Books for Christmas
BOORS FOR GEREMAS It's that time of year again, as eminent readers and writers recommend tomes— some old, some new—certain to delight giver, recipient, and Santa alike. ELLIOTT ABRAMS The...
...The new computerized corrected edition, whatever its faults, is a good excuse to re-read this mega-novel, or to read it for the first time and claim that you're rereading it to check for errors...
...Charles Murray is senior research fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980 and In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government...
...Attorney General...
...The Names, by Don DeLillo: DeLillo's 1982 warm-up for White Noise and Libra...
...The Old Guard Republican desire to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, labor laws, and farm programs is the dream of a "splinter group'`their number is negligible and they are stupid...
...It was published in 1984 but is worth hunting down...
...For patriotic thrills try Margaret Coit's 1950 Pulitzer Prize biography, John C Calhoun, which inspired my motto: If at first you don't secede, try, try again...
...Closer to home, Liberty Press's new collection of letters and speeches by the Father of Our Country goes nicely under any tree...
...LEE ATWATER The Prince—Machiavelli The Republic—Plato Crime and Punishment—Dostoevsky Huey Long—T...
...Martin's Press), and Fortnight's Anger (Carcanet Press...
...An important contribution to the history of those turbulent years...
...I much prefer it without music...
...As far removed from the hip, disaffected flavor of most of our more recent fiction as one can get...
...The book that ushered in the Reagan boom...
...There remains only to recommend the most recent novel I've read by the master, Anthony Trollope...
...Some think it began with a Big Bang and will end with one...
...Miss Morris begins with the colony's origins as a spoil of the war Britain fought for the right to sell opium to the Chinese, and she traces its development to the modern financial center that Mrs...
...So let us come to Numbers Two, Three, and Four in my Christmas book list...
...Collectivism's failure is ultimately a moral issue, and there is still no book more on target as to the true moral dimension of the battle between individualism and collectivism than Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged...
...Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men (1986...
...Weaves a broad tapestry out of the sometimes tangled threads of the twentieth century with only occasional snags...
...PATRICIA SCHROEDER Put these books in your holiday stocking: The Warrior Queens, by Antonia Fraser (Knopf...
...A marvelous book—maybe we ought to refound America, using boatloads of convicts...
...Robert Caro, The Power Broker...
...Jogger-haters and other enemies of health will be restored by the chapter called "Black Coffee" in Stefan Zweig's Balzac, which contains a truly inspiring estimate of the number of cups the great novelist drank during his sedentary career of 18-hour work days...
...Tom Cullen's 1954 study of Jack the Ripper, When London Walked in Terror, is not only a classic of the true-crime genre but a fine wine of wishful thinking to be sipped after watching Molly Yard and Eleanor Smeal on television...
...Morison shows the opposite by combining technical exposition with intellectual history...
...Lost Illusions (1837-1843), by Honore de Balzac...
...JACQUES BARZUN In the excellent series of Lakeside Classics privately published by R. R. Donnelly, the great Chicago printers, Volume 62, issued in 1964, is a particular treasure...
...1988) and the upcoming Statute of Limitations, a Washington comedy to be published in 1990...
...The Practice of Management, by Peter Drucker...
...Whatever else, the collection dispels any suggestion that the General was a political naif...
...Only Hayek has rivaled Jouvenel in the demonstration of why it is the inexorable fate of redistributionist programs to culminate in centralization of the state's power instead of in relief to hapless minorities...
...Rand was way ahead of the intellectualworld in coming to grips with this issue...
...Andre Jardin, Tocqueville (1988...
...The first is one of the year's hits, Simon Schama's Citizens...
...All the classics are here, and TAS readers will happily note that they have not been sanitized: the big, bad wolf gets it with the woodsman's ax, and other beasts are dispatched in a similar manner whenever they are found threatening kindly old grandmothers and unsuspecting smaller prey...
...In his eightieth year, Patrick Devlin, the greatest English judge of our time, did a unique thing: he wrote an account of a famous criminal trial over which he himself had presided...
...Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft for those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed...
...He doesn't seem very anxious to fight, either...
...A powerful book giving a first-hand view of the horrors imposed on those Russians who rejected Stalin's Communism...
...Moreover, the book is suffused with what Richard Weaver called "the older religiousness," the sense of human finitude which is the basis for Otto's great hymn to mystery—and not so frightening as it might be as we come, in such company, to contemplate what Christmas signifies...
...PETER R. KANN Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow, a chilling account of the Soviet terror-famine of the early thirties, focused particularly on the Ukraine, which killed some 15 million peasants...
...J. William Fulbright...
...Not to be missed...
...2. The subject matter must particularly interest me...
...In [Senator Knowland's] case, there seems to be no final answer to the question 'How stupid can you get?' " "War today is unthinkable...
...The happy 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 break for Jewish and Christian philosophers is that "our God is reasonable," that truth is one, and that both languages—of philosophy and faith—address from different angles the same existents...
...The best biography in English is still Duff Cooper's Talleyrand, written in 1937...
...give it to a friend...
...The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen...
...A history of the American West, the book traces its beginnings to the days of the cave-dwellers and takes us on a wonderful, exciting journey to the present...
...Roger Scruton is professor of aesthetics at the University of London and editor of the conservative quarterly, the Salisbury Review...
...And his tolerance and pluralistic approach to philosophy put him in the next rank after David Hume...
...So why not dawdle over arms control when nothing is going to happen anyway...
