Books for Christmas Holiday gift suggestions from some of our favorite readers and writers.
MORTIMER J. ABLER I have two sets of recommendations of books for people to use and read. The first set consists of guidebooks to reading itself. Here there are three items: (1) The Harvard...
...These three didactic biographies share a refreshing, almost novelistic prose style, while remaining true to the facts...
...This definitive history of a painful subject, superbly illustrated from preColombian America to the 1970s, is a joy to the reader (with no dental problems...
...CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY Modern Times, by Paul Johnson...
...For the sake of truth-in-packaging, I should acknowledge that the Library of America's publications of American classics are supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...CAL THOMAS Crime and Its Victims: What We Can Do, by Daniel W. Van Ness (InterVarsity Press, 1986...
...In the age of acquisitiveness this slim volume seemed deliciously relevant...
...and the major Western states can do no better than read the middle third of this seminal product of the scholarship of genius...
...New American Classics, by Jeremiah Tower ($27.95, Harper & Row...
...Hatch, Noll, and Marsden are evangelical Christians who are also American historians...
...Thieliecke was one of the strongest voices during the troubled days of the Third Reich and its consequences in Germany...
...Knopf, 1985...
...The terrorists were linked to Abu Nidal's shadowy Black June organization...
...But Dr...
...The most ragged page of all is that upon which Mme...
...I would like to suggest Real Christianity by William Wilberforce, abridged and edited by James M. Houston...
...This is a new book which begs to be read...
...Lynne Cheney is chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...Modern Times is history with a moral message: "the abolition of man...
...The ideology Lewis sought to counter was current at the start of this sixty-year period, for in the 1920s, Johnson observes, "the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value...
...After Tolstoy's Letters in two volumes, his Diaries in two more, all translated by R. F. Christian (Scribner, 1983, 1986): the two sets of books provide much material for literary and cultural criticism, and also display without need of commentary the Jekyll and Hyde personality—literary genius and unabashed monster...
...The "wonderful Renaissance," the "liberating Reformation...
...In the 1950s, he organized and led the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, assembling the best and brightest scholars to begin demolition of the main underpinnings of the liberal foreign policy establishment...
...In 1985 he was designated President Reagan's official biographer...
...Chuck Colson is chairman of the Prison Fellowship Ministries...
...In his book Johnson points out that "the outstanding non-event of modern times was the failure of religious belief to disappear...
...Scion of a leading Viennese family of the empire period, Robert was educated to follow many distinguished forbears into high governmental position...
...Yquem, by Richard Olney with photographs by Michael Guillard ($45.00, David R. Godine...
...The photographs are beautiful, the words full of affection...
...Their views deserve attention from those interested in the enduring tension between the City of Man and the City of God...
...a dramatic narrative that has the crack-and-dash of a thriller novel...
...He died solitary and under a false name in a Brighton hotel room in 1888...
...I will therefore go to the next highest level: Conservatism- Dream or Reality, by Robert Nisbet...
...If I were allowed to send only one book to my friends this season, this would be it...
...Robert is a tad too much the rascal to tell readers much about his personal life, but his observations on the foreign policies of all the Western nations and the Soviets from the 1920s through the middle fifties rank with those in Paul Johnson's Modern Times...
...The ones on Samuel Johnson, Francis Bacon, Warren Hastings, in particular, and his History of England, specifically chapter one, which in my Everyman's Library version runs to 109 irresistible pages...
...One ends the reading as full of pity as of fury...
...Tina Brown is editor in chief of Yanity Fair...
...Standing in the great tradition that dates back to Aristotle (and indeed before him), Lewis shows that "a dogmatic belief in objective moral value" is necessary not only to the proper moral education of the young but also to "a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery...
...His story reflects the dominant aspect of his personality— his intellect—but the reader can see that his emotional faculty was also touched as he moved—or, more accurately, was moved—to faith...
...A readable biography of the noted portraitist with 50 color reproductions...
...He arrived penniless in the U.S...
...Notes on the State of Virginia...
...in the 1920s, his education largely irrelevant, made money on Wall Street and married much more of it to live as a fox-hunting aristocrat in the suburbs of Philadelphia...
...The Wild Blue, by Walter J. Boyne and Steven L. Thompson ($19.95, Crown)- A fast-moving novel thai tells the history of the U.S...
...Other novels I read again were J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country (Academy Chicago, 1984), and A. J. Mojtabai's Autumn (Houghton Mifflin, 1982), both slender, exquisitely written, and agonizing in their descriptions of love cut short—the former by youth, the latter by old age...
...Read about them in Hugh Trevor-Roper's Renaissance Essays (Chicago, 1985), and you see how many more disparate adjectives and ideas you have to use...
...civilization is nothing else than the attempt to reduce force to being the ultima ratio . . . 'direct action' consists in inverting the order and proclaiming violence as prima ratio...
...I learned of it only because of its inclusion, well-merited, in Adler and Hutchins's Great Books...
...The story of why General Eisenhower didn't go for Berlin is fascinating...
...Dentistry: An Illustrated History, by Malvin E. Ring...
...Against All Hope, Armando Valladares...
...Difficult Loves, by Italo Calvino, is now in paperback...
...Since Larkin's death last year, this final work—of penetrating and immensely sensible criticism—is all the more to be cherished...
...JAMES J. KILPATRICK Let me recommend: 1. The Straw Giant, by Arthur Hadley (Random House, $19.95), a hard-hitting look at the state of our defense preparedness...
...4. Talleyrand, by J. F. Bernard (Putnam, $12.75...
...By next Christmas I plan to be up to page 200...
...Riveting stuff, since it solves without doubt a sixty-year-old Los Angeles murder mystery...
