Books for Christmas
BOOKS- FOR CHRISTMAS Once again, bipartisan gift suggestions for the Holidays from eminent readers and writers. WICK ALLISON Redford is making this into a movie Allison (Delacorte) and_ The Coming...
...Kenneth M Duberstein is Chief of Staff to the President...
...Aiiall v sibly about a Parisian physician's strug- :---Iii , -1-_-_---_-_:.---- .- 11r- -4 - -...- ,.., k ,, N _,_, ,, - - ---- . -'1 r i' N ''---"''-- 7.' `,,'N^ :. , $v , r-;:',1 k I 1 „i i crisp new copy of, say, the Device Good gle to build his dream home on the i-------n...
...I defy any human to put this book down...
...Watch it, though: this guy thinks inflation is a good thing (he imagines it expropriates the rich when all it really does is bail out government for a while), and in all those pages he can't explain how a supposedly deflationary Fed gave us the inflation of the 1970s...
...It is actually about i -..:::: --- - = ---_---,--___ - s,-- --;.--c...
...He writes a Monday column in USA Today and has written three books...
...and publisher , -d is published in this century—and thank- months before I opened it...
...His sketches of persons he has known are particularly skillful, blending as they do description, tribute, and digressions about life, love, and literature...
...Lynn takes a familiar life and gives it fresh interest, demonstrating the high quality of Papa's art, the strengths and weaknesses of his embattled character, and his every tic...
...A funny, touching, and charming account of growing up in wartime America and learning to put a cheerful face on loneliness and fear...
...The title of one of his later tales which became a well-known film, The Bride Wore Black, suggests the formula of upside down perception, but Woolrich did not work to formula...
...Blunders and thievery, sexual oddity and bizarre poverty and dignity...
...Fitzgerald chronicles the romanticism, recklessness, manners, morals, and lost dreams of a generation that seems all too modern...
...Battle...
...These assumptions continue to unite politicians from Ronald Reagan to Edward Kennedy and certainly Bush and Dukakis...
...fully republished in the last year or in the morning when I closed it...
...There are many, many splendid pictures (most of them in color), photos, maps, and diagrams on which to feast the eye when not reading the encyclopedic new text by Robert J. Courtine, food editor of Le Monde...
...The autobio of the Miami Herald's ace crime reporter...
...He captures the spirit of the New Deal era by focusing on individuals, particularly Thomas Corcoran ("Tommy the Cork") and Ben Cohen, both of whose private papers Lash mined to good result...
...each volume available hardbound, $13.95...
...But note his defense of the seeming redundancies of legal prose...
...A remarkable, almost unbelievable, story...
...I've read both Cohn books and this one is the definitive treatment...
...Just published by Villard...
...E.B...
...Just as the imposition of reparations far beyond Germany's ability to pay contributed to the rise of fascism in the Weimar Republic, so are current debt obligations, which many Third World countries are unable at current rates of interest to meet, likely to contribute to the demise of democracy in Latin America and elsewhere around the world...
...2. Finest Hour (1939-1941) and Road to Victory (1941-1945) by Martin Gilbert...
...It's good that he did...
...14.95 each...
...pages, $17...
...4...
...Chris- of National Review Christine Allison s his wife...
...Nothing more needs to be said...
...BOB GREENE Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank...
...The story of Mike Milken, who really ran the show at Drexel Burnham...
...ERIC BREINDEL Three new books, all works of nonfiction, would make good Christmas gifts for politically minded friends...
...Wesleyan, 1988...
...Merry Christmas...
...Samuel Hynes, Flights of Passage (Naval Institute Press, 1988...
...The Stories of F Scott Fitzgerald...
...Sir Ernest Gowers: The Complete Plain Words (Godine, 1988...
...Add to this Conversion: A Spiritual Journey by the sinner come home to God but always as a literary man, Malcolm Muggeridge...
...A searing account of the Cambodian holocaust from the perspective of a survivor whose personal testimony about the tragic fate which befell his family and his people has earned it a prominent place in the long and tragic literature of man's inhumanity to man...
...Stephen J. Solarz is a Democratic congressman from Brooklyn, New York...
...Swimming Pool Operation and F4 / 2 aiii okot( .1, /IA iic\,,'',3,ic,4—i _ 4,,_ , , . ...,--: ....„ ,, , = ' 1, 1 vi 111 1,,, r _ t' ,,,,,‘,,,iii Iv_ 3..._)-(,:,,i,,rt...
...If you share my annoyance with so many contemporary novels—with their indulgent focus on the adulterous adventures of anguished academics and advertising men—then this red-blooded masterpiece will remind you why we once thought fiction represented a writer's highest calling...
...JAMES M. BUCHANAN I remain bemused by our willingness to publish, review, and read fact as fiction when, at the same time, we refuse to acknowledge fact as fact...
...My favorite is his first, Appointment in Samarra, which describes the human condition under contrasting circumstances, and gives one greater insight into the compartments in which people place themselves—often to their own disadvantage...
...w,„‘„s1 , , disaster, neurosis, courage, persever- ;1------.„;:-,,: ,/,', ,,'' -----7- ---_:__- _--_- __17...
...A food book beyond compare: the new Larousse Gastronomique edited by Jenifer Harvey Lang (Crown, $50.00, 1193 pages...
...Think of him as the man who made the modern day robber barons...
...This book will fry your eyes off...
...Though by no means written as expose, Rollyson explodes the mythology Hellman created about herself...
...I also enjoyed The Fords, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz...
...I have read many books about the Civil War but never one written so compellingly and so comprehensively in one volume...
...The irony is that television news, which sometimes comes across as stridently anti-business, is herein depicted as an offending business in its own right, devoid of character and scruples...
...you know you're the best at what you've already mastered...