...and the opinion, which somehow comes naturally out of the events related, is easy to agree or disagree with...
...Where would we put it...
...ROBERT W POOLE, JR...
...The preface is written by a noted Colorado congresswoman...
...His Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953) and The Responsibility of the Artist (1960) are wonderfully proportional, beautiful studies, for example, in which both Senator Helms and the National Endowment for the Arts might find much illumination in their present perplexities...
...What would we do with a large Army if we had it...
...John Chamberlain is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of A Life With the Printed Word...
...Not everyone was at Woodstock in the late 1960s...
...Special Relationships, by Henry Brandon, the story by a great Czech-born British correspondent, of his experiences and observations during almost fifty years in the corridors of power in Washington...
...The Liberal Crack-Up, by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Jay McInerney is the author of Bright Lights, Big City, Ranson], and Story of My Life...
...Moved by distance and new experience to reflect upon what family and regional history had done to the life of Faulkner's hero, Isaac McCaslin, I pondered his retreat from engagement in time with a mixture of impatience and sympathy...
...The complete seven-volume set is in print...
...And in Arturo Toscanini: Contemporary Recollections of the Maestro (Da Capo Press), a great music critic, the late B. H. Haggin, meets a great conductor in Haggin's two books on Toscanini, now reprinted with new material...
...In Europe such a habit predominated from 1815, the year of Napoleon's downfall, to August of 1914...
...I adore The Honest Rainmaker, but Science is the finest thing on boxing ever, or certainly after Pierce Egan, Liebling's spiritual mentor...
...Second Skin, by John Hawkes: long before Hawkes's novels became too precious, he was an American modernist with a breathtaking style, drunk with language, direct as a dagger's thrust...
...Michael Novak is the George F Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute and the publisher of Crisis, a lay Catholic magazine...
...In its actual, existing situation, however, philosophy is practiced by men and women who are born out of the belly of a woman at a particular time and place, within a particular horizon, living within concrete communities...
...The Most of S. J. Perelman: any "Most of' or "Best of" is rather a cop-out, I know, but this collection is just so rich I couldn't help myself...
...Of the many masterpieces this unsurpassed student of American business has written, this is the best...
...and if I can add a sixth for those times of reading about America's favorite pastime—Joseph Reichler, The Baseball Encyclopedia...
...It was thought that General Giap would attempt another Dien Bien Phu, in which case the 101st Airborne was on standby to encircle the NVA regulars encircling our troops...
...Without mixing up theology or faith with philosophy, which has its own rules of evidence and method—without fide-ism, fundamentalism, or any infidelity to philosophy itself—existing philosophers consider the same domain of human moral striving that moral theology and faith consider...
...Almost three decades after its publication, this novel remains an amazingly prescient account of the peculiar contemporary malaise of fandom...
...A., wife of National Review's new publisher, includes within her two covers every rhyme, fable, and song you half remember from childhood...
...At the other end of the journey, the predictable inclination is in the opposite direction, toward remembrance of books whose importance we have recognized for many years and whose function in illuminating our lives in both the moral and the intellectual sense is beyond dispute...
...The career of super-builder Robert Moses isthe backdrop for some unique insights into twentieth-century urban politics...
...Finally, any one of George MacDonald Fraser's "Flashman" novels...
...the first novel and still the best...
...In Exile from the Land of Snows, by John E Avedon...
...Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Ethics of Redistribution (1952...
...It should be made into a film (again) by David Lynch, now that John Huston is gone...
...Life and Death in Shanghai, by Nien Cheng—one indomitable spirit in a world of thugs, bullies, and moral cretins...
...Friedman actually was better able to empathize with people on both sides of the barricades because of, not in spite of, his Jewish background...
...Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is director of the Robert Kennedy Memorial and director of the Maryland Student Service Alliance at the Maryland Department of Education...
...In perfect contrast to Faulkner's Ike is the subject of J. Evetts Haley's Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman (1936...
...But I only read Bonfire twice...
...Modern Times, by Paul Johnson...
...Finally, for our Indiana subscribers, or for those who wish they lived in the birthplace of Booth Tarkington, Thomas Riley ("What America needs is a good 5-cent cigar") Marshall, and The American Spectator, I recommend 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 Natural Features of Indiana, published by the American Midland Naturalist (University of Notre Dame, $10...
...Charles H. Mcllwain, Constitutionalism (1939...
...the classic study of alchemy, witch-hunting, investing in tulip bulbs, Jim and Tammy, and the stock market of the 1980s...
...It was done first through many scholars publishing evidence and argument, and then by the proof engraved on long-playing discs...
...Total Baseball (Warner Books): essential reading for the Four Awful Months between the World Series and spring training, John Thorn and Pete Palmer's monster encyclopedia will introduce your wife, husband, and/or children to the higher altitudes of statistical theory while teaching them a lot of American history in the process...
...These quotes, and many other interesting ones, are available in Eisenhower, Stephen E. Ambrose's fine biography...
...At that point, I had one balk—the latter's vague language and loose-jointed ideas repel and I question the link...
...He is at work on a memoir of Berkeley...
...This is a gripping novel about the dangers of plastic surgery by the beauty director of Vogue...
...Kife...
...I THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 29 recommend the book without any embarrassment or hope of financial recompense, because the ten I have already given away have brought requests for as many more...
...No, the speaker in each case was Dwight D. Eisenhower, the last President who understood foreign affairs, who was determined and able to hold federal spending down, and who could stand up to hawks in the Pentagon and in both parties...
