Books for Christmas
BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS An American Spectator tradition continues: Holiday gift suggestions from eminent readers and writers. JOSEPH ALSOP As I grow older, I find myself reading more and...
...Eisenhower at War, by David Eisenhower, Random House: The incredible story of how one man's generous and enduring character held the alliance together for victory in World War II...
...JAMES R. THOMPSON Christmas is a special and traditional time for myself and my family and we certainly enjoy reading some of the classic tales of the season...
...Chronicles of Wasted Time (The Green Stick and The Infernal Grove), by Malcolm Muggeridge...
...however, to truly appreciate its special quality I would suggest reading the original Dickens text...
...George H. Nash, a historian, is the author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 and The Life of Herbert Hooves a multivolume biographyin-progress...
...Republican Party Reptile by P. J. O'Rourke (Atlantic Monthly Books, 1987...
...A compelling study of the Soviet Union by two emigre historians who, with unique sources and insight, freshly examine the nature of the Soviet state and the role of the West in helping to sustain it...
...Drano for clogged minds, as someone once said...
...This is the seventh volume of a "people's history" of the United States...
...Among his earlier tales, I would especially push The Swoop...
...2. Thomas S. Szasz: The Therapeutic State (Prometheus Books, 1984...
...DIANNE FEINSTEIN My recommendations are: 1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy—a brilliant exposition of life in nineteenth-century Russia and European geo-political changes...
...Or Main Street if you prefer, or Dodsworth or Elmer Gantry...
...DA1087 NAME TITLE ADDRESS CITY/STATE/ZIP INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA Quantity CARD NUMBER EXPIRATION DATE THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 45 cover, this is a bargain in both history and literature...
...Everyone who has read those two, which carry the story up to Pearl Harbor, eagerly awaits -the next in the series...
...ROBERT M. GATES Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present, by Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich (Summit Books, 1986...
...This provocative study, written by a man otherwise known for his instinctive optimism, presents a worrisome future in which half a billion people in the free world will face 9.5 billion in the rest of the world...
...BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS An American Spectator tradition continues: Holiday gift suggestions from eminent readers and writers...
...An instructive discussion of the process by which a legend has become widely accepted as fact...
...Time HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, INC...
...Jacques Barzun is a historian and critic...
...Ten Years of Exile: The Memoirs of Madame de Stael, translated by Doris Beik...
...The Homecoming: This original Christmas story later inspired the Waltons series...
...This is a fine analysis of a tragic figure, a man who started as a hero in his early career and ended as an abject failure...
...And the Works of George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax, by far Britain's most interesting politician, but also up to "The struggling for Knowledge hath a Pleasure in it like that of Wrestling with a fine Woman...
...Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse, by Hugh Trevor-Roper (1977...
...PETER BAUER 1. Nigel Barley: The Innocent Anthropologist (Penguin Books, 1986...
...A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson—anything of Mr...
...The autobiography of a remarkable young schizophrenic who managed, through sheer force of will and intellect, to drive herself halfway through an outstanding medical school despite the suicidal siren calls of "the voices...
...Finally, Rowan Greer's Broken Lights, Mended Lives (University of Pennsylvania) is a luminous study of how Christians in the first three centuries tried to work out the imperative of being "in but not of" the world...
...As yet, there is no definitive statement of the independent European peace movement, so Anti politics (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) by Hungarian writer George Konrad, will have to suffice...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 41 PATRICK J. BUCHANAN For history, Modern Times by Paul Johnson...
...Always worth reading is Robert Musil, the great and neglected...
...I am enjoying a book called Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry...
...the slightly bedraggled but shrewd agent, the unrelenting KGB, and excellent local color...
...Weaver, a neoconTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 WHAT IS A REPUBLICAN PARTY REPTILE...
...In Pursuit by Charles Murray (Simon and Schuster, 1988...
...Critics typically say that of course we are all capitalists now, and then return to spinning their socialist dreams...
...This seminal book lives up to its subtitle...
...Henry J. Hyde, a Republican congressman from Illinois, serves on the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees, and is Ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence...
...Political Pilgrims, by Paul Hollander...
...DAVID HOROWITZ My recommendations: Utopia in Power by Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich, a masterful account of what happens when the missionary left is allowed the opportunity to put its compassionate ideas into practice...
...Michael Kinsley's Curse of the Giant Muffins, an incisive, often risible collection by my favorite tough-minded liberal...
...Perelman on acid...
...They did not always work it out very well, which of course supports Greer's point about the pertinence of patristic studies to our little moment in time...
...Here are needed lessons on how Americans' tendencies to be anti-philosophic can leave them prey to ideologues...
...JOSEPH ALSOP As I grow older, I find myself reading more and more of the long works I hurried through when I was young—or at any rate, substantially younger...
