Books for Christmas
saw the beginning of the political rehabilitation of Ariel Sharon, who, banished to the hinterlands of ministerial responsibility after being found to bear some indirect responsibility for...
...Give them to a favorite friend as a matched set...
...The Spirit o f Enterprise, by George Gilder (Simon and Schuster, $17.95...
...the author's politics may be distasteful, but they are submerged in this delicious novel that is irresistible for political junkies...
...Likewise for Churchill (The Last Lion, 1983) in the depths of World War II, as William Manchester proves most brilliantly...
...Robert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist and publisher of the EvansNovak Political Report...
...The book shows what one man with drive and curiosity can do...
...Charles Murray's jackhammer pounding of the foundations of the liberal welfare state, Losing Ground (Basic Books, $23.95...
...We will.now d i s c u s s . . , the struggle for existence...
...Finally, from an American point of view, the elections demonstrated both the vitality and the fragility of Israel's democratic system...
...Martin's Press, $I4.95), a broad ranging book filled with his characteristic learning, offeri n g a hopeful pofitical and social strategy to realize the American dream in this generation...
...her narrative is "pauperism" in early industrial England...
...A little-known work on how Western intellectuals from George Bernard Shaw to William Sloane Coffin, Jr...
...by William Satire (1978...
...Discussions of industrial policy, "mixed economies," and protectionism indicate that we have not heeded Hayek's warning: There is no middleground between competition and planning...
...It reveals how faulty and misleading "science" has created a cancer epidemic scare and fostered greater government- control over consumers and the workplace...
...In a work of intellectual and social history for which "masterpiece" is an insufficient description, Professor Himmelfarb recounts why the plight of the poor came to be a major concern in England during the first decades of the industrial era, what the most influential minds of the day thought could be done about it, and how government and private charity evolved in response...
...Carr, The Romantic Exiles (1933...
...Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner (to be published in the U.S...
...The catalogue of memorable miscalculations surely includes Bloomsbury's grave misgivings about Maynard Keynes's marriage to a Russian ballerina...
...I' Edwin J. Feu~ner, Jr...
...lambs) to views on military security...
...WILLIAM M. H. HAMMETT Diaghilev, by Richard Buckle (Atheneum, $13.95...
...Charles Murray's new book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 (Basic Books, $23.95) is also very important...
...He absorbed life, and we are the beneficiaries of his amazing absorption...
...How do we measure "success" in assessing a transfer...
...saw the beginning of the political rehabilitation of Ariel Sharon, who, banished to the hinterlands of ministerial responsibility after being found to bear some indirect responsibility for the massacres at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, now holds the influential Industry and Trade portfolio in the Cabinet and is a rising force in the Likud...
...WICK ALLISON The Times Are Never So Bad, by Andrd Dubus (1983), contains the most powerful short story I've ever read...
...Naipaul...
...Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley...
...Charles Moore is editor of the (London) Spectator...
...Well, really, anything by Chandler...
...ed., 1983) by Jude Wanniski...
...Chronicles of Wasted Time, by Malcolm Muggeridge (1973...
...I might say that in this category again, Gulliver's Travels would have to be one of the great classics of all time...
...Jean Francois Revel, a French socialist, has just published How Democracies Perish (Doubleday, $16.95) in translation...
...How could Hamlet be such a magnificent human being, yet so flawed in judging people--not just Claudius, but particularly himself...
...He proved a king most royal, who deserved a longer life and better times, but remains at the core both wondrous and mysterious, as Robert Bain heroically portrays...
...Modern Times, by Paul Johnson (1983...
...George Glider's new book, The Spirit o f Enterprise (Simon and Schuster, $17.95), restores the forgotten yet all-important role of the individual entrepreneur to the center of technological progress and economic growth...
...Metaphysical play disguised as narrative...
...Jedediah Morse and New England Congregationalism (1983), by Joseph W. Phillips (no relation): A retrospective on the impact of religion in American politics during the late 1700s and the early 1800s',-including assorted tidbits about the Unitarian takeover of Harvard in 1803 and conspiracy as a political issue in the early days of the Republic...
...He is chairman of the U.S...
...The Abolition of Man (1943)--C.S...
...His Pushkin was a gem, and his Catherine the Great a charmer...
...Spock...
...DICK WAGNER A t Dawn We Slept (1981), Gordon W. P r a n g e . . . the detailed and compelling story of day-by-day movements of the enemy and American military leading to December 7, 1941 and the aftermath...
...Because Lewis Carroll is so charming and provocative...
...Still, they ought to learn something or what's the point...
...He further argues that Jews, humanists, liberals, pluralists, and small " d " democrats all can benefit if the role of religiously based values is accepted and strengthened in our public life...
...for a reminder that a novel can portray passion without pornography, George Eliot's Middlemarch...
...Charles XII (1895...
...Let me suggest the following: Frederick Forsyth, The Fourth Protocol (Viking Press, $17.95...
...A lot of people would like to know how in the world I know as much economics as I do...
...R. James Woolsey practices law in Washington...
...Alice in Wonderland...
...Klehr's The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (Basic Books, $26.50...
...It's a myth debunker...
...Today poetry has almost become as extinct as seeing a dinosaur on the expressway...
...Of these books, I would recommend Elizabeth Drew's to every American who cares about the integrity of our national government...
...Neuhaus reasons persuasively that by denying religion a significant place in public discourse we eventually deny politics and government their moral legitimacy, as that is understood by most of our people...
...Hook's tentative title is Out o f Step: A Life in the Twentieth Century...
...Diaghilev was the catalyst and creative force and this is his definitive biography...
...Taylor says, "The most fascinating book on World War II . . . . " The dawn ofmodern scientific warfare by its principal architect--a gentle physicist given to hoaxes with, thank god, an instinct for the Nazi jugular...
...Gary Hart represents Colorado in the United States Senate...
...And finally my favorite book for all seasons: Witness, by Whittaker Chambers...
...Nor will the assorted mankind-saviors clustered in such leftist scams as i'he Institute for Policy Studies and the National Council of Churches...
...So, I declare The "Liberal Crack-Up haut concours, and hope the sainted editor will understand...
...War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy...
...The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future life...
...Modesty prohibits him from including his book Conservatives Stalk the House among his recommendations...
...Kendall and Carey cogently set forth the uniquely American political theory bequeathed us by the Founding Fathers...
