Books for Christmas
become too cheerful. Three policemen bolt past me, chasing a half-naked drunk brandishing a broken bottle. I am growing tired of Bethlehem; I have managed, however, to wangle a rare pass into the...
...Impoverished, ill-paid, ill-fed, illclothed, ill-housed, Wellington's soldiers were determined to "give as good as we got," he wrote...
...He looked at them and said, "Christmas...
...Boning up for a trip through Eastern Europe last spring, I came across this book from my late Great Aunt Mary's library...
...Reading what he went through made the days I was spending in a cell seem halcyon by comparison...
...White...
...Besides, it takes a few swipes at the foibles of the press...
...Please forgive me for recommending only one book, but it is 4,987 pages long, which means that most people will not be able to finish it at one sitting, even those terribly irritating souls who are so fond of telling you (and I think of this as a disease) that they started a book when they went to bed and stayed up all night with it until the end...
...It is more real than ever...
...3. The Rules of Chaos, by Stephen Vizinczey...
...The Radetzky March, by Joseph Roth, a longneglected Austrian novelist of the between-the-Wars period, brings back with a marvelous sense of atmosphere the last sad, bitter days of the AustroHungarian Empire...
...The minimum initial investment is only $500...
...Butler argues persuasively that if we are going to stop out-of-control spending, we need to build privatizing coalitions which give constituencies e reasons for supporting reductions in federal programs...
...A review of the seven capital sins in action...
...I never read him while he was alive, and since we met a few times, I regret it so much now...
...Defeated, I beat a retreat back to Manger Square to watch the proceedings on the closed-circuit screen...
...Calvin Trillin is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and a columnist for the Nation...
...After endless security checks conducted by soldiers and monks, I find myself in a superb position directly behind a marble pillar...
...4. The Count of Monte Cristo for sheer adventure...
...Richard Marius's Thomas More is a strong and credible analysis of the sixteenth-century saint...
...The memory mellows and takes "to itself again the soft, unreal semblance that Poetry & Tradition give to things they hallow...
...By distorting the data and corrupting the process of understanding in such a way that it leads public opinion to react differently than if it understood the true nature of reality...
...The essential and quintessential settingthe-record straight account of this century's key events...
...In Innovation and Entre preneurship (Harper & Row, 1985), Drucker surpasses himself by directly relating future prosperity to successful...
...One hopes that Revel is too pessimistic, but his description of how the West's freedoms have again and again been used against it is the kind of gloomy assessment we must face...
...George Bush is the Vice President of the United States...
...Doctorow, Philip Roth, and others of their ilk call themselves great, he would have finally been convinced of his first rate talent...
...Burton Yale Pines is vice-president of the Heritage Foundation, former associate editor of Time magazine, and author of Back to Basics...
...One comes away from this book with a better understanding of why the Russians can't forget that invasion and why they seem paranoid today...
...She gives one a new way of looking at Russian culture, from 987 A.D...
...The picture mellows with distance, Twain wrote of Bethlehem months after he had visited the town...
...Current Distribution Rate Putnam Option Income Trust II Putnam Option Income Trust II offers investors a high current return primarily from writing covered call options on a portfolio of quality common stocks...
...On what probably is today's most important issue, they make the logic of the Strategic Defense Initiative irresistible...
...You'll receive regular income and always have access to your money...
...It in cludes one novel and three biographies...
...It tells us more about our minds and times than any other essay of the same sort that I have come across...
...You really can make your Christmas day with the marvelous privatization examples and receive some hope that buying constituencies through reckless spending can be controlled in democracies...
...Moving, tremendously powerful, beautifully written...
...Auberon Waugh is a columnist for the (London) Spectator and other British publications...
...Texas...
...3. The Oxford Book of English Verse...
...The horns are curled round upon themselves with such a multiple convolution that if anybody bumps against them he does not get hurt...
...If you want to know why the Reagan campaign was not done with a cutting edge, and why the President's mandate is so vitiated already, read Richard Darman's memo...
...George co-religionists-reveal an artist Sheehan, whose earlier work Running who sought to create "a fiction of nd Being is equally exciting...
...The editor, Morton J. Frisch, exercised good judgment in his selection of items to be included and provided an intelligent and most useful commentary...
...Favorite numbers: 1, 6, 10, 37, 51, 55, and 78...
...For conservative anglophilia, this liberal tirade-oh, but it has the ring of truth!-is a powerful antidote...
...I'm joking about Proust and all the other guys who've written books that supposedly thoughtful peo ple tout, fools buy, and nobody reads...
...Naturally, it's painful at times to have to reach past Ulysses Morte dArthur, and The Faerie Queen, each of which I read at least once a year...
...The book is as entertaining as it is instructive...
...The Kingdom by the Sea, by Paul Theroux...
...The proper study of mankind is animals, and the inclusion of this beast, which I recommend as the totem animal for columnists: An animal is born in Asia which they call a bonnacon, and he has a bullish head and from then on the rest of his body like a horse's mane...
...Rather, Goldstein discusses the real sins of reporters, things like faking and plagiarism and the refusal to make corrections in a fair and aboveboard fashion...