...i ,§ --- i lis,) _ _ -,- 1'16, . 44,,i, a- I .„„„, 0 , , , . Ifi,/,?...2,:',' ;;;,, ,,::„:.,:ri...
...Then there is John B. Judis's biography of Bill Buckley, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives...
...There's nothing books available from the U.S...
...Jacobs sets the stage nicely...
...The film was good but the book is even better...
...31, 1900...
...By avoiding the experimentalist trap while adapting classical exposition to her own highly original ends, Miss O'Connor offers in her work a way around the post-modernist literary bog that has deadheaded literary fiction at the present time...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell,Jr...
...Left absolutely alone in her thinking day to day, she is thrown back upon Wittgenstein's dictum that the real problem is not philosophical matter itself but our "knotted understanding" of things...
...Noble, profound, and incomparably eloquent, this great novella is worth re-reading every year...
...Dandelion Wine...
...Huffington does the considerable service of relating Picasso to the cultural and political forces and values that make him more interesting than is sometimes thought and more admirable than is frequently understood...
...This is a book that certainly does not solve the problems of South Africa but gives substantial facts about which all responsible American citizens should become aware...
...He demonstrates that—contrary to her claims in Scoundrel Time—Hellman was actually a member of the Communist Party in the 1930s...
...A lot of books about vast, troubled, shrinking General Motors are being assembled in a lot of word processors just now, but I'll be surprised if any surpasses Albert R. Lee's unheralded Call Me Roger, a fascinating, intelligent...
...Amble back to the days when one Washington gentleman might address another (Adams's friend John Hay in this 1893 instance) "Dear Heart...
...Faulkner himself is, of course, stalking larger prey—writing of man and nature, a boy's coming of age, and the gift—and the curse—of the American earth...
...is the Editor-in-Chief of The American Spectator...
...Former Commerce Department official Clyde Prestowitz's Trading Places (Basic Books, 1988) is eloquent testimony to what happens when a well-meaning public official, armed with these assumptions about the free market, free trade, and the open door, confronts the wreck of the American semiconductor industry at the hands of the sagacious and statist Japanese...
...This modest volume does an excellent job of summarizing and interpreting the ideas that have guided and beset the Western world since Descartes and Newton...
...Govern 1. The Story of San Michele by Alex s...
...This brief book is probably the best available treatment of one of history's most troubling questions...
...Syndicated columnist Bob Greene's new book, Homecoming, will be published in January by G. P Putnam's Sons...
...11 , ' 1 ,, , ,, .,,i,` 4,, , ''''' . , 'Hi 11 1 ,v4' Perspectives John PhiT S of what it means to be a brother—and ,(54...
...Exactly one hundred years ago this remarkable work, one of the great bergs of English literature, was published by Cambridge University Press—and disappeared almost at once except from the shelves of Arabists and connoisseurs of the language until its reissue by Cambridge in 1921, with an introduction by T. E. Lawrence who had found inspiration both as adventurer and writer in it...
...Wilder's account of a frontier girlhood spent in the wilds of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Missouri, and the Dakota Territory in the 1860s, seventies, and eighties is a literary masterpiece, as well as an invaluable historical document...
...The existential loneliness of Giacometti's Parisian dog has a major rival across the English channel in the series of dog paintings also executed in the early 1950s by Francis Bacon...
...The Killer Angels...
...For two reasons: (1) Because this is as good as nonfiction writing gets, and (2) because it offers a hint as to why Wolfe decided to try his hand at fiction...
...news...
...Your entire wine cellar would be in peril...
...The ones I like best: Todd Gitlin's intelligent Years of Hope, Days of Rage and Albert Gold-man's relentless, iconoclastic Lives of John Lennon...
...Ah well, begin with Hardball...
...Michael Shaara provides as compelling an account of the Battle of Gettysburg as one can hope to find in fact or fiction...
...4. The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes...
...N m...
...Dave Barry is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald and the author, most recently, of the collection Dave Barry's Greatest Hits (Crown...
...Scott exposes the Abolitionists (some preachers) who supported the terrorist/murderer John Brown (now you know why the New York Times people went bananas when they originally published this book and then read it...
...Larry King's nightly TV (CNN) and radio (Mutual) shows are watched and listened to by 10 million Americans...
...It was 4:30 enlivened your own childhood...
...KENNETH M. DUBERSTEIN I would recommend Modern Times, by Paul Johnson, because it offers a good perspective not only on the events of our century, but also on the forces that shaped it...
...A book I am certainly looking forward to reading is Barry Goldwater's Goldwater...
...Stuart C. Irby, Jr...
...Best thriller since Red Dragon, which he also wrote, back in 1981 (out in paperback...
...One of the most affect- ' 3i' 'P lilti.//, '---'-'4%*------ --7------"'>-____ --- -'.----- - - i'T'14):,: Ai'li!!0 ., ' IWO...
...That sort of delightful nonsense...
...For numerous reasons, it seems that humanity would be served well if this book were to be read again by those of us who first encountered it years ago—and, perhaps more important, to be read for the first time by new generations who have probably never heard of it...
...In Martin Gilbert's monumental eight-volume biography of Winston Churchill, these two books about the Prime Minister during the Second World War are probably the most magnificent and memorable of them all...
...A retired professor is urged by his ,", -, ' /- - , , , ,,,,,,,,,,, , , , i, illialik '',::- :'children to set down in writing some of the stories he had so often told them --, -'--_, ---=----- _ _. , i' ,,, --/,', iji ) ,-,,,,,:o : _tb:: - _! - ' iv...
...for that "special somea son...
...Paul H. Weaver, John M Olin Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of The Suicidal Corporation (Simon and Schuster/Cato...
...He also proves that Hellman's "Julia" was a work of fiction—again, contrary to her own claims...
