Books for Christmas
BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS Holiday gift suggestions from renowned writers and readers. ELLIOTT ABRAMS It is unfashionable in government circles to read documents of greater length than five pages....
...Perhaps the most overwhelming book about war ever written, because it deals with the most overwhelming combat experience in history: the average German soldier on the Russian front, going through a meat grinder that produced 10 million casualties in an army of 12.5 million (American figures were 800,000 in a military of 16 million...
...The American Elections of 1980, edited by Austin Ranny (The American Enterprise Institute...
...Just how much actual good are these do-gooders actually doing with our money, and is their expensive and tax-financed training either necessary or even helpful for the doing of this good...
...It's called Qu'est-ce qu'un chomeur...
...Olivier Todd, journalist, novelist, is former editor of L'Express under Jean-Francois Revel...
...A book that ascribes meaning to the experience without embracing the politics that engendered it...
...The Aleck Maury stories are some of the best, most haunting things written in America in this century...
...To my mind, the most interesting thing Brizay shows is the difference between the old, 1930s type of...
...Walter Laqueur is Chairman of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University and author of numerous books, including The Terrible Secret, published last spring by Little, Brown...
...ANDREW GREELEY The White Hotel, by D.M...
...Envy, by Helmut Schoeck...
...No need to be a reader of crime fiction to admire and enjoy these wonderful pieces of literary criticism combined with self-revelation...
...The Oak and the Calf, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
...investigation, is that the compassionists themselves seem not to care about the answers...
...My third choice is Instead of Regulation (Lexington Books), a practical handbook both for budget-cutters and supply-siders...
...This is Solzhenitsyn's account of his public career as a writer in the Soviet Union...
...The Book of Lights, by Chaim Potok (Knopf...
...For this year I recommend: National Defense, by James Fallows...
...Fourth and finally, I recommend a racket-busting onslaught upon our professed and professional compassionists...
...It's about the development of Data General's Eagle computer, which is to say that it's about the people wiio engineered it, not the damned machine...
...Norman Thelwell is an outstanding landscape painter, cartoonist, and book illustrator, and his A Plank Bridge by a Pool (Scribner's) is highly recommended for those who love the English countryside, wildlife, and building things...
...CHARLES PETERS Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, and Lolita are my eternal favorites...
...Pritchett, Oxford University Press, 1981...
...William Phillips is Professor of English at Boston Univeristy, Editor of Partisan Review, and has just completed a memoir...
...It's a book to bore your friends about...
...My only criticism of them is that they are too objective...
...The whole experience helped him to write Three"Who Made a Revolution: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Six Keys to the Soviet System, books that are essential to understanding the madness of the past sixty years...
...Joseph Sobran is an editor of National Review and a syndicated columnist...
...Goethe himself described Elective Affinities as a novella, with the explanation that it involves an unprecedented situation or occurrence, and the reader soon becomes aware that beneath the beautiful surroundings and gracious manners Goethe describes with the skill of a great master, compulsions are at work which even he did not claim to understand, compulsions, he said in his announcement of the book, "which only a higher power-possibly not in this life-can remove completely.'' There are two good modern translations...
...a brilliant performance...
...He went to Moscow under the absurd delusion that he could explain everything about America to Joseph Stalin...
...A fine novel about two young rabbis who end up in Korea in the early 1950s...
...The Devil takes it into his head to visit Moscow with a retinue that includes a naked red-headed vamp and a coal black, bipedal, cigar-smoking cat, and other underworld denizens that Milton wot not of...
...Elective Affinities, byJ.W...
...A Son of the Middle Order, by Hamlin Garland...
...JAMES WEBB I offer the following five books, all of which I consider classics: The True Believer, by Eric Hoffcr...
...John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces...
...Andrew Greeley is Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona and author of countless books, including The Cardinal Sins...
...Especially since the author, a former Soviet officer and a born writer, has saturated his account with black humor and some very vivid scenes...
...An important, superbly written restoration of an ethic that has been languishing too long in the Great Society...
...Robert Alter, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author, most recently, of A lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal and The Art of Biblical Narrative...
...Also, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Milan Kundera, and The Panther's Thumb, by Stephen Jay Gould...
...Henry Regnery is President of Regnery/Gate-way, Inc., and author, most recently, of Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher...
...WILLIAM PHILLIPS Badenheim 1939, by Aharon Appelfeld...