...The Russian Tradition, by Tibor Szamuely...
...Now available in soft "ITS IDEOLOGICAL REPERCUSSIONS WILL BE FELT FOR DECADES" Read it now...
...Welcome, Silence, by Carol North, M.D...
...This is good and genuine material...
...Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis...
...Published just a few years ago, Paul Johnson's masterful analysis of twentieth-century history has already become a classic...
...10175 "A chilling account of Stalin's regime cold bloodedly killing 20 million of its own subjects...
...In Pursuit (as in "of happiness") is sort of a humanist approach to the social sciences...
...A history of the world's most staggering genocidal campaign, in which at least 14 million peasants perished...
...I love to wonder about how I would have done if I had been in such-and-such a situation...
...foreign policy...
...GARY L. BAUER I would start with The Birth Dearth, by Ben J. Wattenberg, an analysis of the problems the West will face economically, politically, and socially if free men and women continue to have only 1.8 children per family...
...Not coincidentally, all three are associates of Oliver North...
...But it is filled with oddball words and phrases peculiar to that distinct and isolated corner of the U.S...
...4. Leonard Q. Ross (Leo Rosten): The Education of Hyman Kaplan (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...430 pp...
...Edward H. Crane is president of the Cato Institute...
...1987...
...The Sunday Times of London quite rightly called it "one of the greatest autobiographies of our time...
...Crisis and Leviathan by Robert Higgs (Oxford University Press, 1987...
...521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y...
...or How Clarence Saved England (A Tale of the Great Invasion), and if Ferrol Sam's two autobiographical novels of his boyhood in Georgia, Run with the Horseman and The Whisper of the River, don't grab you by the heart, you don't have a heart to grab...
...A reading of this volume ought to be a required course for budding statesmen...
...Box 217 Depot Street Schenevus, New York 12155 (607) 638-5400 1 P 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 long illness and of her triumph over it against all odds...
...For sheer pleasure, a rereading of Catherine Drinker Bowen's Miracle at Philadelphia, a leap back to college days with a new version of Sir Thomas He rewrote the history of Poland...
...China: Alive in the Bitter Sea, by Fox Butterfield...
...A new edition of his shorter essays and novellas is now available from the German Library...
...It's a historical masterpiece for which there is no exact parallel, and it delights me all the more because it irritates professional historians...
...It is a story that most people are familiar with through television and movie depictions...
...RICHARD W. CARLSON Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, by Derek Freeman...
...This woman's balloon should have been pricked long ago...
...How this could come about is the subject of this sympathetic biography...
...Chicago Tribune "The first major scholarly book on the horrors [of Soviet collec tivization...
...William G. Hyland is editor of Foreign Affairs...
...ORDER FORM ^ Cash/Check ^ VISA ^ MasterCard ^ AM EX Price Total $32.95 (c) $16.95 (p) 1.75 1. Shipping and handling BANK NUMBER (MC) CA, IL, WA Tax Total SIGNATURE Mail to: OPEN * COURT, Attention: Order Department, Box 599, Peru, Illinois 61354...
...Yes Virginia, endless controversies...
...WILLIAM G. HYLAND My first recommendation would be Robert Rhodes James's biography of Anthony Eden...
...And then I never really settled on any particular books, it's just essays and short stories and plays and doggerel of Robert Service and H. L. Mencken and James Thurber...
...This adroit reconstruction of an unsolved murder of 1920 evokes at the same time the color and tone of the decade that followed—postwar gaiety and the reckless determination to enjoy and show off the ability to do it...
...A collection of essays by this acute and relentless thinker on modern psychiatry and the erosion of personal responsibility...
...Here they are: The New Right v. The Constitution by Stephen Macedo (Cato Institute, 1987, revised...
...for an insight into the character of the Soviet Union that cut the deal with Hitler, Stalin's Secret War by Nikolai Tolstoy...
...Established 1947 Steel Rule Dies Silk Screen Printing Die Cutting Silk Screens Garment Imprinting P.O...
...Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants and Their War, by Eric Larrabee (Harper & Row, 1987...
...Lenin's specter still haunts the world...
...Macedo takes Bork, Rehnquist, Meese, and the rest to task for their unprincipled majoritarianism, moral skepticism, and lack of appreciation for the Supreme Court's role in protecting economic liberties...
...Colville's work not only sheds new light on the British effort in World War II, but also provides delightful insights into the most democratic politician of modern times Winston Churchill...
...So closely argued and assiduously documented is his case that it seems few people are willing to take him on...
...LEONARD GARMENT Bed-ridden with the flu when I read William Safire's stupendous Freedom, I finished with bruised ribs...
...Eastern News Distributors, Inc...
