Books for Christmas
Rustin, Bayard
BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS A book buyer's guide for the Holiday Season. ALLAN BLOOM Professor, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. A cautionary tale for our season: Telford Taylor's...
...The FYealth of Nations by Adam Smith: The book affords crucial insights into human nature, and would make particularly valuable reading for the utopians in our midst who're willing to give it a chance...
...and, almost alone among New York intellectuals of his generation, Winston believes we had every right and reason to fight the nasty Vietcong and the execrable North Vietnamese...
...former publisher of The American Spectator...
...author, most recently, of The Real War...
...Any informed discussion of the problems of the "culture of poverty" must begin with this book as its basis...
...His life, it turns out, was full of falsehoods, large and small, and the first tie was his turning away from his Jewish self...
...I especially recommend one of his earlier novels which is, in my opinion, a minor classic and has not received the attention it merits: A House for Mr...
...Alexander Comfort...
...Some two years ago I wrote of Bernard-Henri DSvy's Barbarism with a Human Face that it had "changed the mind of a generation...
...Foote brings new life to Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman, and cuts through a lot of the romantic nonsense about their Southern counterparts...
...I commend to you every one of the twelve...
...And b,, its ~qde a p,ece o| wood On w h l t h "~a', painted plait} and full...
...For those weary of the solemnities of newspaper pundits...
...Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress: Must reading for those who seek positive guidance from the past in order to build a better future...
...This study, ,commissioned by the League for Industrial Democracy well in advance of the Polish strikes, is an examination of the status of workers' rights in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Eastern and Western Europe...
...The Civil IVar, by Shelby Foote...
...The reviewers are all celebrating Confederates, by Thomas Keneally, but I figure it'll have to go some to touch me the way this book did...
...Biographies are hot items, presumably because they are filled with anecdotes that can be chuckled over at cocktail parties and "working" breakfasts...
...She wasa most u n c u l t u r e d g l r l Who d i d n ' t tareapmchofsnuff For any h t c r a r v s t u f f And gave the classlt s all a mls, s Observe t t t ( ' t o n s e q u r ' n c t o f t h t ' , ' As t h e wa.,, walking home one day...
...I recommend From the Terrace by John O'Hara...
...A remarkable history, as compelling as Sh6gun...
...A lovely, thoughtful evocation of a few of the people who fought at Gettysburg...
...Biswas...
...His very readable and moving account touches on such topics as the national question in the USSR, racism, and the growth of dissent...
...Rupert of Hentzau, his negative-image adversary, is an equally charming scoundrel...
...William Crapo Durant was a natty little man who launched three great automotive empires, which ultimately combined to become the greatest automotive emplrc of them all, General Motors...
...Unfortunately, the virtues The Pluto crat celebrates are nearly as unfashionable as its author, so the tome is out of print...
...For me, the best Civil War work to date...
...I r THI" VERY FI;RIOUS HUI.L A ia...
...Ostensibly his rhymes were for children, though the children who like him best seem to smoke, drink, and grow moustaches with expertise unusual to youth, h would be a disservice to the reader, however, to waste print explaining Mr...
...Irregardless--as Joe Humphries, the famous leather-lunged announcer of the second Madison Square Garden, would say--the book should be read by everyone...
...Urbain's Horseman, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz...
...One may differ with him on particulars but the perspective of his thought has a perennial validity...
...and from my brother Charlie, Jan Morris's Destinations...
...But the man was prolific, and a dozen volumes are required to contain his life's work...
...in the United States, however, it was a commercial dud and so changed almost no one's mind, though it infuriated the class of academics who were eager for Eurocommunist victories in Italy and France as a vast new o p p o r t u n i t y for research in the social sciences...
...The Wild West with moats and bannered turrets...
...Cauttonary Verses, the collected poems of Hilaire Belloc, also must be purchased used...
...3) John Dewey's Experience andNature --the richest in suggestiveness of all of Dewey's philosophical writings...
...I never could understand why men like Sartre in France, Pritt in England, and the lesser fellow travellers in the United States like F. Schuman and Corliss Lamont who denied the existence of the Gulag did not hang themselves after the publication of Solzhenitsyn's work...
...1 urge a close reading of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, perennially reissued, the richly comic novel about Fleet Street and reporters covering,a zany civil war in Africa...