...The treatment is serious and humorous at the same time, and only at two or three places can one think the satire too savage...
...The whole thing is set in Corsica...
...ANTONY FLEW My choices are all FIDO books, "FIDO" being a World War II acronym for Fog Intensive, Dispersal Of...
...The first serious attempt in modern literature to describe the life which continues after this life is finished, the book concludes with a "coda'' that describes a kind of pur-gatorio in which the paradiso is being constructed in part through human effort...
...This book is a masterpiece for showing us the big picture: why various institutions exist and why people behave the way they do...
...Let's pretend to be serious and start with the essay, which deals with what is probably the most important problem on the home front, in France, since 1974...
...Ethnic America, by Thomas Sowell (Basic Books...
...A sordid epic of liberal bootlicking...
...His next novel, Marco Polo, If You Cam, will be published in January...
...Even though it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize a few years ago, Beautiful Swimmers is an important book...
...Everywhere else the facts justify the degree of passion and pain...
...Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Harvard University Press...
...and, again, "One of the most striking unreasonablenesses...
...Marvelous book...
...Ethnic America dispels myths regarding race in America...
...A tough, closely argued but utterly fascinating exploration of the ways in which the human existence is affected by contest and strife...
...This admirable volume of over forty short stories extends from specimens by Sir Walter Scott to John Updike...
...I read it in two nights...
...Elliott Abrams is Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs and a former contributor to The American Spectator...
...HUNTINGTON CAIRNS Letters ofH.L...
...Two sample sentences, one interrogative and the other declarative, show a rare, genuinely radical approach: "Why," Janet Richards asks, "should it be acceptable to base a relationship on common intellectual interests, but not on a common wish for sex...
...All three books document that laughter and tragedy are, at the margin, inseparable, the one enhancing the other...
...The author of this penetrating and loving examination of the southern mindset, circa 1938, committed suicide before the book was published, ostensibly because he feared the criticism of his fellow southerners...
...Read and decide...
...This year, to set off the festivities of the Christmas season and as a sobering reminder of what and whom we face in dealing with one aspect of the global struggle to defend the democratic world, I recommend Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko's The Time of Stalin: Portrait of a Tyranny (Harper & Row) translated from the Russian edition, published in New York, by George Saunders...
...Both authors demonstrate the benefit of association with me...
...JOHN CHAMBERLAIN A Life in Two Centuries, by Bertram D. Wolfe (Stein and Day...
...The essays cover topics ranging from the government-manufactured oil crisis to the virtues of greed...
...I must begin, therefore, with an urgent warning against bookstores, most of which have contracted a peculiarly virulent and penicillin-resistant form of venereal disease...
...But you can't expect perfection from everyone...
...I think that at a time when 44 Soviet divisions are concentrated on the Polish borders, when 85,000 Soviet troops are killing civilians in Afghanistan, and numerous Soviet military advisors are scattered in many parts of the world, it is interesting and, above all, instructive to look at the Soviet Army from within...
...The first full-scale scholarly biography, which addresses the question of why a man could be so great in war and so incompetent in peace, by a fine and thoughtful historian...
...of the several books of his I have read, this made by far the greatest impression...
...wry wisdom, and the sort of playfulness that touches serious matters with great plan-gency...
...Simon (just imagine...
...Thomas...
...The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness, by Anne Wortham (Ohio State University Press...
...James Atlas is Associate Editor of the Atlantic Monthly...
...This book is a classic and it will likely mark the zenith of Sowell's career...
...Sammler is a Polish Jew who has experienced our century at its worst and risen above it...
...One feels very guilty about America...
...DAVID HERBERT DONALD Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Harvard University Press...
...They won't come out and say, as I would, that individual freedom is a good thing...
...It is as strangely fanciful as Baron Corvo, and more playful than he could ever have been, given his paranoia...
...The author's reports to Harry Hopkins are a marvelous example of the kind of honest internal evaluation the government desperately needs but seldom gets...
...Did the "feudal element" effectively control the major European states until 1914...
...The first is Le Dernier Cafe de I'Empire by Angelo Rinaldi (Gallimard...
...Thank God he doesn't seem to care...
...Priscilla L. Buckley is Managing Editor of National Review...
...Sidney Hook, his lifelong friend, said Wolfe never wrote a dull or unclear sentence...