...his further ex- adulthood to narrow into slits of suspipose Spectator readers live, deserve a plorations into the sociology of ant- cion every time they watch the evening little variety, especially when excellent dom will captivate you...
...t :2.',,,,,,C.,iiiki., ..!-----------: „. pages, $18...
...His courage, physical as well as mental, and his almost Christlike dignity in moments of crisis, imparts an urgency to his book that any number of Lawrence's camel charges and train up-blowings fail to generate...
...i-7...
...Add to these selections the increasing flow of materials from TAS, and the growing number of centers, institutions, think-tanks, which provide islands of sanity in a "Don't Worry—Be Happy" world...
...Harvard University Press, $150.00 for the three-volumeset)-2,350 pages in all...
...7...
...The 'Little House' Boxed Set: Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, Farmer Boy, On the Banks of Plum Creek, By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years, The First Four Years, by Laura Ingalls Wilder (Harper & Row, paperbound, $30...
...paper...
...With crisp, powerful, and elegant arguments, the authors advance the deceptively simple notion that anti-Semitism is generated by those same essential elements of Jewish belief and behavior that have guaranteed the survival of the people of Israel over the centuries...
...TERRENCE M. SCANLON For some nuts and bolts studies of why deregulation works, I suggest The Doomsday Myth by Charles Maurice and Charles W. Smithson...
...Evidence that the suffering was not limited to the nice guys and the winners...
...N 0 ' , I , ' friend or loved one on Christmas bestseller (number one on the New ; , "W:::.7.7 , trek...
...The battle scene's description and dialogue are so rich and real that Lee, Longstreet, and Chamberlain will remain with you for a lifetime...
...Christmas is a time to put away ton (Nick Lyons Books...
...f0/', ,---„,-, %„-, -- ,i,pi,., -,,was written at the suggestion of a _;;;:ii:‘ ,t,;94,,e,,,, _, _i...
...Doughty, who believed that the English language had declined precipitously from the days of Spenser and the Tyndale Bible, uses both archaic words and words archaically...
...The Discoverers...
...And the late Prof...
...After reading it we ap20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 preciate anew Papa's skills...
...CHILTON WILLIAMSON, JR...
...141...,,:&,„,„ir , , morning when he or she excitedly tears York Times list for that year) is Osten...
...The sixties having been an era of self-serving self-betrayal, it's fitting (if still dismaying) that these books put down their subject in order, as it seems to me, to glorify their participant-authors...
...And yet, he got Arabia and its people on paper, as also no one else, before or since—while enduring physical hardship and, as an "infidel," the constant threat of violent death...
...News & World Report...
...How anyone can read this and not be very upset is beyond me...
...i'C...
...JOHN LOFTON The Book of Romans in the New Testament...
...This is a book about the extraordinarily able, often eccentric people who ran the New Deal agencies and formed FDR's kitchen cabinet...
...Why the Jews?: The Reason for Anti-Semitism, by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin (1983...
...quite like the Or, look on the face of a e, \-z----- --* - .;,.,__,,,,-..*-,..,- - - :_;;11.1,,--- ..ilh, ,'' .. 0-'--,N : i 4 - , ;i...
...George F. Will is a nationally syndicated columnist...
...And after a long day in the bureaucracy, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is just what the doctor ordered...
...He begins with the title v - -- __ ^ , -. ,,, i 1 0 „,i, t , , , j...
...South Africa: The Solution by Leon Louw & Frances Kendall (Amagi Publications, Ltd...
...A masterpiece...
...John Lofton is a columnist for the Washington Times...
...This is an old book and many people I know have appreciated Lewis's down-to-earth, practical yet intellectual approach to Christianity...
...In literature, I like Ibsen's work, especially The Doll House...
...Sir Karl now tells me, in a letter received this very morning, that he wishes he had been equally emphatic about the scientific pretensions of Marx...
...No one spins a better tale of the biggest game of them all, the US vs...
...ANTONY FLEW The Red Prussian by Leopold Schwartzschild, long out of print, has at last been reissued by Pickwick Books (P.O...
...In Laboratories of Democracy (Harvard, 1988) David Osborne shows that state governors, from Pennsylvania's Richard Thornburgh to Michigan's Jim Blanchard, were also forced by economic circumstances to turn away from the shibboleths of free market capitalism toward a more activist economic role for the state...
...PAUL H. WEAVER Some of the best books I've read lately fall in a category I think of as wonder ful-but-outrageo us-yet-stil 1-awfully-good...
...Powell (history, University of California, Santa Barbara) demolishes the so-called Black Legend myth, which falsely denigrates Spain, Spaniards, and most of their works...
...But all readers of The American Spectator must by all means acquire a copy, read it, and thereafter do everything they can to ensure that others are infiltrated into the libraries of all those colleges in which professors preach Marxist this and Marxist that, corrupting the young American mind...
...Wilder was one of the finest writers in the history of American literature: humane, poetic, unsentimental, unflinching in her grasp of reality, and with a prose style as spare and imagistic as Hemingway's—as well as a thousand percent more honest...
...deter you: he may get it right...
...But persons interested in the criminal law have long awaited this volume of the Complete Works to lay their hands on this collection of Fielding's reports to the government on current crime, accounts of cases (including Elizabeth Canning's), and defense of his ideas on handling "the great increase" in street offenses...
...Chilton Williamson, Jr...
...Antony Flew is professor of philosophy at the University of Reading...
...Citizen Cohn by Nicholas von Hoffman (Doubleday...
...Who Killed CBS...
...Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Presidio, 1981...
...It is both exciting and escapist but the Musketeers are notably wearier and more realistic...
...When I put it down, I wanted to listen to Jolson records for a week...
