Books for Christmas
BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS Holiday gift suggestions from friends and enemies. JACQUES BARZUN Roger L. Williams: The Horror of Life (University of Chicago Press, $22.50) is a model of interdisciplinary...
...JOHN A. HOWARD Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (University of Chicago Press, $7.00 paper...
...For the most piquant and instructive misery, I recommend first-century Rome...
...Tradition, by Edward Shils (University of Chicago Press, $20.00...
...She has total mastery of scene, gesture, situation, and the workings of the human heart...
...If you hate Henry Kissinger, you will love this item...
...Having been fascinated by the late Gordon Prange's dissection of the Pearl Harbor debacle, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (McGraw-Hill, $22.95/$9.95 paper), I sped through his Miracle at Midway (completed by Gordon M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon following Prof...
...Drawing from his experiences in the Napoleonic wars, Clausewitz provided a practical and a theoretical foundation for the moral principles underlying American political-military relationships expressed so eloquently by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison fifty years earlier in The Federalist...
...The complete, authoritative text of the greatest and most readable work ever written in psychology...
...An upbeat view of the patria pleasing to folks who grew up in a more civilized era, but with the potential for penetrating the non-literary preoccupations of the "you know" generation as well...
...No reductionism mars this exposition, which is indispensable for an understanding of the modern temper...
...Those among TAS readers who so fantasize will profit from Wieseltier's brilliant and authoritative essay...
...These and similar suggestions are timeless and proceed from my feeling that we must each do our bit in the ceaseless struggle to recover contact with the Logos...
...Fascinating, however, to observe the genre...
...they are based on diary entries adroitly embodied in a quiet narrative...
...It's a joy to read...
...LEO ROSTEN The Unheavenly City, by Edward Banfield (revised edition available from Little, Brown & Co., $9.95...
...He is currently at work on a biography of Ernest Hemingway...
...What Should Psychologists Do About Psychoanalysis" is itself worth the price of the volume...
...For example, I recommend only one work of fiction for such situations...
...Will whoever has my copy please return it...
...In this case, I suggest William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience...
...Arab vs...
...REED IRVINE Monimbo, by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss (Simon and Schuster, $15.95), a sequel to The Spike that does for Castro's plans to flood this country with drugs and agents capable of creating racial violence and chaos what The Spike did for the KGB's disinformation operations...
...On the one hand, the essay trumpets out the virtues of psychoanalysis...
...Incidentally, the book grew out of an article published under another name in The American Spectator...
...Just the good news, folks...
...Somehow this detached overview enhances the passion of that struggle for a mound of coral in the Pacific...
...Written on his deathbed and originally published by Mark Twain, his memoirs are evidence that even the sainted Mencken could sometimes be wrong...
...Frost has a gentleness and a reverence for nature that refreshes the soul...
...Dependable Marxists lay down the line in the first three offerings...
...They've posited elaborate new rules for journalists, e.g., never file a dispatch that will harm the "information sovereignty" of your host country...
...Anything and everything written by Eudora Welty...
...Paul Johnson's Modern Times (Harper & Row, $27.95) you may, with luck, finish by year's end, not that it won't engross you-it's a stemwinder-but its 817 pages are so tightly packed with fascinating information that it is better savored than romped through...
...In terms of raw battle drama, Manchester's WWII recollections rank with The Red Badge of Courage and Mailer's The Naked and the Dead...
...The Federalist Papers...
...The world has seldom had a better biographer...
...Maybe these folks need to persecute, massacre, ravage, and martyr each other...
...It amounts, in fact, to a chrestomathy of his writings and thoughts on all subjects and is thus the means of getting to know at first hand one of the greatest minds this country has produced...
...Highly unusual setting and action...
...But when a 93-year-old friend whose critical judgment I much respect told me that I shouldn't miss it, I trotted off to the nearest bookstore...
...The Histories is a terrific reminder of what happens when people forget dignity, order, and the other virtues of social conservation and let politics run around unfettered, sticking its hind parts into everything...
...Do we live in the most savage era of modern times...
...The editor's note reveals the magazine's scope: the issue contains a series on war that reflects "different and offering differing views...
...That is Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park (Random House, $13.95/ $3.95 paper), an artfully crafted, latter-day dime novel featuring a weary Russian policeman slogging through the bureaucratic mire of the worker's paradise...
...Irving Kristol, Reflections of a Neo-conservative (Basic Books, $19.95...
...Her Valley of Decision was an American Forsyte Saga...
...Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret with Introductory Essays by Peter Paret, Michael Howard, and Bernard Bro-die, and a commentary by Bernard Brodie (Princeton University Press, $28.50...
...Kenneth S. Lynn's most recent work is The Air-Line to Seattle (Chicago, $17.50), a collection of literary and historical essays on American civilization...
...This, to be sure, is a book for all seasons, a collection of essays spanning Kristol's entire career and providing a coherent and insightful view of our present situation and how (in the sense of a history of ideas) we got to be the way we are...