...The psychologist author takes great pains" to show that for all the efforts of the National Inquirer, and the acceptance of the Parapsychological Association into the AAAS notwithstanding, there is still not sufficient reason to believe that the candidate science of parapsychology has in fact got any peculiar and authentic phenomena to be about...
...SIDNEY HOOK The five books I listed last year have a timeless significance and bear repeating...
...The last three chapters are stories written in biblical verse which will be read for decades...
...ROBERT ALTER I should like to recommend two volumes of poetry that appeared during the past year-first, because books of poems make ideal gifts, and second, because poetry rarely gets the reviewing attention it deserves, which means there are always fine things coming out that people ought to know about but don't...
...Foreigners probably know Rinaldi as one of the five most important literary critics in France...
...In the general area of economics, I recommend The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, a story of computers that will inform and surprise you by dramatizing the realm of high art and inspiration in contemporary America...
...Joseph Epstein, Ambition...
...But there is only one thing wrong with a zenith, which gets him my sympathy...
...The Glitterdome, by Joseph Wambaugh...
...Kelly's Arabia, the Gulf and the West, a brilliant analysis of the Middle East...
...People who persist in claiming that Dreiser "can't write" should read this book...
...Raymond Chandler, Selected Letters (ed...
...A revolutionary theology book by one of Catholicism's finest theologians, stressing the experiential and narrative dimensions of religion...
...John Lukacs, Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines...
...Apart from that, there are two novels...
...Frank MacShane collected the letters of Raymond Chandler, who also wrote a detective story now and again, and lived a perfectly wretched life...
...Sammler's Planet, by Saul Bellow...
...He is currently in the south of France working on a novel, in French, and a kind of new journalistic essay, in English...
...Insightful and often moving essays by one of our foremost literary critics, who writes with special authorityon Southern literature and history...
...ROBERT NISBET Here are a few titles that I enjoyed during the past year: Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death...
...The Mind of the South, by Wilbur Cash...
...JOHN ONG First, Ronald Williams' Montrose (Barrie & Jenkins), a beautifully written biography of the great Scots soldier and statesman...
...From Bauhaus to Our House, by Tom Wolfe...
...William F. Buckley, Jr., is the editor of National Review...
...believes that people live better lives than they used to and that people made it happen...
...Edited by Robert Poole of Reason magazine, this is a series of studies of alternatives to federal regulation agencies...
...Parker writes splendid detective stories, and as usual he is generous with one-liners and even longer smart remarks...
...In L 'Empire des Nuages (Grasset), the main character is a successful painter, definitely over 50, who gets involved with a young woman, definitely under 30...
...We both recommend The Present Danger by Norman Podhoretz, which is sufficiently short and to the point to demand the attention of all thoughtful people and of government officials as well...
...Bert Wolfe was guilty of one of the most misspent lives on record, but he turned it all to wonderful account when he came to write about it...
...Instead, assuming you already know about the superb new work of Thomas Sowell, I urge you to turn to the second-hand bookstores and attempt to find, and foist on your publishing friends, a copy of Black Education: Myths and Tragedies, a marvelous, partly autobiographical polemic written ten years ago by Sowell that was the most exciting book I read this year...
...An engrossing history of death and mourning rites in the West since the Middle Ages, one that tells us much also of great value about kinship and society...
...What is most remarkable about this remarkable book is that it is controversial...
...I would rate Amichai as one of the best living poets, and some of his most remarkable work has been in his love poems, which are by turn richly sensual, whimsical, hauntingly sad...
...His latest book, Unfits rebelle (Grasset), was published in April...
...Secondly, Richard L. Gregory's Mind in Science (Cambridge University Press), an essay in the history of science on a subject of which many of us know too little, and I knew virtually nothing (but had to learn): how scientific thinking about mind and matter developed over the ages...
...Apart from the obvious respect this collection will evoke for Netanyahu, who died while liberating a hundred hostages in the famous Entebbe raid, these letters also reveal a great deal of thought about our world and offer an unforgettable image of a philosopher and soldier...
...A detailed and fascinating account of the redemptive pilgrimages made by American intellectuals during the past sixty years to the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other totalitarian Meccas...
...Turn to it...
...Sidney Hook is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, New York University, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and author, most recently, of Philosophy and Public Policy (Southern Illinois University Press...
...A must for all scholars interested in the Soviet Union...
...A pacifist in World War I, he was right in there with Jay Lovestone in trying to make something of the American Communist Party...
...The Second Coming, by Walker Percy...