...Ernest W. Lefever is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center...
...I have managed, however, to wangle a rare pass into the Church of Saint Catherine for Midnight Mass, and I am determined to go...
...Time has dated but not diminished the charm or romance of Halliburton's adventures...
...Every page records searching thought and calls for corresponding reflection, yet affords at the same time the thrills of suspense and recognition, quite as if it were one of the usual facile and "timely" improvisations...
...In a few minutes, Bethlehem was behind me...
...MW "ff RICHARD D. McINTYRE I haven't had much time in the last year to read new books, but let me recommend some older ones: The Last Lion, by William Manchester...
...and all other states) -Computed by annualizing most recent quarterly distribution of $0.475 ($0.10 income and $0.375 short-term gains) and dividing by the maximum offering price of $12.56 on November 1, 1985 Results for this period are not necessarily indicative of future performance...
...I too am glad I saw Bethlehem, but that night I had been wandering the City of the Nativity for too long and I was feeling tired and Jewish (a stranger amid the celebrants) and so I left, walked past the checkpoints, glanced back at the drunks swaying through Manger Square and the faithful gathered in front of the white screen, and climbed aboard one of the special buses that ferry visitors between Bethlehem and Jerusalem...
...the only one of the early dissidents to receive due notice has been Jung...
...the bleak deaths of good men will reduce most readers to tears...
...5. The View from Rappahannock, by Eugene J. McCarthy...
...But, then, Tocqueville predicted that public spiritedness would be in for a hard time in modern democracy...
...Things that I agree with completely...
...Thus, the new information below, not to be found in the New York Times or anywhere else...
...CAROLINA HERRERA 1. The Old Testament, King James Version, for its beauty and obvious reasons...
...Tocqueville remains the best foreign interpreter of the American spirit...
...Not only still fun to read, but an intriguing reminder of the seeming innocence with which the 1960s assault on our society's institutions and traditions began...
...Inebriated bagpipers stumble through the night...
...An intensely interesting study of power and society in today's Soviet Union...
...Available from the Swedenborg Foundation, Inc., 139 East 23rd Street, New York, New York 10010...
...it is all of these, as I had occasion to learn again when, this past spring, I devoted a full semester at Georgetown University to the teaching of it...
...What an insight...
...I told him it was past midnight and thus all the regular buses had stopped, but since it was Christmas he might be able to find transport into town at the bus depot up the street...
...Toil Free 1-800-325-8180 (III...
...Who has been giving sounder ones longer than Peter Drucker...
...Masterly brush-stroking with words...
...Proust may be great, but you have to have a sense of priorities...
...Donald J. Devine, former Director of the United States Office of Personnel Management, is currently a consultant in Washing ton, D.C., specializing in political and governmental management...
...Tvo books on the present day particularly impressed me...
...RICHARD GRENIER In the past year I have read (or reread) three books that cast a remarkable light on very different eras...
...A CONSTANCE HORNER The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes, The Rocksburg Railroad Murders, and The Blank Page, by K.C...
...Their ad says, "If Jay Gatsby were alive today he would buy this book"and I think the ad is right...
...3. The Irony of American History, by Reinhold Niebuhr...
...Incidentally, the Anchor Book, onevolume edition-a good translation, on the whole-has by my count seventeen mistakes in it, either typographical errors or quite obvious mistranslations...
...4. Zain, C.C., Spiritual Astrology, 1975...
...JACQUES BARZUN Thanks to the natural lobby that has been created by all the unhappy people on couches, Freud's work and opinions have prevailed in the public forum...
...Once, he said, he was invited to shoot with him in the regular practice...
...He is also con sulting director of Bob Dole's PAC, Campaign America...
...Russian literature and music have long in terested me, but I have never studied them systematically...
...2. Vision of Piers Plowman, by William Langland...
...Finally, I've been fascinated by Wittgenstein by WW...
...Cheever was the discovery...
...Eileen M. Gardner is education policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation...
...He has documented dramatically how disinformation quite literally poisons the lifeblood of democracy...
...The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy...
...AUBERON WAUGH Alas, I can think of no advice to your fellow countrymen on their reading...
...If only he had lived long enough to see people like Joseph Heller, E.L...
...Having always read about the great Corsican in French books, I finally decided to read something from across the channel...
...The late Protestant theologian's words sound as though they were written yesterday...
...Modern Times, by Paul Johnson...
...Now Paul Stepansky has written about Adler a careful, systematic, and unexcited study for which we may be grateful: Adler was not one-idea'd and his views inspire respect and invite reflection...
...It is a powerful collection of essays, and on top of everything else Muggeridge writes-like a dream...
...It is the one novel with enough intellectual depth and emotional resonance to satisfy one's need for literary sustenance...
...Naipaul...
...You won't put this one down until page 387...
...The Chief, by Lance Morrow...
...Most of the townsfolk sooner or later anguish in "Muscotti's (multi-ethnic) bar," which ought to be a candidate for the Spectator's Great Saloons series...
...What is more, a paperback edition is available...