...Essence of Hayek includes reprints of many of Hayek's best essays: "Inflation, the Misdirection of Labour and Unemployment," "The Use of Knowledge in Society," "Competition as a Discovery Procedure," "Why I am Not a Conservative," and much, much more...
...you end up reading entire paragraphs aloud to savor the similes...
...When the Kissing Had to Stop, by Constantine Fitzgibbon...
...Burnell, new edition edited by William Crooke (1978...
...Don't read this around strangers--your continuing helpless laughter will draw stares...
...But no journalist could not love Evelyn Waugh's Scoop and Michael Frayn's Towards the End of the Morning, All these books make me proud to be English...
...The biggest surprise to me was not the near poetry of the writing but the fact I was whipping through the pages as if it were an airport thriller...
...But, my own favorites are: A Mixture of Frailties and Rebel Angels...
...and Representative Newt Gingrich's explanation.of how the Republican Platform would have read if he had writt e n all of it instead of only most of it, Window of Opportunity (St...
...by Pantheon in 1985), is a novel set in Switzerland (my favorite country) and written by a lady who does not sound like one of today's female writers...
...Essential reading for the college student confronted With trendy leftist professors who specialize in debunking traditional Christian beliefs...
...The labor camps have won high reputations throughout the Soviet Union as places where tens of thousands of men have been reclaimed"--Anna Louise Strong, American writer, 1936...
...Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea...
...With wit and logic, he tells us in narrative form what the pollsters have been telling us in dry statistics, to wit: The liberals have had it...
...The West Bank and the fate of the Palestinians living under Israeli administration is a torturously complicated issue, combining the moral dilemma of the Arab role in a Jewish state with the strategic reality of Israel's vulnerability...
...so much to enjoy, so little time to dip into the pile...
...For the beauty of the prose and the strength of his "weak" characters...
...As for novels, I cannot decide between Emma by Jane Austen, The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope, and Tom Jones by Henry Fielding...
...From a young liberal skeptic to a committed religious believer, Muggeridge takes us on an autobiographical odyssey from colonial India to Stalinist Russia, from editorship of Punch to his days with the BBC, giving us his uniquely personal observation of major events and personalities in the twentieth century...
...It has changed the worldview of many people--including me, when I first read it thirty years ago...
...Hayek's Road to Serfdom...
...For the difficulty of negotiating arms reductions with the Soviets, I suggest two other books, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban, by Glenn Seaborg (1981) and Doubletalk: The Story of Salt I (1981) by Gerald Smith, the chief American negotiator...
...Herzen and his circle of exiles from Czarist Russia in Switzerland-their love affairs, intrigues, and the beginning schisms within the modern left between violence and reform...
...Jack Kemp is U.S...
...Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known...
...R.Q...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984...
...The Federalist Papers...
...Fields of Fire, by James Webb (1979...
...I believe that one of Dickens's works can teach us more about life than all of the theories and studies in the world...
...As a libertarian/conservative, I am bothered that it seems okay for us to be intolerant, even bigoted, on this subject...
...It needs American financial backing to help set its economy back on course and to help keep pace with a rapid, mainly Russian-provided arms build-up in the Arab world, and it needs the world's greatest democracy standing firm with one of the world's smallest and most troubled democracies...
...This unfinished novel presents an example of Flaubert's passionate feelings against the middle class...
...The Experts Speak, by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky (Pantheon, $19.95...
...Two old favorites: Whittaker Chambers's Witness--A surprising number of relatively youthful conservatives have never gotten around to reading this absorbing and superbly written 1952 account of one of the twentieth century's most significant lives...
...Brilliantly elucidated by America's finest political philosopher...
...Readers of Commentary and Encounterare waiting for Sidney Hook's memoirs, which have been excerpted in several recent articles in those magazines...
...Erika Holzer is a lawyer turned novelist whose human rights espionage novel Double Crossing (Putnam) will appear in paperback (TOR Books) in April...
...Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, by Allen Weinstein (1978...
...Joseph A. Califano, Jr...
...After seven years out of power, Labor under Peres now has the opportunity to regain the trust (and votes) of many Israelis who distrusted Labor's drift to the left when it was aligned with Mapam...
...LF#LIE LENKOWSKY Perhaps it's because of daily doses of the Washington Post, but a year in the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 27 nation's capital has led me to become preoccupied with misery and political radicalism...
...Le Carr~ in a cowl...
...A Life with the Printed Word (1982)--John Chamberlain has written, with his characteristic gentleness and modesty, a wide-ranging literary autobiography which is a fascinating guide to the principal intellectual currents of our century...
...Two very different books that I enjoyed inordinately: (1) Lincoln by Gore Vidal (Random House, $19.95...
...Sowell's lively, precise, and fact-filled treatise will enable you to shut them up or at least dispatch them whimpering in shame...
...Probably because sh6's never heard of Women's Lib...
...His best collection of stories...
...I have never read a more profound work, nor a more eloquent warning against the dangers of government intervention...
...EDWIN J. FEULNER, JR...
...Get a leg up with this excellent Central America primer...
...Whether it's Little Dorrit in Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop, Or Agnes pointing upwards for her students in David Copperfield, or the best of times and the worst of times in A Tale of Two Cities, I feel Dickens was perhaps one of the most humane writers of his time...
...He is a former fmdersecretary of the Navy, was a member of the Scowcroft Commission, and is currently delegate-at-large to the START talks...
...Although he is misinformed about nuclear power plants by the sea (he thinks they can explode), the author's perambulations around the edge of Great Britain and his observations of British idiosyncrasies make great reading...
...Tom Sharpe, Porterhouse Blue (1974...
...For inspiration, read federal judge Herbert J. Stern's Judgment in Berlin (Universe Books, $15.95), a fiction-like true story of the author's heroic stand against the State Department and the Soviets in defense of the American Constitution...
...Chesterton...
...The author, a Yale scholar, traces society's attitudes about homosexuality from the beginning of the Christian era to the fourteenth century and shows that present prejudices took root "about the time of the Crusades...
...GARY HART Ironweed, by William Kennedy (1983...
...A must for political junkies...
...And having patched over old differences, Labor's Big Three--Peres, Defense Minister Rabin, and Deputy Prime Minister Navon--are moving the party into a new era of shared rule...
...Moving, dramatic autobiography of one of t h e great artists of the century...
