Books for Christmas
Glazer, Nathan & Broder, David S. & Manchester, William & Morris, Edmund & Lynn, Kenneth S. & Bennett, William J. & Gershman, Carl & Nixon, Richard M. & Gilder, George
BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS Holiday gift suggestions from some of the writers whose books would top our own list of recommendations. WILLIAM J. BENNETT Director, National Humanities Center; co-author of...
...Shogun is such a work...
...A classic I've gone back to this year, perhaps a somewhat forgotten classic, is John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems, perhaps as good a study of public opinion as the Walter Lippmann book...
...His book deserves to be better known...
...The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr: On establishing or reestablishing the plausibility of original sin, grace, and evil...
...He is an American survivor of the Gulag, and his story is enormously compelling...
...The most lucid, logical, and illuminating exposition of pure economics I read was The Positive Theory of Capital by Eugen Bohm-Bawerk, which makes one wonder why Keynes had to be so labyrinthine and finally so evasive...
...A contemporary book I enjoyed was Great American Dreams by Robert Kaiser and Jon Lowell, a rather more cheerful view of the public mood than President Carter offered in his July speech...
...Written with wit as well as flair, it is a superb vehicle for escapists...
...It radiates pride, honesty, and understanding...
...Alexander's is the most interesting mind in architecture today...
...An excellent antidote to much modern social science...
...author of RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon...
...2) The Recovery of American Cities, by Paul R. Porter: The study of American urban problems is not the liveliest intellectual subject, but Porter has approached it with boldness and imagination, and with an informed optimism about America which grows out of long experience in and out of government...
...NATHAN GLAZER Professor of Education and Social Structure, Harvard University...
...Although Scott Burns finally drifts off into a nirvana of states and corporations withering away, leaving "the household economy" in doughty Jeffersonian splendor, his Home, Inc...
...He has, in my opinion, the most perfect style in 20th-century English literature, with his flawless rhythms and enchanting command of metaphor...
...The only book I've read in the past year that I could recommend to the general reader is The Oregon Experiment, by Christopher Alexander and some collaborators...
...Finney's protagonist is a man of our time who is transported back into the New York City of the 1880s...
...It shows, demonstrates, establishes, the full strength of the philosophy upon which the Republic stands...
...author of Affirmative Discrimination, Remembering the Answers, and Beyond the Melting Pot (with Daniel Patrick Moynihan...
...author of The Party's Over: The Failure of Politics in America...
...I admire Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror immensely, but I believe Life on a Medieval Barony is the best work in that category...
...Clavell is a master storyteller, but he is also remarkably accurate about Japan in the year 1600...
...3) The Immediate Experience, by Robert Warshow, with an introduction by Lionel Trilling: Subtitled "Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture," this may well be the best collection of essays about American politics and culture and their relationship to each other...
...All his books about World War II in Germany are masterpieces of irony and perception, but this book about Wehrmacht veterans caught in a haunting trap is my favorite...
...Paul Johnson's Enemies of Society...
...DAVID S. BRODER Syndicated columnist...
...Kirst is perhaps the most underrated modern German novelist...
...Shogun, a novel of Japan, by James Clavell...
...This book repudiates sentimentalism about the Negro, social dependence, and "the double standard of judgment with its special philanthropic allowances...
...Warshow, who wrote mostly for Commentary and Partisan Review, died in 1955 at the age of 37...
...1) Coming Out of the Ice: An Unexpected Life, by Victor Herman: Like the messenger who said unto Job, "and I only am escaped alone to tell thee," Herman speaks to us about a dark totalitarian world which has not disappeared, and which cannot be resisted unless it is first understood to be evil and anti-human...
...offers a valuably original perspective on recent trends in the U.S...
...WILLIAM MANCHESTER Adjunct Professor of History, Wesley an University...
...It will lift your spirits as much as Dewey's book may help you understand why there is such a sense of malaise...
...I recommend Ukridge, a collection of stories equal to, if less familiar than, the delightful Jeeves...
...The most valuable contemporary book of economics I tried was the last one, Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell, which is also the best book of sociology and political theory I have encountered in recent years (its only serious rival being Banfield's The Unheavenly City Revisited...
...The Battle for Guadalcanal by Samuel B. Griffith II, Brigadier General USMC (ret...
...Since I have spent the last year in the sometimes luminous depths of the dismal science, studying several score books on economics-surfacing for air chiefly to read aloud nightly from the classics War and Peace and Pat the Bunny (respectively with my wife and child)-my Christmas list will lack a certain fa-la-la...
...co-author of Counting By Race: Bakke and the Great American Debate about Equality...
...When, at the end of the day, I cast around blearily for something to read for pleasure, I usually end up with old favorites, books grown so familiar over the years that I can continue "reading" them through the first mists of sleep...
...Montgomery was the first serious commentator on the case since the 1920s to challenge the dogma that in executing Sacco and Vanzetti the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had re-enacted the crucifixion of Christ, and the intellectuals repaid Montgomery for his heresy by ignoring him...
...author of 'Israel, the Arabs, and the Middle East...
...Brothers in Arms by Hans Hellmut Kirst...
...That his book was not even widely reviewed, let alone lavishly praised, at the time of its appearance in I960 is to be explained by the liberal orthodoxy of the intellectuals...
...author of A. Divided People, The Dream of Success, and William Dean Howells: An American Life...
...Time and Again, an illustrated novel by Jack Finney...
...Mencken...
...EDMUND MORRIS Author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and the forthcoming Theodore Rex...
...Above all I love P.G...
...Wode-house, who is to tired eyes what Mozart is to the tired ear...
