...KENNETH E. BOULDING Professor of economics at the University of Colorado...
...I never go back to it without learning something new...
...He cannot be written off as a genre writer...
...The best anybody else could do was twenty-four...
...Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America...
...Box 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 PLEASE PRINT ^ New subscription ^ Renewal ^ One year (ten issues) $10 ^ Two years $18 ^ Three years $25 ^ Payment enclosed ^ Please bill me Name Address City State Zip X71 The American Spectator December 1977 29 ELISEO VIVAS Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Northwestern University...
...One of the most vicious books of our age by one of our most influential immoralists...
...They would come all the way from Hollywood to see Nick...
...She has two rare (and increasingly scarce) qualities: intelligence, and a sense of what is relevant in our culture...
...War and Peace...
...If she didn't know us, how could she deceive us...
...Nick could fill one of these with thirty-two layers of different liqueurs...
...Wells' The Outline of History, which I received as a Sunday School prize as a boy in Liverpool...
...Daniel Bell—The Coming of Post-Industrial Society...
...I dare any reader not to learn from it...
...the first recording of an opera was made...
...London] Daily Telegraph Join the thousands of thoughtful people who read The American Spectator—the magazine Time magazine has called "one of the nation's most energetic and sprightly journals of opinion...
...On the premise that the readers of The American Spectator are more familiar with the works of their ideological friends than with those of their ideological enemies, I herewith offer a sampling of some of the most dangerous and debased writing to appear in recent years...
...Here, you take this," she said...
...The books that follow are not books to be "enjoyed," in the ordinary sense of the word, during the reading of them, although their digestion gives me both satisfaction and a profound sense of their having been conducive to the health of my mind...
...Scientific proof that individuals who deprive their innocent neighbors of life, liberty, and property are not criminals, but those who punish them are: "The principle of no punishment cannot allow of any exception...
...An unsentimental but sympathetic account of life in America...
...Not to worry: By good fortune he was on the wrong train...
...The American exception (writing in 1885) "appears to meto have arisen rather from skillfully applying the curb to popular impulses than from giving them the rein...
...And he didn't use no gadgets or no eyedroppersor nothin...
...There was a time when James was on everybody's college reading list...
...Science-fiction, at its best, is probably the most important literature of this century...
...As a result, they raise difficult questions, which a parent must be prepared to answer...
...Housman himself is of course fine, and I'd give his Collected Poems for my fifth, except that this year Rudyard Kipling's Verse, endlessly skilled and interesting, has got itself dipped into more often: add Hardy and you gain full immunity against Dylan Goon and such...
...This witty autobiography of a high-school dropout, who turned his back on his father's jewelry business and became America's foremost philosopher, is full of gems of art and wisdom...
...And so, of course, is Vladimir Nabokov's recollection of his old friend Professor Timofey Pnin...
...Nie, Verba, and Petrocik have ingeniously demonstrated how American voting decisions take their shape, and show that in many ways the present era is like the 1920s...
...Famous and Curious Cemeteries by John Francis Marion (Crown, 1977...
...WALTER LAQUEUR Director of the Institute of Contemporary History and Weiner Library in London...
...Sample "diagnoses": "Never in his [Wilson's] life could he allow himself to entertain religious doubts....Twice at least he remarked: 'I believe in Divine Providence...
...The second book is only 53 pages long, and is entitled "Chapter Notes...
...May be a seminal work...
...The Social History of the Machine Gun by John Ellis (Pantheon, 1976...
...He is one of our very best writers, and this is a book of great virtuosity...
...Author of Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine...
...One of the highest points, if not the highest, of the Annapurna range of novels of the West...
...Handwriting: A Key to Personality by Klara G. Roman (Pantheon, 1952...
...Fritjof Capra (Shambarala Publications...
...Although history is studded with the names of neurotics, monomaniacs and psychotics who have risen suddenly to power, they have dropped as suddenly to disgrace...
...The classic text on the theory and practice of psychoanalytic character assassination, by the originator of the Freudian faith and a famous American diplomat...
...Here, Epstein tells a rather different story...
...Controversial Essays by John Sparrow includes superbly destructive pieces on the Lawrence and Housman industries, the latter a model of the cool demolition of portentous pseudo-scholarship...
...Joseph that you have a happy marriage...
...Whitman is a lyrical defender of the Common Man and "Human Rights...
...1977 Josiah Lee Auspitz DANIEL BELL Professor of sociology at Harvard...
...JOSIAH LEE AUSPITZ Writer...
...Joseph...
...This man is one of the sanest minds produced by the West since "the waning of the middle ages...
...he is a locus, a point at which many genetic and environmental conditions come together in a joint effect...
...The Telephone Book by H. M. Boettinger (Riverwood, 1977...
...This brilliant classic has been far more influential than Karl Marx in developing the Communist perversion of democracy...
...A classic...
...One has to read slowly, again...
...Thanks to Supreme Court rulings and to the marked inferiority of the sacred to the profane in television programming, the Bible is one realm of a child's experience that can remain relatively within a parent's control, even after the child enters school and passes from the age of innocence to that of barbarism...
...Then a blush of uxorial pride colored her face and she began to recount the memories...
...I should've cut it in half, you know ?" I retreated and tugged on the Weller...
...This account of confusion and ignorance in the management of a war is really an allegory for national economic planning...
...Author of The Great Terror...