...A scholarly and readable monograph dissecting the widely canvassed myth that J. Pierpont Morgan's fortune was founded with the help of a fraudulent transaction in the Civil War...
...He had decided to die, and was crushed by a collapsing funnel...
...O'Rourke has ro be the funniest writer going, and boy does he go...
...Both re-create going to East Africa, which was a peak life experience for me...
...NANCY DICKERSON For over fifteen years, long before the movie was made, my favorite book was Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen...
...Martin's Press...
...I will have another go at Vasily Gross-man's Life and Fate: it is one of those enormous Tolstoyan novels which some like better than I do, but in this case it really is "social realism" about the USSR...
...James R. Thompson is governor of Illinois...
...Washington Post Book World "A comprehensive record of what may stand as the crime of the century...
...You ought to be born to that...
...Joseph Alsop, for many years a syndicated columnist, lives in Washington, D.C...
...He pulls off what was crassly called in my youth an "RF," in this case a kind of literary mooning that mocks pomposity...
...4. Keeping Faith by Jimmy Carter—the first volume of President Carter's memoirs and an excellent account of the Camp David Accords...
...The author, the leading Soviet writer on Hitler's death camps, here devastatingly makes the parallel with Stalinism...
...The first is Manhunt (Jove/Random House), Peter Maas's gripping account of how CIA agent Edwin Wilson sold explosives to Qaddafi...
...Clandestinely written by the Nobel laureate and Solidarity leader...
...John de Crevecoeur (Viking Press...
...Finally, for entertaining and provocative fiction, The Thanatos Syndrome demonstrates once again Walker Percy's ability to dissect American culture and expose it, warts and all...
...Gripping, horrible, necessary...
...Peter Collier's Downriver, a brilliant novel of radical deficiencies and radical excess by my favorite like-minded coauthor...
...The effect on society of Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, first printed in 1928, is almost incalculable...
...The best account yet of leadership at the top in that war...
...Otherwise, Gibbon's Vindication again: wonderfully catty controversy...
...In calling for methodological individualism rather than quantitative analysis, Murray challenges the architects of the welfare state to recognize that the terms and condiEDWARD H. CRANE I'm pleased to recommend five books guaranteed to enlighten your readership...
...While I wouldn't recommend it for general public reading, I personally love to re-read a page or two of The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White...
...The Capitalist Revolution, by Peter L. Berger, outlines fifty propositions about property, equality, and liberty that ought to be part of any conservative's arsenal...
...paper $9.95 —The New Republic At better bookstores or directly from "Carefully researched and OXFORD PAPERBACKS superbly written...
...Conquest has succeeded in restoring [the peasants'] human faces...
...Eaten in small bites, you'll put on weight without getting fat...
...an opportunity to witness a great social revolution in the words of the man who has contributed an heroic and lasting chapter to contemporary history...
...Frank Deford is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated...
...Long overshadowed by Witness, this book of letters and reflections deserves to be rediscovered...
...Evangelicals in America: Who They Are, What They Believe, by Ronald H. Nash (1987...
...And the writing is beautiful...
...he was shot at home, not for some misdeed at the bridge table...
...After all, the Civil War gave us Americans our only real saint, Abraham Lincoln, and our only serious national epic in the bargain...
...The Wise Men by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, because it is the best way to learn how Washington works...
...and a newly published book, Wilderness Sojourn by David Douglas, because if you can't get away from it all, just go sit in a corner and read part of this small volume and it's almost the same thing...
...My favorite Dickens is Bleak House, but I would also recommend one of his lesser known novels, Barnaby Rudge...
...The three pieces on the Hinckley case are likely to be of particular interest to readers of The American Spectator...
...He is also co-author of The Kennedys: An American Drama and The Fords: An American Epic...
...I don't care if everybody assumes (probably correctly) that I'm a perpetual teenager...
...No wonder...
...The Fringes of Power: Ten Downing Street Diaries, by John Colville...
...It provides critical perspective on the perennially topical question: can the Soviet Union overcome its internal crisis...
...Conacher, John Matthews, and Mary S. Millar 'The best-edited and best-annotated political letters in the language.' Michael Foot, The Observer $60.00late John Courtney Murray's thoughts on "The American Proposition...
...This is the best history of the Soviet Union I have read...
...But I also find it very beautiful and very instructive...
...This delightful evergreen gains added interest in the light of bilingual education in American public schools...
...Pity that those cultural anthropologists who knew the extent to which Mead's rep was built on hogwash and self-promotion never had the guts to speak out earlier...
...Robert M Gates is the deputy director of Central Intelligence...
...It was technological hubris and human stubbornness, Captain Smith sailing into ice-fields he knew were there at more than 22 knots...
...Elwell was a famous and prosperous bridge expert...