...One of the trials of being a biographer is that I have to read billions of words of dry, dull prose in search of the odd phrase or anecdote that shines-much as a miner* sifts rubble for specks of gold...
...Porter is at his best in analyzing broad demographic and economic trends and in showing why the prevailing pessimism of many liberals is a sign of their own failure of vision and does not reflect the actual prospects for a revival of our cities...
...It remains the best antidote to life in a nation dominated by people who pretend to believe that sex is chiefly carnal and androgynous, and who fail to guffaw at solemn voices implying that the differences between men^nd women are no more important than, and somehow analogous to, the differences between blacks and whites...
...By far the best presidential biography of this century-in a class with Blake's Disraeli...
...I do-so much so that when I'm not in the mood for reading prose I read string quartets and song cycles, preferably in old editions like Breitkopf & Hartel, now attractively reissued by Dover...
...The best read on it is Making It by Norman Podhoretz, which I am embarrassed to admit I was deterred from reading for a decade by the herd of hyenas who reviewed it on publication (the same bunch, essentially, who sang unison hosannas at Cheever's descent, partly nude, into the urinals of Falconer...
...Its moral and intellectual tone compares favorably with the chauvinism and self-pity which have marred the work of so many black intellectuals today...
...Robert H. Montgomery's Sacco-Vanzetti: The Murder and the Myth...
...I enthusiastically recommend the following books for must reading in 1979: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris...
...Brilliant, profound, and readable analysis of the forces which change the world-past, present, and future...
...High on Foggy Bottom by Charles Frankel: A thoughtful philosopher and sensible man comes to Washington and wonders with probity about the habits of the Capitol's denizens...
...A story of heroism and human greatness...
...The best novel about passions, illusions, and politics I have ever read...
...In my view this is the best of the many retellings of Malory's le Morte d' Arthur...
...This, too, is a novel which contains a tremendous fund of social history...
...Naipaul's melancholic A Bend in the River...
...Evelyn Waugh's prose is almost as beautiful as the Master's, and his humor is at its most exquisitely savage in Black Mischief The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz are wonderful, whether one loves music or not...
...CARLGERSHMAN Executive Director of Social Democrats, USA...
...William Manchester's American Caesar...
...GEORGE GILDER Author of Sexual Suicide, Visible Man, and the forthcoming Wealth and Poverty...
...This is surely the most readable and fascinating account of European society seven centuries ago...
...My list of books I've enjoyed this year is even briefer than usual, because so much of my time has been consumed in writing one of my own...
...Of the many books which have been written on Guadalcanal, General Griffith's is surely the most lucid, the most compelling, and the most reliable...
...Nevertheless I was enormously impressed by Montgomery's grasp of the facts of the case and by the logical brilliance of his argument when I finally got around to reading him this past fall...
...In the course of the 1960s, other analysts-notably Francis Russell and David Felix-did further damage to the dogma, but Montgomery's courageous, pathbreaking study represents the best of the revisionism, in my opinion...
...It is a literary phenomenon of our time that while many works of nonfiction, regrettably, contain much which is in fact fictitious, there are certain novels which contain a great deal of fascinating information about historical events...
...Of the little contemporary fiction I've seen recently I like best Nadine Gordimer's Selected Stories and V.S...
...He is chiefly known for The Night of the Generals, which became popular because of its narrative drive...
...The magnitude of the loss becomes apparent from reading just the first essay in this collection, "The Legacy of the 30's...
...economy and a useful complement to his excellent column, which, along with that of Warren Brookes, gives the Boston Herald the nation's best financial coverage outside the Wall Street Journal...
...Everybody should...
...4) The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke: Published in 1925, this collection of essays, fiction, and poetry by and about American Negroes is marked by exuberant creativity, a vital, integrationist race consciousness, and a lively enthusiasm for American democracy and culture...
...New and fascinating insights into Mac-Arthur, the military genius, and extraordinary human being...
...It covers everything from the life of peasants and the feudal tournaments to monasteries and wall cities...
...author of American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964, The Glory and The Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972, and Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H.L...
...While the third in a series of which the others are A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building, it is the shortest, most concrete, and most effective in communicating a unique and yet not idiosyncratic vision of how to build, from rooms to cities, so as to achieve something of the qualities we admire in the buildings and towns of the more harmonious and happily (for architecture) materially limited cultures of the past...
...The Princess Casamassima by Henry James: About the passions of.political dreamers and the realities that elude them...
...The book is gracelessly written, and at times the author's absolute certainty that Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty carries over into a sort of unholy glee which is rather unpleasant to behold...
...KENNETH S. LYNN Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University...
...The Federalist: Everybody nods to mention of it but hardly anybody reads it, especially in the schools...
...RICHARD M. NIXON Thirty-seventh President of the United States...
...His involvement with that period and the surprising denouement of the novel are both striking and memorable...
...See also Niebuhr's The Irony of American History for these matters as applied to politics...
...The author is an extraordinary Marine officer who translated Mao Tse-tung's work into English in the 1930s and played a key role in the South Pacific as a fighting colonel...
...Endurance by Alfred Lansing: The story of Ernest Shackleton and his ship-wrecked crew at the South Pole...
...Arthur Rex, a legendary novel by Thomas Berger...
...Life on a Medieval Barony, a picture of a typical feudal community in the thirteenth century by William Stearns and David Davis...
...In preparation for one of my unfortunately perennial "debates" with the unisex claque, I studied the new and much improved English edition of Steven Goldberg's The Inevitability of Patriarchy...
Vol. 12 • December 1979 • No. 12