...ELLIOTT ABRAMS The bicentennial of the French Revolution moved me to read two very different, and very fine, books worth recommending...
...His most recent book is Free Persons and the Common Good (Madison Books...
...Don Aslett's book on house-cleaning is not only a marvelous how-to-do-it, but its lessons—about junk, and about letting the chemicals work while you do something else, for example—are also wonderful guidance for other areas of our lives...
...This is the story of the black community of Fulton, Virginia, (near Richmond) begun after the Civil War and ultimately destroyed by urban renewal during the War on Poverty...
...It is a fascinating book by the former secretary of the Navy who had the courage to take on Washington's well-heeled defense establishment...
...Jewish and Christian moral theology raises new questions for philosophers: about the recurring human weakness of will, for example, and the nature of God, whom so many humans seek...
...The last chapter can be read as an independent work...
...Eric Hammel has compiled a superb oral history of those first three months in 1968 at Khe Sanh...
...George Weige4 president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, is author...
...Well, not quite, for Flashie remains the consummate coward (as he is the first to admit), whoring, bribing, and conning his way through all the decisive events of nineteenth-century history, including a memorable meeting with young Congressman Lincoln in Flash for Freedom...
...Each of them is quirky, preposterously ambitious, and successful...
...Peace, so Adelman has decided, is a habit of mind...
...More Like Us, by James Fallows (Houghton Mifflin)—a provocative and timely viewpoint on Japan...
...Almost singlehandedly, Maritain supplied the theory from which the Christian Democratic parties of Europe and Latin America sprang after World War II...
...Witness, by Whittaker Chambers...
...JAY McINERNEY Don Quixote (1605-1615), by Miguel de Cervantes...
...Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities...
...His grasp of the many-sided subject and his engaging prose give the large book the speed of good fiction and make the prospect of the next anything but daunting...
...It is a how-to book on provocation...
...But her intelligent writing is in the service of responsible, strong feeling...
...a crackling novel of language and politics set in Athens circa 1980...
...and that it comes with no guarantee of lasting forever...
...Therefore: From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas L. Friedman...
...Try Robert Andrews's sparkling first novel of double-dealing at the CIA, the KGB, the White House, the Kremlin, and a great burger-and-brew joint in the wilds of northern Virginia...
...It's hard, indeed, to think of a better author to introduce oneself to for Christmas 1989, or any other time...
...African history as Africans tell it...
...John Lukacs is well known for his histories and with special esteem for his work of theory, Historical Consciousness...
...its existence is not necessary...
...He calls himself a reactionary largely because he reacts, and an original sinner not because he has invented new sins, but because he shows his modest performance in that line as originating decisions and conditioning thought...
...Among his books are Sexual Desire (The Free Press), Untimely Tracts (St...
...RONALD E. BURR Khe Sanh: Siege in the Clouds, by Eric Hammel (Crown, $24.95...
...A brilliant depiction of the experience of mothering and being mothered, rendered all the more poignant by the author's early loss of her own mother, and her own childlessness...
...In Our Image, by Stanley Karnow (Random House)—a comprehensive history of the United States in the Philippines at a time when both countries must reach major decisions on the relationship...
...His most recent book is The Economic Consequences of Immigration (Basil Blackwell...
...All the old conservative truths about the errancies of this century can be found here...
...ARCHIE ROOSEVELT A Place for Us, by Nicholas Gage (a sequel to the magnificent story of his martyred mother, Elen0, recounting the fascinating experiences of his passage from his ancestral mountain village in Greece and transition into his American present growing up in his ethnic family...
...The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes (Knopf...
...The pair, moreover, are types we shall not soon meet again—men of honor...
...Abraham Lincoln, by Benjamin P. Thomas ($10.95...
...Hashim Khan's book about squash is fun to read even if you never touch a racquet, partly because of the uproariously funny accent that is transcribed by Khan's editor...
...No believer in freedom—or, rather, the struggle for freedom—can omit this book from any list of recommended readings...
...Therefore, it is proper that as a list of recommended books I offer nothing new, but rather a set of old friends in whose merits I continue to delight: works which have passed the test of long familiarity and frequent use...
...John Ehrlichman is at work on a novel for Simon and Schuster involving the trial of an impeached President...
...With this book you can renew your communion with nature, and enjoy the Hoosier state even more...
...An example of modern British fiction at its highly conscious, civilization-threatened-by-chaos best...
...CHARLES MURRAY For fun and profit too, I loved The Examined Life, by Robert Nozick, and Microcosm, by George Gilder...
...As soon as my wife writes her next novel, I will recommend that one too...
...KATHLEEN KENNEDY TOWNSEND Plutarch's Life of Caesar—for those who have forgotten that leaders once fought at the head of their armies...
...A splendid mix of fact, anecdote, and folklore, the book provides a vivid portrait for those who have never been and a fitting epitaph for those who have...
...Ronald E. Burr is publisher of The American Spectator...
...Amidst the worldwide retreat from socialism, F. A. Hayek's The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism is a fitting epitaph...
...Limo and Three are Arthur Bryant's two books, Years of Victory and The Age of Elegance...
...Thatcher intends to hand over to the Communist mainland against the will of the locals...
...Authors Joel Kotkin and Yoriko Kishimoto make a compelling case that America's greatest strengths are precisely those characteristics in which we are most unlike the Japanese: open markets, open borders, individualism, and entrepreneurship...
...To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf...
...It is to my two-year-old daughter what Bonfire was to me...