...It would take wild horses to drag me to a football game, but this book, about the intense rivalry between Alabama U and Auburn, goes down like a twelve-year-old single malt...
...Written in a clear and jargon-free style, it is a cornucopia of fascinating topics—e.g...
...It's about football the same way Hamlet is about Danish foreign policy...
...2. Harper Brothers, New York City, years ago published a book by Douglas V. Steeres entitled Doors Into Life, which is a presentation of five of the preeminent devotional classics of other generations...
...Henry Salvatori is the founder and former CEO of Western Geophysical Co., now a subsidiary of Litton Industries...
...John Corry is the nonfiction television critic of the New York Times...
...The literary Blue Velvet...
...Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman...
...An appreciation of what many think is the greatest white wine in the world...
...In another of its excellent series of the critical concern books, Carl Henry is not only a leading (if not the leading) evangelical theologian of the past three decades, he more than any other has been sensitive to the inadequacies of contemporary evangelicalism to respond to social crisis...
...An excellent handbook on legal developments regarding church and state, Religion in American Public Life argues persuasively that our free society depends ultimately on religious values for both stability and protection of individual rights...
...LYNNE CHENEY My all-occasion gift book (weddings, birthdays, Christmas, Chanukah) is the Library of America's Thomas Jefferson...
...I would also recommend Gene Smith's dual biography Lee and Grant...
...It consistently outsells all other books, yet most of the intellectual elite have never read it, much less understood it...
...JACK LIMPERT Good books to look at: LIFE: The First Fifty Years, by the editors of Life magazine ($50.00, Little, Brown...
...They 'I are also the kind of books designed to produce a double take when gingerly unwrapped by my citified Eastern friends...
...RICHARD G. DARMAN I am obliged first to recommend the works of Plato, Shakespeare, and the Federalists, along with the Bible— enough, I suppose, to live and govern by...
...The Watchful Gods, which includes "The Wind and Snow of Winter'^he most resonant story I have ever read about our lost frontier...
...JOHN UPDIKE Some books that occur to me are: The Assault, by the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch...
...This is a damned important book that deserves a wide audience...
...It is hilarious, and everyone should meet Uncle Toby...
...Winchester set out to visit each of the sixteen remaining British colonies, with result hilarious and poignant...
...This book, by one of the world's most respected social scientists, contains the strongest analysis and defense to date of the economic and social order that distinguishes our society and its underlying moral and practical principles, of which many of our intelligentsia are painfully ignorant...
...Solzhenitsyn brilliantly chronicles the mutation of Communism in the midst of the Russian people and demonstrates with overwhelming testimony of many of its victims that no matter who is at the head of the Soviet government, nothing has changed, or will change...
...Yankees at the Court: The First Americans in Paris, by Susan Mary Alsop—how covert assistance from France enabled George Washington with a few thousand contras to defeat the strongest army in the world...
...A Stroll with William James, by Jacques Barzun, is a learned rendering of the Ufe and thought of a man whose nostrums for our time are as sound as they are, alas, unthinkable...
...While not exactly in the spirit of the season...
...Religion in American Public Life, by A. James Reichley (Brookings, 1985, paper...
...How TV is undermining democracy by converting what should be serious discussion into show business...
...Classic literature with brilliant political, historical, and spiritual insights...
...HERBERT STEIN I suppose it would be unsporting for me to list Her Only Sin, by Benjamin Stein, Biz Speak, by Rachel Stein Epstein and Nina Liebman, and Washington Bedtime Stories, by Herbert Stein as the three top books of 1986...
...The Naked Public Square, Richard John Neuhaus...
...and Lieutenant Elmo Zumwalt III with John Pekkanen ($18.95, Macmillan...
...They had a victory of sorts: with the passage of sanctions against South Africa, they proved there is an issue over which one can be hysterical without much fear of criticism...
...The author clearly depicts how the Soviet Union is organized and functions and how the Party dominates every aspect of Soviet life and government...
...I loved the moment when the managers for a lackluster challenger expressed great hope of their young man's chances against the undefeated Rocky Marciano...
...The Gulag Archipelago, by Alexander L Solzhenitsyn...
...Forget, meanwhile, the argument about whether Orwell was a man of the left or the right...
...The safest gift book of 1986...
...Cutting Edges, by Charles Krauthammer...
...Writing about religion has its place, but writing inspired by true faith ought to have a superior place, particularly at Christmas...
...My favorite public man etched so delightfully, so excitedly by Maurois...
...Rain or Shine is, along with Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising, the best read of the year...
...and if anyone has the last four volumes I shall pay hard cash for them...
...A great tribute to the triumph of the human spirit...
...Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction (Thomas Nelson Publishers, Nashville, Tenn...
...Beryl Markham's West with the Night, published in 1942, was forgotten until reissued by North Point Press in 1983...
...A very human story full of different kinds of courage...
...Maybe that's where Updike readers should turn...
...Ike's grandson and Julie Nixon's husband has surprised a lot of Washingtonians by writing an authoritative, interesting account of Dwight Eisenhower's performance as World War II general...
...77?^ Bible (do you really need the author of this one...
...Here again are three books: (1) Carl Van Doren's The Great Rehearsal, which is coming back into print...
...It will not likely be forgotten again...
...EDMUND MORRIS The new book which has caused me the purest deUght this year is a glossy compendium from Abrams, Krazy Kat: the Comic Art of George Herriman...
...I wonder: If there are enough Updike readers to make him a bestseller, where do they all turn between his books...
...Essays in the History of Liberty: Selected Writings of Lord Acton, edited by J. Rufus Fears (Liberty Press...