...The Twelve Caesars is as good as People magazine and Penthouse letters to the editor combined, yet you needn't be embarrassed to have it on your coffee table...
...To be honest, I always considered William Manchester to be one of those prolix wimps who infest university English departments and manufacture massive pageants of history with the aid of an army of graduate students...
...Masochism it is, to read their analyses...
...William S. Gilbert, The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan (Norton, $9.95 paper...
...Both wisdom and wit lie deep in the pages...
...O'ROURKE Christmas is supposed to be a joyous season...
...Fortune smiled last year in Robertson Davies' Deptford Trilogy (Penguin, $3.95 each)-a remembrance of things Proust, only readable...
...William James, The Principles of Psychology (Harvard University Press, $17.50 paper...
...Draw foreign policy conclusions as you will...
...It is an inspiring story of political maturation: beginning as a master of pork-barrel finaglings in the Illinois legislature, Lincoln gradually developed that clarity of moral vision which he expressed in his debates with Stephen Douglas...
...He also paints a grand portrait of a congress full of weenies and an executive branch with cancer of the prerogatives...
...Helen Hazen: Endless Rapture: Rape, Romance, and the Female Imagination (Scribner's, $11.95) compares wittily and subtly the often -violent doctrines of modern feminism with the evident tastes of women in literature and with some facts of common life...
...It is a work of massive historical and cultural authority...
...LEWIS LEHRMAN I have only one recommendation...
...Personal Memoirs of U.S...
...He professes at the University of California and City University of New York...
...While I managed to avoid Robert Ludlum and John Jakes during my recent sojourns in the air, the resulting selection is hardly laden with undiscovered literary nuggets or tomes sure to alter the course of history...
...Harry G. Summers, Jr., an infantry veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars, now on the faculty of the Army War College, is the author of On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Presidio Press, $12.95), which recently won the 1983 Furniss Award...
...Brock Yates is author most recently of The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry (Empire Books, $13.95...
...Robert Lekachman is the author of Greed Is Not Enough: Reaganomics (Pantheon, S13.50/S3.50 paper...
...Readers of this journal, I believe, can take their medicine straight...
...The test, says Pool, is whether new electronic information technologies are protected by the First Amendment as the print media have been, or whether the electronic media-broadcast and cable-are wrongly regarded, and therefore regulated as common carriers (as telephone and telegraph), or as scarce media (as radio and television...
...If China ever opened its doors," he quotes one of his Chinese friends in his concluding paragraph, "everybody would go...
...The whole history of voluntary action in the United States...
...Mario M. Cuomo is Governor of the State of New York...
...Says Tacitus: "Rank, wealth and office, whether surrendered or retained, provided grounds for accusation, and the reward for virtue was inevitable death...
...Thus my modest suggestions for a Christmas book list...
...Even worse, he devotes a good lecture income to supporting a magazine that did more than most to change the intellectual climate of the country...
...His latest, Who Knows: Information and the Age of the Fortune 500 (Ablex Pub., $19.50), tells more than there is to know about the great American communications conspiracy...
...It is one of the even rarer genre: a book that forces you to think about matters -general and technical-that never occurred to you at all and which, in doing so, opens up a vast new perspective on the very nature of work, and of life (and death) in history...
...PRISCILLA L. BUCKLEY Russell Baker is not my favorite humorist, not by a long shot...
...Reflections of a Neoconservative...
...anybody in arm's reach...
...Whether RCA, IBM, ITT, and the like meet secretly to plot control of worldwide news and data flows is, at best, difficult to imagine...
...So we are treated to subtle and elegantly written analyses of Adam Smith, the American Revolution, Machiavelli, etc., and confronted with what Rabelais would have called the substanti-fique moelle of neoconservatism, and henceforth of any viable conservatism...
...It is short on hard information, as all books on China are, because free inquiry is still repressed on the mainland and because the country's chaotic, disorganized economy defies systematic fact-gathering...
...Reagan could do a great service not only to himself but to his country if he would only review it from the Oval Office...
...Based on his experiences as a war correspondent and his interviews with participants from both sides, Karnow has written the most balanced and objective account of the Vietnam tragedy yet produced...
...Knight's essays on economics, religion, public policy, and the social sciences are works of genius and originality...
...Horror of horrors, he enjoys skiing and sailing...
...Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh President of the United States, is author most recently of The Real Peace...
...A cleansing, uncompromising expose of the absurd reasoning and cockamamy "facts" of the radical Left (the muddled middle) of the sixties and seventies, and their hysterical supporters in the universities and the media...
...This would let us all off the hook...
...William F. Buckley, Jr., Overdrive (Doubleday, $16.95...
...Marcia is one of our most neglected novelists...
...The best book ever on urbanology, the "underprivileged," the inner city, the suburbs, city welfare, etc...
...It carries florid, heavy-handed attacks on Western journalists as conveyors of capitalist power and government policies...