...In this time of growing enthusiasm for both Japan-bashing and Japan-aping (via high-tech industrial policy), one of the past year's most refreshing books was The Third Century: America's Resurgence in the Asian Era...
...How did we ever see such a century...
...My fondness for underlining really nasty sentences is more than satisfied by Reflections of a Russian Statesman, by Konstantin Pobedonostsev...
...Richard Thornburgh is the U.S...
...The author, who died in 1907, says things about "the fantasy of universal enlightenment" that you will never find in an NEA press release...
...FLORENCE KING My "desert island" book is Nancy Hale's 1942 novel, The Prodigal Women...
...It is what our conservative Republican fathers and mothers thought, but in better, more readable prose...
...the greatest reference book since Ernest Schweibert's Trout...
...No Christian layman of the last two centuries covered more ground—or covered it more deeply—than Jacques Maritain...
...Centennial, by James Michener...
...Schama deserves all the praise he has gotten: the book is extremely lively and lots of fun, as well as a significant contribution to the new scholarship about the Revolution...
...Forget it...
...even in translation, this is a better novel about New York in the 1980s than The Bonfire of the Vanities...
...The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: I know, I know, but "The Sea Change" is simply haunting and no one ever talks about it...
...It's a funny/sad tale of rivalry between a countercultural burnout and would-be fishing guide and the cranky old thug whose tactics to restrain trade culminate in murder...
...For those new mommies and daddies, Christine Allison's I'll Tell You a Story, I'll Sing You a Song is just the thing...
...Guaranteed to coax a smile from the Grinch himself...
...But here are some interesting titles that have recently come my way...
...Add to these Maritain's marvelous studies of politics, Man and the State (1951), Christianity and Democracy (1944), and Reflections on America (1958...
...The Sweet Science: no New Yawker's reading list is complete without Joe Liebling...
...Biographies make fine holiday gifts, especially for students who need role models (as RET reminds us in his editorial on page 10...
...Finally, The Lady With the Alligator Purse by Nadine Westcott...
...Unfinished Painting (Random House) by Mary Jo Salter is an elegant book of poems that deserves more notice than it's received...
...Through it we can see at last why the full man is greater even than the author of Democracy in America...
...JOHN BUCKLEY Ninety-7ivo in the Shade, by Thomas McGuane: the third novel by our Republic's finest comic writer, with prose whose power-to-weight ratio matches a Suzuki motorcycle...
...but for me it has always been a series of demonstrations on how conservatives can profoundly annoy Liberals across a whole range of issues...
...RICHARD MERKIN A Walk on the Wild Side: Nelson Algren's most wonderful book, a suite of hallucinatory memories of New Orleans in the early thirties...
...RICHARD THORNBURGH Robert K. Massie, Peter the Great...
...The Rise and Decline of Nations, by Mancur Olson (Yale University Press) —although published in 1982, an important message for Americans seeking understanding of the structural rigidities of various national economies andthe ways that we might gain greater freedom to progress...
...Haley's biography is a heroic narrative, powerfully written, dramatic and persuasive, of the cattle kingdom and its unfolding north and west from Fort Worth after 1865: of the great age of the cattle drives, an enterprise in which my mother's people played a role and which therefore speaks to me in a personal way...
...As the old order passed, Kidd fell in love and married an aristocrat...
...I begin with William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses (1942), which I first read seriously while a young naval officer sailing the Pacific on the USS Hornet in the spring of 1957...
...And proves, over and over, that fiction can foreshadow fact...
...Senator Steve Symms, a Civil War enthusiast, told me this is the finest book ever written about the Battle of Gettysburg...
...These five books will all be stimulating for readers interested in the foreign policy of our country...
...A Place for Us, by Nicholas Gage...
...The same goes for "Hills Like White Elephants," an extended and touching confrontation between lovers about abortion...
...BOORS FOR GEREMAS It's that time of year again, as eminent readers and writers recommend tomes— some old, some new—certain to delight giver, recipient, and Santa alike...
...The story of a father on an icy island off the coast of Maine, trying to prevent his daughter's suicide as she mourns the murder of her husband at the end of World War II...
...Adlai Stevenson...
...The Collected Poems of W B. Yeats`Because a fire was in my head...
...Paul Kennedy...
...It contains the most laconic narrative voice and some of the best dialogue around...
...Still the best book ever about Washington, D.C., and the foibles of its denizens...
...It's a very old fashioned book: just the facts, no psychobabble, lit up not by the author's prose but by the subject's brilliance...
...Most impressive is his ability to report the horrors, tragedy, and bravery of the men who experienced it all...
...Each, in its own way, is likely to affect the way you look at the world...
...in Bloomington, Indiana...
...In short, the character self-portrayed is both likable and worthy of respect...
...Of all Michener epics, this is his best, in my opinion...
...A fuller treatment will be found in Maritain's Science and Wisdom (1940...
...Through African Eyes, by Leon C. Clark (CITE...
...The Notre Dame University Press is a good place to look for paperback titles otherwise out of print...
...Lord Devlin's book, Easing the Passing, is a wonderful interweaving of the substance of the trial, including material evidence and cross-examination, with his inner debate about the decisions he made and with his reflections on the law and those who administered it on that occasion...
...Elevation of the human spirit is guaranteed...
...A perfectly poised novel, yet not without enormous reserves of compassion...
...A Wake for the Living (1975) by Andrew Nelson Lytle is exceptional among modern books, a full evocation of the old agricultural, familial order of life which came to an end in both North and South with the conclusion of the War Between the States...