...A meditation on heresy, disguised as a mystery novel, if you like _9 your theology, semiotics, and medieval history delivered cunning and sharp, invest a weekend in this one...
...for wonderful airport reading, Jack Finney's Time and Again (1978...
...That is, she writes with elegance and humor where women--average elegant and feminine women--are concerned...
...Although on some points Neuhaus is a firm critic of the Christian New Right, he is gratified that they have joined the public debate...
...R.V...
...Stevenson has long been called the children's poet and writer...
...A Father's Story" ripples along until-wham--Dubus plants a fist in your stomach...
...My congressional colleague, Newt Gingrich, has just offered Window o f Opportunity...
...Now it's Miller time...
...The best novel onVietnam, told from the vantage point of the young American soldier...
...Newspaper Days, by H.L...
...I have to say I found the three volumes of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago an unforgettable experience...
...Fawn Brodie packs in all this and makes it so enthralling...
...THEODORE M. HESBURGH During the past couple of years, I have become intrigued by the large number of books that have emerged regarding the nuclear dilemma facing mankind...
...Michael Voslensky's Nomenklatura (Doubleday, $19.95)--in which a Russian expatriate identifies and knowledgeably describes the new class that, although shrewdly denying its own existence, rules the USSR with an iron hand, exploiting the enslaved population while enjoying the best of everything: special food stores, special holiday resorts, special schools for its children, special hospitals for its sick, even special cemeteries for its dead...
...This is a Baedeker to those folks who, in the name of God, Justice, the Environment, and various other causes, would social engineer us into a radically different America...
...KENNETH L. ADELMAN The Devil Drives (1967...
...What a wonderful way to spend the Christmas holidays...
...You've endured a year of Ron~ild Reagan, Norman Lear, Jerry Falwell, and a pride of bishops expounding democratic theory...
...A masterpiece...
...Sharon, together with Finance Minister Moda'i and Deputy Prime Minister Levy, will shape the Likud of the future...
...Mencken, or any other of the master's works, to perceive the difference between the real thing and the labored imitations that often appear in The American Spectator...
...In doing this he meant to show them incapable of ever overcoming their plight...
...My own solution is to create loose categories so that, depending on the mood, I know what to reach for--very handy...
...Israel needs America standing by its side in order to fend off the unremitting hostility of the Arab nations, much of the Third World, the Soviet Union, and their vapid clones at the United Nations...
...For spine-tingling suspense on Christmas Eve (when you can afford to stay glued to the page all night and sleep late in the morning), I recommend Mary Higgins Clark's new Washingt0n-based psychological thriller Stillwatch (Simon and Schuster, $M.95), which zeros in on a woman vice presidential candidate who is not what she seems...
...Charles Krauthammer is senior editor of the Nay, Republic, contributing essayist to Time magazine, and recipient of the 1984 National Magazine A ward for Essays and Criticism...
...This is an expos~ about cancer...
...Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy of the U.S...
...Elizabeth Drew, Politics and Money: The New Road to Corruption (Macmillan, $4.95 paper...
...What is the justification for transfers...
...The Fatal Gift, by Alec Waugh (1973...
...His novel A Bend in the River (1979) is arguably the best thing ever written about development and underdevelopment, and should be required reading for every employee of the Agency for International Development...
...Rather than envy me or chalk it up to genius, read Exchange and Production, clearly the best all around textbook, written by two of my mentors at UCLA...
...An important work that examines the whole range of programs intended to help the poor initiated by the Great Society, and finds that they were not only inefficient but unjust--in requiring transfers from one group of poor to another...
...Also, provides much reason to be thankful during this holiday season that most of us were not born in the People's Paradise...
...If you listen carefully as you read, you will be able to hear the laughter of the angels...
...For lighthearted pleasure and an irresistible feeling of utter benevolence, it's a toss-up between two animal literature classics--I simply couldn't pick one over the other...
...Fact: Overall age-adjusted cancer rate has remained stable or decreased slightly over the last forty years...
...I had, after all, received a pre-publication copy, and had enjoyed the book tremendously...
...For those confused by PBS's fictional account of this case, this is the antidote...
...Curtis Bill Pepper, We the Victors (Doubleday, $17.95...
...The second, Ben Wattenberg's The Good News is the Bad News is Wrong (Simon and Schuster, $17.95), is Wattenberg's analysis of the statistical data which emerge from the 1980 census...
...Lewis put his finger squarely on the modern philosophic assumptions which would deny us the dignity and integrity o f human persOnality...
...PETER D. HANNAFORD The Liberal Crack-Up, by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Flip any page in this book and find a detail like: Social worker advises lady to quit work because she'd net more on welfare...
...You don't have to be a cat lover (before you read GaUico's book, that is) to laugh out loud over this first-person "Manual for Kittens, Strays, and Homeless Cats" by the world's most brazenly precocious feline, whose advice includes how to take over a family, buttering up the man of the house, and protecting a whole rang e of feline property rights...
...Salvation and Godly Rule, by R.J...
...Reading it was like hearing the Kennedys, something I've managed to do, alas, whenever I was at Xenon and other places of ill repute where the young Kennedys hang out...
...Forty years after its publication, we are still facing the questions that Professor Hayek raised...
...A peaceful, sensitive, kind man--"a sweet, lovely rose"--who spent his entire reign somehow in the saddle waging bloody war...
...Our Shakespeare of 1930s Los Angeles is the single best underrated writer this country has produced...
...The sentences crackle...
...Surprise, surprise, the novel's heroine makes the right decisi, on at the end...
...THOMAS W. PAUKEN Orthodoxy, by G.K...
...The Coercive Utopians, by Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac (Regnery Gateway, $18.95...
...Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., is president of the University of Notre Dame...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell's delicious chronicle of the rise and pratfall of the new left, The Liberal CrackUp (Simon and Schuster, $16.95...
...For the antiquarian in each of us) Sir Gavin de Beer's Alps and Elephants (1955)--A marvelously learned and lighthearted response, by the late director of the British Museum, to a notoriously difficult trivia question: Precisely which pass over the Alps did Hannibal and his lumbering pachyderms take before descending upon the astonished Romans in the valley of the Po in 218 B.C...
...One saw Churchill's flaws in the first five minutes, and then spent a lifetime learning his virtues...
...MARVA N. COLLINS Bouvard and Pdcuchet, by Gustave Flaubert...