...Remember the days of Nixon, Ford, and Carter when it seemed as if Presidents were being hired by the hour...
...No pattern of social behavior persists for two millenia unless it fulfills a want...
...MARTIN PERETZ David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard University Press, $20.00...
...John R. Silber is President of Boston University and currently serving as a member of the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America...
...Julian L. Simon is Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and teaches at the University of Maryland...
...This may be the purest brand of pseudo-academic balderdash, for all I know about theological history, but it nonetheless remains a sensational read...
...Abraham Lincoln: A Biography, by Benjamin P. Thomas (Knopf, $15.95...
...A recent number describes the "voice of truth and unity" delivered by the media in Afghanistan...
...That was before I read his Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (Little, Brown, $14.95/$3.95 paper...
...to be the same foul, treacherous, bloody mess it is today-Jew vs...
...For those who prefer the homegrown Marxist analyst of communica-ions, I suggest Herbert I. Schiller...
...Frank E. Manuel, The Changing of the Gods (University Press of New England, $18.00...
...A businessman can take this book home to his family and neighbors and say with pride: "Here's something you can read if you want to understand what I do...
...While most people haven't quite noticed, Glazer, a communitarian neoconservative, understood as-and even before-it was happening...
...One of the dormant gems of social philosophy which jolts the assumptions of the liberals and some conservatives, too...
...With a clear sense of what is just and what is not, this is a guide to those perplexed by issues of race, ethnicity, and individual rights and responsibilities...
...Besides, she is probably the only etiquette expert ever quoted in a text on military strategy...
...Characters & Their Landscapes, by Ronald Blythe (Harcourt Brace Jo-vanovich, $14.95), a set of graceful essays marked by the same sense of place and people displayed by Blythe's Akenfield and The View in Winter...
...Russell is only nine years old -talks to all of us whose parents are on that downhill slope...
...Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, by Joseph Schumpeter (Harper & Row, $5.95 paper...
...The Roman Way, by Edith Hamilton (Avon, $2.95 paper...
...0 'Rourke is former Editor-in-Chief of the National Lampoon and author of Modern Manners: Etiquette for Very Rude People (Dell, $5.95...
...Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Decade (Basic Books, $19.95...
...China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, by Fox Butterfield (Times Books, $19.95/$9.95 paper...
...Lebanese vs...
...To the United States...
...Of even more compelling import today than when it appeared thirty-five years ago...
...The Twelve Caesars by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus...
...KENNETH S. LYNN Henry A. Murray, Endeavors in Psychology: Selections from the Person-ology of Henry A. Murray (Harper & Row, $35.00...
...My third choice would be any novel by Canada's premier novelist, Robertson Davies...
...A fine biography is Susan Cros-land's memoir of her husband, Tony (Tony Crosland, Jonathan Cape, Pub., $19.95...
...The other constituency is comprised of people who imagine winnable wars...
...LEONARD R. SUSSMAN My Glossary For International Communications (Media Institute, $10.00...
...He informs a witty and arresting narrative with passionate introspection...
...I read these in college, of course, but had not reread them until last year when a very thoughtful friend gave me a first edition...
...The figure in the carpet is discreet at first, almost imperceptible...
...The Left hates Bill because he knows how to spend money...
...SUSAN STAMBERG This is a strange list, revealing as much about the shortness of my attention span (or the sparse amount of time I can devote to pleasure reading) as it does about my reading tastes: Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings, by Sarah Greenough and Juan Hamilton (Callaway Editions, $75.00...
...Having run out of neighbors and friends to destroy, the fanatical Mideasterners destroy themselves...
...The best one-volume biography of the man who freed the slaves and saved our Union, this is also a stirring portrait of life and death on the frontier-of hewing logs and building cabins, of milk poisoning and typhoid fever, of vigorous debating societies where totally self-educated frontiersmen matched and honed their wits...
...This is a highly original analysis of economic crisis in America from a radical perspective...
...It deals with the lives and afflictions of the six great French writers who set the tone indicated in the title...
...Priscilla L. Buckley is Managing Editor of National Review...
...Adam Meyerson is the Editor of Policy Review, a quarterly published by the Heritage Foundation...
...It is a saga of everyday heroes-from the crack inventors at 3M, to the Frito-Lay salesmen who trek hours out of their way to make sure every Mom and Pop store gets its corn chips, to the McDonald's franchise owners who insist on cleanliness and courtesy...
...The way it takes Keynes apart is delicious...
...available from Freedom House, 25 W. 40th St., New York, NY 10018...
...Col...
...Professor Pool describes how giant communications systems, and networks of systems, are struggling to embrace new technologies...
...JACQUES BARZUN Roger L. Williams: The Horror of Life (University of Chicago Press, $22.50) is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship and superbly lucid writing...
...The man who has been described as the godfather of neoconservatism in America displays in these sparkling essays the qualities necessary to such a status...