...Now after nearly half a century, it has become possible to write a dispassionate, leisurely biography, and the English critic and conductor David Cairns has done it...
...Two books by young writers: The Last to Go (Harcourt Brace) by Rand Richards Cooper is a group of related stories that deals in an unsentimental, humorous, and also touching way with interactions among the members of a suburban family...
...Orthodox Jews read the first few awesome paragraphs of Genesis soon after the beginning of every Jewish year...
...WILLIAM WHITWORTH "To amass military power without regard to our economic capacity would be to defend ourselves against one kind of disaster by inviting another...
...Her essay, "Dreaming of Hitler: A Memoir of Self-Hatred" appears in the recently published anthology, Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal A collection of her pieces—as well as a second novel entitled The Discovery of Sex—will be published by Poseidon Press/ Simon and Schuster...
...Give it to someone who thinks history is coming to an end...
...When considering how humans ought to live, existing philosophers necessarily borrow from other sciences, whose methods are different, such as sociology, anthropology, psychology—yes, and theology...
...Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon: still the unrivaled postwar epic, which somehow, miraculously, renders the birth of the nuclear age as a modern day farce...
...M E. Bradford, professor of English at the University of Dallas has recently published (with Regnery Gateway) an edition, From Eden to Babylon: The Social and Political Essays of Andrew Nelson Lytle, and (with Sherwood Sugdon & Ca) a new collection, The Reactionary Imperative: Essays Literary and Political...
...Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state in the Reagan Administration, pn2ctices law in Washington...
...Is He Popenjoy...
...Quite different, but properly so, is W. L. Morison's study of John Austin —no, not a misprint for Jane Austen, let us give her a rest from palaver...
...Money, by Martin Amis: a portrait of vulgarism and excess set in New York and London in the Reagan/Thatcher years by the most important comic novelist of his generation on either side of the Atlantic While politically he maybe dumber than an eggplant, Amis nonetheless writes sentences that make one howl with laughter, and, especially in Money, does so in an utterly convincing and wicked narrative voice...
...Now he has delved into his own past and produced the Confessions of an Original Sinner...
...1. They must be good...
...Reading Citizens brought very much to mind again Talleyrand, that intriguing figure who survived, and indeed flourished, under the Ancien Regime, Directorate, Consulate, Empire, and Restoration...
...JOHN CHAMBERLAIN For Christmas giving there is Kenneth Adelman's The Universal Embrace: Arms Summitry—A Skeptic's Account (Simon and Schuster...
...M. E. BRADFORD In our formative years and while we are in the midst of our education—before we have, in an intellectual sense, assumed a stance and character—it is natural, when asked about what books seem most important to us, that we speak of discoveries and of the joy that comes with first acquaintance and fresh insight into matters that once seemed mysterious...
...Though the lieutenant was bred a lawyer, he is a born stylist, a brilliant observer of man and nature, and a true philosopher, for whom war is not all horror and glory...
...JOHN EHRLICHMAN I suggest two books: Peking Story, by David Kidd (Clarkson N. Potter...
...by William E Buckley, Jr...
...Evelyn Waugh's trilogy is the finest fiction to come out of the Second World War...
...A great book...
...Well, good: H. L. Mencken's memoirs are his most enduring writing, and vindicate Alistair Cooke's judgment of Mencken as a great American humorist in the tradition of Mark Twain...
...Edwin Mulhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer, by Steven Milhauser...
...They want "brilliant pebbles" that will take on missiles in outer space regardless of numbers...
...Flowing from this vision is another short volume, On Christian Philosophy (1955...
...Center Game (Bantam Books): Tired of high-tech thrillers which read like fictional glosses on Jane's Fighting Ships...
...most recently, of Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life (forthcoming from Farrar Straus & Giroux...
...RICHARD G. LUGAR Nicaragua, by Shirley Christian (Random House)—a remarkable account of the intertwining history of the United States and Nicaragua...
...Adelman wants to go back to "ordinary means," as does Irving Kristol...
...In its essence, philosophy is grounded—for any philosopher worth her salt—on evidence and methods that spring from the best that human intelligence can push itself to...
...Richard Merkin is a Limner Columnist, Educator, Amateur Baseball Historian, Good Time Sport, and member of The Fancy, In Good Standing...
...Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, which, for the few who haven't yet read it, is simply the funniest novel of the 1980s...
...The Lives and Dreams of Soviet Youth, by Nancy Traver...
...Rudolph Otto's The Idea of the Holy (1923) came into my hands when his discussion of the "numinous experience," of the power, majesty, and holiness of God, was of direct assistance in resisting the modernist demand that we consider the Deity "socially" or "scientifically," without too much "mythologizing" about divinity per se...
...Among books published in English this year, I have been particularly impressed by Francoise Thom's Newspeak, a study of Communist language, issued by The Claridge Press, 43 Queen's Gardens, London WC2...
...JULIAN L. SIMON In the minds of psychologists, I think, William James has just about displaced Sigmund Freud from the position of best psychologist ever...
...A fine book on an important subject...
...L. BRENT BOZELL 111 Lost Illusions, by Freda Utley...
...Robert W. Poole, Jr is president of the Reason Foundation and publisher of Reason magazine...
...Competitive Advantage, by Michael E. Porter...
...If you missed them as a child, you're still not too old to enjoy them...
...ROBERT NISBET Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919...
...Re-read the book and compare the hostility with which it was greeted in 1957 with the extent to which so many of its insights are now widely acknowledged...
...Martin's Press...