...If you take joy, as I do, in the craft of writing, then stand back in awe of Rain or Shine (Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), Cyra McFadden's bittersweet story of her rough-and-tumble adolescence as the only child of a hell-raising rodeo announcer and a self-centered dancer, whose infidelities, boozing, and stormy domestic Ufe form the backdrop to her memoir...
...4. Crossroads, by Leon Jaworski, chief prosecutor of Nazi war crime trials and Watergate (David C. Cook Publishing Company, Elgin, Illinois...
...Samples: "The European stands alone, without any living ghost by his side . . . he has lost his shadow...
...This book remains the most magnificent autobiography ever...
...The best and, I hope, the last word on what conservatism is...
...The dolts would not stand for him...
...Her brainy dialogue and batty characters wormed their way into my subconscious until I was hooked...
...Both are in paperback, and together they tell you most of the important things you need to know about our century...
...The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood...
...You may also give, to bright college students and up...
...I strongly agree...
...It's an explanation of forces shaping the present and a prescient forecast of our future...
...Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis...
...Like the weather, the solution to crime and the burgeoning prison population has seemed to elude the experts...
...His journals, deftly edited under the title The Master Eccentric by his friend Jonathan Goodman (Allison and Busby, 1986), richly satisfy the literary, social, and criminal interest, as well as portray a commanding character who may well appear less and less eccentric as time goes on...
...Jack Valenti is president and chief executive officer of the Motion Picture Association of America...
...White deserves his fame for a greater reason—his revision of accepted rules about the heart patient's proper way of life, now common knowledge...
...What better time than Christmas, for whatever reason, to resolve to read it through in a year, which takes about five chapters per day...
...2. Perfume, by Patrick Suskind...
...Clearly written and a gift that would be welcomed by any experienced home cook...
...His latest book, A Word or Two Before You Go . . . , has just been published by Wesley an University Press...
...The old players, such as Rube Marquard, Bill Wambsganss, and Goose GosHn, speak with an earthy poetry...
...JOHN R. SILBER Against AII Hope: The Prison Memoirs of Armando Valladares, by Armando Valladares (Alfred A. Knopf...
...3. The Trouble With My Church, by Helmet Thieliecke (Harper & Row...
...Great fun for anyone who loves airplanes...
...The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
...it also revealed the dark side of the New Deal for the first time in American historiography...
...Novus Ordo Seclorum, by Forrest McDonald, is a singular and eminently useful account of the Republic's founding as we observe the two hundredth anniversary of the Constitution...
...In this book he is playing catchup with himself, but is still ahead of most...
...Go to your library to get Little Journeys into the Homes of Great Philosophers, by Elbert Hubbard (don't worry if people say "Elbert Who...
...Finally, you give to children and imaginative parents the Chronicles ofNarnia by C. S. Lewis and Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame...
...Skillfully selected by the University of Virginia Scholar Merrill Peterson, the Jefferson papers contained in this book cover such a range that no one except a specialist will ever need another volume of our third President's writings—and what writings they are: the Declaration of Independence...
...Rivers is to counterterrorism what Clifford Irving was to Howard Hughes...
...CHUCK COLSON Augustine's Confessions...
...All deal with violence, yet share a certain poetry and calm intelligence as well...
...Adams gives us marvelous portraits of Jefferson, Madison, Napoleon, Talleyrand, and fits them into a narrative all the more compelling for the narrator's unmistakable presence...
...On a rank with Robert Byron's The Road to Oxiana...
...This "how to do it" book on how to communicate between computers using telephone lines is a must for the computer buff who wants help from terminology to equipment to step-by-step procedures...
...His novel The Connoisseur will be reissued by North Point Press next spring...
...Not long after, LBJ announced he would not run for reelection, and the relationship between the White House and the establishment has never been the same since...
...Reading Krauthammer's political essays is like reading Vidal, but in this case it's not a guilty pleasure...
...A favorite line is dealing with a scene at a beach on a holiday, in which there was "a silent hullabaloo of balloons...
...A challenging presentation of conservative philosophy applied to a range of current policy issues...
...But he was also an avant-garde novelist and a prophetic critic of the welfare state...
...Found this in a usedbook store (copyright 1960...
...Paul Dudley White, the cardiologist, became a national figure when he was called in to treat President Eisenhower, after some bumbling efforts by the White House Physician General Snyder...
...2. The Lover, by Marguerite Duras...
...John R. Silber is president of Boston University...
...More important, the contrasts of these life histories present a moral for today's leaders—those who seek power for the sake of principle often, ironically, fare better than those who seek power for power's sake...
...A short book (a mere 144 small pages in the old, anonymous translation), it is full of brilliant insights and epigrams...
...RICHARD C HALVERSON 1. Multnomah Press, Portland, Oregon, has been producing a series of volumes, entitled Classics of Faith and Devotion...
...John Updike is the author of Roger's Version and other books...
...Marx sanctified...
...Posner's Economic Analysis of Law, first pubhshed in 1972, and now in a much expanded and revised third edition, has been the bible of that movement...
...by Richard A. Posner, Judge at the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit...
...For those in this country who wonder why Mex ico doesn't shape its institutions as replicas of our own, the author has this to say: "On the ruins of a long line ol theocratic and militaristic empires, Cortez imposed the values of a profoundly Catholic and intellectually repressed Spain...
...LINO A. GRAGLIA I would like to recommend Economic Analysis of Law (Little, Brown, 1986, 3rd ed...
...Stretching a bit, one might think of David Stockman's The Triumph of Politics as a related work—focusing on strengths and weaknesses of American leadership in and around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue...
...I have already given several copies to friends and relatives and will surely give more this holiday season...
...2) Charles Van Doren's The Joy of Reading, published last year by Crown Publishers...