...Distributions and share price, which are not guaranteed, will fluctuate...
...The Anglo-Boer War, by Byron Farwell...
...Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) is for me the most accessible, challenging, and downright entertaining political philosophy of the century...
...Proust...
...Thus he drives away his pursuers with noxious excrement...
...This year's most gripping tale...
...they've been telling the wrong story...
...gave the world their avant garde genius...
...Money Angles, by Andrew Tobias...
...And any tree that it reaches catches fire...
...I found Crime and Human Nature by James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein the most comprehensive and well-written explanation of the causes of crime and, for that matter, of law-abiding behavior...
...It's been a bumper Brookner year, with this, her latest, and the equally fine Hotel du Lac...
...ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE At the top of my list for the foreseeable future is How Democracies Perish by Jean-Frangois Revel...
...Malcolm S. Forbes is chairman, chief executive officer, and editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine...
...Not pleasant reading, but riveting...
...Seriously...
...Send a copy to your favorite journalist...
...The editors did not dumb-down the verbatim essays from Disraeli, Johnson, Shakespeare, Scott, Dryden, Dickens, William Pitt, Franklin, Jefferson, or the Bible...
...An old man collapses and is carried out on a stretcher...
...Has all the weaknesses of any period...
...There is Herbert Marcuse, whose many writings have explained so forcefully how it is that making people prosperous and secure and happy is really just another form of oppression-and cruel oppression at that...
...Not so well known as Middlemarch, but great...
...Available 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 from the Grail Foundation of America, 2081 Partridge Lane, Binghamton, New York 13903...
...Walter Berns is the John M. Olin Distinguished Scholar in Constitutional and Legal Studies at the American Enterprise Institute...
...And, of course, he won...
...Because I reviewed it for the New Republic...
...Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...Mother Russia, by Maurice Hindus (1943...
...What a loss it was to mankind when Spengler passed on to his higher reward...
...I.seldom read non-fiction, but Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is more than a novel...
...Because I wrote it...
...Roth, a Jew, by then a refugee, committed suicide in Paris when the Nazis entered the city in 1940...
...Richard G. Lugar is the senior senator from Indiana and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...CALVIN TRILLIN I hesitate to say that I can't think of any books I read in 1985 that I would recol mend-that leaves room, I reap e, for the interpretation that I hal n't actually read a book in the past tet months-but I'm afraid my mind is in fact, a blank...
...WILLIAM J. BENNETT 1. The Federalist...
...A string of colored lights comes crashing down...
...They went outside someplace and banged away with .45s...
...Name Address City/State/Zip Phone I a THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 i 25...
...Michael Mott's The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton is an instructive look at a modern-day saint with many human failings of his own...
...Eugene J. McCarthy is the former Senator from Minnesota...
...And I am glad, a hundred times glad, that I saw Bethlehem, though at the time it seemed that that sight had swept away forever every pleasant fancy & every cherished memory that ever the City of Nativity had stored away in my mind & heart...
...It is a study that brings our Civil War President to life as only a great novelist can do...
...Mayor Freij surveys his kingdom from the balcony of his office...
...Richard Halliburton's Complete Book of Marvels...
...Next on my list is The Set Up by Vladimir Volkoff, a masterpiece by a man who will one day be elected to the French Academy...
...A splendid biography of one of the last heroes of the modern age...
...I was pointing at black, silent hills...
...I was not alone in finding them extraordinarily helpful in forming a set of criteria for my own political judgments...
...An abridgement of the original published in 1835 and 1840...
...No matter...
...Wilson...
...Constance Horner is Director of the United States Office of Personnel Management...
...The bus depot is not far from my apartment on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, and as I walked home I saw a Hasidic Jew in frock coat and fur hat approaching...
...Perhaps they should start with the Bible and move on to Shakespeare before tackling Joyce and Milan Kundera...
...For when he turns to run away he emits a fart with the contents of his large intestine which covers three acres...
...Colonel John R. Elting is one of the few exceptions and his Superstrategists is a delight...
...5. Sherlock Holmes for mystery...
...Published last year, and brilliantly reviewed in the August 1985 TAS, this new biography offers no new insights or facts on the life of the greatest Catholic of his time, yet it makes compulsive reading...
...I have read Pride and Prejudice several 23 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 times and am always amazed at its freshness...
...I mean, what would life be like without A La Recherche du Temps Perrlu...
...Michael Novak introduced me to these mystery novels set in a declining bluecollar Western Pennsylvania town whose police chief, Mario Balzic, reminds us that moral problems once could cause visceral anguish, not just delectating cerebration...
...ERNEST VAN DEN HAAG Fanny Trollope, The Domestic Manners of the Americans...
...Christmas," he said, "what is Christmas...
...Richard Grenier is the author of The Marrakesh One-TWo (Penguin...
...MARK HELPRIN When The American Spectator asked me to provide "a list of my favorite books," I thought I had it made, because I have already done this for the New York Times, its sister publication on the Eastern Seaboard...
...0...
...My father visited Churchill several times during the War...
...CHARLES MURRAY It has been back to basics this year...