...People are coming to realize that Eastern Europe is too small a place to start a war, and they are beginning to suspect the world itself is too limited a theater for unleashing heavy stuff that will ruin a whole hemisphere...
...In addition, I have been much impressed by Alain Besancon's study of Liberation Theology—La Confusion des Langues (Calmann-Levy, Paris)—and by David Pryce-Jones's study of Arab politics, The Closed Circle (Harper & Row...
...Jacques Barzun's most recent book is The Culture We Deserve (Wesleyan University Press...
...He isn't really letting Ronald Reagan or George Bush down, for they are SDI supporters who want to find satisfaction in a different direction...
...In a story about an expatriate American's inadvertent discovery of a pattern of ritual cult killings throughout Greece and the Middle East, DeLillo explores the origins of language, the disorientation of travel in the modern age, and the fragility of being American in a perilous region...
...Under the title 7ivo Views of Gettysburg, it contains an English colonel's report as observer on the Confederate side and Lieutenant Frank Haskell's account as Unionist participant...
...Read it now before Vineland, Pynchon's first novel since G.R., is published in February...
...The title won't make any sense for a couple hundred pages, but you'll enjoy the trip anyway...
...A helpful aid to understanding the Russian (and sometimes even the Soviet) mentality...
...An elegantly written explication of homo economicus...
...Henry Adams, Democracy...
...No child should be deprived the opportunity to read this series of wondrous tales by the great philosopher...
...Filled with final sayings, moments of ultimacy, poems such as "Rumor at Twilight," "Last Walk of Season," and "After the Dinner Party" have lodged themselves in the Anthology of our dreams...
...Faces, by Shirley Lord...
...A gem...
...Compiled two decades ago by one of the founding fathers of the movement, this book remains the most comprehensive and readable chrestomathy of conservative thought...
...What better biographies to suggest than those of two great American heroes...
...In Vietnam 5,000 United States Marines underwent a torturous three-month siege at the hands of more than 15,000 NVA...
...if not, the ordinary means of diplomacy will do...
...The father of modern geopolitics makes it lastingly evident that as long as the Heartland and the World Island exist there is no end to history...
...These seem to be reasonable criteria...
...He was, as usual, right...
...Archie Roosevelt, a career intelligence officer, served in the Army from 1942-1947 and from 1947 through 1974 in the CIA...
...Greetings from Colorado, by Marshall Sprague (Graphic Arts Center...
...It's an excellent introduction to the balance of his works...
...Of the many memoirs published by former members of the Reagan Administration, John F. Lehman, Jr.'s Command of the Seas (Charles Scribner's Sons, $21.95) deserves special mention...
...The best book I have read about the Dalai Lama and the ravaging of the Tibetan people by the Chinese Communists...
...An illustrated linguistics book explaining why capitalismo is the Spanish word for "mercantilism" not "free enterprise," and why democracia doesn't mean much of anything at all...
...The case was that of Dr...
...Florence King's essays on American life, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye will soon be followed by a companion volume, Lump It or Leave It, to be published in 1990 by St...
...It should be required reading for every social worker and planner who wields power over communities in the name of doing good...
...Like any good intellectual autobiography, it is rich in explicit opinion and intimate fact, but two things about it are uncommonly agreeable: the intimacy is dignified, not obtrusive...
...It foreshadows not only much of his own later work but also much of the work of many others on a variety of subjects (variety itself being one of those subjects...
...GEORGE WEIGEL Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (Harper & Row): Jaroslav Pelikan's exposition of how the "image of Christ" has shaped, and been shaped by, different cultures is happily accessible to a general readership, to whom it should help introduce the sharp mind and elegant prose style of one of America's truly great scholars...
...Without him conservatism as an intellectually identifiable movement in these United States is unimaginable...
...She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, which she calls the "Lit Critters," and has served on the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary...
...Tom won two Pulitzer Prizes for himself and the New York Times and is in danger of winning a third for this excellent book...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 27 The work is a worthy addition to his earlier writings on the modern criminal law in England...
...TOM TARZIAN Did You Ever See a Dream Walking...
...DAPHNE MERKIN After considerable deliberation, I've settled on the following: The Movie Goer, by Walker Percy...
...I'm damned tired of Air Force sales programs...
...and Pete Dexter's Deadwood, a wonderful time-machine Western of the Lonesome Dove variety...
...But it does exist now, is beautiful, and spurs the most remarkable wonder—and thanksgiving...
...Gripping, gruesome history...
...William H. Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College and the author...
...As the Court legislates, as Congress tergiversates, and as the Executive salivates, it is tonic to re-read this hard-nosed classic...
...Harry Williams Art of War—Sun Tzu Stonewall Jackson—Burke Davis Lee Atwater is chairman of the Republican National Committee...
...The interminable arguments and parade of figures at Geneva and Vienna never result in anything "substantive...
...Alaska, by James Michener...
...The rest of us could follow them with profit...
...The first full biography of its subjectand it is wholly admirable...
...Hayek's Constitution of Liberty is still his masterpiece...
...A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin, the story of the creation of the Middle East, the attempts of the various Great Powers to shape it, and the violent reactions of the peoples caught in this central arena of the World Stage...
...The Good Neighbors: How the United States Wrote the History of Central America and the Caribbean, by George Black (Pantheon...
...Patricia Schroeder is a Democratic congresswoman from Colorada THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989 31 ROGER SCRUTON Sometimes a truly interesting writer is not credited with the insights which others borrow from him—such was E. E Benson, whose How We Are (1932) is an immortal classic of social analysis, beautifully and imaginatively written, and a penetrating study of Europe in decline...