...But I cannot resist recommending them in a class by themselves, "acts of Will...
...Alabama Showdown, by Geoffrey Norman...
...The Master Terrorist: The True Story Behind Abu Nidal (Adama Books, 1986) is relevant reading for anyone seeking information about Nidal and a better understanding of the terrorist phenomenon...
...Edmund Morris: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Coward McCann & Geoghegan, 1979...
...If American Spectator readers have not yet discovered Molly Keane {Good Behavior, Time After Time) I envy the delight in store for them: she is an Anglo-Irish writer as poetic as Keats and as savage as Evelyn Waugh (Obelisk 1983...
...For those still beguiled by the romance of the Cuban revolution, this poet's book is required reading...
...So that my motives don't appear too impure, I will also point out that last Christmas, while I was still a senior editor at the Washingtonian magazine, I was recommending Frances Parkman's France and England in North America, another fine Library of America production...
...Flaubert's Parrot, by Julian Barnes...
...Orwell is important not because he tells us what to think (anyone can do that) but because he tells us how to think...
...Based on a BBC television series, this book is a time machine, moving the reader back to a period between 1300 and 1200 a c , when the powerful Myceneans from Greece were expanding both their trading and their political influence...
...A collection of speeches and articles articulating, with remarkable clarity, solid, conservative philosophy written before the author became United States Senator from Texas...
...Stockman's one-time mentor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, put out a book this year that didn't quite make the bestseller list, but which I recommend here nonetheless: Family and Nation...
...If you have wondered why Congress talks so much and accompUshes so little, the author, a Washington lawyer and onetime Capitol Hill legislative assistant, may have the answer: the erosion of the seniority system...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., is the editor-in-chief o/The American Spectator...
...But it is still a great deal more informative than most books about American public policy-making, and a great deal better than the Enquirer-Wke material that was initially highlighted...
...NEIL C LIVINGSTONE It was one year ago, two days after Christmas, that terrorists struck at the Rome and Vienna airports in seemingly coordinated attacks, leaving 128 dead and injured...
...Whatever its faults, he says, the seniority system gave structure and discipline to federal lawmaking...
...It's a helluva fine biography James J. Kilpatrick is a nationally syndicated columnist...
...The second set consists of books that everyone should read during the bicentennial year of 1987...
...For those who need to escape the quotidian horrors of twentieth-century America, or twentieth-century anywhere, there is comfort in the old Southwest: Coronado by historian H. E. Bolton, The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin, Sky Determines by Ross Calvin, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver by J. Frank Dobie, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark's collection...
...Robert, now 80-plus, is currently U.S...
...Also worth the effort, his History of Christianity, wherein one learns that, save for a very few clerics, Christianity hasn't done much to change human nature...
...There is a lyrical quality to Donovan's writing, and both his style and subject matter recall Conrad's Heart of Darkness...
...3. The Spoils of Poynton, by Henry James...
...the vertical invasion of the barbarians...
...Is Inequality Inefficient?, The Taste for Discrimination, The Economic Basis of Freedom of Speech—with something interesting and significant to say about almost every major issue of both private and public law...
...A rarity among American politicians, the Senator has a demonstrated capacity to distinguish large ideas from small—and to do so well ahead of the crowd...
...Crumbling Foundations, Donald Bloesch...
...Henry...
...Anyone who's serious about understanding the politics, economics, and culture of the U.S...
...This is a moody, sensual account of young womanhood...
...With unscotchable optimism McMaster tells the whole improbable tale, unfettered by any of the New Age bugaboos that make so much modern American history tedious and for normal minds inscrutable...
...It captures, at once, the characteristics of British leadership that both won the War and lost the Empire...
...Christopher Buckley is author o/The White House Mess...
...JACQUES BARZUN For a steady view of the contemporary scene there is nothing like reading history, not because history repeats but because it degeneralizes...
...It has made the bestseller hst in spite of its alleged weakness of plot and its redeeming social value: a seriousness about ideas...
...R. RANDOLPH RICHARDSON Democracy, Capitalism, and Socialism, Joseph Schumpeter...
...is chairman of the Republican National Committee...
...Smith's book about Woodrow Wilson has always been one of my favorites, and I was not disappointed by this volume...
...Inevitably, it is more a biography of Krazy than of the self-effacing genius who created him, but the reproductions prove (if proof be needed) that the gulf between Herriman and all other comic artists is unbridgeable...
...The "law and economics" movement, urging the application of economic reasoning to legal issues, is by far the most important, if not indeed the only, development in law school teaching and curriculum in the last fifty years...
...It is a must for Civil War buffs, and in fact I have given it as gifts to several—including the New York Mets' first baseman, Keith Hernandez...
...TINA BROWN 1. The Good Apprentice, by Iris Murdoch...
...Lino A. Graglia is the Rex G. Baker and Edna Heflin Baker Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Texas School of Law...
...and (3) my book about the Constitution, under the title We Hold These Truths, to be published by Macmillan in the early spring of 1987...
...Though Tolstoy never stopped looking into his soul, he knew very little about himself and not much more about those around him— an ideal stance for making their life and his own an absolute hell...
...One of the most beautiful, whimsical, delightful reminiscences I've ever read...
...Modern Times by Paul Johnson and Political Pilgrims by Paul Hollander...
...Gilbert Stuart: The Father of American Portraiture, by Richard McLanathan ($35.00, Abrams/National Museum of American Art...
...Lewis was a man surprised by joy, a nice surprise if ever there was one...
...1 guarantee you delightful reading about some most interesting folks who are called philosophers...
...Terry Eastland, director of public affairs for the Justice Department, has written for The American Spectator since June 1975, when he contributed "The Amazing Grace of C. S. Lewis...