...The Kennedys An American Dream, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz...
...I do...
...JEFF GREENFIELD Since 95 percent of The American Spectator's audience will be spending Christmas digesting the latest intellectual proof that American slavery was a free market transaction, let me offer a couple of novel suggestions by authors worlds apart politically, but united by the gift of humor...
...Writing in 1983, he saw rioting hooligans coming over the hills...
...Christmas," I said, "you know-the holiday of the Christians...
...The most recent book about Norman ailer is Peter Manso's Mailer: His Life and Times...
...I went home and watched Midnight Mass on television, falling asleep on the couch and waking to the hum of static and a cold December dawn...
...Available in reprint edition from the Conservative Book Club...
...If you are an Eskimo or Evelyn Wood you might be able to do that with Winston Churchill's magnificent six-volume history, The Second World War (Boston, 1950, HoughtonMifflin...
...As a one-time Navy aviator I found this a real page-turner...
...I loved it...
...6. Antonia Fraser's History of the English Monarchs is an easy and fascinating introduction to history...
...John P. Diggins's The Lost Soul of American Politics (1984) and Garry Wills's Inventing America (1978) make a wonderful pair for pondering what we're talking about when we invoke the Founding Fathers...
...Three with a Bullet, by Arthur Lyons...
...BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS Once again, eminentoes thump for literary gifts at Holiday time...
...A democracy "cannot combine its measures with secrecy or await their consequences with patience...
...FRANK GANNON The Great Gatsby, with illustrations by Michael Graves, published by Arion Press, San Francisco...
...Available from the Church of Light, 659'h South Saint Andrews Place, P.O...
...A classic, meaning everybody talks about it and few read it...
...What an irony it is that as great a writer as Somerset Maugham went through life thinking he was second rate, and worse, believed critics who said he was...
...EILEEN M. GARDNER 1. A Compendium of Swedenborg's Theological Writings, Samuel Warren, compiler, 1979...
...It always seems to l on these occasions...
...A memoir of Morrow's extraordinary, powerful, oft-painful relationship with his father...
...Mario M. Cuomo is the governor of New York...
...These well-illustrated books served as the basis for two remarkable television series which I found very helpful as both a stimulus to my own study of the humanities and physiology and as a way of bringing my four sons to share similar enthusiasms...
...Wittgenstein's personality surely is as interesting as his philosophy is path-breaking...
...For auld lang syne, find your discarded copy of my Reagan Electionomics regarding how it should have been done...
...Kenneth H. Cooper and The Running Life by Dr...
...The books-superbly written and extensively researched-are fascinating insight into one of the giants of American history...
...It is all about his imprisonment by the French, and subsequently the English, while making his getaway from the invading Nazis...
...As good a writer as her son Anthony, Fanny is perhaps the first neoconservative...
...ERNEST W. LEFEVER Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, Oxford University Press, 1946...
...Salinger...
...On the eve of the Constitution's bicentennial, this is the only one-volume edition of Hamilton's writings available...
...Speaking about logic, did you ever wonder why there are so many news stories on "world hunger...
...Also historical, but in the spirit of mockery, Paul Horgan's Clerihews take up (and quickly drop) a hundred or more great figures from the past, which are also graced with suitably ridiculous drawings...
...She came in an ardent liberal and left as a strong conservative...
...Joseph Heller's Catch 22, while likely to offend more patriotic readers, is still an astonishing work: Slapstick sequences will reduce most readers to tears of laughter...
...He considers the "Last Arcadia" to have been, yes, the presidency of Calvin Coolidge...
...It seems to me they have an awful lot of catching up to do...
...Ben J. Wattenberg says the media haven't been getting the American story wrong...
...Her portraits of Southern characters (high and low) are marked by realism and great good humor...
...A narrative of modern times (post World War I) by a man whose perspective is obviously not limited to the twentieth century...
...Bob Dole is the majority leader of the United States Senate...
...Family and Friends, by Anita Brookner...
...4. The Siege, by Clara Claiborne Park...
...A family's account of the nurturing of their autistic child...
...and c) the divinity of marriage and the consequences of breaking the marriage covenant...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 In an entirely different vein, there is Jesus Rediscovered by Malcolm Muggeridge...
...Her new novel will be published here next year...
...I've got a two-volume set of Remembrance of Things Azst, but I plan to leave it in my basement, where it is mildewing gracefully...
...Eager to perform a public service, I informed the publisher of this, and offered to take the trouble, if asked, to specify page and line, but the publisher (Doubleday) did not respond to my let ter...
...A House for Mr...
...Never heard of it...
...I recommend both highly...
...5. Steinpach, Richard, How Is It that We Live after Death and What Is the Meaning of Life, 1979...
...This scholarly tome sheds light upon one of the ways God speaks to man-through the heavens...
...Misty figures move across the closed-circuit screen but only a Jesuit could figure out what is going on...
...Constantine...
...The choirs have surrendered Manger Square to the drunks, and in the chill night air I hear bellowing and yelping and the sound of police whistles and smashing bottles...
...No one who reads one of these journals needs to read the other...