...Here a Jungian psychiatrist who has lived and practiced abroad as well as in this country confides in a disarming manner his views, failings, memories, and hopes-a unique sort of intellectual autobiography...
...At the end, however, I add one valuable antidote...
...It was meant for two constituencies...
...This is the best thriller I ran across in 1983...
...A withering attack on the mewlings about underdeveloped nations, "racism," the African dilemmas, the moral blackmail of the backward...
...No sophisticated household should be without the free flow from Moscow...
...Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, by Judith Martin (Atheneum, $19.95/$10.95 paper...
...Grant (Da Capo Press, $10.95 paper...
...The exception this year was the novel Ironweed by William Kennedy (Viking Press, $14.75), which 1 read in one evening-to-dawn sitting...
...She copes, not drearily, or wearily, but with verve and gusto supported, and sometimes preyed upon, by a loving, quirky, but never cranky family...
...About My Table & Other Stories, by Nicholas Delbanco (Morrow, $11.95...
...WILLIAM E. SIMON I'd like to recommend three volumes...
...This is a hard-hitting book for the layman which tells you where the economy is headed and why...
...Kaplan, having retired from the foreign service, the corporate world, and GEO magazine, now lives and writes in New York...
...Beyond the Wasteland, by Samuel Bowles, David Gordon, and Thomas Weisskopf (Doubleday, $17.95...
...I just read it a second time: the Philip Magnus biography of a good man, Prime Minister Gladstone {Gladstone), a true conservative, as an antidote to the poisonous intellectual deceit that conservatives can win, in the words of Disraeli, by "dishing the Whigs" and by enacting the policies of the left-wing opposition...
...The result is a welcome and well-written perspective on what went wrong...
...Like many Americans before and since, H.L...
...One can imagine the paroxysms of fear and guilt that might be generated by Anthony Lewis, Elizabeth Drew, Carl Rowan, et al...
...He is author most recently of The Ultimate Resource (Princeton University Press, $17.50/ $7.95 paper...
...This is a model biography-appreciative but not uncritical, informative but not too detailed, with a clear and graceful narrative...
...Nathan Glazer, Ethnic Dilemmas, 1964-1982 (Harvard University Press, $20.00...
...KAPLAN A Christmas book list...
...One cannot live by lapar-otomies alone," says Murray...
...the spirit that bloweth where it listeth, bestowing meaning and life, or the absence of it that leaves us so terribly alone...
...It would be nice to believe that persons and their characters don't matter and that leaders are small boats borne upon the tide of history...
...Harper & Row, $19.95...
...Naturally the Left regards all this as sheer indulgence...
...Her book gives ample evidence why form and tradition are essential underpinnings to a well-ordered society...
...COL...
...Details the impact of Communist propaganda on the U.S...
...I was reading it when Tyrrell's letter arrived: an intellectual autobiography which is not only brilliant, absorbing, surprising, convincing, provoking, revealing, and charming but finally pertinent, like the agelessly Jewish gaze of the author (peering at us from the book jacket designed by William Davis...
...Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion, by P.T...
...One closes the book marveling at the good fortune of the Americans and the smugness of the Japanese, as well as their despicable behavior with prisoners of war...
...The Jewish War by Josephus...
...Or L'Annoncefaitea Marie, if you can find it...
...Two books by Washington Irving, The Conquest of Spain and Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (AMS Pr., $21.50...
...The occasional merriment and the redoubtable Buckley wit do not for a moment conceal the rich substance of the author's continuing service to the commonwealth...
...Or The Brothers Kara-mazov, ditto...
...DeWitt's War, by Hans Koning (Pantheon, $13.95...
...This is a minor masterpiece...
...I can pass up his New York Times column with the greatest of ease, so Growing Up (Congdon & Weed, $15.00) was published and hit the best-seller list without my even noticing it...
...ADAM MEYERSON In Search of Excellence, by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr...
...The Federalist Papers ate as indispensable a tool to understanding political man today as they were two centuries ago...
...Its hero is an honest Dutch mayor during the Nazi occupation...
...The author's style gives the book excitement as well as conviction...
...P.J...
...But how is Paul Johnson going to top this one...
...He does not suffer fools gladly, whether American or Vietnamese, and his jaundiced eye sees through the cant and deliberate misrepresentations that still cloud public perceptions...
...values for both journalism and the public served...
...Leon Wieseltier, Nuclear War, Nuclear Peace (New Republic/Holt, Rinehart & Winston, $7.95...
...Martin Peretz is Editor-in-Chief of the New Republic...
...Reed Irvine is Chairman of Accuracy In Media, Inc...
...The analysis of romances, on the one hand, and the hopes of the several schools preaching the New Woman, on the other, makes for instructive and piquant reading...
...It is must reading for all leaders and would-be leaders in the Western world...
...His failed presidency has obscured what Abraham Lincoln knew so well-that Grant was one of the finest soldiers the American Army has ever produced...