...His "semi-autobiography" will be published next spring by Regnery/Gateway, Inc...
...Mencken...
...When he tried to shoot himself, he was so smashed he missed...
...Charles Peters is Editor of the Washington Monthly...
...Beware, above all, of any new work celebrated as "poetic" or '. 'literary" by John Leonard, or any fiction composed by, or under the influence of, a professor of -English (unless of course you are genuinely curious to know the profoundly moral sensibility that leads a man to leave his wife for a sensitive coed...
...is the conjunction of the demand that women should be the sole judges of when and how often they have children with the claim that other people, with presumably no part in the decision, should pay for them.'' Second is James Alcock's Parapsychology: Science or Magic...
...better yet give it to them for Christmas and hang on to your own copy...
...If we can claim Chandler as an American, we now have another great letter-writer to rank with Byron or Berlioz...
...The other is a neo-conservative before there were any...
...WALTER E. WILLIAMS In the interest of fairness, I recommend two authors for splendid Yuletide reading, one black and one white...
...I leave the fifth recommendation open, for even the reader should be allowed to exercise his free will and revolt against any recommendations...
...Pergamon...
...He called it a "modest task"-and was lucky to escape with his head...
...A sometimes tedious book about "Teedie" from his birth to his ascendance as president which provides much to ponder as we re-examine what it means to be a leader in this country...
...BEN J. WATTENBERG The Ultimate Resource, by Julian Simon (Princeton University Press...
...Allen, is a fresh view of the Transcendental Essayist by the distinguished biographer of Whitman and William James...
...This is a remarkable semi-allegorical, semi-realistic treatment of the Holocaust...
...Naipaul, a superb rendition of the "modernization" of Africa, and J.B...
...One Third of A Nation: Lorena Hickock Reports on the Great Depression...
...A linguistic philosopher as well as an MD and novelist, he puns more outrageously than anyone since Shakespeare...
...The best compendium of what happened...
...Philadelphia has never been more alive and convincing than in the author's word-portraits, which include William C. Bullitt, Agnes Repplier, and Boies Penrose...
...Norton and Company...
...The Graves of Academe, by the now celebrated Underground Gramrnarian, Richard Mitchell, is a faithful account of the decay of American schooling while "education" flourishes...
...JOSEPH SOBRAN Carry On, Jeeves, by P.G...
...Ben J. Wattenberg is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he co-edits the only magazine in America better than The American Spectator-Public Opinion...
...Ethnic America, by Thomas Sowell (Basic Books...
...Wodehouse...
...Clear-eyed and often fascinating history of nine American ethnic groups...
...It represents two important new movements-one in journalism that brings together investigative enterprise, graceful prose, and analytical rigor...
...The New Elite, by David Lebedoff (Watts...
...Beautifully written...
...The world of Goethe's dignified, 18th-century aristocrats is a long way from the New York of Saul Bellow, but his characters, for all their elegance, exhibit the same human frailties, if to a less spectacular degree...
...For those who prefer thrillers, Double Crossing (North Hollywood: Stratford Press), a novel by Erika Holzer, offers a good mix of spy-story entertainment and education in the matters of world politics...
...If he weren't so damned funny, he would get his intellectual due...
...George Gilder is the author of numerous works, including Wealth and Poverty and Sexual Suicide...
...KENNETH S. LYNN William W. Warner, Beautiful Swimmers...
...A powerful account of Sol-zhenitsyn's struggle to survive and to publish, and a masterful recreation of Tvardovsky, the famous editor of Novy Mir, who is torn all his life between orthodoxy and heterodoxy...
...a paperback (Pluriel) written by a chap named Bernard Brizay...
...But they may not know that he is also a superb novelist...
...by Frank MacShane...
...But his idiocies resulted in scrapes that made remarkable stories, all of which get their rueful due in a most clear and lively autobiography...
...JAMES ATLAS My favorite new novel this autumn was Celia Gittelson's Saving Grace, a fine satirical novel about a Pope's abrupt flight from papal responsibilities to a remote Italian village...
...The title has at least four different meanings, and maybe more...
...the other in politics that, in its perception of problems and possible solutions, seeks to free itself from the blinders of conventional liberalism and conservatism...
...Selected and edited by Guy J. Forgue...
...Bert lived to embrace Austrian economics...
...Stories of Faith, by John Shea...