...It's probably the best single-volume biography of Lincoln...
...It was written by my daughter-in-law, but that doesn't make it any less good...
...Bordeaux (1985), by Robert Parker, Jr...
...WILLIAM McGURN For those who like to take their Christmas seasons with some history, Jan Morris's Hong Kong is the perfect companion to a roaring fire and a glass of eggnog...
...For the uninitiated, these are the would-be papers of Harry Flashman, the bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays whom author Fraser has resurrected as a hero of the Crown...
...L. Brent Bozell III is chairman of the Media Research Center and publisher of Media-Watch...
...Could it have been because the Age of Ideology hadn't really dawned...
...an abridged volume edited in 1968 by Richard Harwell is also available (Charles Scribner's Sons, $18.95...
...In this age of glasnost, Chambers's message is more important than ever before...
...Both are readable and in many ways amazing, but Haskell's work is an ignored masterpiece of American literature...
...These books launch us into the story of the great peaceful century, which only had to put up with Bismarck's limited skirmishes of 1866 and 1870...
...Do such sentiments set things up for Gorbachev...
...Washington, by Douglas Southall Freeman...
...Warrior angels and iron ladies who entered where men quailed to tread...
...His new family failed to cope with the People's Republic and gradually lost its mansion and way of life...
...Ulysses (1921), by James Joyce...
...William Whitworth is the editor of the Atlantic Monthly...
...Oxford paper) is—like other of Trollope's later works—eminently sane, engaging, and thoroughly interesting...
...The finest examination of the elements of success in business that I know of...
...This fascinating group portrait of Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett, and McCloy is also a superb piece of postwar foreign policy history...
...Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), by Charles Mackay...
...Happy campers, jumping jackalopes, and cabbages as big as the Ritz: a litho-chromed and hand-tinted postcard journey through Colorado in the first half of the twentieth century...
...Like an Olympic archer, Wolfe hits his targets every time...
...Scott Davis worked there during the Vietnam war (he was a conscientious objector) and has written a gripping story of what happened to the real and interesting people who lived in Fulton...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1989...
...Daphne Merkin is author of the novel Enchantment, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish fiction in 1986...
...Winter is a good time to reflect on how Washington kept a ragtag army together with little money and few supplies, and still managed to defeat the world's foremost power...
...In this slender volume, Hayek distills a lifetime's study of how and why economies succeed or fail...
...Reads like a novel...
...But this closing section takes up only ten pages out of 200 and leaves what precedes a superb monograph...
...It is a thorough description of the physiography of the Hoosier state, including climate, geology, water, plants, animals, forests, and other interesting features of God's handiwork...
...As I have argued before, Kirk is an American Cicero (as he was even thirty-five years ago) in apprehending the American enterprise according to a long view of things...
...It reinforces in the context of Lytle's own part of American history the interpretation offered in Kirk's majestic synthesis andin the rendering of Faulkner's novel...
...The definitive antidote for a case of severe Orel Hershiser-itis...
...Adams, accused of having drugged to death his elderly women patients in order to secure their gifts by will...
...At the end, he finds the modern sequel to the original Austinism in the work of Harold Lasswell...
...The beautiful bluestocking heroine is a bona fide misanthrope, and the Great American Breast-Cupping Scene, which is about as stimulating as watching Julia Child construct a pastry cone, is absent from its pages...
...The World of Patience Gromeg Making and Unmaking a Black Community, by Scott C. Davis (University Press of Kentucky...
...Russell Kirk's The Roots of American Order (1975) achieves an inclusive vision of American history and institutions, of our origins and the impetus of our collective past, which no one else in our time could have made...
...From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas L. Friedman...
...A paperback edition of this vast work which you can actually carry with you on holiday...
...in the Jamesian tradition, but less involuted and more accessible...
...Richard G. Lugar is the senior senator from Indiana and former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...
...The slim and handsomely illustrated volume is a powerful satire on the foibles of the medical profession andan ode to the therapeutic benefits of pizza...
...Chronicles of Narnia, by C. S. Lewis...
...People were reading William Graham Sumner, the Yale pioneer sociologist who said: "If people are mad enough, they will fight...
...The figure of Berlioz the creator is now pretty well known, in the best way possible, by his great works...
...Peter R. Kann is publisher of the Wall Street Journal and president of Dow Jones...
...A fascinating account of the author's four years in Peking from 1946 to 1950, two years before the Communist Revolution and two years after...
...In this elegiac narrative the themes of personal responsibility and heroic achievement developed in Haley's Goodnight are in the end reaffirmed...
...most recently, of Catholicism and the Renewal of American Democracy (Paulist Press...
...The apex of the Perelman pyramid for me is Is There a Doctor in the Cast which I've been reading for twenty-five years (at least) and have been shamefully but delicately ripping off for nearly as long...
...WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD I could recommend Proust's novel, Wordsworth's complete poems, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and Anthony Powell's Music of Time sequence...
...A fascinating and moving account by an astute and insightful first-hand observer of the terrible struggle between Arabs and Jews in and around these two great centers of the storm...
...Merkin is associate publisher and vice president of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...George Washington: A Collection reveals a man whose entire life was devoted to the overriding goal of American union, the ultimate achievement of which would not have been possible without him...
...I can claim, conservatively, to have read it more than 200 times in the past six months...
...So Adelman has resigned as the Republican party's arms controller...