...JOHN R. SILBER The War Against the Atom, by Samuel McCracken (Basic Books, $18.50...
...At 3,80 rb each subscription, the magazine is worth every rb...
...Expensive, but worth it at $250 for a year...
...1984, by George Orwell...
...ordained or bereft of God...
...Tyrrell honors me, and confirms my suspicion that he is an editor of genius...
...Otherwise our holy days become nothing but marketing ploys...
...were blowing away world leaders at the same rate today as between 1890 and 1910...
...Exciting and frightening reading...
...This is the best of the industrial policy manifestoes and a well-argued case for a carefully delimited planning policy...
...The Rosenberg File, by Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, $22.50), who set out to prove that the atomic spies were innocent and had been framed and ended up convinced of their guilt after carefully examining the voluminous FBI files that the Rosenberg children had obtained under a Freedom of Information request...
...Joseph Kraft is a nationally syndicated columnist and a regular contributor to the New Yorker...
...Mencken gained his impressions of Ulysses S. Grant from his failures as a President...
...HARRY G. SUMMERS, JR...
...The path this book broke when first published in the nineteenth century has become obscured by the moral lassitude and legalistic obfuscation of our times...
...It's a romp that can bring tears to the eye...
...On War provides reaffirmation from an unlikely source of the enduring wisdom and common sense of those remarkable men who brought our Republic into existence...
...media, naming names and spelling out the successes the Kremlin has enjoyed...
...His alternative: stop pushing the free flow of information (that's subterfuge for unfree flow, he says), and substitute the people's flow, regulated on their behalf by governments...
...Endeavors in Psychology collects for the first time in one volume the papers that together represent the full range of his ideas...
...ROBERT LEKACHMAN The Price of Power, by Seymour Hersh (Summit Books, $19.95...
...The idea of "the rule of law" has never been more relevant...
...The New Testament-the majestic language of the old Douay version inspires in a way that modern texts, like those in the Jerusalem Bible, for example, cannot match...
...H.J...
...People who shout 'All power to the people' want power to be handed over to-the people who shout 'All power to the people!'" Leo Rosten is author most recently of Hooray for Yiddish...
...The Histories by Cornelius Tacitus...
...Freedom and Reform, by Frank Knight (Liberty Press, $14.00/$6.50 paper...
...Daily reports for each additional region are available at $80 from the National Technical Information Service, 5285 Port Royal Road, Springfield, VA 22161...
...The most illuminating analysis of the "issues" I know-a remarkable and prophetic masterpiece that argues that capitalism will fail because of its remarkable successes, not its shortcomings...
...Some helped themselves to priesthoods and consulships as the prize of victory...
...On War, by Carl von Clausewitz...
...Cook Books, Fly Fishing Books, Spy Novels -long may they wave, but not for Christmas...
...James Hillman: Inter Views: Conversations with Laura Pozzo on Psychotherapy, Biography, Love, Soul, Dreams, Imagination, Work, and the State of the Culture (Harper & Row, $13.41...
...Its villain possesses not a single redeeming virtue...
...A beautiful collection of stories about men in their middle years, preserving their relationships with friends and family, permitting themselves to dream and be wistful and loving...
...My favorites for "dipping" purposes: The Poetry of Robert Frost, collected by Edward C. Lathem (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, $6.95 paper...
...He remains for me the supreme historian of this century, and a stylist on the level of Hazlitt...
...China-worship is no longer in fashion among Western journalists and intellectualoids, and Fox Butterfield's account of his years as the New York Times bureau chief in Peking (1979-81) is the most engaging of a series of revisionist books that have recently come out...
...Anyone who fears dated-ness in James is in for a grand surprise...
...This is a book that I published...
...It is popular military history in the genre of the brilliant John Keegan and, like him, Prange and company play no favorites when dealing with the antagonists...
...I do not blush for adding my own most recent book, because it is so much more James's than mine...
...useful, however, if we are to understand the frank objectives of the adversary...
...One believes that it is sinful even to talk about nuclear weapons...
...Looking Back, Looking Ahead, by Irving Kristol (Basic Books, $19.95...
...free of spite, and eager for the best talent in his administration, Lincoln forgave the repeated personal disloyalty of several Cabinet members...
...The IOJ is the Moscow front that trains thousands of Third World and East-bloc journalists, and acts as a mobilizer of their publics through the mass media...
...Others acquired official posts and backstairs influence, creating a universal pandemonium of hatred and terror...
...Kennedy is poet laureate of people in a Depression-era urban backwater...
...Incisive, blunt, masterfully written, and completely free of ideological cant, Modern Times depicts the rise of the modern totalitarian state and leaves the reader with a renewed sense of the twin dangers we face today: the aggressive ambitions of the Soviet Union in the East, and the moral listlessness that is exhibited all too often by leaders in the West...
...ROBERT NISBET Paul Johnson, Modern Times (Harper & Row, $27.95...