...former newsman...
...Richard Collier's 1971 biography, Duce...
...Read the Oxford Universit)' Press's collection of his 5"elected Wrttingsand his History o f l t a l y , that being another account of how prosperous countries fall apart when governed by one too many lunkheads for one too many years...
...Ar~dlgnorantb, thmbed the g a t e ' N...
...author among other works of The Quest for Being, and 'pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life...
...Rudolf Rassendyll is my kind of Victorian gent...
...I venture the prophecy that he will be rediscovered in future years...
...Mussolini been born in America, I am quite confident he could have become an admired congressman, renowned for his compassion, audacity, and all the public policy quackeries now favored by the progressive brethren...
...P.J...
...We've "forced him to become a dictat o r , " Mr...
...History "s Carnival by Leonid Plyushch...
...Conversely, I found Joshua Chamberlain, colonel of the 20th Maine, one of the most likable figures in historical fiction/fact...
...This memoir of Chinese-Amer,can e x p e r i e n c e is unique...
...I wish I'd been there...
...Editor-in-Chief Hearst Newspapers: Because of eye problems over the past few years, I find book-reading pretty much of a chore, and I depend heavily on publications like Book Digest magazine to keep me abreast of current books...
...The young dhcerate %'('nt bhndlv forward to her fate...
...But Winston, who served in Vietnam as an Army lieutenant, has faith in freedom, duty, patriotism, and several other items foreign to the psyche of Graham Greene...
...A book so e n g r o s s i n g , it is hard to put down...
...But not so S a r a h ' Not so Sal...
...MARTIN PERETZ Editor-in- Chief and Pubhsher, The New Republic...
...Having waited in vain for Jane Pauley to publish her memoirs, I submit the following list of books that I reread in 1980...
...O. Henry should be read with a fat glass of scotch in hand, to muffle laughter when hilarity is preponderate and to open the lacrimal glands when gross sentimentality holds sway...
...This is what the Cold War is about--not the question of free enterprise versus government control, a matter of degree concerning which reasonable men and women who put freedom first may differ...
...Tip is a biography of Tip O'Neill, Speaker of the House, by Paul Clancy and Shirley Elder...
...It's the most thoughtful election-year book in recent times, written by one of the most thoughtful men in America...
...1 read everything he writes with immense pleasure...
...It is an excellent compendium on the status of free trade unionism and makes a compelling argument for the interrelationship between independent trade unions and democracy...
...The Centaur by John Updike: Despite its acknowledged flaws, Updike and I agree that this is his best novel...
...WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST, JR...
...At any rate, Stewart Alsop has said that Liddy would have been a national hero had his career spanned World War II...
...He was so frightened of his Jewish origins that this commentator on iust about e v e r y t h i n g said not a stern word ever against Hitler's anti-Semitic outrages...
...I was warmed by the revelation that in his days of decline he actually tried to cut a deal with the French builders of the Amilcar, hoping to import it to the United States...
...What a breath of fresh air that little gem would have been in thts land of automotive ironmongery...
...PETER BRAESTRUP Edttor o f The Wilson Quarterly...
...This is Winston Groom's novel about the war in Vietnam, Better Times Than These...
...Paul Johnson, The Offshore Islanders: A revealing account of the rise and fall of a great people...
...Life for new,~men at home and abroad has been imitating Scoop for dccades'Apocalypxe Now and The Deer hunterwere ballyhooed fantasies Vietnamized by Hollywood for the box office Neither, o f c o u r s e , comes close to Vietnam's r e a l i t i e s , or even to plain human truths...
...I) George Santayana's Life of Reason still seems to me to incorporate the wisest and best balanced philosophy of life...
...Moreover she has wisely grown Confirmed in her instinctive guess That literature breeds distress...
...My suspicious prejudice against chivalrous, courtly old Robert E. Lee, with me since I was a child in Kentucky, was confirmed by what I read here...
...26 TIlE AMFRICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980...
...andotber m)t,e...
...I commemorate every trip to London with a visit to Henry Sotheran for the express purpose of buying a Henty first edition...
...The Life of Reason should be helpful to minds debauched by the irrationalities of the sixties...
...Anything by G.A...