...John B. Judis is a senior editor of In These Times and the author of William E Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (Simon and Schuster...
...The Corpse Had a Familiar Face by Edna Buchanan (Random House...
...elii...
...With the dismal lines of the presidential candidates last TV debate bong-bonging in my head, I file this list of recommended books for Christmas and am reminded again that we read not only for information and entertainment but also to improve our facility with the Queen's English—or should we now be saying the Prime Minister's...
...ii„.1,, ic...
...Reading of the spiritual quest of poet Julius Lester, and watching his evolution from a black radical widely accused of anti-Semitism, to his current life as an observant and profoundly engaged Jew, it is impossible to remain unmoved...
...And I'll be rereading Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer, about my beloved Brooklyn Dodgers and when we were all young...
...A contrapuntally structured, good-tempered, and artfully satisfying work...
...How Politics is Played—Told by One Who Knows the Game, that being Tip O'Neill's former aide, Christopher Matthews...
...DAVE BARRY admit...
...Eighteenth-century London reminds one of other places at later times...
...Daniel Boorstin has produced a prodigious, scholarly, and fascinating account of the truly awesome feats of those who had to brave oceans, burn dogmas, and reach into the realm of the unknown...
...ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities will be required reading for centuries for anyone who wants to understand where and how we began to lose our bearings...
...ek N ,-;:/— -_,11.-"i),, 12, Manufacturing Practices (GMP) regu ..::.:* Oiliir...
...Might as well move on to a totally new challenge...
...Elvis, without missing a beat, replied, "The Los Angeles police department...
...Powell names names—and some of the names will surprise even the most suspicious...
...The Bear, by William Faulkner (1942...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 JOHN B. JUDIS By the time these book recommendations appear, the choice in the 1988 presidential election will no longer appear to have been between God and Satan, but between two men separated by only a whisker of real political difference...
...William Regardie is the editor-in-chief of Regardie's magazine...
...Losing Ground, by Charles Murray...
...Though written before the rise of Jesse Jackson, the insights provided here will help to explain his puzzling and seemingly self-destructive Jew-hatred...
...2. The late Joseph P. Lash, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Eleanor and Franklin, barely finished Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the New Deal (Doubleday, 1988) before his recent death...
...MICHAEL KRAMER The Republic—because even Dan Quayle knows he should know it...
...N. k '41...
...Something new—everyone's favorite, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities...
...This is must reading for those who think today's publishers won't publish crap and call it a book...
...i. ,,,is,,w...
...I would suggest the following for starters: The Search for Historical Meaning, by Paul Edward Gottfried...
...1, 111 - i- 1 twenty more - — ,ii...
...This one presents no such difficulty...
...What is more, Lynn so brings him to life that if Hemingway walked into your living room and had a drink you would know exactly what to expect...
...It just makes the whole period fascinating, graphically packing it in with concise and logical explanations that make you want to hurry on to the next page...
...JACQUES BARZUN Paul Horgan: A Certain Climate (Wesleyan, 1988...
...Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works, selected and annotated by Sally Fitzgerald (The Library of America, $30...
...When Hell Was in Session by Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr., with Ed Brandt...
...and a novel by William Buckley, Mongoose...
...Any one of those should be enough to make a person climb a weather vane some spring sunrise...
...1-:1:11...
...Buchanan's covered more murder cases than Lou Cannon has White House news conferences...
...He is also the author of non-fiction books on the White House staff, the sixties, the medical profession, and the movie industry...
...The sad condition of New York City, and the hopelessness of its leader's institutionalized liberal thinking, are most depressing...
...the literary skill by which the narrative consciousness of the volumes expands and sophisticates itself as the child Laura grows into adulthood can only be appreciated by adults—and sophisticated ones at that...
...Prestowitz shows the direction in which the next administration, whether Republican or Democrat, will have to turn...
...Elvis World, by Jane and Michael Stern...
...Moving to my own business, I learned from Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan (Oxford), that Grover Cleveland should have long been among my heroes, the last President who vetoed legislation on the understood principle of laissez faire...
...These are my current top four—with Harris a must...
...Michael Kramer is chief political correspondent for U.S...
...Francis M. Nevins, Jr.: Cornell Woolrich: First You Dream, Then You Die (Mysterious Press, 1988...
...Paul Fussell is Donald T Regan Professor of English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and the author, most recently, of Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays (Summit Books...
...Ai le lish specifications for devices, or when - - ''' ,,, '7';' 6...
...Sort of: "Sure, you have a noble Lady you want rescued—we're your men...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 21...
...Nick Lyons children or grandchildren you've alpolicy tomes and look back to the sent this to me with a recommendation ready discovered how much you've Wick Allison is the president of Allison classics...
...The performance shows extraordinarily persistent and sagacious research, for Woolrich was secretive and friendless...
...You couldn't tell from the television show, but Mrs...
...Look around come April, and say, `Who'd like to fix the roof?' And whichever face lights up is the face you want, Douglas...
...Here are some books that have impressed me deeply...
...Jacques Barzun is a historian and critic...
...The Morality of Law, by Lon Fuller...
...Thank God for the Italians...
...almost literally, she shows us "fear in a handful of dust...
...The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe...
...Other favorites include: Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow, Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, and The Charm School by Nelson DeMille...
...his book is both an indictment When it comes to holiday gift-giving, writing transports the reader into And now two plugs: I'll Tell You a and a caution of how the First Amendthe for my money you just can't beat unimagined worlds...
...Three little-known books to read it, and it sat on the shelf for forgotten of the tales and songs that Publications, Inc...
...Every page is full of information I didn't know...
...discusses requirements of the Good 't...
...A mock-serious study, beautifully illustrated and told tongue-in-cheek by a professor of fine arts at New York University...
...A wonderful biography of Al Jolson...