...Upon close reading, it seems to have nothing to do with Jewish history or culture but everything to do with regional psychology...
...there aren't many of these folk among TAS readers...
...Johnson's canvas is the world, starting at the turn of the century...
...Baker's mother, a Depression-era widow with small children to support, dominates Growing Up...
...Ought to put the Rosenberg case to rest once and for all-but won't...
...It begins by taking a look at America's traditional ideas, particularly the right to freedom and a chance to live better, and asks whether we can revive our fading dreams...
...The Coercive Utopians, by Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac (Regnery Gateway, forthcoming), a fascinating expose of the hidden agendas of the rabid environmentalists, the leftist clergy, the media elite, and many other presumably well-motivated useful idiots who are doing in the country and the values they profess to love...
...Thomas tells of the awful carnage in the Civil War, of the initial military ineptitude of the North, of a captious and sniping press that makes today's newsmongers look almost responsible by comparison, of how America's most eloquent speechgiver read little but Shakespeare and the Bible, which he knew virtually by heart...
...I re-read for the third time Lewis Namier's Revolution of the Intellectuals...
...BROCK YATES The following list might be described as high-altitude reading matter, i.e., suitable for consumption when juggling a small bag of macadamia nuts and a glass of scotch while attempting to ignore the aluminum-siding salesman seated beside you...
...This is not one of those rare books that change people's minds...
...John Chamberlain is author of A Life With the Printed Word (Regnery Gateway, $12.95...
...Robert Nisbet is Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...If the American people could have kept him out of the Presidency by prolonging the Civil War until 1877, it would have been an excellent investment [for] West Point and bad whiskey had transformed his cortex into a sort of soup...
...This packet-Reading for Maso-chists, Communications Division-is needed because authoritarians of many stripes seek to impose a "new order" on the worldwide flow of news and information...
...But this is not all...
...This is the handbook for citizens interested in the new communications technologies, or personal freedom, or both...
...Prange's death...
...It's a refreshing change from accounts of yellow rain and butterfly booby traps that amputate children's limbs...
...RICHARD NIXON Of all the books I have read this year, one in particular deserves to be mentioned by itself: Modern Times, the one-volume history of the twentieth century by British historian Paul Johnson (Harper & Row, $27.95...
...The Democratic Journalist is published monthly in Prague by the International Organization of Journalists...
...If a "complete works" doesn't exist-stories and novels-it should...
...He is co-author of The Case for Gold, and has written for Harper's, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications...
...This packet is meant to prepare vocationists and avocationists alike for the new editorial "order...
...The Masada incident is worth special attention...
...It brings alive the harsh, rivalrous nature of political life, and imparts humanity to someone I used to regard as all warts...
...Dicey (Liberty Press, $15.00/$7.00 paper...
...The rest of my appetite for intellectual stimulation, if not enrichment, can be satisfied by a variety of solid, but openly commercial, nonfiction works...
...Charles H. Miller: Auden: An American Friendship (Scribner's, $13.95...
...Olympic Committee...
...It ranges from David McClin-tock's riveting examination of the sleaze merchants who corrupt what remains of art in Hollywood, entitled Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood & Wall Street (Morrow, $17.50), to the wonderful, high-style speculations of Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Delacorte, $15.95/$3.95 paper), wherein Englishmen Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln pummel the reader with a fiendishly detailed theory that Jesus of Nazareth survived Golgotha and fled to southern France where he sired a line that resulted in the Merovingian Dynasty, the Knights Templar, and an elite secret society which survives to this day...
...A writer and poet who was once Auden's student in Michigan and remained a friend (no more than a friend) gives a portrait of Auden not elsewhere to be found...
...I take it all back...
...Don't be put off by this wonderful book just because it has been at the top of the best-seller list for nearly a year...
...Peters and Waterman recount what everyone in business instinctively knows: the best-run businesses stress service to their customers, make high-quality products, instill pride in their employees, and shun paperwork and bureaucracy...
...Its central themes are the universal breakdown of morality and the eruption of political (chiefly Leninist) power on all continents...
...JOHN CHAMBERLAIN The Healing of America: What Can Be Done About the Continuing Economic Crisis, by Richard Cornuelle (Putnam Pub...
...Laughter and the calls of the vendor dominate the streets of Kabul, writes the Czech journalist, nothing like the "dangers lurking everywhere that Western papers feed their readers," he adds...
...Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, by A.V...
...It's a religious spirit, if you will pardon the expression, and this book is a great Christmas gift...
...Best Loved Poems of the American People, edited by Hazel Felleman (Doubleday, $12.95)-ideal for preparation of speeches and instruction of young people...
...the intelligence of the giver is thus doubly shown...
...This collection of essays-a political autobiography of sorts-is full of Irving Kristol's usual wit, insight, and common sense...
...The profits made by the prosecutors were no less odious than their crimes...
...In so doing, Manchester brings more majesty to his own unheralded drama than he ever did to the Krupps, the MacArthurs, and the Churchills, all of whom were forced to tiptoe after the attic-loads of trivia in which he buries his more commercial efforts...