...It is terrific for people who want a feel for what life is like in a complicated and wildly contradictory society...
...What a path Muggeridge has traveled for over eighty years...
...A Perfect Spy, John le Cane...
...A work of profound (and profoundly pertinent) learning by the new Librarian of Congress...
...FRANK DEFORD I'm delighted to respond to your interesting query, although I must confess I feel like this is one of those tests where they tell you just answer honestly, there are no right-and-wrong answers, but you know your answers are going to be considered wrong anyway...
...In the last year another book comes close to that distinction in my opinion, and that is Beryl Markham's West with the Night...
...It throws into relief the paradox of the respect or even self-abasement with which the West faces African rulers...
...Richard Burt is the United States Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany...
...Dianne Feinstein is mayor of San Francisco...
...Must reading for anyone remotely interested in politics and foreign affairs...
...3. R. Gordon Wasson: The Hall Carbine Affair (1948...
...A person who can't keep a secret "leaks like a basket...
...Oxford University Press —Los Angeles Times Book Review 200 Madison Avenue "Likely to become a classic...
...These are the "perfect" spy novels...
...It is a dramatic and sad story about two very human Revolutionary- figures...
...That's the fun material for me and it contributes fully to my great relaxation and enjoyment...
...Time "Powerful and well-documented...
...Fielding's Tom Jones reads wonderfully and so does most of Dickens...
...The Great Depression of 1990 by Ravi Batra—a little fanciful but something to focus people's attention on a brewing problem...
...I started rereading it as soon as I had finished Foote's three volumes, because this is the unique Japanese national epic...
...for a view of the McCarthy era, I have read nothing better than A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy, by David Oshinsky (crackling good...
...JEFFERSON MORLEY True conservatives, appalled by the way Ronald Reagan and Oliver North traduced the Constitution, ought to read two books about the covert action community...
...ALAN K. SIMPSON I flog myself because I don't feel I have time to burrow into some good books...
...This fellow O'Rourke is funny...
...Then I also love Rudyard Kipling...
...As corn-pelling a book as I ever read, plus it also reveals so much about the human condition...
...Among Wilson's close pals were Richard V. Secord and former high-ranking CIA officials Thomas Clines and Theodore Shackley...
...The exact title is Marlborough, His Life and Times, and it can be obtained in several formats ranging from two to six volumes...
...Caro's eagerly awaited sequel will chronicle a period of even thicker intrigue...
...It was of great use to me in two weeks of meetings with government brass and in conversations with ordinary Chinese...
...The Discoverers, by Daniel Boorstin, Vintage: One of the most remarkable books of this age...
...What was the final tune played by the band...
...A kind of fish, I said...
...A new look at how a central element of the present Soviet system was established, and the legacy...
...The depredations of this odious crew are further chronicled in The Crimes of Patriots (Norton) by the Wall Street Journal's brilliant investigative reporter, Jonathan Kwitny...
...Richard W Carlson, a journalist and former mortgage banker, is director of the Voice of America...
...Gary L. Bauer is Assistant to the President for Policy Development...
...Drawing heavily on diaries and other contemporary documents, it is a lively account of how Americans have lived over the centuries of nationhood...
...For one thing, he loves Roosevelt...
...If you have time for only part of it, read the chapter entitled "Morningside": the autobiographical account of a conservative young man who entered college in 1920, found his spiritual and intellectual worldview corroded by relativistic secular liberalism, and ended up a committed Communist...
...The character of Magnus Pym, the flamboyant con man, is unforgettable...
...Another of my great loves in readingand literature are any and all books about art and artists from the "West" of Frederic Remington to the "East" of Jackson Pollock...
...I finished this book on the plane to Peking...
...In addition, favorite books are A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, because it makes you laugh out loud...
...Wiebe with J.B...
...Better still, she has written a unique and moving "inside account" of a nearly twenty-yearliggr Greenleaf Steel Rule Die Corp...
...If you doubt that "truth is stranger than fiction," read this riveting volume...
...O'Rourke is not just hilarious, his political satire is perceptive and devastatingly on target...
...I found this first volume of Manchester's biography a fascinating and intimate insight into the early years of perhaps the West's greatest statesman of this century...
...Powerful, pithy, poignant, puckish, highly enjoyable stuff for me...
...The New Left assault against academic freedom and intellectual integrity during the 1960s, recalled here by Bloom, parallels today's ideological campaign to pressure scientists to boycott our Strategic Defense Initiative research programs...
...Republican Party Reptile, by P. J. O'Rourke...
...This is highDctane wit, S.J...
...In any event, in no particular order: Alive by Piers Paul Read...
...250 West 55th Street New York, New York 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 ROBERT CONQUEST The books I shall be reading are a bit unChristmassy in one way or another...