...The most e x t r a o r d i n a r y fiction I have read this year is something I had also read last year: Elsa Morante's History: A Novel amply m e r i t s this r e r e a d i n g . Against a tableau of g r e a t and traumatic e v e n t s , Miss Morante has drawn several taut psychological portraits of people whom either fear or youthful innocence and, in an,,' case, also circumstances destroy...
...In contrast to these lives, it is exhilarating to read Scholem's voyage From Berlin to Jerusalem, a seemingly casual memoir though rich in detail of weighty times, hut also a prototype of the spiritual journey which modern Jews will be obliged to make, not so much in order to be Jews but simply to be free men and free women...
...The lesson was not lost upon The child, who since has always gone A long way round to keep away From signs, whatever they may say, And leaves a padlocked gate alone...
...from Susan Sontag, Elias Canetti's The Conscience of Words...
...J . B . K e l l y ' s Arabia, the Gulf and the West may be the most important study of contemporary political history to be written in the postwar era...
...Pmsoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope...
...It is a courageously evenhanded look at our erstwhile national mess and a book that does not depend upon sitting among the potsherds heaping ashes on our heads for its appeal...
...its tedium testifies to its solidity...
...O'ROURKE Editor-in-Cbief ofNational Lampoon...
...And its nostalgia for the New York of a generation ago is not at all mushy...
...Tough stuff...
...A Time for Truth and A Time for Action by William E. Simon: two important and eminently readable books about what may prove to be the most critical issue of our day: the connection between economic and political liberty...
...But brilliant and successful as Lippmann was, he is revealed as a pathetic man, a sycophant when young, a pretender in middle age...
...The Family, Sex and Marriage In England 1500-1800 by Lawrence Stone: Scholarly but far from solemn, this comprehensive survey tells much about why Women's Lib is long overdue and, in the process, makes our own social and sexual relationships seem clean and enlightened...
...Henty wove 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 wonderful pre-Doctorow adolescent fiction around real people and real events--wars, usually--in which bright, brave lads from the U.K...
...The man who in this century has best p e n e t r a t e d to the core of authentic religious experience is Gershom Sholem...
...Finally, perennially, Plato's Republic and The Bible...
...Henry...
...member, board of contributors, The Wall Street Journal 1 have been on a V.S...
...In the same category of biography I would place MacArthur by William Manchester...
...I suspect it was written as an answer to Babbitt and other such fatuous portrayals of American spiritual vacuity...
...Had Mr...
...There is no extant complete collection, but such was his popularity in his day that most junk stores have a set or two lying around and they will sell them cheaply if you express d i s i n t e r e s t and claim that you need books to level the dresser or something...
...Isaiah Berlin's Against the Current, a collection of e s s a y s in the history of ideas--a mode in which only a few Americans excel--includes a disruptively provocative discussion of Disraeli as statesman and court Jew, the latter being a not uncommon type in the West...
...My own differences with it I have detailed in The American Scholar, Spring 1980...
...The last great statesman who cared for the regime of liberty and knew how to live within its constraints was Winston Churchill...
...In my opinionO'Hara is our most u n d e r r a t e d novelist, and this is his most underrawd novel...
...author o f four books on Cromwellian England, editor of half a-dozen textbooks...
...It is made all the more fascinating by the fact that Plyushch, a Ukrainian mathematician who endured the living hell of three years in Soviet psychiatric-prison hospitals, remains a dedicated proponent of democratic socialism...
...Therefore, I read and appreciated Merle Miller's book LBJ--An OralBiography, which captures the warm, human side of this extraordinarily complex Texan who was much more sensitive and responsive than his gruff manner suggested...
...These two Washington journalists provide the most recent examples of how Democrats are forgiven for their extreme partisanship, and understood in light of their backgrounds--a lesson we should be reminded of occasionally...
...the message emerges from the faithful account of the detail of real political life...
...I was always a fan of LBJ and felt Americans treated him shabbily...
...Despite a cabal that has sought to discredit Weinstein and his work, anyone who reads it carefully will find that it is a remarkable introduction, as fascinating as it is illuminating, into some important aspects of American social and political history...
...This profound book aroused a great deal of i:ontroversy in civil rights circles when it was first published in 1978...
...Plyushch's book is an account of a Soviet dissident's intellectual odyssey...
...I don't call either of these great books, but they do give an idea of what the folks in Washington are r e a d i n g - - o r at least talking about...