...Before you sample Schiller or subscribe to the periodicals, I strongly urge you to read, several times, Ithiel de Sola Pool's Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age (Harvard University Press, $20.00...
...What's Ahead for the Economy: The Challenge and the Chance, by Louis Rukeyser (Simon and Schuster, $15.95...
...It is a very thoughtful volume and his political analysis is, as always, first rate...
...These stern lessons are combined with gossip and smut...
...These unedited broadcasts and press accounts provide the inimitable derision and threats of doom-all intriguingly supposed to woo Americans back to a sweet-smelling detente...
...always honor a government's "right to communicate...
...P.J...
...In the end, the public should have unprecedented choices to secure diverse information through new print, broadcast, cable, and videotext services...
...Reading these essays and reminiscences you will find yourself meditating about the meaning and effects of the secularization of our (Western) societies...
...William Gibson, A Mass for the Dead...
...It is the most sympathetic and celebratory book about business and businessmen ever written...
...His failure to command a wider public in this country bewilders me...
...I have now made my way through The Federalist again and have been struck anew by the extraordinary wisdom of our founding fathers and their profound understanding of human nature...
...Doesn't sound like much for Christmas, does it...
...Pool is optimistic: he believes we can have freedom with diversity, the magical combination that desperately frightens the authoritarians...
...Grant . . . was almost the perfect military man," Mencken wrote in 1931, "dogged, devoted and dumb...
...Vietnam: A History, by Stanley Karnow (Viking, $20.00...
...Baker's first chapter, a visit to his aged mother in a nursing home-she tells him, querulously, that he, this middle-aged stranger, is not her son Russell...
...A kind of latter-day Rubens of the IBM Selectric...
...JULIAN L. SIMON On reflection, it seems that for me the oldies are not just best, they are the only thing, when it comes to suggestions I give with confidence...
...But maybe they are just books for all seasons...
...Give The Dartmouth Bible, a great companion to the King James, which everybody already has...
...Slaves were suborned to speak against their masters, freedmen against their patrons, while those who had not an enemy in the world were ruined by their friends.'' The best argument for re-electing Reagan since Mondale's campaign kick-off speech...
...Happily, Rukeyser's answer is an optimistic one: the choice is still ours if we take action in the ten critical economic areas he discusses...
...Frederic Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty...
...At long last the myths and misunderstandings that were almost the hallmark of our Vietnam involvement are beginning to give way to reason and sober analysis...
...Anyone who would advise a reader, as Miss Manners did recently in her newspaper column, to give thanks for being spared the ignominy of being maid-of-honor to a woman who had no honor is worth reading on that account alone...
...Jacques Barzun is University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, literary adviser for Charles Scribner's Sons, and author of numerous books, including Teacher in America (Liberty Press, $9.00/$4.00 paper...
...It is a veritable pasture of charity and good will when compared with the two decades of assassinations, massacres, terror bombings, street riots, mass strikes, public executions, and brutal class struggle which Mrs...
...Target America, by James L. Tyson (available from AIM, $10.00/ $2.00 paper...
...McGraw-Hill, $24.95) like the USS New Jersey at flank speed...
...By contrast, My Brother's Keeper lacks wide social scope, but it is a tremendously dramatic story of the family bond, done with both realism and compassion...
...Schiller has no difficulty imagining it, and providing tables and charts...
...A Trumpet for Reason, by Leo Rosten...
...This fair-minded scholar and wise theorist of democracy calmly takes us through the last two tempestuous decades during which our constitution underwent drastic, but not yet fully discernible, change...
...They are intelligent gifts and very inexpensive...
...They run the gamut from A to B. For subscribing to the Democratic Journalist for $6 (from Parizska 9 110, 01 Prague 1), one gets the IOJ Newsletter as a monthly bonus...
...And the reminiscences can be trusted...
...Syrian vs...
...on the other hand, it arraigns the Freudian system for failing to bind up the wounds it makes...
...Kristol's subject is our civilization, finally...
...Simon and Schuster, $15.95...
...John A. Howard is President of the Rock-ford Institute...
...Fascinating reading now that the Moors-the Arabs-are on the move again...
...For those who enjoy sparkling social satire created by an absolute master of the language, Gilbert's libretti remain the unsurpassed treasure...
...For those unfamiliar with his work, the Deptford Trilogy (Penguin, $3.95 each) is a good start...
...Because this is its year, and we should probably read it more often than every two decades, on assignment...
...If you want the gospel from Big Brother I recommend the fascinating Daily Reports from the Soviet Union transcribed by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service...
...All three books are available in paperback from Penguin Classics...
...But this year, thanks to Basic Books, we have Irving Kristol's Reflections of a Neoconservative (Basic Books, $19.95...
...Nonsense...
...An intelligent and breathtaking collection of the master's works, in which the authors prove he was as great a photographer as he was a magnet for the inspired artists of his time...