...An outrageous guide to the hopes, fears, neuroses, and aspirations of the current generation of upwardly mobile Americans...
...Nick had the poor judgment to leave the Times but still remains a close friend and one of the most moving writers I've ever read...
...First published in 1952 and still available through the Modern Library...
...His analysis in Roots of American Order allows us to determine what is central and what ephemeral in the American record...
...William McGurn is Washington bureau chief for National Review...
...Adelman has decided that worries about arms limitation are not a key to peace...
...After Apartheid: The Solution for South Africa, by Frances Kendall and Leon Louw (ICS Press)—a bestseller in South Africa when published over three years ago, this book attempts to defuse the question of racial dominance by suggesting a governance system based on the Swiss canton structure...
...No doubt the central volume is Existence and the Existent (1948), a slim little set of chapters on the main spine of the Christian intellectual tradition, the "intuition of being...
...It's also, arguably, Waugh's masterwork...
...His Varieties of Religious Experience defies comparison with anything else...
...Especially influential here was Integral Humanism (1936...
...A Biography, by Gerald Clarke An utterly absorbing, unreductive biography of a dazzling, imploding talent...
...George Washington's Collected Letters—common dignity, uncommon courage...
...Who said those things...
...John Buckley is the author of the novel Family Politics (Simon and Schuster...
...Freeman's accounts of Washington's farewell to his officers at Fraunces Tavern and to the Continental Congress in Annapolis are unforgettable...
...I often recommend Otto's book to young people who have just realized that it is not enough merely to read Holy Scripture in anachronistic innocence or to worship with no sense of what it is that we honor and praise...
...Robert IVisbet's most recent book is Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship (Regnery...
...A. M. ROSENTHAL All books I give for Christmas must meet three strict criteria...
...A. M. Rosenthal is former executive editor of and a columnist for the New York Times...
...Anyone who has read his masterpiece Eleni about his mother should read this book about his father...
...Robert Kennedy...
...Since 1975 he has been director of international relations at the Chase Manhattan Bank...
...Just for fun—but what great fun—there's Water Music, by T. Coraghessan Boyle, sort of a Marx-Brothers-Go-toDarkest-Africa set in 1795...
...The book is hard to find, but worth the effort...
...But it tooksome doing to pull him out of obscurity and misrepresentation...
...The fictionalized account of the Russian and American invasion of this huge, forbidding territory, beginning with the arrival of its first daring explorers, the Eskimo and Indian tribes who had to endure that conquest...
...3. They must be written by a friend or relative...
...Paul Johnson, Modern Times...
...During the worst days of the Terror, he found himself in America—a story which alone is worth a book...
...Wealth and Poverty, by George Gilder...
...Julian L. Simon is a professor at the University of Maryland's College of Business and Management...
...Few books, to my knowledge, so effectively give the lie to Soviet propaganda, in both its old and new, Gorbastic, versions...
...I know the editor-in-chieffor-life insists that this is a piece of political analysis, explaining how the Liberals came upon such hard times...
...John Austin was the founder in the early nineteenth century of an important school of jurisprudence, now supposedly outgrown...
...An underappreciated American classic...
...Number Four is Harold Nicolson's The Congress of Vienna...
...A "must" for anyone in, or aspiring to, public service...
...The Long Loneliness, by Dorothy Day—a woman who found a way to remain a Catholic...
...The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara...
...Happy Days, Newspaper Days, Heathen Days (Knopf): we seem to be into trinities here...
...Robert Penn Warren's recent death sent me back to his New and Selected Poems (Random House), particularly the first eighty-five pages of work he published in this decade's first half...
...Your local bookstore does not have this in the window, but with perseverance you can dig up a copy—and won't be sorry...
...The High Hard One: a rough and tumble and real biography of Kirby Higbe, a grand red-neck in the Grand Tradition who pitched for Brooklyn (and a few other teams) back when pitchers neither graduated from high school nor maintained a staff of financial advisors...
...that it is fit for human habitation as no other part of the universe is...
...Cooper's fastidious and probing style brings out all sorts of possibilities in his material...
...He is the author of a recent book on his experiences, For Lust of Knowing which still, after more than a year and a half, can be ordered at the bookstores...
...Virginia Woolf at her most capacious...
...Milhauser's obsessive look at the obsessive nature of childhood is imbued with a Proustian quality of memory...
...The first volume is out and it is a delight...
...The gods of the philosophers and millenarians are nothing beside the God of Job, the Crucifixion, and Gospel of John...
...This intuition begins in wonder that this blue-orbed earth exists at all...
...And a grim reminder of the ,nature of the system that now spawns Gorbachev's so-called new Soviet man...
...Insofar as she uses meter and stanza and rhyme to beautiful effect (especially in the poem "Dead Letters," written to her mother) Salter is a "formalist...
...Tom Tarzian is chairman and chief executive of Sarkes Tarzian, Inc...
...That would put him in danger of physical assault throughout the journalistic world...
...Capote...
...MICHAEL NOVAK As the axis of the world tilts away from politics and economics, toward questions of how humans ought to live, those who wish to celebrate Christmas by recalling the new ethos announced at the Mass of Christ's birthday could hardly do better than to expose themselves to the writings of the remarkable Christian philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973...
...The best literary biography to come along in years...
...Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, Unconditional Surrender [The End of the Battle, in the American edition] (Penguin): Mailer, Jones, Heller, Vonnegut...
Vol. 22 • December 1989 • No. 12