...OLIVIER TODD I would recommend three books: two novels and one essay...
...Huntington Cairns was one of Mencken's friends and is an authority on his work...
...London: Temple Smith) Colin Brewer and June Lait put all the right, unanswered questions to our British tax-financed social workers and trainers of social workers...
...Truisms on human motivation and mass movements by a self-educated working man with great insight...
...My wife, Rachel, who reads, insists that I recommend Joseph and His Brothers, the greatest of Thomas Mann's novels, more glorious than the Bible's Joseph, and Henry James's neglected masterpiece about women, The Bostonians...
...Antony Flew is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading arid author of The Politics of Procrustes (Prometheus Books...
...Read the MidnightEconomist'to find out why...
...William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (W.W...
...VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY Victor Suvorov, The Liberators: Inside the Soviet Army (London: Hamish Hamilton...
...Hatred of the superior is a basic sin-at least Moses, Plutarch, Dante, and Shakespeare thought so, not to mention the Church-but we don't talk about it these days...
...This expanded and corrected edition presents an even more enthralling story than does the version of the novel on which we have previously relied...
...Whether they like him or not, few people suspected that he could so forcefully renew his vision and his style...
...Nevertheless, I have recently read and recommend A Bend in the River by V.S...
...Mencken was the most forceful figure American Literature has known...
...The Oxford Book of Short Stories, chosen by V.S...
...Any P.G...
...I strongly recommend these three books...
...This book is flawed: It's much too short to leave contented anyone who admires Teddy Roosevelt and good writing...
...Actually, any Wolfe will do, but this is the latest...
...a book, someone said, written by a committee about committees for a committee, but still fascinating...
...By extending his investigations to the experiences of the Irish in Ireland, the Jews in the Pale in Russia, the Italians in southern Italy, the Puerto Ricans on their own island, and the blacks in Africa, Sowell finds many a special key to differences in ethnic reactions to America...
...Vladimir Bukovsky is author of To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter...
...We must change the incentives that they face once they are in office...
...The Pope may not think Kung is a Catholic theologian anymore, but this volume demonstrates both his Catholicism and his conservatism and also proves that Kung is one of the most able critics of the conventional wisdom of Freud and Marx and the other modern false prophets...
...Wodehouse...
...Sol-zhenitsyn's account of his unremitting battle with the Soviet bosses gives us some idea of what it is like to be a writer in a society dominated by ideology, as well as the impact a courageous man who is a skillful fighter and knows where he stands can have...
...Sociology without sociologese...
...Another good book to set beside you, especially for TV commercials, is William Allen's Midnight Economist (Playboy Press), a collection of essays written by a UCLA professor who was once a mentor of mine...
...The Collected Stories of Caroline Gordon (Farrar, Straus, Giroux) is a wonderful way to become acquainted or reacquainted with the marvelously crafted tales of this fine writer...
...GEORGE V. HIGGINS Everyone should read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder...
...Before you rush off to criticize greed, make sure you understand that more gets accomplished when greed-as opposed to altruism-is in operation...
...In this epic battle, Bulgakov and Satan take all 15 rounds...
...A brilliant, fascinating, and disturbing analysis of the persistent gap between the promise of American ideals and the performance of American politics, by one of the most thoughtful observers since Tocqueville...
...Goethe...
...Sowell...
...It points out the systematic differences between private and government decisions...
...Does God Exist?, by Hans Kung...
...Wodehouse is as funny as Shakespeare is Shakespearean, and this book is a sure way to spread the addiction...
...His description at times rivals Jaroslav Hasek's famous Good Soldier Schweik...
...The story of a moderate, patriotic, and conscientious man attempting to discharge his duties to society and the state in an era of political extremism, religious fanaticism, and arrant hypocrisy can, of course, have little of practical instructiveness in our day, but it is a stirring tale all the same...
...Finally, is it fair to recommend the new, "unexpurgated" edition of Sister Carrie} (Penguin...
...As complex as the issue of race is, one can't help but conclude from Sowell's work that (1) there's not much that has to be explained about blacks compared to past discriminated-against groups, and (2) if we didn't treat the disease of racial discrimination, it would eventually go away by itself...
...Among Chandler's varied subjects, his estimates of twentieth-century novelists show his acuity and remarkable independence of mind...
...It means that much of the literature about the Second World War will have to be rewritten...
...Nor will there be such sufficient reason until and unless we have some repeatable demonstration of ESP, PK, or whatever else...