...for their political education, Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims ( 1981 ~. Diane Ravitch is the author of several books, most recently The Troubled Crusade: American Education 1945-1980 (Basic Books), and the forthcoming collection of essays, The Schools We Deserve...
...A man can be destroyed but not defeated...
...There are, of course, dozens of other good books on this same subject, but these would be basic to understanding the true dimension of the problem and some solutions that are possible...
...To make some sense of the stranger flights of public discourse in recent years, especially on issues like Central America and nuclear weapons, one could do worse than ponder Professor Klehr's tale about the vulnerability of an open society to crypto-revolutionaries...
...Whether you call it enterprise or capitalism or supply-side economics, it works...
...For Labor, 1984 saw the break-up of its historic partnership with the leftwing Mapam party...
...A gtudy of echoes...
...Following.are some of the best, but this list is hardly all-inclusive...
...My Christmas categories are motivated in part by the holiday spirit, in part by that end-of-the-year mood of sobered reflection one tends to slip into...
...Son of the Middle Border: Hamlin Garland...
...The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler...
...Beatrice and Sidney Webb believed in ideas while their opponents believed in politics...
...His description of pioneer life during the heroic years, as he calls them, following the Civil War when the prairie was settled and brought into cultivation has the feel and smell of authenticity: Garland was a part of it...
...For the matchless literary style, his understandingof the human condition, and his treatment of the struggle between loyalty and love...
...Children have been fortunate that one of the gifted writers of the last century lent his talents to their pleasure...
...Clare Boothe Luce is a playwright, a former congresswoman, and former United States Ambassador to Italy...
...Lynn's skillful, elegant exposure of the fatuousness of some highly acclaimed liberal academics and writers is a contribution to clear thinking, and can be read with pleasure...
...The Memoirs o f a Superfluous Man (1969)--Albert Jay Nock wrote an autobiography as a bemused observer in a world of which he largely disapproved--a true curmudgeon...
...Victor Lasky is an author...
...Readers in search of escape from contemporary contentions can try Mario Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.95), a vivid if pessimistic tale of a nineteenth-century millennialist uprising in Brazil...
...The most celebrated of his works is "The Deptford Trilogy" (Fifth Business, The Manticore, and Worm of Wonders...
...They recommend books and sell them...
...Silence, by Shusako Endo (1979), is a Japanese ~atholic's recounting of the agonies of the first missionaries...
...Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition, by Willmoore Kendall and George Carey (1970...
...Soon to be published (by Basic Books...
...This story shows that many people with great minds are trapped by circumstance...
...The Cahil...
...The Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich, written before the author lapsed into quackery and psychosis, to recognize the pathology inherent in some of our own society's mass institutions...
...Charles Wohlstetter is chairman of the board of CONTEL...
...Absolutely the best present you could give a true reader is a gift certificate and the Cahills' taste...
...they show thatresources are becoming more plentiful and the world is becoming less crowded as more landbecomes habitable and arable...
...Hammett is president of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research...
...Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, by John Boswell (1980...
...Space travel is utter bilge"-Dr...
...Czarist Russia provided the dancers and the rest of the world provided the audiences for one of the most extraordinary artistic accomplishments of the twentieth century--the Russian Ballet...
...Are you tired of congressional and judiciary lies about how the Constitution justifies one federal law after another...
...The first, the now famous Collier and Horowitz book, The Kennedys (Summit Books, $20.95), is for one thing a very good read...
...Rich~ird John Neuhaus not only wants to put Christ back in Christmas, he wants to put Christianity back into what he calls .The Naked Public Square (Eerdmans, $16.95...
...HOWARD PHILLIPS Here are five books which I have read recently and from which I have profited much: Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom 1822-1832: The second book in a trilogy by Robert V. Remini (1981): The authoritative history of a courageous, antiestablishment President...
...If I could recommend only one book for everyone, it would be F.A...
...With all the diffidence appropriate to the situation, and without imposing any particular order, I'd suggest they read (or reread): Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, to acquire an appreciation of tilting at windmills as an exercise that is not only necessary but do,~'nright enjoyable...
...Julian Simon and the late Herman Kahn's The Resourceful Earth (Basil Blackwell, $19.95) is a magnificent answer to the "small is beautiful" syndrome...
...by the time he had reached young manhood and set off for Boston and a writing career, the family had reached South Dakota and had settled on six different farms...
...This is a historical book intended primarily for young readers...
...Peter D. Hanna ford is boardchairman of a public relations/public affairs firm and author of The Reagans: A Political Portrait (Coward-McCann...
...Although it was unfinished at his death, Flaubert's notes show he planned to make the two men move in a full circle, eventually returning to the same point at which the novel begins...
...District Court for the American sector of West Berlin...
...For young readers this is a rare story of courage, determination, and loyalty...
...Kingdoms of the Blind, by Harold W. Rood, published in 1980 by the Carolina Academic Press: A compelling historical critique of arms control and its folly...
...With a few deft strokes, the author evokes a whole world of aching frustration...
...Undergroundto Palestine, by I.F...
...Captures the situation as much today as when it was written...
...Armen Alchian and William Allen, Exchange and Production (Wadsworth Publishing, 1983...
...Stone (the 1976 reissue containing the author's thirty-years-later afterword), to gain some valuable insights into the perennial crisis in the Middle East...
...He explains why our social programs have actually exacerbated our social problems...
...Revel strongly supports democratic freedom, and his book is concerned to correct the weaknesses democracies are sometimes prone to...
...Indeed, the novel becomes almost a caricature of the way in which a great mass of people lived in his time...
...But those who take this harrowing trip will find it difficult to readjust to a world in which the problems of Latin America are all laid at the feet of Yankee imperialism or the IMF...
...Georg e C. Roche III is president of Hillsdale College and the" Shavano Institute...
...The Coercive Utopians, by Raei Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac (Regner~, Gateway, $18.95...
...While fiction, it is scientifically authentic...
...The book clearly demonstrates the philosophy that we should be careful what we wish for...
...Edith Efron, The Apocalyptics: Cancer and the Big Lie (Simon and Schuster, $19.95...
...Henry Regnery is president of Regnery Gateway, Inc...
...Two recent books illuminate American politics...
...TAKI Not exactly having distinguished myself last August in London's Heathrow airport, my first reaction upon being asked by the editor of TAS to name the best books I read this year was to mention The Liberal Crack-Up (Simon and Schuster, $16.95...