...Pool acknowledges that public freedoms could be restricted if the new technologies are over-regulated or if an unregulated market constricts...
...Tuchman so vividly describes...
...The first tells how the Moors got into Spain, the second tells how they were expelled 800 years later...
...A valuable narrative of major trends of the past half-century in American schools and colleges...
...Well, you should have been in Rome when Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and Vespasian were all Emperor during the same year...
...Based on the real life story of two eccentrics, it is anything but eccentric in the telling...
...Henry A. Murray is the most attractive as well as the most significant figure in American psychological thought since William James...
...Mencken would have envied her common sense, her wit, and especially her occasional sting...
...Congressman Bud Shuster, Believing in America (Morrow, $13.95...
...Bauer (Harvard University Press, $17.50/ $7.95 paper...
...Group, $14.95...
...Perhaps I've been reading too much feminist fiction lately, but these stories reminded me that men can be caring and preserving and frightened and brave...
...MARIO M. CUOMO With homework always on hand, I tend to dip into an assortment of books rather than read individual volumes in their entirety...
...Such "new rights" demand reeducation for fogies who still believe that certain values inhere in describing events with balance and independence...
...And then (and this is my point) you arrive at Kristol's animadversions on Freud, Einstein, Christianity, and Judaism (in the concluding section of the book) and understand that the leitmotif of these Reflections lies far deeper than public affairs and political economy, narrowly understood...
...Our most learned and intellectually elegant historian of ideas, and witty and provocative besides, makes vivid and germane the seemingly most arcane and dated theological ideas and myths of the pre-modern era...
...JOSEPH KRAFT These days I read mainly for information, and it is a rare piece of luck when something good comes my way...
...Suetonius refutes such chicken-hearted determinism...
...The book reveals the origins and consequences of the irrational and misinformed fear of nuclear power...
...Upon re-reading Barbara Tuch-man's The Proud Tower (Macmillan, $17.95/$4.50 paper), I was once again reminded that the noun "crisis" is presently being overused by the media to the point of absurdity...
...What a shame the Times, the Post, and the evening news missed all that...
...My Brother's Keeper, by Marcia Davenport (Bentley, $12.50/$3.50 paper...
...As President he was a magnanimous reconciler, much like George Washington...
...if the anarchists, nihilists, International Workers of the World, etc...
...a shatteringly honest autobiography of a small hero in a big war-Marine non-com Manchester returning to the fetid little islands of the Pacific where the scenes of carnage, bravery, and the pain of his own riddled body pound at his senses...
...The treatments of progressive education and of the whole blow-up of the 1960s illuminate a great deal more than education in American society...
...Although the Howard-Paret translation is the best that's ever been produced, reading On War is still hard going . . . but it's worth it to dispel current nonsense and hysteria over matters military...
...This powerful book should serve as a counterbalance to the prevailing sociological trend in which the most naive assumptions of the Enlightenment are swallowed whole...
...Like my friend Corinna I have now become a bore on the subject...
...Davies is not only Canada's finest contemporary novelist, he is one of the best anywhere...
...Jacques Barzun: A Stroll With William James (Harper & Row, $19.95...
...It should infuriate readers of this journal...
...Bless him...
...I must warn him, however, that I take a dim view of the custom that has grown up among us of submerging the significance of our highest and holiest of days under masses of trivia...
...The Next American Frontier, by Robert Reich (Times Books, $16.60...
...The KGB Today: The Hidden Hand, by John Barron (Reader's Digest Press, $19.95), wherein a brilliant expert on the Soviet espionage and active measures agency mines another rich lode of information supplied by important defectors such as Stanislav Levchenko to tell us what the enemy is up to and how he is doing it...
...But Butterfield provides a colorful, anecdotal picture of the fear and bitter poverty that dominate Chinese life, as well as the tragic waste of the Chinese people's incredible talent and energy...
...William E. Simon, former Secretary of the Treasury, is President of the U.S...
...Susan Stamberg is co-host of National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" and author of Every Night at Five: Susan Stamberg's "All Things Considered" Book (Pantheon, $9.95...
...Without question, the best history of the twentieth century in any language...
...That is too much to ask, given the state of contemporary affairs...
...Overdrive, by William Buckley (Doubleday, $16.95...
...But the next best thing to present joy is distant misery...
...Lewis Lehrman is founder of the Lehrman Institute, a public policy forum for the study of economics and foreign policy and state and local government problems...
...The Divine Milieu: An Essay on the Interior Life, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Harper & Row, $3.95)- Christian theology presented in a form that for me is pure poetry...
...Easier than reading Gibbon, but just as revealing...
...Leonard R. Sussman is Executive Director of Freedom House, New York...
...H.J...
...Josephus gives an eyewitness account of the Jewish rebellion against Rome and, in doing so, shows the Middle East of 66 A.D...
Vol. 16 • December 1983 • No. 12