...IV, V, and VI: 1892-1918 edited by J. C. Levenson et al...
...t_____2_ - - - - - , flyfishing but turns into something W,_-_-_- (2P ,, , , ' ''' ._, ---- , • - -:=-.............................,,,yi3O" / miss federal titles that make "can't ,,,,/ / 7, miss gifts include A Five-Year Flan,,,,, ', . ,'' l' t i • I I ',f: , ° . ,l'i-tik" \'.--.,: s $15...
...A compulsively readable and consistently illuminating family chronicle, offering tales of genius, pettiness, self-indulgence, enlightened leadership, and eccentricity...
...is a senior editor at National Review and the author of several books, the most recent of which is Desert Light, a novel...
...My favorite anecdote from the book: Peter Noone ("Herman" of the British rock group Herman's Hermits) visited Elvis during Elvis's fallow period...
...Michael Medved is co-host of "Sneak Previews," the weekly movie review show on PBS...
...1' ir;4"Iti:, likely t exclaim "This manual to . ance, and love...
...I read it in galleys...
...Solitude: A Return to the Self, by Anthony Storr, is an inspiriting defense of the spiritual benefits of being alone, drawing upon the experience of people whose creativity was nourished by the best company they ever kept, themselves...
...R. J. Rushdoony's Christianity and the State, Otto Scott's The Secret Six, and Phillip Powell's Tree of Hate (all available from Ross House, Box 67, Vallecito, CA 95251...
...Hot Dog...
...7,4 , ,.....,- ,-m,"--- --- — wit L d medical devices intended to be comman Maclean (University of Chicago...
...exposes the television world for what it often is—a wild and wicked business...
...R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...3 , m...
...Each story is a gem, worthy of turning over and over to catch the facets in the light of our own experiences...
...to p...
...now, with her inclusion in the Library of America series (the only other contemporary author represented there is William Faulkner) she comes into her own...
...LARRY KING 1) Absolutely read Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs...
...Rollyson, in other words, has found the smoking gun...
...And for some laughs, try Norman Lewis, Naples '44 (Pantheon, 1978), a diary kept by an intelligent British soldier trying to understand a madly ungovernable populace in 1944...
...Another important book is Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation, by Ronald Reagan, in which the President speaks out against abortion and its moral impact on the nation...
...Iltt ilii 4' -std., -,,,, ,, N, vs, . . ' .i'' li_....w .1...
...A thoughtful and entertaining book...
...Try it...
...fair-minded, but devastating portrait of GM chairman Roger Smith by a former GM speechwriter...
...Apparently fishing for a compliment, Noone asked Elvis what his favorite group was...
...Al 'III ;-,i 1,-,--7- ------- Ali . :t, t.‘AlliZ,j.S ..- ,, 0-4411 1 -- -11...
...Most viewers of the film Tom Jones probably did not suspect that the author of the picturesque saga was a magistrate and a criminologist...
...There's a second reason to make a Christmas gift of Covert Cadre—David Horowitz's altogether moving introduction...
...The Economy of Cities, by Jane Jacobs...
...Martin's Press, 1988...
...A memorable celebration of love under pressure, Letters to Olga, June 1979 to September 1982, by Vaclav Havel, translated from the Czech and with an introduction by Paul Wilson (Knopf, $25.00, 397 pages...
...Sklar shows that out of the pre-World War I political conflicts, leading Republicans and Democrats came to subscribe to certain fundamental assumptions about corporate power and America's overseas role...
...Charming canine whimsy: The Dog in Art From Rococo to Post-Modernism by Robert Rosenblum (Harry Abrams, $27.50, 120 pages...
...The novelist and biographer who has made the Southwest his preferred locale is also an essayist in the great tradition...
...However, let's resolve the matter of price...
...Frequently one is asked who is the bright new liberal commentator to be weighed against the platoon of bright conservatives who have been thrown into battle this past decade...
...3. The Color Purple by Alice Walker...
...I; , -- ..ii.' I -=----,=- .. , _-"'"*, LA . \,,, 'il,$'„ j=!, ,, $ N, Manufacturing Practices Manual (400 island of Capri...
...be or she is 4...
...Subtitled "A Romp Through Intellectual History...
...Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis...
...Henry Fielding: An Enquiry Into the Causes of the Late Increase in Robbers, Etc...
...r ._, _ _ ---"=-Fft-1- i"---- - - - - ' _ ''' _ ; --* A -, --.,c...
...I could list many more exciting titles, but I recommend that you see for yourself at one of the GPO bookstores, conveniently located in Washington, D.C., and nearly a third of the states...
...He began by writing crime fiction of the sort that magazines published in the late 1920s but soon created a genre of his own, later much imitated, but never with his characteristic tone...
...The Edge of the Sword, by Charles de Gaulle...
...This book has sold reasonably well across the country but has been a bestseller in Washington, a city of coalitions and committee meetings...
...but the great bulk of the book gives us the urbane British civil servant speaking quietly to his fellows and telling them how to be simple and direct...
...WILLIAM REGARDIE Monday Night Mayhem by Marc Gunter and Bill Carter (William Morrow Co...
...Maintenance pnages, Philip (144 and more, an unstintingly honest account...
...1. A Cambodian Odyssey by Haing Ngor...
...A powerful and poignant portrayal of black poverty and suffering, it is also a deeply moving tribute to the triumph of the human spirit in the face of economic and emotional adversity...
...Matthews writes well, knows politics intimately, and is a straightforward liberal, not a trickster juggling reality...
...This may be one of the few books ever written on economics which reads like a fast-paced novel...
...Craig W. Lowell and his extended family of warriors, the whole saga being published under the general title, The Brotherhood of War...
...A memoir by a one-time USMC aviator, now aneloquent Princeton literary scholar and cultural historian...