...The Complete Works of Charles Dickens...
...R. JAMES WOOLSEY E.H...
...Before I have no child left to read to, won't someone publish an affordable library of the great and neargreat traditional children's classics...
...In a lighter vein, I have enjoyed the Russian biographies by Troyat...
...Hook often writes with a novelist's gift for narrative and character, and his book promises to tie the decisive antidote to rose-colored recollections of the American Communist subculture by the likes of Liilian Hellman, Vivian G"ornick, Jessica Mitford, and .Warren Beatty...
...In any event, it left me with a feeling that the world was cheated that Lord Randolph was not also the father of, say, Dr...
...facts in Ben Wattenberg's The Good News is the Bad News is Wrong (Simon and Schuster, $17.95) is like a jar of colorful and wonderfully palpable marbles on the coffee table: something cheerful you can actually take hold of when overcome by too much intellectual woe and evasion...
...The American Diamond (1965), Branch R i c k e y . . . a baseball book of quality by the wise and beloved Branch Rickey...
...Although the new government is for the moment intact, there is some worried speculation in Jerusalem about U.S...
...Davies, a first-rate storyteller, is a most learned, yet wonderfully funny and tender observer of human foibles and follies...
...The cultural and political dimensions of social thought are compellingly demonstrated, and one hopes that her colleagues in the history profession will follow her method...
...The .battle of Gettysburg reconstructed at the personal level from the memoirs and letters of a few superbly chosen participants...
...Garland was not a great writer but an honest one...
...Five titles which come immediately to mind--some new, mostly old: Witness--Whittaker Chambers gives us a compelling analysis of our times, from his unique perspective as " . . . an involuntary witness to God's grace and to the fortifying power of faith...
...Stein and Day, $15.95) is a thoughtful critique of the doom-and-gloom school of educators by an iconoclastic teacher who understands that the prospects for material and spiritual growt h are becoming brighter and suggests that education should be better balanced by presenting the optimistic view of the future as well as the gloomy view...
...Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby...
...Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (1974...
...Spare, subtle, and deeply moving...
...The Black Arrow, by Robert Louis Stevenson...
...Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin (1983), is a fantastic tale that transports readers to a Manhattan of the imagination...
...Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh...
...Jesus Rediscovered (1969)-Ma'lcolm Muggeridge provides a unique and moving spiritual message...
...The notion that a relatively small, socially marginal band of radicals, operating in league with a foreign power, could wield much influence in American society and politics is about as believable to most adults as--well, Santa Claus...
...101 Famous Poems, an anthology compiled by Roy J. Cook (1981...
...Isaiah Ben-Sasan, Japanese and the Jews (1981...
...ELLIOTT ABRAMS For those seeking to understand the Third World, and who also enjoy marvelous writing, turn immediately to V.S...
...In composing the brief list that follows, I've tried to avoid the preachy and didactic...
...The Kingdom by the Sea, by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin, $16.95...
...Sorry that I can't recommend anything to read in the art field, but very little in the art field is readable...
...This is because I like nothing from the twentieth century so well...
...William A. Rusher is publisher of National Review, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author, most recently, of The Rise of the Right (William Morrow...
...Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, until recently director of the Voice of America, is now managing editor of Reader's Digest...
...Miss Himmelfarb's dramatis personae include Dickens, Thackeray, Mill, Disraeli, Marx, Tocqueville, Burke, and Malthus...
...Jones, The Wizard War (1978...
...Words and phrases that make up the language of American politics...
...or Department of Agriculture has one employee for every 34 farmers and occupies 16,000 buildings across the country...
...A forced change in the unity government's carefully charted agreement on the West Bank and Jordan could quickly bring the government down...
...The novel takes place in that old standby of English ironists, the hotel of disappointed gentility...
...Children...
...Darwin: The Origin of the Species...
...How the .original revolutionary tract, the Biblical Exodus, has influenced the subsequent history of the revolutionary idea...
...Believe me, after Seeing or reading it annually and teaching it for several years, I find there is a new nugget each time you experience the work...
...The historical background of the plot deals with a minor battle of the War of the Roses and the appearance of the infamous Richard, Duke of Gloucester, as a young soldier...
...BRUCE CHAPMAN New books, strategically designed to help the right side achieve superiority in the intellectual arms race: George Gilder's prophetic witness to what entrepreneurship is doing to assure America's future, The Spirit of Enterprise (Simon and Schuster, $17.95...
...These five ought to suffice, at least for the month of January...
...Something's wrong with America and you don't know why...
...Clear your mind with Berlin's classic on liberalism and liberty...
...for their historical understanding, Tocqueviile's Democracy in America...
...Fact: Nature is a greater cancer threat than man...
...is senior partner in the Washington office of Dewey, Ballantine, Bushby, Palmer, and Wood...
...My final two suggestions have probably already been mentioned in this issue, but I would like to add my recommendation: Tyranny of the Status Quo by Milton and Rose Friedman (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $10.95) and The Spirit of Enterprise by George Gilder (Simon and Schuster, $17.95...
...There is a subtler message here: Even though there were a lot of Democrats running around loose, these past twenty years of American 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 life have not been all that bad...
...With this in mind, it is best that Israel be allowed the freedom to choose its own course...
...John Gavin is the United States Ambassador to Mexico...
...The book reads swiftly and shows what a first-class poet, as well as how conservative in his politics, Eliot was...
...I thoroughly enjoy reading over and over again such selections as: "The Builders" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "House by the Side of the Road" by Sam Walter Foss, "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer, Kipling's " I f , " and so many, many other treasures that have become a missing part of contemporary life...
...The translation in the Penguin Edition seems somewhat flat and uninspired, but the notes and introduction are excellent...
...Absolutely indispensable to an understanding of the appeal, and the menace, of Communism, and of Chambers's heroic one-man battle against it...
...Volume VI of his definitive biography, it covers with loving attention those heroic years that insure Churchill's place in history...
...Rushdoony (Ross House Books, Vallecito, California, 1983): The intellectual progenitor of the Religious Right dispenses additional insights concerning the sovereignty of God and the applicability of Biblical law...
...For this holiday season, her chapter on Charles Dickens is especially good to read...
...what this great America is all about...
...Lydia Lopokova, edited by Milo Keynes (1983...
...Miss Lopokova, later Lady Keynes, fooled them all and this collection of essays reveals a remarkable woman as well as a fresh perspective on her husband...
