Books for Christmas
TAS's annual Holiday gift suggestions from distinguished readers and writers. WICK ALLISON The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, by Bill Bryson (Morrow). A quirky history of the...
...The Fly Fisher's Reader, by Leonard Wright (Fireside...
...Squarenote gathered all the research, organized it, and even printed out my lecture notes...
...A short course on the current thinking of today's leading environmental activists, visionaries, organizers, and poets...
...A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander et al...
...He was much more than that in history —the man who led the Soviet Union out of the long nightmare of Stalin's terror and who began the reformation of the Stalinist system now being carried on, perhaps carried out, by Gorbachev...
...An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880-1918, by Patricia O'Toole, is the seamlessly woven story of Henry and Clover Adams, John and Clara Hay, and bachelor Clarence King, who took to each other with a curious urgency reminiscent of teenagers forming a secret club...
...RICHARD JOHN NEUHAUS Chatting with Terry Teachout a while back, I discovered that he, too, observes the most pleasant habit of reading each year W. Jackson Bate's Samuel Johnson (Harcourt, Brace...
...3. The Last Lion, by William Manchester...
...0 Allows you to print out all your notes, or just a selected group of them, to carry with you or send to colleagues...
...What drew them together will surprise nostalgiacs who wish they had lived in the tranquil and uncomplicated nineteenth century: the Five of Hearts were what would today be called a "support group...
...It is wellwritten, which is to say intelligible outside the specialist guild, and it imparts an outlook that is steadying among the rock and roll of economic prophecies and political nostrums...
...For example, everyone should carefully study Maggie Gallagher's Enemies of Eros, a luminously sage and sensuous account of the collapse of the sexual polarities that make us happy and powerful, fatuous and dutiful, and able to raise children who repeat the polarities, and make the world go down the Laffer curve rather than into Chapter 11 with Ms...
...The mockery of contemporary high culture's pretensions has never been more engagingly carried through than in Saichi Maruya's Singular Rebellion (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1986), the greatest comic novel since Flann O'Brien and the early Evelyn Waugh...
...Malcolm Bradbury, Mensonge...
...The author has a marvelous ability to transport you into another world which you don't want to leave...
...Other entrancing pursuits include "babyfoot," a game, and the supernal investigation of the sport "Taureaux Piscine...
...This Canadian author tells wonderful stories about families—really chronicles of strange and interesting events—since the beginning of the century...
...NANCY REAGAN An American Life, by Ronald Reagan...
...WILLIAM L. ARMSTRONG be good holiday gifts: The People's Religion, by George Gallup, Jr...
...Francis A. Schaeffer, now deceased but one of the most remarkable men I ever met...
...In the American debate over the Soviet experience, the left sometimes seems to think that Stalin never lived, and the right that he never died...
...Easy To Learn, Use...
...I ended the year in the clutches of Petr Beckmann's Einstein Plus 7ivo (Golem Press, Boulder, Colorado), which wields Ockham's razor with trenchant effect against Einstein's warped effort to twist time and space into variables and the velocity of light into an absolute...
...The original title of the book was Testament, which explains the tone of "final message" that pervades some of the best pieces...
...and (with Katrina vanden Heuvel) Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev's Reformers, which has just come out from W. W Norton in paperback...
...Brady's book is a sharp, straightforward account of what that war was like for a young Marine lieutenant—all the brutality and pain and boredom that any ordinary war involves...
...Khrushchev's son Sergei reveals considerable details about the plot that overthrew his father in 1964, and thus much about the men who misruled the Soviet Union until Leonid Brezhnev's death in 1982...
...Published in 1948, it powerfully presents the contradictions of anomie, grace, faith, frailty, disillusionment, disestablishmentarianism, and unoriginal sin that weave through his many masterpieces...
...Just mention this ad, and we'll send you a copy of Squarenote 3.0 to try, at our risk, for 30 days...
...Of course, one must enjoy the prose of cases and judicial decisions, while keeping in mind the link between the several constitutional rules at work in law enforcement...