...The best yet of the cop stories of this heir to the ancient Irish tradition of "black" humor...
...The Four Loves, by C.S...
...Once an Eagle, by Anton Myrer...
...Saul Bellow is a gifted and skillful writer...
...Effortlessly edifying, this book is simply great company, the way Boswell's Johnson is...
...The other book which requires more time and more careful reading is Professor Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions (Basic Books...
...The Pennsylvania Edition of Dreiser's Sister Carrie...
...The most damaging finding, which would surely be repeated in any parallel U.S...
...This does not prevent him from dissecting the psychological misery of unemployment, whether of an industrial worker or of an executive with a fat bank account...
...It should be distributed on the lines and scale of Gideon Bibles...
...JACQUES BARZUN Waldo Emerson, by G.W...
...Lewis...
...John Chamberlain is a nationally syndicated columnist...
...I found this the most fascinating book of thfe year...
...The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Desmond Morris...
...But beyond my continuing lucubrations in economics, I found little time for reading during the past year and am ashamed to admit I wasted all too much of it in morbid reflection on the iridescence of rot in contemporary fiction-particularly works by John Updike, who epitomizes a literary establishment that has been sickened and stultified by secular humanist banalities...
...edited by Leonard Schapiro and Joseph Godson...
...He is Program Director for the International Center for Economic Policy Studies...
...This is one of the most poignant books I've ever read...
...Never mind if you don't even like The Birds of America, if you love America, its history, its diversity, its geography, its romance, you'll find enchantment in following the picaresque trail up and down America of the great painter, naturalist, and adventurer as did the Har-woods...
...Jacques Barzun is University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, literary advisor of Charles Scribner's Sons, and author of numerous books, including Teacher m America, reissued this year by Liberty Press...
...The other novel is by Francois Nourissier, who is very well known in France and seems to have everything: titles, success, position as literary critic on a number of papers, membership in the Academie Gon-court...
...It goes beyond banal, classical studies of unemployment and really tries to tackle the problem without rhetoric...
...Robert Nisbet is Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of many books, including History of the Idea of Progress...
...Robert B. Parker's most recent is A Savage Place...
...There is no other direction but down...
...It was a rewarding experience to re-read, after more than fifty years, Garland's account of growing up on the prairies in the 1870s and 80s as the son of a pioneering father, of finding his way to Boston, then the literary capital of the country, and establishing himself as a writer...
...Poor Dr...
...The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer...
...The protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, doesn't succeed in his effort to reform the twentieth century, but his effort makes this the most hilarious book I've read in many years...
...Finally, and with cousinly pride, Walter J. Ong's Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness (Cornell...
...A witty Graham Greene, Percy is probably the finest of the swarm of Catholic novelists who are appearing everywhere one looks...
...I'd also like to recommend Imaginary Crimes, forthcoming from Viking, by Sheila Ballantyne, an earnest but vividly written novel about a woman who recalls her traumatic, desperately unhappy childhood, the early death of her motherland the misadventures of her father, a petty criminal...
...Walter E. Williams is Professor of Economics at -George Mason University...
...The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War by Arno Mayer (Pantheon) is a book that rises above such handicaps as a dedication to Herbert Marcuse, the author's annoying Marxist taxonomy, and a persistently plodding style, on the strength of a single virtue-a fascinating thesis...
...The notable additions to our knowledge come from the detailed treatment of Emerson's childhood and youth, but the proportions of the book are not impaired and the narrative from end to end is engrossing...
...No other account of an American environment contains more fascinating information or is more evocatively written than this study of the crabs and the watermen of the Chesapeake Bay...
...The book begins with the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which vaulted Solzhenitsyn from the obscurity of a mathematics teacher in a provincial high school to a world figure, and ends with his expulsion from his homeland eight years later...
...the sex in it, by contemporary standards, is not even noticeable, but the story itself is utterly absorbing, and as crammed with social information as Balzac...
...Goodrich...
...John Ong is chairman of B.F...
...Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims...
...Self-Portrait of a Hero: The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu [1963-1976] (London: Random House...
...This is a collection of essays by leading sociologists, economists, and modern historians, and it will help answer the following question: Will the Soviet workers follow the example of their Polish brothers...
...She's a real individualist who hasn't yet been ruined by contact with the jargon of her new sociological friends...