...Honest, RET did not put me up to this...
...Wick Allison is editor in chief and publisher of Art & Antiques...
...Catalogue, by Tom and Susan Cahill (Cahill & Co., Dobbs Ferry, New York...
...Ackroyd has an extraordinary power of entering into the mind of his subject...
...This under-recognized account of genocide in Cambodia was the real scoop of the 1970s and remains one of the most significant books of our time...
...The Kennedys, by Peter Collier and David Horowi~tz (Summit Books, $20.95...
...TheGreek Upheaval (1978), by the greatest Greek writer since Homer...
...For the classic narrative of a gigantic personality...
...Written in 1509 in the full flood of creativity and confidence of the Renaissance, and only a few years before the storm of the Reformation broke over Europe, Erasmus's wonderfully witty and telling satire of human vanity and pretentiousness has much to say to us...
...He offers no easy answers...
...Actually, I love The Voyage of the Beagle...
...Davies is an author who ought to be much better known to his U.S...
...If you are a member of a "mainline" Protestant denomination, you may wonder after you read this where your Sunday offering is going...
...Earlier biographies (Morgan, Gilbert) furnish endless enrichment of those virtues...
...It is set in the fifteenth century...
...Taki's most recent book is Princes, Playboys & High-Class Tarts (Karz-Cohl...
...As A.J.P...
...Erwin Knoll is editor of the Progressive and author of the just published No Comment ( Vintage/Random House...
...PENN KEMBLE The collection of...
...Dick Wagner is a consultant to Major League Sports teams...
...An insider's account of one of the most successful "reform" movements of modern times--Britain's Fabian Society...
...In Praise o f Folly: Erasmus of Rotterdam...
...It is beautifully written, and it tells us about an .area of the world that tends to get lost behind our Eurocentrism and our newfound interest in the Arab world...
...I discovered Dubus and Endo through their quarterly catalogue, as well as some Chandlers I hadn't read...
...neighbors...
...There is nothing here from the twentieth century, I am afraid...
...Regnery...
...Alas, on economics, the authors stick it only to conservatives and Republicans...
...ERIKA HOLZER The private reading lists of busy people have a way of becoming unmanageable...
...DIANE RAVITCH If I were preparing a literary Christmas present for friends who had been educated in typical American public schools at some time during the past twenty years, these are the five books I would include: for sheer delight, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice...
...Then read (or reread) the words of the Framers who clearly defined the role of the fed...
...I reread this book to find out what kind of race of people made the rise of Andreas Papandreou possible...
...For the music, the magic, and the laughter...
...Information Agency, and he serves on the boards of numerous other foundations and research institutes...
...An antiCommunist novel, almost a classic, one that should be reprinted by Conservative Book Club...
...We learn a great deal from these two books about the fundamental health and progress of American society, while simultaneously that society is being attacked by an elite which too often does not share in or admire its virtues...
...It's enough to make you mad...
...It is a lucid interpretation of his writings o n economic and political thought, and his effect on the debates of economics and political science...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 JOSEPH A. CALIFANO, JR...
...Representative.from the 31st District, Buffalo, New York...
...you'll conclude today's Congress, courts, and executive are a band of outlaws who thrive on public envy...
...there is no point in offending TAS readers' tender sensibilities...
...or in six months federal agencies published 102,000 different brochures...
...But even Taki was unable to explain how this cretin manages to tweak Uncle Sam's nose continuously and still benefit from it...
...Like all contemporary books, those o n my recommended list presuppose the core books of Western civilization, from Aristotle and the Bible down to von Mises in our own time...
...Considering the calumny and misrepresentation heaped upon supply-side economics, a desirable Christmas pursuit would be a return to the source to find out what it's really about: How the World Works (rev...
...The man is an artist and his artistry is i n his punch--and the spiritual force behind it...
...You don't have to know small French poodles to lose your heart to an unforgettable member of the species as she plays havoc with the lives of author Susann and her husband...
...I would describe its purpose as straightening out a number of representative liberal professors and writers--Garry Wills, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Frederick Lewis Allen, Bernard Bailyn, Leo Marx, among others--and critically examining some equally representative liberal positions...
...A sparkling comparative essay on two chosen peoples--covering everything from sacrifice (rice vs...
...Its miscellany provides the funniest and best picture 1 know of the way two utterly different cultures can mix...
...Penn Kemble is a vice-chairman of Social Democrats, USA, and a founder of the Institute on Religion and Democracy...
...pressure on Israel to make concessions in the West Bank following the American election...
...For all their length and intensity, they were filled with drama, wit, emotion, and a profoundly moving lesson about our world...
...KENNETH Y. TOMLINSON Galina: A Russian Story, by Galina Vishnevskaya (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $19.95...
...The classic parody of a London newspaper's (read the media's) attempt to cover events abroad...
...Garland begins the story of his life with his earliest recollection, of his gaunt, weary father, wearing the blue overcoat of the Union Army, his musket on his back, walking up the lonely road to their Wisconsin farm house...
...Centennial (1974), James A. Michener...
...Old books: the well-written and wise children's classics that one works ever harder to find, and nine times out of ten show up only in second-hand book stores...
...Hamlet...
...William M.H...
...It is the work of a scholar who knows where he 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 stands, writes in great style, and sees things as they are...
...Richard J. McCormick, S.J., Readings in Moral Theology Number 4: The Use...
...Gore Vidal shares this astonishment and shows gloriously that in the depths of the Civil War, all we had was his will...
...Thomas W. Pauken is director of ACTION...
...The Human Factor, by Graham Greene (1978...
...Except Art & Antiques, but it's not a book (even though it's prettier and comes ten times a year and only costs $36...
...they also exemplify how the piety of the Church of England is superior to that of Roman Catholicism...
...Pieces of Eight, by Edwin Vieira, Jr., published by Devin-Adair, 1983: Well makes thecase for constitutional, honest money...
...My plan was to name only The Liberal Crack-Up, and declare that anything following it was bound to be such a terrible anticlimax that I had refrained from reading anything for the rest of the year...
...WALTER E. WILLIAMS Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality (William Morrow, $11.95...
...But only books they like...
...Hiss is demonstrated to be the psychopathic liar, not Chambers...
...VICTOR LASKY Pofit&al Pilgrims, by Paul Hollander (1981...
...In his own words: "The most troubling aspect of social policy toward the poor in late twentieth-century America is not how much it costs, but what it has bought...