...And finally do not overlook Kenneth Lynn's superb biography of Papa: Hemingway...
...Spycatcher is the best of many spy books that I have read, a thriller extraordinaire...
...While the playwright was a political prisoner doing hard labor, his only contact with the outside world was a weekly letter to his wife—and that censored by a brutally censorious prison warden...
...Eric Breindel is the editorial page editor of the New York Post and a syndicated columnist...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 19 RICHARD NIXON My list for recommended reading covers a pretty wide spectrum...
...Arnaud de Borchgrave is the editor-in-chief of the Washington Times...
...The South, despite the infestation of Holiday Inns and Gannett newspapers, forever remains "different...
...USSR...
...The authors display unusual sympathy for the American business community and its values, while managing to convey a marvelous sense of the heroic efforts involved in building a great corporation...
...This reissue of a classic handbook to decent writing contains an entertaining historical retrospect by Joseph Epstein and some modernizing by other hands, not all of it called for, perhaps...
...Perhaps the one hope is that from the ashes of the bonfire there will emerge a reawakening of the need to change...
...This readable compendium is the work not of an academic, but an amateur trained in business and the law...
...EDWARD W HAYES My absolute favorite book is the sequel to The Three Musketeers called Ten Years After...
...I I' -------- ' Meeting the Automatic Data Processabout his younger years in the wilds of -- - ----L ' s '''' 4 '' ''''' ' l'i 1 2 i 1 i .trilr...
...by Peter Boyer and Spycatcher by Peter Wright...
...Travels in Arabia Deserta, by Charles M. Doughty (Dover Press, 2 vols...
...For the rest, follow him blindly, if that is your temperament, and with discrimination if you wish to resemble him...
...PAUL FUSSELL I've recently been reading, thinking, and writing a lot about the Second World War...
...Cold Friday, by Whittaker Chambers...
...The Bear is most readily available as part of the collection Go Down, Moses or in the superb sampler, The Portable Faulkner, as edited by Malcolm Cowley...
...A great literary artist, she managed to convey through her lucid prose poetry the spiritual poverty and perversity of the modern world without moving outside the geographical compass of middle Georgia to do it...
...Rollyson managed to locate a letter/memo Hellman sent to her attorney on the eve of her testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in which she acknowledges her past membership in the Party...
...For Schwartzschild's biography definitively disposes of all pretense that Marx was either an honest scholar or even a tolerably decent human being...
...fil . '''' -;',------, -,".1--- _ ....___ -- i \l, 1, , fil 1 '‘ ,,,' :' . vv, it \ d.,.:7..,1...
...4 (1,< , ,,,,-' lation that firms marketing medical friend as a cure for the author's insom- iiii...
...STEPHEN I. SOLARZ Here are a few books I've read recently that struck me as particularly interesting and worthwhile...
...Douglas," she whispered, "don't ever let anyone do the shingles unless it's fun for them...
...The earlier American edition was handicapped by its baffling combination of English text with a French-language index...
...South Africa is a complex problem...
...His essay, and Powell's study, make for riveting reading...
...It is the only book he ever wrote...
...Runners-up are Who Killed CBS...
...They are unusual, I adventurer...
...Though it is at times shamelessly overwritten and the prose runs through every imaginable shade of the color purple, this book presents a vivid self-portrait of a uniquely compelling public figure...
...k-.14*- 0111111111111ft ing autobiographies ever published, 1...
...Agree with him or not, but Murray has influenced an entire cadre of policy makers and any stab at revisiting the problems above will have to first deal with Murray's not inconsiderable intellectual hurdles...
...I, iiitii,i,,,, , ,/ fill', 1 ,, '330 oi,, ing and Telecommunications Needs of Montana...
...He writes in the informal as well as in the critical, biographical, and historical genres with the ease of manner of an Augustan and in this collection supplies a choice group illustrating all three kinds...
...tine vividly reminds us of how to make lovely w so—will give a rich return to any Crompton was not a scientist, but an small eyes grow big in wonderment...
...This exhaustive life of a strange writer comes as close to solving the psychological riddle presented by its subject as any biographer could conceivably do...
...Grady McWhiney, a history professor at Texas Christian University, helps us understand this apartness in a brilliant study of the Celtic South, entitled Cracker Culture...
...The Predators' Ball by Connie Bruck (New American/Simon and Schuster...
...Bill thoughtful reader...
...NM tti--,,, ,, 4 •-•'N...
...COLIN WALTERS Fiction lovers willing to be teased and entertained in experimental mode might try Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson (Dalkey Archive, $20.00, 240 pages...
...A lucid and luminous analysis of the economicconsequences of the Versailles Conference, which brought an end to World War I but sowed the seeds which led to World War II, it has a distinct and disturbing relevancy for the contemporary debt crisis in the Third World...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 17 "Yes'm...
...nia...
...Last, and certainly least, The Boz (Doubleday, 1988), about the overgrown jerk Brian Bosworth, who played football at the University of Oklahoma and now plays for the Seattle Seahawks in the NFL...
...Her books are "children's books" only in the sense that children can read, enjoy and admire them...
...Because up there on that roof you can see the whole town going toward the country and the country going toward the edge of the earth and the river shining, and the morning lake, and birds on the trees down under you, and the best of the wind all around above...
...Appended to the main discourse is a useful series of sketches of thinkers known and less known, followed by a good index...
...This 1930 .,,, , , ---, ;-;------=-* q01.,-,, i ,,- . , 1/4...
...Something in-between—I still think of The Spike, by Robert Moss and Arnaud de Borchgrave, when I read of the activities of IPS, government officials and bureaucrats, media types, and of belated apologies from aging actresses...
...This thoughtful examination of IPS—the hard left's most important thinktank—demonstrates the extent of IPS's influence on Capitol Hill and within the Democratic party...