...All of Philip Larkin's poetry —High Windows and three or four other slender volumes—spare, evocative, modern, pellucidly clear, and immensely moving...
...In addition to its other virtues, reading aloud provides a pretty exacting test of the quality of literary craftsmanship...
...We had just returned from vacation in Maine and he had heard the caretaker order a "cod" of wood for winter (known as "wintah...
...It is a touching, historic portrayal of a pre-commercial Christmas as it existed during the years of the Great Depression...
...Among our favorites are: A Christmas Carol: One of the truly classic tales of Christmas, this has been one of my personal favorites since I was a small boy...
...Leonard Garment is a Washington attorney...
...Twas the Night Before Christmas: I don't think any Christmas would be complete without at least one reading of this wonderful poem...
...The clear, concise account (250 pp...
...The reason is that it deals with a subject which most Americans find difficult and therefore tend to ignore...
...The same rules apply to Shelby Foote's massive narrative history of the Civil War...
...News & World Report...
...The pioneering modern narrative of the disaster remains Walter Lord's A Night to Remember (1955), written when many of the survivors could still be interviewed...
...2. Middlemarch by George Eliot (pen-name of Mary Ann Evans)—one of the great nineteenth-century English-language classics...
...Payne's biography of Lenin holds the man out to clear view, separates him from legend, and brings him almost alive on paper...
...I think it embodies the true excitement of the Holiday season for young boys and girls and I always enjoy telling it to my nine-year old daughter, Samantha...
...FORREST McDONALD For openers, let me put in a plug for the old-fashioned practice of having the father or mother of the household read aloud to the family, which in my household we do every night...
...Those who are interested in the course of foreign affairs would do well to read it and ponder...
...He fits the same bill in many ways...
...It should be must reading for anyone still confused aboutthe nature of totalitarianism...
...My second recommendation is Edward Luttwak's book, Strategy...
...It concludes in the 1940s...
...Yes, a Lord Jim, but there is a "Lordite" faction...
...As though war and peace were not subject enough, Weigel is really proposing an imaginative reappropriation of Roman Catholic social thought across the board...
...Percy fans will find this one his best yet...
...A fascinating history of the settlement of Australia by English convicts...
...Cold Friday, by Whittaker Chambers (1964...
...Murray is at once brilliant, passionate, and persuasive—perhaps the most important social scientist in the latter half of the twentieth century...
...This little book is a lucid survey of a religious-cultural phenomenon whose ultimate impact will affect us all...
...Freeman demonstrates beyond doubt that many of Mead's observations about Samoan society were wholly wrong, some of them preposterously so, and her conclusions ridiculous...
...Her perceptive remembrances of illustrious contemporaries—Talleyrand, Czar Alexander, all the Bonapartes—are insightful, stimulating, and fun to read...
...It is an essay that remains eerily relevant today...
...GEORGE J. MITCHELL 1. The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes...
...Peter Berger's The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions about Prosperity, Equality and Liberty (Basic) has also received wide attention, but has not provoked the debate that is needed...
...For fastest service, call toll free 1-800/435-6850...
...Most beguiling book I ever read...
...It was a neat story...
...Modern Times, by Paul Johnson...
...Overwhelmed for a time by inner chaos, she was eventually cured almost overnight following experimental treatment and has now completed her medical education...
...This nineteenth-century French nobleman's travels in Russia paralleled Alexis de Tocqueville's journeys in America, and like Democracy in America, Custine's memoir presents remarkably acute and enduring insights...
...I laughed so hard reading this book that my armchair needs reupholstering...
...Ernesto Betancourt, who runs the highly effective Radio Marti, touted this book to me in a conversation about Alexander Cockburn and the crowd at the Nation...
...still, for that matter...
...New York, NY 10016 —The Wall Street Journal 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 Malory's Le Morte DMrthur, and an assortment of spy novels (some masquerading as non-fiction...
...3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck—a riveting, heart-breaking story of farmworkers' lives in California...
...The whole question of strategy, military strategy in particular, has to be considered by those who are involved in the conduct of high policy, yet inevitably we become mired down in tactics and gamesmanship...
...Robert Conquest's most recent book is The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (Oxford University Press...
...Lewis simply had America right better than anyone else...
...It is a masterpiece of historical detective work...
...A Little Revenge: Benjamin Franklin and His Son, by Willard Randall (Little, Brown, 1984) is about the tortured relationship between Franklin and his illegitimate son William...
...This is the best book I know on the subject of why the Soviets behave as they do...
...Richard John Neuhaus is director of the Rockford Institute Center on Religion and Society and author, most recently, of The Catholic Moment...
...Berlin Game, Mexico Set, and London Match, by Len Deighton...