...But fortunately there are occasional surprises: Among 1986 autobiographical entries, for example, 1 would recommend John Colville's The Fringes of Power: 10 Downing Street Diaries 1939-1955...
...Against All Hope, by Armando Valladares, is the most impressive recent indictment of the totalitarian brutes whom Dr...
...The Landing, by Haynes Johnson and Howard Simons...
...DON HODEL William J. Cook, The Joy of Computer Communication (Dell Publishing Co...
...I have now bought three copies of this magisterial tome, and two years later I am up to page 100...
...Caro's masterful biography does more than show how an obsessive power-seeker employed ruthless, hardball politics in his career...
...The Money Rustlers: Self-Made Millionaires of the New West, by Peter C. Newman—tells an exciting story about the innovative men and bold spirit that won the continent...
...Phil Gramm, The Role of Government in a Free Society (The Fisher Institute, Dallas, Texas...
...Lewis wrote The Abolition of Man in the mid-forties, which marks almost the midpoint of the history of the world (1917 to 1982) that Johnson chronicles in this huge and hugely ambitious book, which is a delight to read and reread...
...Today, especially in the House of Representatives, it has given way to a power vacuum which, at times, all 435 members try to fill...
...FRANK J. FAHRENKOPF, JR...
...Good reading for students of government and for taxpayers...
...Herbert Stein is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...This reflects more on my attention span than on Johnson's awesome ability to blend history with narrative...
...Evan S. Connell is the author o/Son of the Morning Star...
...This came out in 1973, but I just got around to reading it this past spring...
...Another year has nearly gone by without a single new idea from the liberals...
...Ambassador to some garden spot or other in Southeast Asia...
...With the patience of a Sherlock Holmes, he helps us identify the layer of that hill in Western Turkey that was almost certainly the Troy of the Trojan war...
...The Sun Never Sets, by Simon Winchester...
...Christ met Caesar in the Cuban prison—and Christ won...
...Here are the profound insights and personal experiences of a thoughtful, influential American...
...Finally, let me wholeheartedly offer up Honorable Member (Patrick Stephens Ltd...
...Ira Berkow is a sports columnist for the New York Times and author of the recently published Red: A Biography of Red Smith...
...Disraeli, by Andre Maurois, in print as a Modern Library book...
...As the editor notes, "Lord Acton's powerfully original analysis of the nature of individual and political freedom and of the forces that foster and threaten that freedom speaks to the most profound concern of the late 20th Century...
...This biography should inspire every disgruntled Democrat thinking of changing parties instead of principles...
...On the other hand, one book on terrorism to pass up (or if someone gives a copy to you, to use one page at a time in the family outhouse) is The Specialist: Revelations of a Counterterrorist (Stein & Day, 1985) by "Gayle Rivers...
...Incidentally, Gurney's Power of Sound should be known and read by all music critics...
...Her childhood in Africa and her solo flight across the Atlantic are truly astonishing...
...As for TrevorRoper, he writes like an angel and judges like a Solomon, even though he did err at first about Hitler's diaries...
...Here there are three items: (1) The Harvard Guide to Influential Books, just published by Harper & Row...
...IRA BERKOW Following are some books that, had I been given them for Christmas—or any other time—I would have been deeply grateful to the donor: 1. Quite Early One Morning, by Dylan Thomas...
...A classic by the late English writer who held the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at Cambridge until shortly before his death on November 22, 1963...
...Chauchat, masked, addresses the word tu to Hans Castorp for the first time: surely the most erotic moment in twentieth-century fiction...
...Anyone who hasn't read this should be dropped from The American Spectator's subscription list...
...Johnson says, and proves, that political movements are the curse of our times...
...He represents a model of courage and a powerful, prophetic voice in times of trouble and crisis...
...RICHARD NIXON I would recommend two recent books for Christmas time readers: The first is David Eisenhower's definitive, monumental work about his grandfather's service as Supreme Commander in World War II, Eisenhower: At War It is the first truly great biography of Eisenhower...
...The book that Ronald Reagan ought to read or reread before any more meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev...
...Owen Harries is editor of the National Interest...
...A magnificent exposition on the need for religious influence in public life...
...Prophetic warning against mixing ideology with the unadulterated truth of God's revelation...
...Almost 3(X) reproductions in color, featuring Homer, Sargent, Marin, Hopper, and others...
...This Pulitzer Prizewinning biography traces the development of a unique, original American, who matured into the model of a manly statesman at the same time the United States matured into a world power...
...I also consider it a public service not to miss an opportunity to tout Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy, easily the best piece of literature that I had not only not read, but had not even heard of upon completing my formal education, and therefore fear it may have escaped the attention of others...
...The Story of the Early Days of Baseball by the Men Who Played it...
...A ripping good yarn about two Nazis landed by submarine who come pretty close to assassinating FDR...
...It is an excellent guide to the media, embracing 169 pages of very lively writing...
...Hollander writes about the Western intellectuals who fell in love with the movements...
...The conquest therefore reinforced a powerful tradition of political authoritarianism and divine omnipotence that to this day resists the incursions of Western liberalism...
...All three belong in the library of a discriminating reader...
...The Liberal Crack-Up, by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...First, you give the fourvolume, paperback edition of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, which Harcourt Brace Jovanovich has packaged in a nice yellow box...
...JOHN CORRY There is no question about what books to give for Christmas...
...Coping with one ally who is your enemy and one ally who is your rival to defeat one enemy who will be your ally...
...Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr...
...A cookbook that is long on flavor and substance by a chef who has a degree in architecture from Harvard...