...Box 925, London W2 1FA...
...his syntax has prompted critics to remark that he wrote the language as if he found it lying around...
...it_--:-?,--_,3'AN- 7N' 1 ,IJ ''': 1 : .1,--,),, ., ..:L...
...is president of Irby Construction Company in Jackson, Mississippi...
...I think it is good to reflect on the fact that Jeremiah Denton lost his seat in the Senate because he was trying to be a good senator representing the whole United States and spent very little time building a political base in Alabama...
...It may for copyright reasons be difficult to get in the USA...
...Douglas Spaulding can't quite accept the departure of his ninety-yearold great-grandmother: "Grandma, who'll shingle the roof next spring...
...GEORGE F. WILL Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, brings convincing learning and proper energy to the task of reducing Picasso to his appropriate size...
...The history of a purely American game show, rich in instant tradition with a parade of truly bigger-than-life players...
...Written on the canvas of the triumphs and tragedies of a global conflict between the forces of good and evil, it definitively demonstrates how the wisdom, eloquence, and resolute determination of one man made a critical difference in the salvation of Western civilization...
...The measure of Doughty's greatness is that this book, written by a gentle and devout English Christian who traveled down with the Haj from Damascus to Medain Salih for the purpose of inspecting mysterious inscriptions supposed to have Biblical import and spent two years living among the Bedouin tribes, has far greater drama than Seven Pillars of Wisdom, whose author was a soldier, not a scholar, and who actively courted danger and adventure...
...i ' ' i:1::"Atil `,„A,N ',7- ' - i; N qt,o' ...7-1 , yr , i ti ) ,----__ ..:.i...
...We have all met the players in Wolfe's absorbing book, and no author today draws them with so fine a pen...
...The next administration will have to do something about the rot in our older cities, about problems like the decline in affordable housing, the homeless, crime, and poverty...
...In truth, no one, before or since, has written like Doughty...
...A modern Helen gamely struggles with being the last person on earth...
...The text reads like a narrative and not a textbook, and it is free from both oversimplification and smartness...
...This is Ray Bradbury's story of a twelve-year-old boy's (Douglas Spaulding) realization of the joy of being truly alive—walking barefoot in the grass, sipping lemonade on his front porch, shedding winter's concrete-heavy shoes for a new sky-touching pair of sneakers, and helping to pour summer in a glass so that during some wintry day you can "change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip tilting summer in...
...The book which so strongly gripped St...
...It's a powerful hour, if you give it half a chance...
...Don't let the fact that Robert - - ' . - ---,-- - - t -- - 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1988 one" who deserves "only the best," there's Achievements in Radio, which "provides an extensive history of the achievements of the National Bureau of Standards in radio science over the past 70 years...
...If you have small deeply about our children's futures...
...Christopher C. Faille: These Last Four Centuries (University Press of America, 1988...
...I can't wait for the film...
...On the surface it's a thrilling hunting tale about a determined party tracking a legendary bear who has rampaged for decades through the "Big Woods" of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi...
...Matthews is the man, not Michael Kinsley, who is essentially an accountant with a talent for sly bookkeeping, or Richard Cohen, who belongs on the Style page...
...Witness Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, which I have recommended to most (not all) of my friends...
...4) A Season Inside: One Year inCollege Basketball by John Feinstein...
...NN, N> ‘,-,.,, Munthe (Carroll & Graf...
...But hectic lives, such as I sup- Africa captivated him...
...The recent books about the sixties are like their subject: self-indulgent, incomplete, captivating...
...He traces the paths hacked by history's explorers—from the days of sundials to those of the "indestructible" atom—at once inspiring and humbling us...
...mercially distributed...
...WILLIAM S. COHEN Inviting me to share with readers some of my favorite books is tantamount to asking me to spell the word banana—I am willing to do so but have difficulty in knowing where to stop...
...Clancy is the Ian Fleming of the eighties...
...A sensitive, modest, and honest Marine's account of his ghastly experience in the Pacific...
...Lately I've been plowing through books on media, and for my money, Daniel Boorstin's funny, polemical The Image, published a generation ago, is still the best, written in an age when, for reasons I don't completely understand but am grateful for, people were interested in something more than whose side the press is on and so criticized journalism without being boring, spiteful, or self-serving about it...
...For the insatiable appetite, The Letters of Henry Adams, Vols...
...Lovesong, by Julius Lester (1988...
...A warm, engaging tale of a real sleazeball...
...People Like Us by Dominick Dunne (Crown...
...STUART C. IRBY, JR...
...This book makes you smile and understand what all the excitement was (and is) about—and makes you realize that there are ways of portraying the truth about a celebrity without resorting to unrelenting nastiness...
...A. One is sweet, the other stern: both care_ 3. Ways of the Ant by John Cromp- Rusher (Morrow...
...Rushdoony makes the case for a return to a Biblical doctrine of civil government—and details the disastrous consequences of not having such a doctrine...
...RICHARD HARWOOD My first entry is, of course, redundant inasmuch as all American Spectator subscribers will have read by now The Aviators, it being the eighth volume in W. E. B. Griffin's series on the adventures of Lt...
...Judis struggles honorably as a man of the left to do a great man of the right justice and tells a story all political aficionados should be familiar with...
...RICHARD M. SCAIFE Something old: I've always enjoyed anything by John O'Hara and, from time to time, go back and re-read him...
...A small book .to cherish...
...But no, it was Great-grandma somehow transported, singing, pounding nails, replacing shingles, high in the sky...
...Boyer's story is a cynical one that takes you deeply behind the scenes to view the fratricidal bloodletting that led to the decline and almost fall of CBS News...
...It costs $55, but at 876 pages, it's going to provide decades of reading satisfaction...