...If any shreds of the Kennedy Mystique remain after this literary coup de grace, it will be a surprise...
...it is a magnificent hybrid-part murder mystery, part historical reconstruction, part tale of adventure...
...Because too few people have read it...
...He takes us on a tour of many aspects of American life (viz., the environment, health, drugs) and shows us-with facts and statistics-that the right story is that we've never had it so good...
...His book raises press bashing to new heights...
...The specter of a world class innocent fomenting upheaval in darkest Africa is a perfect antidote to journalistic self-importance...
...The Essenes (the elite Jewish sect to which Jesus and John the Baptist almost certainly belonged) were authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, noted "watchers" of the heavens, master prophesiers, and teachers of the Holy Law...
...The book is The News at Any Cost, and it wasn't what I expected...
...The Habit of Being.- Letters of Flannery O'Connor, selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald...
...Honor, for one...
...Niebuhr sees irony when "virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue...
...Carolina Herrera is the internationally known fashion designer...
...Instead, he writes about the moral and spiritual poverty of our unbelieving age, and how it leaves so many of us isolated in the dark dungeon of our ego...
...As son Malcolm Jr...
...I couldn't get through Guerrillas, which is supposed to be one of Naipaul's better books, and A Bend in the River was good but left me a little cold...
...I first read these books as a college student...
...NORMAN MAILER I don't feel up to ransacking these old brains so will content myself with listing two books that gave me great pleasure this summer, The Stories of John Cheever and M.R...
...Jacques Barzun, a historian and critic long at Columbia University, is now literary consultant at Scribner's...
...It's quite a panorama, beautifully detailed...
...TAKI Here is my list of required reading during the hols: 1) Hilaire Belloc, by A.N...
...21 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 It is truly a watershed book that ranks, as a work of nonfiction, with George Orwell's 1984...
...miracles" and to discover real miracles s= I pit Mˆ s i sV= 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 book to be reread every five or so years for the eloquence of Chambers's pen and the power of his ever timely and relevant message...
...Thus, an account of diplomatic, political, and military history is seasoned with a former cavalryman's feel for the countryside and the report of an individual rifle, a former M.P.'s concern for the ordinary family, a former First Lord of the Admiralty's involvement in the dispatch of fleets and the design of new ships...
...We let them down and twenty-one years later paid the price for it...
...Having just returned from a trip through People's China, I read with particular attentiveness Richard Bernstein's From the Center of the Earth, which for searching, skeptical analysis of an alien world has rarely been equalled...
...In David Landes's Revolution in Time one is concerned with the inner life only as it has been affected by clocks, watches, and chronometers...
...It reveals Napo tc be the first modern man, i.e., callow a bureaucrat at heart, uncaring for 1' soldiers, vain and glory-seeking...
...Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor-in-chief of the Washington Times...
...You may know the book as Remembrance of Things Past...
...Was he the first neoconservative...
...My personal junk food is politics...
...Jeff Greenfield is a correspondent for ABC's "Nightline" and a nationally syn dicated columnist...
...International, Apartado 372, Costa Rica, Central America...
...While it wouldn't be plagiarism, it would be worse It would be the transformation of a boy who once thought that standing on a bank of the Hudson and throwing out crab traps was everything in the world, into a public relations jack-in-the-box...
...Probably because it deals with a subject that most writers do not wish to face-how Soviet disinformation has led us to adopt policies or nonpolicies favorable to the Soviet Union...
...Not for the dilettante...
...And he was wry...
...It tells, perhaps, more about the human side of More than I, personally, wanted to know...
...Frank Gannon is the editor of Saturday Review...
...I even took Ulysses on my honeymoon...
...The American Enterprise Institute has performed its kind of public service by publishing the Selected Writings and Speeches of Alexander Hamilton...
...63105 Please send me a prospectus containing more complete information about Putnam Option Income Wust 11, including charges and expenses...
...And for escaping it all, Evan S. Connell manages to be both scholarly and up all-night absorbing in his account of Custer, Son of the Morning Star (1984...
...Morgan writes like a dream, and not the kind of dream Heller and Roth keep writing about...
...Proust...
...I try to keep Proust at the ready, always in an accessible place in my bookshelf...
...This excellent selection of Swedenborg's major concepts encompasses a) the importance of man's life on earth where, through free choice, he builds a soul fit either for heaven or for hell...
...In other words, it wasn't a screed on how the press lets President Reagan get away with murder...
...William J. Bennett is the U.S...
...Belloc suspected people in public life, predicted and hated the modern greenmailer, believed blindly in Christ, and wrote history according to Belloc's particular prejudices...
...A brief, lucid, and sobering lecture on life and life after life...
...What a cast of heroes...
...They expected the teachers to guide their pupils through a "hundred leading authors" in their original words...
...RICHARD G. LUGAR First of all, I would recommend reading or rereading Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter and The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk...
...It is interesting to Americans not only because of the current turmoil in that region, but because of the war's similarity to the American Revolution...
...6) Finally, I suggest The Liberal Crack-Up, by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., a combination of Burke, Voltaire, and me...