...The Agency: The Rise and Decline of the CIA, by John Ranelagh, is a very competent history of the evolution of the Central Intelligence Agency up to the end of the Carter Administration, whereupon the book simply blows up...
...3. The Law as Literature, edited by Ephraim London...
...As long as the Soviet Union, in order to ensure the long-term survival of its totalitarian rule, continues to be explicitly and totally dedicated to the extinction of our free democratic society, it behooves every concerned citizen to clearly understand the true nature of our formidable and totalitarian adversary...
...Aristotle said a crocodile is a fearsome thing, but a beautiful drawing of one is a source of pleasure...
...Friends to whom I've already given Thomas Jefferson can expect to receive Henry Adams's History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, also published by the Library of America...
...Once a Warrior King (}AcGraw-Wi\\, 1985), David Donovan's haunting personal reminiscence about Vietnam, qualifies as my "book of the year...
...the list is indisputable...
...Here is another book published by Multnomah Press...
...His life {Take Heart, by Paul Oglesby, M.D., Harvard Press, 1986), ably written by a student and colleague of his, takes one to far places in the company of a picturesque character...
...A scholarly assessment of the false gods man chooses to worship and of the beguiling way in which we are seduced away from worshiping the God of Scripture...
...Richard Nixon was the 37th President of the United States...
...Occasionally one finds a fiction bestseller that suggests there's a somewhat more complex reality and a more interesting reading pubhc than the one that's represented by the works of Quinn, Krantz, Steel, et al...
...5. Christian Countermoves in a Decadent Culture, by Carl F.H...
...The Christian Mind, Harry Blamires...
...Jacques Barzun is a historian and critic...
...James G. Watt, The Courage of a Conservative (Simon and Schuster...
...Surprised by Joy is Lewis's own spiritual autobiography, an account of his journey to faith, from childhood into his early thirties...
...Now there is a book which explores Nidal's demented mind and the activities of his vicious band of followers...
...Richard C Halverson is chaplain of the United States Senate and author of No Greater Power: Perspectives for Days of Pressure published earlier this year by Multnomah Press...
...Reviewers have compared Valladares's achievement to that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn...
...Simply speaking, one of the finest travel books ever written...
...Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, by Alan Riding...
...American Watercolors, by Christopher Finch ($85.00, Abbeville...
...We also meet the Hittites, who presided over a vast kingdom in Anatolia and had as sophisticated a foreign service as one encounters today...
...As stated in the jacket, the author "has the knowledge of a scholar, the pen of a journalist, and the eye of a de Tocqueville...
...Red Storm Rising, by Tom Clancy— throws back the Soviet army, navy, and air force, just barely, in 650 pages...
...R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...Putting General Relativity to the Test by Clifford Will...
...The book is the ultimate fusion of intellect and spirituality and is a challenge to those who think they are intelligent enough to have concluded that God does not exist...
...While on the subject of Western writers, being a Montanan I always make sure my gift list includes a few books that capture the spirit and heritage of the American West...
...indeed, Valladares writes of a Cuban Gulag which rivals the Soviet system in injustice, human degradation, and brutality—in everything, in fact, except in scale...
...4. The Glory of Their Times, new and enlarged edition, 1984, by Lawrence Ritter...
...In Search of the TYoJan War, by Michael Wood...
...In My Time, Robert Strausz-Hupl...
...Jack Limpert is editor of Washingtonian magazine...
...Don Hodel is the Secretary of the Interior...
...Two powerful writers at the top of their form...
...5. The Sweet Science, by A. J. Liebhng...
...The saintly Thomas More, the villainous Paracelsus, and others become different people—not just complex, but intelligible, and none of them perversely wrong...
...2. Stranger in Two Worlds, by Jean Harris (Macmillan, $18.95), an altogether absorbing autobiography of the rise and fall of an interesting woman...
...the 1960s...
...Cat Thomas is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and a commentator for National Public Radio...
...Unfortunately, it has a happy ending...
...History of the People of the United States, by John Bach McMaster, was published between 1883 and 1913 in eight volumes, now obtainable only in a good second-hand book store...
...Neither author is stuffy...
...This book should renew interest in a seminal figure in the intellectual history of freedom...
...Great Contemporaries, by Winston Churchill, which I would select if I went into exile and could take only two books with me...
...which, despite the title, does not concern the male anatomy but rather is a witty and erudite account of how the British parliament works and the trials and tribulations of a young Tory, albeit "wet," M.P...
...A wonderful collection of pieces from Socrates' Apologia to Darrow's defense of blacks in the Sweet case to Justice Jackson as chief prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Trials...
...With the likes of Snake, I, Tina, His Way, and lacocca near the top of the bestseller list, the lessons would seem to be at least as discouraging as they are entertaining...
...The Capitalist Revolution, by Peter L. Berger (Basic Books...
...Edmund Morris won the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt He is at work on a sequel, Theodore Rex...
...The Tolstoy, for one who thought he had read the best of this writer, was a revelation...
...This book is recommended because of its relevance and timehness to the present church/state debate...
...Many readers are apt to be intimidated by its 900 pages, but I would urge them to take the time to read it rather than let it languish on their coffee tables...
...Wind in the Willows is a classic, of course, but try the 1980 Holt Rinehart and Winston hardcover, illustrated by Michael Hague...
...Mortimer J. Adler is chairman of the board of editors of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica...
...It is amazing that a Spaniard writing in 1929 should have written the most penetrating analysis ol the American counterculture ir...
...The drawings are wonderful...
...I perused my home library to pluck the following titles from my recent wanderings in the vineyards of scholarship: Robert A. Caro: The Path to Power: The Early Years of Lyndon Johnson (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982...
...My Father, My Son, by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr...