...Not the "perfect" spy novel, but a brilliantly written novel of postwar British social mores...
...JEFFREY HART When the H.MS Titanic sank on that freezing night in April 1912, it became an instant metaphor, or rather multiple and proliferating metaphors...
...If America is to overcome the deepening moral and spiritual disorder whose ravages we experience daily, the exertions of evangelical Christians will be crucial...
...HENRY J. HYDE The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill Visions of Glory, 1874-1932, by William Manchester (Little, Brown...
...A reminder of the importance of senior military officers willing "to speak truth to power" and rich in imagination, boldness, and savvy on battlefields at home and abroad...
...Against All Hope, by Armando Valladares, is yet another message from the belly of the beast...
...Forrest McDonald is professor of history at the University of Alabama and author of Novus Ordo Seclorum (University Press of Kansas...
...I also adored Lorna Doone better than any book I read when I was a kid, but I don't even know who wrote it, and, as far as I know, nobody reads Lorna Doone anymore...
...Story after story of men and women who found new places, concepts, ideas, things...
...A surprisingly well-written and intelligentanalysis of the social roots of rock 'n' roll...
...It goes with the territory, but now that I have slipped into minority status I should have a little more time to dabble in the pleasure of recreational reading...
...Jonathan Goodman, The Slaying ofJoseph Bowne Elwell (St...
...A fellow who's growing old is "getting over in your book...
...Eloquently and simply portrays brave citizens pitted against political tyranny...
...Musil's sublime masterpiece, "The Perfecting of a Love," is included...
...It sounds like a bar...
...The Bible: An obvious choice for obvious reasons...
...But given Trilling's temperament, it is safe to say an Oliver North would have caused him to puke...
...We could use more Republicans like him...
...Hugh Sidey is Time magazine's Washington contributing editor...
...The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom...
...Christopher Buckley author of The White House Mess THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS DISTRIBUTED BY LITTLE BROWN AND C 0 . 43 tions of their "solutions" to poverty often preempt the conditions necessary for human happiness...
...GEORGE H. NASH Fire in the Minds of Men, by James H. Billington (1980...
...One hopes that someday this study in courage and faith will be required reading in American and Cuban schools...
...The trip begins in schizophrenic socialism, continues through lots of turns and detours, and ends with Muggeridge as one of the most convincing Christians of our time...
...He looked confused...
...Patrick J. Buchanan was director of White House Communications in 1985-1986...
...Now two scholars have produced a "life" that covers the man's entire perilous odyssey and shows him at work in both America and France...
...5. All the Sherlock Holmes mysteries by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle...
...And just what were John Jacob Astor's intentions in the turmoil around the lifeboats...
...The best political biography in years...
...It's a dandy...
...The deep-thinking French exile Germaine de Stael, who got the boot personally from Napoleon after publication of her masterpiece, On Germany, was tough and smart...
...RICHARD BURT Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, by Paul Johnson...
...Nancy Dickerson is a reporter and commentator for Fox Television News...
...The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, by Robert Conquest (Oxford University Press, 1986...
...How Roosevelt selected his senior commanders and, together, they brought the nation to victory...
...RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS The formidable title aside, it is an eminently readable book: Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace by George Weigel (Oxford...
...Finally, my only exotic recommendation is The Tales of the Heike, in two volumes, translated by Hiroshi Katagawa and Bruce T. Tsuchida...
...This book won't teach you any weird pronunciations...
...Alan K Simpson is a United States senator from Wyoming...
...It was the smash-up of the Belle Epoque, the glory of Europe vanished forever, soon to be confirmed by the greater smashup on the battlefields...
...These volumes of scribblings and notes from remarkable conversations and encounters with Baruch, the Webbs, Orwell, Wodehouse, and Nehru are first rate...
...Earthy, robust, tender, and real...
...The Suicidal Corporation by Paul Weaver (Simon and Schuster, 1988...
...Every Real Thought on Every Real Subject Knocks the Wind Out of Somebody or Other...
...Brilliantly written, it is not an easy read, but a rewarding one...
...This book is an important tool for the armchair shrink who wants to poke around in the tangled psyches of those Western intellectuals who fuss and drool over left-wing dictatorships...
...I like Maine a lot and I like the way Mainers -talk...
...This soon to be published book is a brilliant critique of the bureaucratic corporation and how its senior executives are more adept at politics than entrepreneurship...
...The astonishing story of an eccentric English scholar (1873-1944) who lived in China for decades and gained a reputation as a distinguished Sinologist—only to be revealed long after his death to have been a brilliant forger and mountebank...
...Time and Again by Jack Finney...
...The same goes for Wallace Grey's Columbia lectures—Homer to Joyce—another portable pleasure, a full course Humanities dinner...