...Churchill, my father reported, was determined that if there were to be a final battle in London, he would be taken only at great cost to an astounded enemy...
...Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1977...
...Jean-Francois Revel's How Democracies Perish is what its title suggests, a grim, lucid study of how the freedoms of "open" Western democracies are exploited by a relentless adversary which, Revel argues, has established a monopoly of power and principle of action unprecedented in modern history...
...Cameraworks, by David Hockney...
...So I just stretch out my arm and grab Proust...
...Looking for high rates...
...His most recent book is With All Dis respect...
...Not only did Churchill lead the Allies, but he knew from long experience the point of view from every rung on the ladder, and it shows...
...Peter Hannaford is chairman of the board of a public relations/public affairs firm...
...As for Proust, all I can say is that life on this planet is a fleeting experience...
...My second pair of recommendations is The Ascent of Man by J. Bronowski and The Body in Question by Jonathan Miller...
...He waves to me...
...Somewhere, somebody is saying something in Latin...
...A unique feature is the printing of actual campaign strategy memoranda...
...Their steady stoicism casts doubt on modern, humane assumptions on what is necessary to make people happy, to "build morale," to make men, when necessary, even take up arms and fight...
...Regarding domestic public policy problem number one, how to control government spending, Butler begins with the unpleasant fact that under the Reagan Administration spending reached a historic high in 1983...
...Three books I do recommend, however...
...They are Eisenhower...
...He had a superb sense of where he was...
...I think the prob m can be traced to a short story I irote a long time ago, about how writers try to paint an impressive portrait of themselves with the books they list: Every time I try to think of a title, what springs to mind instead is the character who displayed the variety of his intellectual curiosity by listing a biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, a Department of Agriculture pamphlet on spring wheat, and an epic poem on the founding of Lake Wales, Florida...
...Modern Times, by Paul Johnson...
...Looking up, I see a soldier climbing a loudspeaker pole, trying to coax a sloshed blond giant down from his perch...
...All this, combined with the privilege of his hard-won and deserved position, makes for a political memoir which puts to shame the recent wan tomes of our bloodless Washington technocrats...
...A History of Christianity, by Paul Johnson...
...Tirra Lirra by the River-the Penguin paperback of a poignant and perfectly controlled 1978 novel by an Australian writer, Jessica Anderson...
...2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen...
...The voluminous works of this eighteenth-century scientist-theologian add immeasurably to man's understanding of the Bible and Christianity...
...Their Angeology and concept of the Earthly Mother ("Honor thy Heavenly Father and Earthly Mother") greatly expand our understanding of primitive Christianity...
...Available from the International Biogenic Society: I.B.S...
...What was the Civil War like...
...Tom Goldstein tells all in The News at Any Cost (Simon and Schuster, 1985), including that the conflict-of-interest boys can win $10,000 prizes for bringing public attention to "hunger...
...Important changes were made, but Congress will always be able to outspend any conceivable level of growth...
...entrepreneurial management...
...McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader, American Book Co., 1880...
...WALTER BERNS It is customary to praise Tocqueville's Democracy in America as the best book ever written on democracy, America, or American Democracy...
...Not a new work, but newly reissued with important additions, John Lukacs's Historical Consciousness is a book that every social and cultural critic should read and reread...
...The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong...
...For those who do not know what a clerihew is, an explanatory ode has been thoughtfully provided...
...It is a must read, a classic...
...To browse through this campo Santo is to lighten the burden of earlier eminence and success...
...Richard D. McIntyre, the Republican candidate for Congress last year in Indiana's Eighth Congressional District, practices law in Bedford, Indiana, and is an active spokesman for congressional reform...
...I am sure that every Civil War buff has already read Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, but everyone else could perform a kind of public service by including this book in his Christmas gift list...
...Bollingen Series XIX...
...A word of praise for another publicspirited publisher, the University of Chicago Press, for bringing out in the space of one year three splendid books on politics: David F. Epstein's The Political Theory of the Federalist, Joel Schwartz's The Sexual Politics of JeanJacques Rousseau, and Nathan Thrcov's Locke's Education For Liberty...
...There is Oswald 20 Spengler, whose Decline of the West is back in print and available for a hearty weekend of joyous reading...
...PETER HANNAFORD Land of the Firebird The Beauty of Old Russia, by Suzanne Massie...
...He remained cheerful throughout...
...As lively an essay as you're likely to find on the subject of getting and nurturing Greenies...
...Soldier, General [...] and Eisenhower- The Presidency...
...4) Maugham, by Ted Morgan...
...I have a copier in my study, I thought...
...How we could have talked...
...One of the first and still among the most moving tales' of Leninist totalitarianism...
...But what made them fight...
...I forgive him his denigration of Julius Caesar for the sake of the other unforgettable portraits...
...It is astonishing, really, how much light the book sheds on contemporary politics and, beyond that, on our contemporary condition...
...This fascinating, beautiful, and moving account of the battle of Gettysburg provides the answer...
...The perfect perennial for armchair travelers of all ages...