...His most recent volume is Philosophy and Public Policy...
...2) China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston...
...Sophisticated readers will recognize most of the characters on the American scene today...
...Well, it surely did that in France...
...Will, G. Gordon Liddy's autobiography, is better written than Ttp, which may tell us something about the relative merits of journalism school and the FBI training program...
...Today, the arguments Professor Wilson makes about the dominant role of social and economic factors in p e r p e t u a t i n g the existence of the black underclass are beyond dispute...
...Ronald Steel's wonderfully written and definitive account Walter Ltppmann and the American Century was intended as a sympathetic evocation...
...There is already underway in establishment circles an effort to bury or at least to neutralize this devastating narrative of how and why the elites of the industrial societies allowed us to be put at the mercy of religious fanatics, political p r i m i t i v e s , and economic g a n g s t e r s . In scope, in vision, and in literary power, K c t l y ' s volume hears comparison to V, urke's Reflections on the Revolution in France...
...Horatio Alger with clashing swords and the acrid smell of cordite...
...Ih" t o s s e d her hghtly ~.,Ith his horns 2.~ IIIE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 Into a prickly hedge of thorns, And stood by laughing while she strode And pushed and struggled to the road...
...4) Among recent works, it still seems to me that there has not been sufficient recognition of the scholarly achievement and intellectual courage of Allan Weinstein's Perjury...
...Gordon Wood's 1969 The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, is a scholarly chronicle of the masterly work of one of the few groups of politicians that ever accomplished more good than harm...
...I ' v e carried one or another of the three volumes with me on long overseas trips and missed any number o f ' t o u r i s t attractions as a result...
...1) The Second Comzng bv Walker Percy Mr...
...R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...Pay any price demanded...
...Dewey has been neglected rather than refuted by analytic philosophers...
...Class struggle between members of the only class that really counted...
...LEONARD GARMENT Attorney, Washington, D. C. To the end of legitimating lists, most of my recent and truly splendid reading came from other more discriminating readers: from Edmund Wilson, Flaubert's Madame Bova...
...Senior Research Fellow, Hoovar lnstitution, Stanford...
...However, recently I have come across three books I read with great satisfaction...
...I have also been reading James Billington's Fire in the Minds of Men, which is an absolutely fascinating history of the revolutionary idea in the modern era...
...Although it is an uneven collection of essays, I do not hesitate to recommend this anthology because it contains a brilliantly argued defense of the role of trade unions in American society by Tom Kahn...
...author of Big Story, an analysis of Vietnam press coverage...
...5) Finally, in view of the plethora of books on or about Marx in the Western world, especially by individuals calling themselves Marxists but who hold views that Marx would have excoriated, I recommend Leszek Kolakowski's magisterial Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution...
...Hugh Thomas, History of the World: An ambitious project by an author who has the rare ability to evaluate world history with profound insight--going far beyond the superficial overlay of wars and politics...
...It is the story of an upperclassman of parts--intelligent, handsome, brave, and hardworking--whose life comes to nothing...
...Workers' Rights--East anal West by Adrian Karamycky, Alexander J. Motyl, and Adolph Sturmthal...
...Luigi Barzini first recommended this wise sixteenth-century historian and statesman to me, and I recommend him to you...
...A highly readable first novel that starts with the death of a fighting dog and ends with the downfall of a smalltown hero-bymistake...
...Also the key to Kissinger's world...
...Naipaul " k i c k " and recommend both his fiction and nonfiction to all and sundry...
...MORDECAI RICHLER Author of Joshua Then and Now, St...
...For that matter, I am puzzled they did not do so after Khrushchev's speech to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party...
...from Kenneth Lynn, Louis Auchincloss's The House of the Prophet...
...Sara Byng Who could not read and was t o s s e d into a thorny hedge by a bull Of Sara B) ng the tatc' is told How when the chdd was twelve years old She could not read or write a Ilnc Her s i s t e r . l a n e , though barely nine, Could spout theCatechlsm t h r o u g h And part,, of Matthew Arnold too...
...In the future no one should write ab(~ut Marx without consulting this sympathetic, scholarly, and rigorously critical work...
...A cautionary tale for our season: Telford Taylor's Munich...
...His most comprehensive work of scholarship is Sabbatai Sevi, the Mystical Messiah, and the story of the extraordinary life which informed that scholarship is told in From Berlin to Jerusalem...