...Though he never carried the title, he called the shots 'cause he was the biggest gorilla in the joint...
...William Greider's Secrets of the Temple, a political portrait of the Federal Reserve Board, is one of the most spectacular books ever written about American politics and economics...
...for the Media by William...
...He must have known that once you hit a home run like The Right Stuff there is no wisdom in trying to top yourself at the same game...
...Every April for as far back as there were calendars, you thought you heard woodpeckers tapping the housetop...
...I have found it helpful to read several times...
...His vision was much more complex, sinister—and sad...
...Edward W Hayes is a lawyer practicing in New York...
...WICK ALLISON Redford is making this into a movie Allison (Delacorte) and_ The Coming in time lead to its being overthrown...
...Colin Walters is book editor of the Washington Times...
...William S. Cohen is a United States Senator from Maine...
...The definitive Iran-contra book...
...Now those are words that can carry a young boy right to the White House...
...Story, I'll Sing You a Song by Christine ment is now abused and how that could ment Printing Office...
...Just because...
...An easy read about life at the top of the Big Apple social heap...
...Also, the Rev...
...More than anything, Spycatcher brings home how our allies—in this case the British—have so often let us down in the naive hope that somehow short cuts can be taken toward world peace...
...Lash is a superb biographer...
...MICHAEL MEDVED The Fords, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz (1988...
...Terrence M. Scanlon is chairman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission...
...As the authors point out, the Club of Rome is nothing new: the New York Times, for instance, ran a story headlined "The End Of The Lumber Supply"—on Dec...
...Richard M Scaife is chairman of the Sarah Scaife Foundation...
...3) Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life by Herbert Goldman (Oxford Press...
...His encounters with ants in Rusher doesn't want those same eyes in...
...A grandmother's advice has dominated the political news in recent weeks...
...and The Just and the Unjust, by James Gould Cozzens, for its look at values and character, individuals and community...
...3. Also a fun read for those inclined toward biography is Carl Rollyson's Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy (St...
...Richard Nixon is the thirty-seventh President of the United States...
...1. Students of the American left will enjoy S. Steven Powell's Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies (Green Hill Publishers, 1987...
...Richard Harwood is ombudsman of the Washington Post...
...iiiI/f ,,,, , ,____,,.____—_-__ii,,:._ ___ , they manufacture, contract manufac, -_-_--_ , h , ......._ . ,,,,,,, - - -=-- _. -------- , ' ' 1 ture, process, repack or relabel finished 2. A River Runs Through It by Nor- MI: ' . _-- — ,-,,,,I1,0",-.$7.7...
...P. J. O'Rourke, in his wholesome collection of travel diaries to some of the world's hellholes, Holidays in Hell, proves why he would have been an excellent choice to head the Peace Corps...
...For those who insist on maintaining the contrary, Martin J. Sklar's study of the progressive era, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (Cambridge, 1988), will be a useful corrective...
...N ' " , - IS ,,k, ' -,,-7,'"hki;i_ 1,,,, - Bit devices must consider when they estabat the end you will wish there were E.- _ _ -----___t„____ ) ------f"---- ' \ '1 ' ' 'Y P ' 4...
...Ideal for Christmas beach-reading...
...Horowitz—a Red Diaper Baby and ex-New Leftist—discusses the influence of the Communist Party on his family and treats his own coming of age in the antiwar movement...
...It was reading this book which led Sir Karl Popper to add a note to The Open Society, withdrawing the generous things he had said about Marx as a humanitarian and a lover of freedom...
...Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier (Harper & Row, 1971...
...A personal story of survival as a POW in North Vietnam, this is a paperback book...
...At a time when Vietnam may actually be planning to withdraw from Cambodia, thereby creating new possibilities for the return of the Khmer Rouge, this book is a timely reminder of the need to prevent Pol Pot and his murderous minions from ever regaining power in Phnom Penh...
...It , -------= _ , - __- - - 114t1,41?' 7 _ ''' "7 ' ---41*- \\I 7-- - -"--:...e.,t ::i4q.41...
...James M Buchanan is professor of economics at George Mason University and was the Nobel Laureate in Economics in 1986...
...Above all, it provides a glimpse into the realities of life for poor, black women in the rural South and how, in spite of almost unbearable oppression, they have maintained their dignity and humanity...
...vipt the Federal Government (318 pages, piece, which is meant to be about...
...j,,.!4', 7 A - , i ',/ _ , ,I, ., — • - -, - t...
...2) Landslide by Jane Mayer & Doyle McManus...
...It reminds us once more how readily the Soviets have penetrated Western intelligence circles in their relentless pursuit of world troublemaking, if not conquest...
...Michael A. Ledeen's Perilous Statecraft is the first draft of the history of the genesis of the Reagan Doctrine—and why it failed to accomplish what it set out to do in Central America...
...Cardinal of the Kremlin by Tom Clancy (Putnam...
...Paul Duke is the moderator of PBS's "Washington Week in Review...
...Anyone who's interested in how this country works, or who likes to curl up with a serious-minded page-turner, should block out a month to read this epic...
...Flannery O'Connor's novels and stories have become increasingly popular over the past decade or so...
...The infantryman's war in Europe seen—for a change—from the viewpoint of a young German soldier...
...PAUL DUKE My number one choice is Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson...
...Augustine, Luther, and shaped the Reformation, the book which shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that all—believers and unbelievers—are accountable to God and His law and, thus, without excuse for their disobedience...
...In many ways old Henry deserved the damage done by the Ford Foundation, but the rest of us should have been spared...
...The definitive hoops book by one of the best sports reporters...
...i r ,,rol 41 ,4, \ away the giftwrapping to uncover a , - ,w...
Vol. 21 • December 1988 • No. 12