...Fill your pockets with his poems, and you'll never be alone...
...Konrad is anti-Communist, pro-human rights, and anti-Cold War, a combination of ideas desperately needed in U.S...
...Not the one in the wheelchair, the good one who killed bears...
...If, after Walter Lord's searching discussions, you need more, well, there are two fine new books: Michael Davie's Titanic: The Death and Life of a Legend (Knopf), and Titanic: Destination Disaster: The Legend and Reality by John P. Eaton and Charles A. Haas (Norton), both of which add fascinating new stuff, the latter also a wealth of new photographs...
...I then blend those readings to complement my love of seeing and enjoying various galleries and museums wherever I may be...
...But the reader should be sure to reject any format which achieves compression by small print...
...MORTIMER ZUCKERMAN Freedom by William Safire—a brilliant perspective on the first two years of the Civil War from the point of view of the politics of the North...
...Yet, I have no one to blame but myself —and yet they send me home at night with a "full bale of stuff...
...Higgs provides a compelling case that government takes advantage of crises such as depressions and war to greatly expand its power and scope of activities, using the current "emergency" to justify its actions...
...The Path to Power: The Early Years of Lyndon Johnson, by Robert Caro...
...Johnson's is compelling and informative...
...The night lives on indeed, and we have yet to have a full report from the gentlemen who have been on the ocean bottom, exploring the wreck itself with high-tech equipment...
...The lilt and the language of it is just my style...
...Contrary to some published reports, there's no need to revise your list of oxymorons by deleting "conservative humorist...
...Weigel, president of the James Madison Foundation in Washington, D.C., is a bright young scholar attempting to revive interest and understanding in the The Letters of BENJAMIN DISRAELI Volume 3: 1838 -1841 Edited by M.G...
...turned-libertarian, draws on his days as a PR flack at Ford to paint a bleak picture of corporate America's ability (and desire) to defend itself...
...Ignore the clueless negative review in TAS and buy this book...
...Anyone interested in the present turmoil in the Catholic Church should read this book...
...Finally, I would suggest Lincoln Steffens's Autobiography, which in my view is the classic in that genre...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 47...
...The Titanic was the British Empire, Vietnam, even socialism, rich in endless meanings...
...Gay Wilson Allen and Roger Asselineau, St...
...As Mark Krupnik's fine study, Lionel Trilling (Northwestern University), demonstrates, Trilling is far more interesting than some of his putative neoconservative admirers know...
...This magisterial volume traces the rise of the secular religion of revolution---"the amphetamine of the intellectuals"—from the era of Robespierre to the era of Lenin...
...The book has stirred, deservedly, a lively debate, much to the discomfiture of prelates and academics who are embarrassed by the tradition to which they are pledged...
...Similarly, A. E. Houseman's Selected Prose: who can resist "Having small literary culture they are not revolted by illiteracy, having slight knowledge of grammar they are not revolted by solecism, having no sequence of ideas they are not revolted by incoherency, having nebulous thoughts they are not revolted by nonsense...
...Now he has written the extraordinary story of his life...
...Murray's long-awaited follow-up to Losing Ground turns out to be well worth the wait...
...We are proud to be a part of The American Spectator each month...
...and for pleasure, a re-reading of The Temper of Our Time by Eric Hoffer...
...Also, keep an eye out for Buchanan's newest book, to be published by Little, Brown...
...A most entertaining and informative account of an anthropologist's experiences in Cameroon...
...it's a very satisfying experience...
...Lord Bauer is professor emeritus at the London School of Economics and author, most recently, of Dissent on Development (Harvard...
...David Horowitz is the former editor of Ramparts magazine and currently codirector of the Second Thoughts Project...
...He won't be forgotten," said Khrushchev (speaking also of Marx and Engels) "until shrimp learn to sing...
...It certainly typifies the love and caring which has so long been associated with this time of year...
...Discussion...
...Out of Step by Sidney Hook, a merciless chronicle of the intellectual frontier guards of the same social experiment...
...Khrushchev clearly missed the mark on Engels but he was right otherwise...
...Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock 'n' Roll, by Ed Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, and Ken Tucker...
...That's a real pleasure and one of the greatest of treats for me...
...Also, students would be attracted to his name...
...In Illinois, 1-800/892-6831...
...Edward L. Rowny is Special Advisor to the President and Secretary of State for Arms Control Matters...
...When we lived in California, one of my sons asked me what a cod was...
...Must reading for conservatives who haven't yet turned their brains over to the neocons...
...So I recommend, first, any well-printed, complete edition of Churchill's life of his great ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough...
...But even if Berger's opponents are not up to debating him, The Capitalist Revolution will long serve as an authoritative reference...