...it must apply in every case, even the worst case, the most horrible case, the most dreadful case...
...Its subject emerges as a wondrous personage: magnanimous, intelligent, thoroughly generous with his matter and with his mind, a successfully brilliant (which is not the same as being brilliantly successful, a far more common phenomenon), a good and a nice man...
...One says agriculture, and thinks of farmers...
...Would she reminisce, tell a story or two, I inquired...
...Princeton University Press, 1958...
...Yet even within this small sector (four percent of the labor force) there are persons engaged in soil science, crop reporting, marketing—in short, information activities...
...It must have been near two in the morning when the cab came to take Nick and Miss Dora home...
...He's too modest to speak for himself...
...The book is 530 pages of diagrams, equations, and some words...
...The Time Tables of History by Bernard Grun (Simon & Schuster...
...A good read with saltines and a muscatel...
...Author of The Moral Life and The Ethical Life, Creation and Discovery, and D.H...
...TOM WOLFE Contributing editor of Esquire...
...He was fantastically versatile, without ever having to resort to the tricks of the chameleon...
...Anyone who thinks sociology is the elaboration of the obvious should read this work by the finest analytic mind in sociology...
...JOHN LUKACS Professor of history at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia...
...Blessed Rage for Order by David Tracy—a brilliant and innovative yet profoundly traditionalist book by the man who may be American Catholicism's finest theologian...
...Professor Geertz begins, I'm afraid, where most of the rest of us social scientists leave off...
...to remember what else Miss Dora told us, but I know she said plenty...
...Columnist, the Washington Post...
...A most invaluable book for those who find that modern society discourages meditations on the subject of death...
...And you can use hundreds of puns when describing it to friends...
...You'll never want to leave...
...Not as comprehensive as Eating in America, but contains many French words...
...A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, our finest novelist, which makes you see why most other fiction, and sociological writing, is so false...
...No theorizing, but the story is fascinating...
...Now there is no upstairs at all...
...Here you can read how that joyful pessimist Thomas Hobbes first got hooked on geometry...
...Author of Statesmanship and Party Government...
...She is, simply, the Jane Austen of the essay...
...The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin...
...Draw your own conclusions...
...And then to put in the stocking, Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed...
...The Changing American Voter by Norman Nie, Sidney Verba, and John Petrocik—the best available guide to the voting behavior of Americans, and winner of the Woodrow Wilson Prize as the best political science publication last year...
...Lawrence: The Failure and The Triumph of Art...
...Bell makes systematic sense of the way in which changes in the economic structure and the growth of the university have affected the value system of contemporary society...
...Covers everything from design to how to take a shower...
...Easier to read than Gibbon and probably the best book for a writer to browse in and improve his English...
...Robert Merton—Social Theory and Social Structure...
...The entire bundle will cost you $24.15, and when you have finished, you can donate it to the local college library, and get a tax deduction...
...A brilliant analysis of the decline of community in the modern world written well before the rebellion of the 1960s and the reemergence of ethnicity demonstrated how insightful Nisbet was...
...Unfortunately, the federal role in health is weakened by a lack of central guidance...
...The more relevant way of understanding the society is to see how many persons are engaged in information activities (from simple data-processing to the creation of specialized knowledge...
...Possibly the best stocking-stuffer of all is John Barth's masterpiece The Sot-Weed Factor...
...She asked us if we'd come to the back room with her and if she could treat us to a round of drinks...
...theon, 1966...
...Robert Nisbet—The Quest for Community...
...Like the phone book, without commercials...
...Another English biography, John Wain's recent one of Samuel Johnson, I thought just splendid...
...It is," she said...
...Lesley was Coward's secretary and factotum for nearly forty years...
...AUBERON WAUGH Novelist, columnist...
...Philosopher at Large by Mortimer J. Adler (MacMillan Publishing Co...
...Written in 1864, it is about village life in Alsace-Lorraine...
...But one can't have everything...
...The Tao ofPhysics by Prof...
...SN 003-000-00519-4...
...The New Industrial State and other works by John Kenneth Galbraith...
...tion (or at least drug dealers and addicts...
...Skinner) through the "Abolition of Man" (a la C.S...
...Schandler is Specialist in National Defense at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress...
...Didion, Joan...
...So I confine my book selections to some that confront this problem squarely: Walt Whitman: Democratic Vistas...
...For example, I find that in the year I was born, Edward VI was crowned King-Emperor at Delhi...
...I ain't feelin' well...
...Both books are highly informative, well organized, and well written, but it seems unlikely that both can be right in their major premises...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell...
...From him I learned that "everything is what it is because it got that way...
...The Brothers Karamazov...
...The Diaries of Samuel Pepys in nine volumes, a new and complete edition published by Bell, London...
...Since each of the eight parts of Agency of Fear begins with a quotation from Edward Luttwak's study, Coup d'Etat, and since Agency ofFear begins with the oft-told and still frightening tale of the Collinsville raids (where federal narcotics agents broke into a house—the wrong house—at night and terrified the inhabitants by acting in a manner we associate with police states), it is apparent that Epstein is serious...
...No book lover should let a year go by without rereading this humanistic masterpiece...
...For those like me I recommend the following books of information...
...This is the story of the Nixon administration's use of a "drug scare" as a cover for a serious attempt to gain and use illegitimate powers...
Vol. 11 • December 1977 • No. 2