...Two such are t r e a t e d in b i o g r a p h i e s of the past y e a r . Being BernardBerenson by Meryle Secrest is a devastating study of a man who made his name and fortune as an authenticator of the genius of others...
...The story of a boy's growing understanding of and love for his father continues to be haunting, intimate, reassuring...
...SIDNEY HOOK Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, New York University...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 23 IRVING KRISTOL Co-editor, The Public Interest...
...I think...
...Also, with the exception of The Quiet American, it is the only novel about the Indochinese quagmire that stands on its own as a work of fiction...
...DAVID E. DAVIS,JR...
...I offer only two books--as antidotes...
...A more serious book, which all of Washinton should be reading, is The Present Danger by Norman Podhoretz...
...The Declining Significance o f Race by William J u l i u s Wilson...
...Belloc when the same type may be set in such a manner as to quote him...
...Sophie's Choice by William Styron: Unlike so many best-sellers, this profoundly tragic story resonates long after you have finished the book...
...JOSEPH FRANK Professor of English, University of Massachusetts at Amherst...
...Two recent monosyllabic titles are making the circuit: Tip and Will...
...Arnaud de Borchgrave, The Spike: A fascinating blend of truth and fiction...
...Editor~Publisher, Car and Driver magazine...
...This is the quality tip of a large literary iceberg...
...I much prefer this view of n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y Europe to that of Karl Marx...
...He, too, destroys the myth that MacArthur was nothing more than a preening poseur but, indeed, one of history's greatest fighting generals...
...Students of our present geopolitical pickle must read The White House Years by Henry Kissinger, and The Real War by the real Nixon...
...Bulls >o vt'r,, often do...
...I t ' s like peering through a window that I (stupidly, perhaps) never even suspected existed before...
...The book is a paean to the getting of livings, the doing of works, and the meretricious powers of the oncealmighty buck...
...engagingly illustrates how societies fall apart and look for salvation from total clowns...
...The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara...
...Now comes LEvy with his The Testament of God, also having agitated the French intelligentsia, again to near-certain neglect by American critics who resent the aggressive truthfulness of his politics and w o n ' t t h e r e f o r e trouble to ponder his philosophy...
...This is a shame because the new book is a brilliant and astonishing argument for monotheism as the incorruptible antagonist to the idolatries of totalitarian movements and totalitarian states...
...This is the story of a man who had neither _9 the good fortune to have been born earlier, nor the sense to realize it...
...their proper place...
...Although Santayana denied it, the naturalism of Life of Reason is at variance with the Platonism of his Realms of the Spirit written after he withdrew from the academy for the cloisters of the contemplative life...
...Finally, let me suggest Evelyn Waugh's novels, particularly Black Mischief Scoop, and Men at Arms...
...My Christmas list includes some books published before 1980 which I have recently found time to read...
...The Dream Maker, by Bernard A. Weisberger...
...Editor-in-Chief, The American Spectator...
...Handsome, well-born, essentially worthless but very good with guns, swords, horses, s e r v a n t s , and women, he confounds the bad guys, captures the hearts and minds of the good guys, and never lets down the side...
...The)' are short and sweet, and when read along with Guicciardini they remind one of how little the r e p r e s e n t a t i v e s of Homo sapiens change, despite the rise of mental hygiene and Dr...
...The Noble Enemy, by Charles Fox...
...I feel as ifI have sent the reader on a sort of publisher's backlist scavenger hunt, so I would like to recommend one book, at least, which is in print...
...Percy is a superb novelist, certainly one of the most original and enjoyable at work in America today...
...He gives his complete account of statesmanship in Marlborough, His Life and Times...
...He was a plunger and a manipulator, and when it all came crashing down, he had only himself to blame...
...No one who has read The Gulag Archipelago will ever experience undue fear of Communism...
...It's an exceptionally pure tragedy with no violent deaths, unnatural disasters, or undeserved durances vile, and it has a great deal to say about why our best and brightest are so often less than best and o u t r i g h t dumb as ditch carp...
...I. Ipon the fields at ros~ her wa,, A g a t e . ~ct urel~, padlc, ck(.d, stood...