...Eliot, by Peter Ackroyd (Simon and Schuster, $24.95), was a real treat to read...
...I look forward to taking up his latest book, Ivan the Terrible (Dutton, $18.95), to find out once and for all whether Ivan was a closet lil~eral as sometimes alleged...
...Murray, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and an expert on welfare and social programs, has drawn on a vast body of social science data and written a book that even I can understand...
...Ackroyd does not judge Eliot's behavior, only his poetry, as a good biographer should...
...Marva N. Collins is director of the Westside Preparatory School in Chicago...
...Butler's book, on the other hand, is more than a collection of Hayek's essays...
...Cervantes: Don Quixote...
...This seemingly awkward bumbler astonished us all...
...Conservatives have grasped this book eagerly, but-Beware...
...Martin's Press, $14.95...
...Patton: Ordeal and Triumph (1964), Ladislas Farago . . . stimulating description of the Army's heUbent field genius of World War II...
...The third volume even ended the saga on a note of hope, telling the story of resistance and rebellion in the camps and the stirrings of same in Soviet society at large...
...How a virtually headless army of the Potomac could defeat one of history's greatest generals...
...And perhaps one lesson of democracy is that the few free nations of the world should be allowed a freedom of choice without external pressure, especially in matters central to their security...
...Muddleminded.liberals love to profess their concern for the "victims" of capitalism...
...Because it is the most brilliantly constructed series of short stories I have ever read and becafise, while the characters in each of the stories are different, they progress from the simplest emotion experienced by a child, his first view of death--the local parish priest--to the most complex of all human emotions in the final story...
...Stuff a friend's stocking either with Paul Gallico's outrageously funny The Silent Miaow (1964--and still in print !) or, if you can find it, Jacqueline Susann's witty and wise Every Night, Josephine...
...The authors come up with hundreds of wrong--and hilarious-assertions by "experts" ( " I f God had wanted a Panama Canal, he would have put one here"--King Philip II of Spain...
...JACK KEMP This past year has seen a river of optimistic, pro-growth, and prodemocracy books...
...Get this wonderful little howdidit from a good library...
...Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges (1962...
...The Diary of Beatrice Webb: Volume Two, 1892-1905, edited by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie (Harvard University Press, $25.00...
...My favorite reference book is Hobson Jobson: A Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases and of Kindred Terms, by Henry Yule and A.C...
...Leslie Lenkowsky is former Deputy Director of the United States Information Agency and a writer living in Washington, D. C. CLARE BOOTHE LUCE I enthusiastically recommend any or, better, all of the following five novels by the celebrated Canadian novelist, Robertson Davies...
...PETER W. RODMAN As one who helped with research for the two volumes of Kissinger memoirs (which I will shamelessly commend to all connoisseurs of contemporary history), I seem to have an affinity for large tomes...
...Peter W. Rodman is chairman of the Policy Planning Council at the Department of State...
...The first is The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (Alfred A. Knopf, $25.00...
...2) Finest Hour: Winston Churchill 1939-1941, by Martin Gilbert (Houghton Mifflin, $40.00...
...The Snopes Trilogy, by William Faulkner...
...To understand why things have not been moving forward on arms control with the Russians, Deadly Gambits, by Strobe Talbott (Alfred A. Knopf, $17.95...
...It is a magical argument for faith, a deserved best-seller...
...of Scripture in Moral Theology (Paulist Press, $9.95...
...The Idea of Poverty, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (Alfred A. Knopf, $25.00...
...Ralph Nader won't like this book...
...But most important, because the words are sheer poetry, lyrical, and of such elegance and beauty that they have never left me...
...CHARLES MOORE My favorite biography is Boswell's Johnson, which I also suspect is the best biography...
...These core works spell out the full meaning of the morality of freedom which forms the horizon of our lives and provides the intellectual basis for progress, freedom, and liberal democracy...
...It isn't every day, after all, that I'm presented with an opportunity to reach America's conservative intelligentsia, such as it is...
...It is the most revealing book about how money is corrupting American politics...
...Central America: Anatomy of Conflict, edited by Robert S. Leiken (Pergamon, $19.95), By the end of the -eighties everyone will know where Tegucigalpa is, and how to pronounce it...
...Another highly readable Gilder book that conveys through logic and anecdote the message of the 1980s...
...A Tale o f Two Cities...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 25 JOHN GAVIN Plato: The Dialogues (especially The Republic...
...Suavely utilizing everything from archaeological probes and astronomical charts to common sense, Sir Gavin nails down the answer...
...In just two years of looking and reading I have amassed+ two book shelves of which I wilt here indicate five or six titles...
...More interesting are the swiftpaced adventures of Dick Shelton in his attempts to outwit his scheming guardian, Sir Daniel Brackley...
...Satire's Political Dictionary...
...is president of the Heritage Foundation and publisher of Policy Review...
...Anyone on the right or the left who thinks he has found something new to say or do about this issue will be quickly disabused of that by reading this book, while also learning a good deal more about the moral sensibilities of capitalism than its critics (or for that matter, many defenders) normally admit...
...It is enough--especially as the authors have everything on tape--to disqualify the Kennedy family from ever running for office again...
...I would like to see poetry reading and memorization once again rekindled in American homes...
...Howard Phillips is chairman of the Conservative Caucus, Inc...
...A best-seller in Japan by an author whose true identity is still in dispute...
...A thoroughly enjoyable tale that illustrates why the elites will always let you down...
...Murder o f a Gentle Land, by John Barron and Tony Paul (1977...
...the invitation to contribute to TAS's roundup of Christmas book recommendations, and I've been giving the assignment careful thought...
...Amazing how it stands up despite first publication in ! 960...
...The Rise o f Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris (1979...
...To understand what would happen if only one thermonuclear bomb were detonated in New York, a novel, The Fifth Horseman, by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre (1981...
...For a similar background book on the dimensions of the problem and some solutions, Weapons and Hope, by Freeman Dyson (Harper & Row, $17.95...
...Goodbye Darkness (1980), Wiiliam M a n c h e s t e r . . . the true personal sacrifice and view of World War II in the Pacific by a Marine turned writer...
...Elliott Abrams is Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs...
...ERWIN KNOLL I'm grateful for...
...Lincoln (Random House, $19.95...
...CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER Exodus and Revolution, by Michael Walzer...