...An elementary school text that taught subjectivism about morality provoked one of the most readable writers of our century to compose this classic articulation of the idea of objective value...
...This is an insider's daily account of life and decisionmaking in and around 10 Downing Street during the war...
...Now maybe the "conservatives" can turn to trying to solve some problems...
...A powerful apologetic for Christians to think, and thus act, Christianly...
...Some would argue, and indeed some may argue in a certain upcoming political campaign, that we must have not simply a religious America but a Christian America, and that the American past offers solid precedent for such a nation...
...A'e/7 C. Livingstone is president of the Institute for Terrorism and Subnational Conflict in Washington, D.C...
...Possibly the author's sources in the intelligence community do not want the KGB to know that the present custodian of Yankee intelligence is one of the planet Earth's superior beings...
...A very funny and unique experiment in biography...
...He is the author of The Reagans: A Political Portrait (Coward McCann/ and Tklking Back to the Media (Facts on File Books...
...That done, I can more freely confess: I read nonfiction bestsellers...
...A Cast of Killers, by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick...
...Modern Times, by Paul Johnson (Harper & Row, 1983, available in both paper and hardback...
...ALISTAIR COOKE Required Writing, by Philip Larkin...
...And he did many other things, including research on whales (Moby Dick's heartbeat), to earn him an international reputation...
...2) Catherine Drinker Bowen's Miracle at Philadelphia, also being brought back into print...
...This, of course, should be a source of embarrassment...
...and seventies Otherwise the best books i have read this year happened to have been written by neoconservative friends: Gertrude Himmelfarb's Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians (Alfred A. Knopf) and Norman Podhoretz's The Bloody Crossroads (Simon and Schuster...
...And if you really want to have fun, give one to a Japanese business acquaintance...
...Good books to read: The Wise Men, by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas ($22.95, Simon and Schuster...
...I have also manhandled, for the last time I fear, a paperback edition of Mann's Magic Mountain which is now in so many fragments that a sneeze would scatter it...
...Old standbys in this category include Spike Van Cleve's 40 Years' Gatherin's (The Lowell Press, 1977), David Dary's Cowboy Culture (Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), Norman Maclean's The River Runs Through It (University of Chicago Press, 1976), Bill Stockton's Today I Baled Some Hay to Feed the Sheep the Coyotes Eat (Falcon Press, 1983), and my perennial favorite, The Sea of Grass (Alfred A. Knopf, 1937), Conrad Richter's epic clash of cattlemen and homesteaders...
...Peter Hannaford is chairman oj the board of a public relations/public affairs firm...
...Seweryn Bialer's very readable The Soviet Paradox (Alfred A. Knopf, 1986) is an excellent attempt to aid such understanding...
...It is to the law as Carl Sagan's Cosmos is to astronomy and Richard Attenborough's Life on Earth is to biology...
...PETER HANNAFORD Hidden Power, by Maurice Tobin...
...The Search for Christian America, by Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden (Crossway Books, 1983, paper...
...The history of modern times," he writes, "is in great part the history of how that vacuum has been filled...
...Talking Back to the Media, by Peter Hannaford, is more than a manual on how one responds when cornered by Caliban...
...This is the autobiography of one of America's brightest foreign affairs scholars...
...and Sevastapol Sketches by Leo Tolstoy...
...These aren't bestsellers...
...The best Washington book of 1986, this is a long, intelligent look at Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, George Kennan, and Charles Bohlen, establishment figures who shaped American policy after World War II...
...The author, a discerning layman when it comes to archeology, makes a convincing case that the Myceneans overran the Minoans on Crete and did Troy in...
...the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries...
...The Liberal Crack-Up, by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.—analyzes one of the most important political occurrences of our time with wit and deadly serious insight...
...The incredible story of a man who consistently refused to accept defeat, turning humiliation into victory...
...Lincoln mastered it...
...and (3) my own book, A Guidebook to Learning, published last year by Macmillan...
...Surprised by Joy, by C. S. Lewis (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1955, paper and hardcover...
...The Strange Case of Edmund Gurney by Trevor H. Hall (Duckworth, 1980) is a superb piece of retrospective detection about the death of a most attractive late Victorian: Gurney was a man of letters, philosopher, musicologist, and co-founder of the English Society for Psychical Research...
...And at least this middle third is essential reading for anyone bold enough to think he can improve our tomorrows by giving away money today...
...So, like the people who say they read Playboy "for the fiction," I tell myself that I read bestsellers as an education in American cultural sociology...
...Ansel Adams: Classic Images ($29.95, New York Graphic Society...
...That's why you give him for Christmas...
...JACK VALENTI Current: The Reckoning, by David Halberstam, an account of what happens when a great nation (USA) takes quality and meaningful work lightly and magnifies stock prices and shortterm earnings...
...Often, it's the John Updike entry that performs this role— as it is again this year with Roger's Version...
...His exquisitely told tales of ordinary people exude just enough mystery to intrigue and no trace of the fakery characteristic of so much modern fiction...
...OWEN HARRIES I haven't yet read Anthony Kerrigan's new translation of Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses (Notre Dame Press), but its appearance provides a reminder of this rather neglected conservative classic...
...Lewis tells these shocking stories with dignity, grace, and very deep understanding...
...EVAN S. CONNELL Janet Lewis wrote three novels based on famous cases of circumstantial evidence: The Wife of Martin Guerre, The Trial ofSoren Qvist, The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron...
...Jim Reichley's fine book demonstrates the presence and persistence of religious belief throughout our history as a nation...
...As historians, the three dispute the notion that in our past we can find an unambiguously Christian America...
...TERRY EASTLAND I'm incUned to read and recommend books on ethics and religion anyway, but working in the world's largest law office incHnes me even more so, those subjects being ultimately more interesting...