...3) People tend to read books they can identify with, and in the beginning of this year I read Arthur Koestler's Scum of the Earth with great interest...
...5) Hell in a Very Small Place• The Siege of Dien Bien Phu, by Bernard Fall...
...I think Jake Asch is the best, and most underestimated, of the current crop of hardboiled private eyes, and this story of murder and cocaine in the record business is among the best of Asches...
...Excuse me," he said in Hebrew, "are the buses into the center of town still running...
...I feint forward and back, left and right, and finally realize I will make no further progress through this staunch, packed, sweaty mass of Christian soldiers...
...C , yes, and always talking about the co mon man, the way Dodd, Kenne ', and Cuomo are doing today wl le riding in their limos...
...Evelyn Waugh's Scoop remains'the funniest book ever written about the profession-or business-or conspiracy-of big time journalism...
...A detailed account of what some have called "the last of the romantic wars...
...Unlike the vultures that reported from Vietnam when we were involved, Fall wrote with love and admiration for the brave men who fought on both sides in that very small place that will be forever a bit Foreign Legion and France to me...
...FRED BARNES Proust...
...Un Amour de Swann, La Prisonniere-it's not important which volume I seize...
...I'm eagerly awaiting it...
...If you liked The Right Stuff, you'll love this book...
...What is more, in his sketches mingling biography and technical analysis he revises reputations both upward and downward...
...But their influence through changes in business, navigation, and daily life has been enormous, and no modern creature groaning under the impact of too many bodies and events should forgo the satisfaction of discovering in this masterly narrative one of the causes of his oppression...
...and no, we have not done it all with hamburger chains, either...
...Cooper in his latest book has provided a common sense program for wellness based on years of laboratory experience...
...Johnson considers America's great innovator in statist interventionism in the economy to be not Franklin D. Roosevelt, but Herbert Hoover, whose governmental attempts to control the economy, Johnson feels, greatly delayed the recovery from the Depression...
...How does it do this...
...I still keep both volumes handy for current reference...
...Finally, Tom Goldstein, who once worked for the New York Times and then for Mayor Edward Koch, has written a book on the press that I was inclined to dislike-until I read it...
...2. Daniel Deronda, by George Epot...
...Louis, Mo...
...MALCOLM S. FORBES The Pentagon and the Art of War, by Edward Luttwak...
...It's about men and women...
...Biswas is a story, in conventional narrative form, about emigrants from India who live in Trinidad...
...The Quest for the Presidency 1984, by Peter Goldman and Tony Fuller (Bantam Books, 1985), presents a perfectly beautiful and objective view of the 1984 presidential campaign...
...A genius in two arts: painting and photography...
...couldn't get through it and still haven't...
...The style is brisk, the allusions to fine art, life, and literature are numerous and apt, and his competence manifest...
...MARIO M. CUOMO My "recommended" list of books read in '85 is replete with titles that belong to the no-longer new category...
...GEORGE BUSH Yeager...
...Michener is America's prose laureate and this time he has written a book as big, sprawling, and fascinating as its subject matter...
...3. Szekely, Edmond Bordeaux, The Gospel of the Essenes...
...A Soldier of the Seventy-First, by Thomas Howell, is the journal of a Scots common soldier in what was then called "the English army'-Howell literate by accident-who followed Wellington through the Peninsula Campaign and all the way to Waterloo...
...Catcher in the Rye, by J.D...
...For a prospectus on this offering call: 889-4935 (local) Toll Free 1-800-392-8774 (Mo...
...It is the second time I read Fall's classic about heroism and defeat...
...Taki is the senior European editor of The American Spectator...
...Steve) said in his comment: "This book could change the course of American military history...
...Churchill was intoxicated with love of language and love of country...
...I hope these three will help bring chastened optimism back into Christmas...
...Massie has now done it for me...
...This superb translation of the ancient Chinese oracle offers direct, two-way communication with the God within...
...DONALD J. DEVINE Stuart Butler can start your season, proving that the conservatives still have the new ideas, with Privatizing Federal Spending: A Strategy to Eliminate the Deficit (Universe Books, 1985...
...Any Proust will do...
...And now that the greasy monks, & the noisy mob, & the leprous beggars are gone, & all the harsh, cold hardness of real stone & unsentimental glare of sunlight are banished from the vision, don't you realize again, as in other years, that Jesus was born there, & that the angels did sing in the still air above, & that the wondering shepherds did hold their breath & listen as the mysterious music floated by...
...He is the author of The Reagans: A Political Portrait (Coward McCann) and Talking Back to the Media (Facts on File Books...
...Even Chekhov would have envied this brilliant American psychiatrist's thriller expose of Soviet psychiatric abuse of political dissidents...
...Paul Johnson's Modern Times is an extraordinary work of synthesis from a former socialist converted to classic liberalism...
...2) Napoleon, 1812, by Nigel Nicolson...
...But however much his front end does not defend this monster, his belly end is amply sufficient...
...And finally there is John Rawls...
...Sheehan, as foremost philosopher of the running revolution, brings a sense of joy and zest to athletics which I find overwhelmingly appealing...