...But there are more than 50 characters in this novel, which has a multi- dimensional richness- historical, political, social, what have you...
...Even were the competition vastly stronger than it is this would surely be by far the freshest, the sanest, and the most sensible book in its area...
...Midwestern lawyer with wide political experience looks at a key political problem of our time...
...It is a highly competent work edited by a master of the craft himself...
...HENRY REGNERY The Oak and the Calf, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
...and his letters are the best key to his points of view...
...That is a paradox when you consider that Bert Wolfe did such a vast amount of unclear thinking...
...you'll want to go back to it...
...This book explains why...
...Secrets of the Tribe (Sheep's Head Books) is a first volume of poetry by Chana Bloch, full of wit...
...Critics have ignored the coda because they don't know what to make of it...
...A must reading for people who have wondered about race and not found the answer is Thomas Sowell's painstakingly researched new book, Ethnic America (Basic Books...
...Her book-which is distinctly not an academic dissertation-explores the implications of a theory which she defends in most spirited fashion...
...On the Road with John James Audubon, by Mary Durant and Michael Harwood (Dodd Mead...
...For those who might like something more scientific and scholarly, full of figures, tables, and graphs, I recommend The Soviet Worker: Illusions and Realities (London: The Macmillan Press, Ltd...
...The people Garland describes are very different in their values and aspirations from those one meets in much modern fiction, but they had qualities we would do well to remember...
...A novel that follows a true American hero from the Mexican border wars of 1916 through World War Two, with an epilogue in Vietnam...
...Not recommended for women's libbers...
...David McCullough wrote Mornings On Horseback about the early years of Teddy Roosevelt...
...Kenneth S. Lynn is the author of books on Mark Twain, William Dean Ho wells, and other American writers...
...A moving and true book for anyone who has an affinity with, or curiosity about, the career military...
...WALTER LAQUEUR The second volume of the Official History of British Intelligence in the Second World War (HMSO London) covers the period from June 1941 to early summer of 1943...
...George V. Higgins is author, most recently, of The Rat on Fire...
...PRISCILLA L. BUCKLEY The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov (New American Library), has got to be one of the funniest, most sardonic, most damning books ever written about the Stalinist state...
...With a new Foreword by Daniel Aaron...
...First comes The Sceptical Feminist (Routledge & Kegan Paul...
...It throws a searing light on many aspects of present-day Soviet Russia, especially the halt by Stalin's heirs of the process of de-Stalinization...
...The first is Waugh's Black Mischief, which book many may not have read because its thesis, like that of Gone with the Wind, is so quickly grasped...
...My Christmas list this year will be for three books that have taught me, entertained me, and saddened me, about the future...
...unemployment and that of the 1980s...
...In Can Social Work Survive...
...After you have read this book, you will be convinced that we cannot make America free merely by electing freedom-minded men to office...
...Unlike most collections of letters they are highly readable...
...The second is Updike's The Coup, which is, really, a successor novel, fine-tuned to the modalities of current crotchets and conceits...
...WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR...
...My favorite remains Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins...
...This a tremendous work of research by an economist who can beat our sociologists at their own games and set it all forth in delightfully readable non-sociologese prose...
...The best account I know of the great Civil Rights revolution of our times, based upon prodigious research and first hand acquaintance with the participants...
...GEORGE GILDER How I wish I'd found some good new literature to recommend for Christmas in 1981...
...The contrast between the quiet dignity and wisdom of this old man and the life he sees around him in New York is what the book is all about, and is made with great effectiveness...
...Love Poems by Yehuda Amichai (Harper & Row) is a selection of poems both early and late by the distinguished Israeli poet, offered in English translation with facing Hebrew texts...
...while what few public inquiries there have been were always packed and prejudiced by persons with the most visible vested interests in the continuation and continual expansion of all existing agencies...
...Louis P. Simpson, The Brazen Face of History: Studies in the Literary Consciousness in America (Louisiana State University Press...
...David Herbert Donald, Chairman of the Graduate Program in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University, is writing a biography of Thomas Wolfe...
...Anne Wortham, a black who quit a good job as the King Features Syndicate librarian to go back to college and work for a doctorate, doesn't think blacks will make it until they concern themselves more with self-esteem than with group-esteem...
...It has great force and charm...
...What is an Unemployed...
...Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1981...
...James Webb is author of Fields of Fire and A Sense of Honor...
Vol. 14 • December 1981 • No. 12