...Do not miss it...
...Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980, by Charles Murray (Basic Books, $23.95...
...Every year merits another biography, so full were Sir Richard Burton's experiences in Africa and elsewhere...
...Simon and Schuster, $16.95...
...Armington and William D. Ellis, More: The Rediscovery o f American Common Sense (Regnery Gateway, $12.95...
...Anyone who cares about justice and decries political expediency will be astonished, indignant, and ultimately heartened by this fascinating account of a unique hijacking trial in the U.S...
...For all the reasons ever given...
...We all accumulate so many old friends in the pages of our books that it seems almost disloyal to select a few for special mention...
...The book also shows how genuine friendship can be hampered by success and money...
...WILLIAM A. RUSHER Recommended current books: Paul Johnson's Modern Times (1983)ma magisterial summary and explanation of everything that has happened since the end of World War I. Dense with fascinating information, it renders 65 years of chaotic events into an intelligible series, and even leaves us with hope for the future...
...Fortunately, two first-rate recent histories have kept these interests from getting out-of-hand...
...HENRY REGNERY The Air-Line to Seattle: Kenneth S. Lynn (1983...
...The Pofitics of Oil, by Robert Engler (1967), to begin.to understand the relationship between business--at least in one major industry--and government in the American political economy...
...The other is Harvey...
...Dean Herbert London's Why Are They Lying to Out...
...If you haven't read him, be good to yourself this Christmas and give yourself, as well as your friends, all his novels...
...have embraced left-wing totalitarian regimes while downgrading (and enjoying) the fruits of free enterprise...
...It shows his persistent pessimism regarding their aspirations and abilities, and also his hatred of every aspect of their lives...
...It is a THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 29 frightful tale of greed by the grandfather, political ambition and cynicism by JFK and Robert Kennedy, and total self-destruction by the third generation...
...In writing about Eliot he shows, without of course inventing anything, the same capacity for arranging facts and information around a central character...
...CHARLES WOHLSTETTER Dubliners, by James Joyce...
...The characters in the Alger books clearly, to me, represent the Puritan work ethic, and the magnificent dream started in 1776 by our Founding Fathers...
...Ben Wattenberg's neoconservative lament for the pessimism o f over-bred, underexperienced liberals, The Good News is the Bad News is Wrong (Simon and Schuster, $17.95...
...It is an excellent overview of Hayek's work for those who have just discovered this Nobel Laureate in Economics, and it is the perfect gift for those of us who like to read o u r favorite essays over and over...
...We also learn that God is not some cosmic bellboy that comes at our beck and call, and that hard work, determination, courage, and perseverance are still the mainsprings of the American dream...
...Two excellent companion volumes to The Road to Serfdom would be the recently released Essence of Hayek, edited by two former students of Professor Hayek, Chiaki Nishiyama and Kurt Leube (Hoover Institution, $27.50), and Hayek: His Contribution to the Political and Economic Thought of Our Time, written by Eamonn Butler (Temple Smith, s paper...
...Youngsters read it, grown men understand it, and old people applaud it...
...In a time when many youngsters feel that we live in an issue-a-week society and a psychedelic light-show ambiance, I find that the struggle for success represented in the Horatio Alger stories reminds us that no ladders are ever thrown us in life, and that the climbing must truly be our own...
...GEORGE C. ROCHE III Compiling a short list of favorite books is a frustrating task...
...The picture that comes forth is a country whose politics may be in trouble but whose people are doing better and better...
...A very interesting commentary on human beings that is so artfully concealed that even young people can elicit a great deal of joy without understanding fully the impact...
...we just may obtain it only to find out that we did not want it in the first place...
...Four Essays on Liberty, by Isaiah Berlin (t969...
...In fact, he calls for a rethinking of our entire approach to social programs: What are we trying to accomplish...
...T.S...
...Today when many Americans feel that our problems are new, unique, and never before experienced by former Americans, it is important to realize that people like OrweU and Huxley have formerly written with delightful ascerbity and urbane wit about some of the problems confronting Western civilization today...
...Guess which side won...
...Graceful, wry, thoughtful...
...Yet, picking up where Theodore Draper's two earlier volumes left off, Professor Klehr traces the activities of just such a group, the American Communist party, during its most fruitful period, the 1930s...
...A final suggestion for history buffs is Lord Kinross's study of the Turkish Empire, called The Ottoman Centuries (1977...
...The poems of George Herbert, especially those collected under the title The Temple, provide the loveliest example of the poetical use of our language...
...It also demonstrates that many times the less fortunate wish for greater things in life only to find that obtaining these things only increases their frustration...
...With scholarly thoroughness, he shows how it managed to penetrate a remarkable portion of American political life, before collapsing--though not disappearing-under the weight of its own limitations and contradictions...
...Cambridge's fustiest college, under the loony guidance of a new liberal Master and afflicted by literature's most out-of-it undergraduate...
...It's unmatched and unmatchable...
...Alas, a cooler head prevailed and pointed out that arse-licking the editor might be considered normal for New York Timesmen and Washington Post catamites, but not for conservatives...
...ROBERT D. NOVAK I got around to reading it only this year, but Paul Johnson's Modern Times (1983) is necessary for anyone who wants to understand what the professional politicians have done to the world over the past sixty years...
...One story, "The Library of Babel," lies hidden at the center of The Name of the Rose...
...Bantam, 1972, William Morrow, 1974...
...The Horatio Alger Stories...
...Churchill's childhood explains an awful lot about some of the things he did in the future...
...Bruce Chapman is deputy assistant to the President...
...The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco (Warner, $4.95...
...Because Dickens drew characters of such nobility and villainyas to satisfy the most eager, youngster just starting to believe the romantic notion that there are people like Sidney Carton...
...To understand the issues inherent in the nuclear dilemma, The Fate of the Earth (1982), by Jonathan Schell, and a follow-up book, The Abolition (Alfred A. Knopf, $11.95...
...Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University and author of The State Against Blacks...
...he tells it as it was...
...Kenneth L. Adelman is director of the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency...
...Richard Wooley on assuming the post of British Astronomer Royal, 1956...
...The subtitle of this collection of essays describes it as "Studies in Literary and Historical Writing about America...
...Finally, I have recently read The Last Lion and, while William Manchester is no Conrad or Joyce, it is an insight into the background of one of the most important men of our time...
Vol. 17 • December 1984 • No. 12