...The admiral gave the order to use Agent Orange in Vietnam, his son fought his way through the poisoned countryside, and then the son came down with two kinds of cancer...
...A useful analysis of the tremendous importance to America of the religious beliefs of its citizens...
...Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis...
...Modern Times, Paul Johnson...
...A new book and a reminiscence of youth wholly different from Thomas's...
...Two weeks in the Soviet Union this summer have made me even more interested in and less capable of understanding how so inefficient and frustrating a society can possibly continue to exist—for example, if the people waiting on two-hour lines to buy, say, dish towels were free to make and sell such things, there would be no need to wait on line...
...The author, for several years the New York Times'^ man in Mexico City, understands our sometimes puzzling neighbors to the south and why the>' are unlike any other people in the Americas...
...William Manchester: The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Visions of Glory, 1874-1932 (Little, Brown, 1983...
...Alistair Cooke is a journalist and broadcaster...
...Robert Shankland, Steve Mather of the National Parks (Alfred A. KnopOThis biography of the first director of the National Park Service provides insights into the life of a man who saw the need for these living museums and the importance of permitting visitors to enjoy them, while protecting them for future generations...
...WILLIAM J. CASEY Street of Joy, by Dominique LaPierre— an inspiring tale of how folks in the depths of Calcutta sustain each other with love and hope...
...Among them are a number of older books...
...A joy to read, and reread...
...Eisenhower: At War 1943-45, by David Eisenhower ($29.95, Random House...
...Lewis may have been muddled about some things, but the Narnia series—in a boxed paperback collection—is a charmer...
...Though Rayner Heppenstall gave the British public some of its best highbrow entertainment through the BBC, where he wrote and produced for over twenty years, in this country he is known only to amateurs of true crime, about which he was expert...
...It is an important book because of the growing cost of crime in America to the taxpayer and to the victims...
...No pretentious piece of feminist self-realization literature...
...3 Decisiori in Philadelphia, by Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier (Random House, $19.95), the best book about the 1787 Convention since Catherine Drinker Bowen's Miracle at Philadelphia...
...Stockman's book is not as good as his next draft would have been...
...As Christians, they reject the idea of a Christian nation and thus a Christian America (they argue that, post-Israel, there can be no "special" nation selected by God for achieving His divine purposes and that God instead works through the church...
...Not that they have been silent: they went in for much breastbeating over Ronald Reagan's Supreme Court nominees and they argue against SDI and aid to the contras with such persistence as to suggest that they believe that our best national defense is a ration of hatpins and slingshots for every man, woman, and child...
...The classic boxing book by the inimitable Liebling...
...Optimism is the besetting disease of all lovers of the arts...
...Reading Ortega on the twentieth century reminds one of Coleridge's description of seeing Edmund Kean act: "like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning...
...Johnson shows that the abandonment of religious belief particularly by intellectuals created a vacuum in the twentieth century...
...hundreds of letters discussing everything from gardening to classical languages to hopes for the nation— all in Jefferson's lucid and elegant prose...
...Here, then, are five for the season: The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis (Macmillan, 1947, available almost anywhere in both paper and hardback...
...Having opened with a righteous reference to the Bible and the Federalists, I might even confess that sometimes I read bestselUng fiction—like Regrets Only, itself a remarkable confession of cultural vacuity...
...Eisenhower: At War, 1943-1945, by David Eisenhower...
...Seventy-six of the best examples of a great photographer's work...
...Richard G. Darman is the deputy secretary of the Treasury...
...Especially interesting is the account of how Averell Harriman pushed Dean Acheson to turn President Lyndon Johnson around on Vietnam in March of 1968...
...Air Force from its start in 1947 to flights into space...
...Now," wrote LiebUng, "I know why a lot of the books that get pubUshed do...
...Lewis's compelling logic transformed my life, as I understood for the first time who Jesus Christ is...
...R. Randolph Richardson is president of the Smith Richardson Foundation in New York HENRY SALVATORI Confiscated Power by HelSne Carrere D'Encausse is undoubtedly one of the most informative and enlightening books that has ever been written about the Soviet Union and its Communist system of government...
...Presidents take their oath on it, whether they read it or not...
...There is no better account of those pivotal 18 months in world history nor of the role of the one man who was indispensable to victory...
...A. James Reichley, Religion in American Public Life (The Brookings Institution...
...Essays, by Lord Macaulay...
...Not so current: Talleyrand, by Duff Cooper, maybe the most fascinating biography of them all, elegantly composed about history's most charming rascal, rogue, diplomat, and political survivor...
...Hall has used uncontested evidence to show how and why, and as he proceeds he gives splendid portraits of a notable group of thinkers...
...William J. Casey is director of the Central Intelligence Agency...
...But Dan Van Ness returns to the legal and moral codes of ancient civilizations and makes a strong case for restitution, not imprisonment, for nonviolent offenders...
...For humor, I laughed myself into paroxysms over Christopher Buckle's The White House Mess (Alfred A. Knopf, 1986)—the funniest book since Mary Cunningham's memoirs...
...The book forces meditation on the necessity of a moral foundation to political life, and ultimately of a religious foundation...
...1 turned once again to RET's tour de force on the subject of liberalism to refresh my memory as to why the pieties of liberal orthodoxy continue to have such a strong grip on some Americans The answers are all there in 232 pages of very lively writing...
...Finally I take the liberty of mentioning The Morning After: American Successes and Excesses 1981-1986 by George Will and Was Einstein Right...
...My own interest in this book is the reminder of how shallow contemporary faith can be and how profound its potential as we are introduced to the thoughts of God's servants of another age...
Vol. 19 • December 1986 • No. 12