...The same could be said of his other seminal works: Democracy and Education, The Quest for Certainty, Logic: The Theory of lnquiry, and his Liberalism and Social Action...
...To do justice to the darker side of our large and grumpy nation...
...As a recent Washington resident, I _9 quickly learned that everyone talks about-and seems to read--the same things...
...Raymond Aron, In Defense of Decadent Europe: An inadequate title for a profoundly perceptive analysis of the strength and weakness of the West by a foreign policy expert of the first rank JOHN M. OLIN Philanthropist, Conservationist, and Entrepreneur...
...2) The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn--ali three volumes...
...While discussing memorable Italians let me suggest the work of a great one, Francesco Guicciardini...
...For what else can a courtier to the genuinely powerful be...
...While httle Bdl who came between Was qmte u n n a t u r a l l y keen On " A t h a l l e , " by J e a n Racine...
...A wholly forgotten novel by a halfforgotten novelist, Booth Tarkington's The Plutocrat is an uplifting tale e r a young New York aesthete's education to the virtues of America through his unwilling acquaintance with a big, loud, swell, midwestern parvenu...
...This book, too, is out of print, as all novels that d o n ' t involve satanism, lesbian incest, secret Nazi codes from Mars, and spurious family chronicles from the protosimian to the present no doubt soon will be...
...Italo " I r o n Beard" Balbo, veteran of the March on Rome, said, while standing at the doorstep of the Duce's 23year reign, "but Mussolini just isn't made of the right s t u f f . " How true and how amusing...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1980 2"~ Author of Down the Line...
...despite moments of joy and of humor too, it is a book hard to stay with, so exquisite and painful is the r e l e n t l e s s d,~nouemtnt to tragedy...
...The world view of contemporary naturalism which recognizes the distinctive role that man plays in nature...
...Rescued from the packing cases and begun while waiting for the moving men in Brooklyn, Henry Kissinger's A World Restored, a fascinating and more timely-than-ever study of conservative coherence in a revolutionary world...
...who serves as Assistant to AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland...
...The first is Public Nuisances by The American Spectator's own R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...BAYARD RUSTIN Chairman, A. Ph,ltp Randolph Institute...
...would stumble into something like the Thirty Years War, catch the ey e of some heavy-hitter like Frederick the Great, distinguish themselves, and return to the tearful acclaim of Mum and all at home...
...Horace Judson's The Eighth Day of Creation is a vivid evocation and meticulous narrative of the discoveries in genetics and biochemistry in (yes, it is the right phrase) the mysteries of life..This book both vindicates the scientific adventure and tells how it happens...
...Couldn't handle dialogue, but he did great wars...
...JOHN VON KANNON Assistant to the president at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based public pok'ay research instt?ute...
...A few of William Sidney Porter's stories, such as "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Red C h i e f , " are told, read, dramatized, or have their plots stolen so often that we all think ourselves familiar with his art...
...After all, the Bay of Tonkin resolution passed overwhelmingly in the Congress (only two votes against it) and gave Johnson a mandate for action which we later deserted him for pursuing...
...His sense of humor and scathing disrespect for phonies parallel my own and surely prejudice me...
...Only one good novel has come out of the war so far: James Webb's superb Fields of Fwe, both because it truly depicts the harsh complexities of the Marines' war in one of Vietnam's worst sectors, and because it is a genuine novel, not a thinly disguised confessional, with characters who develop, grip the reader, and, later, make him think...
...The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon: Like a very dry martini, its balanced style is a great pick-me-up, while the author's sanity is especially refreshing in our era of evangelistic superstition...
...I respectfully decline to itemize the pleasurable soft and hard core chazerai that make up the bulk of my current bag of books...
...The achievements of Gershom Scholem, the great illuminator of Jewish mysticism, will survive long after Berenson and Lippmann have become mere footnotes to the ages...
...But if you were to go to a public library and thread your way through the photography exhibits, movie collections, microfilm viewers, and video display units--back to the musty cobwebbed corner where they still keep books--you might find a copy...
...RICHARD M. NIXON Thirty-seventh President of the United States...
...hapr, d~, tile Bull that da~, \v.,'a- r a t h e r m the mood tor play "lharlgormg people through and t h r o u g h A...
...l)emocracy and Mediating Structures edited by Michael Novak...
...Churchill loved him...
Vol. 13 • December 1980 • No. 12