...This book deserves to be read by anyone concerned over the seemingly inexorable growth of government in the twentieth century...
...I wonder if it's still around...
...His concluding thought is even more applicable today than when written in the 1830s: "I don't blame the Russians for being what they are, I blame them for pretending to be what we in the West are...
...Szamuely, better than anyone else, develops the historical roots and cultural traditions which go to make up the character of today's Soviets...
...Almost anything by Wodehouse written after 1918 will please, and though it is charming fluff it is also as skillfully written as anything one is likely to find in the English language...
...The Life and Death of Lenin, by Robert Payne...
...This little known story provides a somewhat different view of one of America's most extraordinary citizens, whose son rose to become Royal Governor of New Jersey, and as a loyalist earned the lasting enmity of his famous father...
...HUGH SIDEY Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass, by John Madson, Houghton Mifflin: The story of the real reason we have a farm problem...
...THE RPR AGENDA: ^ aerobics ^ taxation without tax loopholes ^ jewelry on men 1111 government interference in private affairs (unless the government brings over extra girls and some ice) IN FAVOR OF: ^ guns, drugs, fast cars ^ free love (if our girlfriends don't find out) ^ a firm stand on the Middle East (raze buildings, burn crops, plow the earth with salt, and sell the population into bondage) "REPUBLICAN PARTY REPTILE is hilarious...
...a land so rich that it grew greed along with abundance...
...The Power of Politics by William H. McNeal—a forceful perspective on history seen through the changes in military technology...
...So get sick and read Safire...
...Berger demonstrates the causal connection between capitalism, political democracy, and individual autonomy...
...Congratulations on your 20th Anniversary...
...The Letters of An American Farmer used to be in the Everyman Library and one could enjoy the travels, observations, and patriotic fervor of this French-American explorer, soldier, and diplomat...
...Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger...
...Often times we forget why we celebrate the holiday of Christmas...
...A devastating indictment of the ominous current in conservative judicial thought known as "judicial restraint...
...Austrian novelist of the early twentieth century...
...P. J. O'Rourke's Republican Party Reptile, an equally rewarding collection by my favorite loose-minded conservative...
...He convincingly makes a case for the demise of the corporate state...
...This is one of the best books to appear in this country in a very long time...
...is a delight...
...Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace, by George Weigel (Oxford, 1987...
...George I Mitchell is a United States senator from Maine...
...2. America Enters the World, by Page Smith...
...Last year he brought the discussion up to date with the sophisticated The Night Lives On (Morrow...
...Mortimer Zuckerman is editor-in-chief of U.S...
...Buy this, store it in your cuddy, and pull it out for a read of a snowy evening...
...Margaret Mead was the American Lysenko and Freeman proves it...
...It is the only reliable narrative history I have run across, and it is worth all the time the three huge volumes take to read in order to get an overall picture of what happened...
...This collection of essays ought to be handed out on campuses to recruit more neocon-libertarian-centrist-genuine liberals like O'Rourke to the cause...
...Thoughtful and vivid, Johnson's book is invaluable for understanding the complex and perilous age that began with World War I. There is in my Opinion no better history of our recent past...
...O'Rourke is a closet libertarian who shares not only Mencken's wit, but his hatred of the state as well...
...Maine Lingo, by John Gould (and the editors of Down East magazine...
...Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr...
...Lionel Trilling is too often taken, by detractors and admirers alike, as being merely a founding father of neoconservativism...
...Professor Freeman's book is decades late but valuable nonetheless...
...Was Captain Lord (no relation) of the nearby Californian, who could have rescued everybody but chose to wait until morning, a villain...
...There's more excitement in these pages than in the chronicles of James Bond...
...EDWARD L. ROWNY Journey for Our Time, by the Marquis de Custine...
...Jeffrey Hart is a nationally syndicated columnist and author, most recently, of From This Moment On (Crown...
...The book is truly weighty...
...Jefferson Morley is the Washington editor of the Nation magazine...
...When I was growing up, everybody was either influenced by the Catcher in the Rye or The Fountainhead and luckily for me I couldn't get through the first chapter of the latter...
...Answer: not "Nearer My God to Thee," but a dance hall tune known as "Autumn...
...JACQUES BARZUN Gertrude Himmelfarb, The New History and the Old (Harvard Press) is a series of trenchant essays that make clear the changes not merely in the writing of history but in the social, moral, and intellectual attitudes of the authors and the public they address—all this in truly elegant prose...
...Especially interesting is the authors' discussion of how black rhythm and blues influenced the high point of rock—the British bands in the mid-1960s...
...He is always wry and entertaining, and never boring...
...This crisply written and scholarly portrayal of one of the darkest and most complex scalawags ever spawned by the New Deal is superb...
Vol. 20 • December 1987 • No. 12