...Ernest van den Haag is the John M. Olin Professor of Jurisprudence and Public Policy, Fordham University, and a distinguished scholar at the Heritage Foundation...
...The first half is true to that genre, but I plowed on, to be rewarded with a graphic and moving account of the author's tour through freshly liberated villages and cities where millions had perished under Nazi occupation...
...This is a new and limited edition (as well it might be at $400 a pop) of a favorite book which, happily, is short enough to reread every year...
...Reading her novels is exquisitely frustrating because you want to remember half a dozen phrases per page and work them, ever so casually, into your own conversation...
...In two volumes: The Gospel of Peace of Jesus Christ (1982 reprint) and The Gospel of the Essenes (1976...
...Gregory A. Fossedal and Daniel O. Graham's A Defense that Defends (Devin-Adair, 1983) shows the practical absurdity and the moral weakness of the Mutual Assured Destruction strategy of targeting populations so clearly it may even be comprehensible to the Bishops...
...Mark Helprin is most recently the author of Winter's Tale...
...His photographic compositions are even greater than his pool of canvases...
...Described as "masterly" by Malcolm Muggeridge, a very readable history, more social and cultural in content than strictly theological...
...b) detailed descriptions of the communities in the heavens and the hells and their direct relationship to man's life on earth...
...BURTON YALE PINES Witness, by Whittaker Chambers...
...Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler...
...New: 4. The International Garage Sale, by Stefan Kanfer...
...A reminder of how little the nature of the enemy has changed...
...Muggeridge, who came to Christianity relatively late in life, does not try to knock down intellectual barriers to belief...
...Writers on military affairs seldom give signs of ever having thought about anything else...
...Well, I hope by this time you've gotten the drift...
...Imaginative ideas...
...Of course, you can't spend your whole life reading novels...
...BOB DOLE I've thoroughly enjoyed two excellent volumes by Stephen E. Ambrose about one of my real heroes, fellow Kansan Dwight David Eisenhower...
...It's essential to life, like beauty and music...
...Gore Vidal's Lincoln was the most popular of the three biographies...
...Confiscated Power, by Helene Carrere d'Encausse...
...My favorite nonfiction authors come in disparate shapes and sizes...
...The real growth industry in America is entrepreneurial know-how and management skill, which Drucker's insights make so real, even for veteran students of the marvelous market mechanism...
...It's tough going for the first 100 pages, but anyone who sticks with it is richly rewarded...
...When I am asked to recommend an author, I always mention Marcel Proust first, second, and third...
...The Putnam organization, founded in 1937, supervises over $9 billion for 23 mutual funds...
...hence the subject should interest everybody...
...Box 76862, Sanford Station, Los Angeles, California 90076...
...Or write: Drexel Burnham ATTN: B. Anthony Kirk 1st Vice-President, Investments 7701 Forsyth Suite 700 St...
...Why not do it...
...Theroux recounts the events of a threemonth hike around the perimeter of the British Isles where he found only a contemptible ugliness of landscape and spirit...
...She bought it during WWII when the author, along with most everyone else, was writing uncritical paeans to Our Heroic Soviet Comrades in Arms...
...Otherwise, you will have to be content with many daily excursions into the greatest crisis in the history of the West, narrated with humor, vengeance, accuracy, and high enthusiasm by one of the greatest men ever to have lived...
...Bartley, III...
...when Eastern Christianity was adopted) to this century, when Stravinsky, Diaghilev, et al...
...It was a runaway bestseller all over Western Europe but had trouble finding a U.S...
...The best novel I've read in the last ten years or so (not that I've read very many) is A House for Mr Biswas by V.S...
...I stared at him a moment, then pointed south toward Bethlehem, the noise of Manger Square still ringing in my ears...
...EUGENE J. McCARTHY Old: 1. The Bestiary.- A Book of Beasts, by T .H...
...2. The I Ching or Book of Changes, Richard Wilhelm and Carl F Baynes, transl...
...Israeli security men guarding the dignitaries make kabbalistic signs to each other and talk into their lapels...
...But life is unfair...
...A great statement of American ideals and virtues and the moral hazards and responsibilities of power...
...Anyway, sorry I can't helpdespite the story I find such lists interesting...
...I guess you could call it Christian apologetics, but it's not really that...
...publisher...
...James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary...
...The writing is wonderful, and the description of the retreat from Russia far better than watching it on some television program...
...Finally, I would recommend both The Aerobics Program for Total WellBeing by Dr...
...I will read it carefully before I invest or send money...
...Secretary of Education...
...Charles Murray is a senior research fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of Losing Ground...
...It is a short and easy-to-read book...
...Thirdly, The Mind Palace by Steve Pieczenik...
...O'Connor's letterswritten between 1948 and her death in 1964 to friends, literary acquaintances, and in the lives around her...
...I'd find life awfully unfulfilling if I hadn't come across A Theory of Justice along the way...
...He shreds the view that the United States is in a period of industrial decline...
...Everyone should have an easy access to poetry...
...The Irony of American History, Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952...
Vol. 18 • December 1985 • No. 12