...This second volume of a three-part biography of Winston Churchill is one of my favorites and is a delight for any World War II history buff...
...Jesse Helms is a US...
...On an airplane to and from the Soviet Union where Montezuma still avenges, I pored through Morris Klein's Mathematics and the Physical World, a masterpiece that should be read by all teenagers who think that math and science are dull and hard, while the seventy-five flavors of Ben & Jerry's fruit yogurt Marxism taught at major universities in the guise of liberal arts is worth their time and your money...
...Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution From Above 1928-41 (W...
...This should be the inevitable English Iliad for a long time to come...
...With the immediacy of a born historian, Patricia O'Toole shows that in their struggles with depression, anxiety, male passivity, female equality, and alienation from the "modern" age, the Five of Hearts were us...
...Kurth approaches the mysteries of the female mind and heart with the easy confidence of Stefan Zweig, making us sympathize with Thompson even when we feel like strangling her...
...Exit, Voice and Loyalty, by Albert 0. Hirschman (1970), is a brief and unusual critique of economics, particularly in its relation to politics and psychology...
...It would make a great gift for any up-and-coming entrepreneur...
...The story is why Catholics won't sing...
...The essays, notably "The Power of the Powerless," are a bracing instruction in the ideas THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 27 that won the Cold War, and a caution against our taking too much credit...
...Send No Money...
...Boswell's Life of Johnson in the enormous unabridged edition...
...Together they provide a conspectus of current beliefs, some naturally more "belief-able" than others...
...On all sides of the debates, surprisingly few people read this remarkable theologian, and that is a shame...
...No nonsense here about "senior citizens...
...Why Catholics Can't Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste, by Thomas Day (Crossroad...
...The title is wrong...
...Public Library between 1941 and 1964, I love several old books for new reasons...
...He is also a wonderful writer...
...Church, Ecumenism, and Politics (Crossroad) is, as the title suggests, a wide-ranging collection of essays, and an excellent place to begin to remedy the shame...
...William L. Armstrong is a US...
...The Coming Soviet Crash by Judy Shelton...
...The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene...
...LYNNE V CHENEY The Civil War: An Illustrated History by Geoffrey C. Ward with Ric Burns and Ken Burns...
...Of course, we don't see many of the duds anymore...
...They are all fiction, all twentieth century, are available in paperback, but are not contemporary...
...Incredible story...
...Or, any of twenty others by a now-gone artist from an era when funny lines weren't always acid-based, though he zings at an operatic level—Metropolitan, not Grand Ole...
...Fuller...
...Beyond the Boom, edited by Terry Teachout...
...TheNation: 1865-1990 (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1990...
...Among the writers are: Einstein, Theodore Hesburgh, William Buckley, Hans Kling, John Hersey, Mortimer Adler, Alistair Cooke, Robertson Davies, Milovan Djilas, Lewis Thomas, Abba Eban, and Jonas Salk...
...The Second Best Way To Keep Your Research Notes And Information Is On Index Cards...
...but the first two chapters encountered are terrific: David Brooks's "Portrait of a Washington Policy Wonk" and Richard Vigilante's "The War Against the Yuppies...
...A collection of the very best of fly-fishing prose from such masters as William Humphrey, Thomas McGuane, Sparse Grey Hackle, and Ernest Hemingway...
...With fourteen grandchildren on my Christmas list, books are always a shoo-in...
...It's for researchers and writers, not just computer experts...
...It offers a vivid, kaleidoscopic, and shocking view of Roman life after the Republic...
...Wodehouse was the twentieth century's most innocent man—so incapable of understanding his world as to be able to convince you that Bertie Wooster was autobiographical—and a sad reminder of what happens when such innocence comes up against reality...
...3. A Bright Shining Lie, by Neil Sheehan...
...Just another look back at a poorly reported incident in our history, the book's greatest payoff is the portrait of Eisenhower: not nearly so somnolent, many times more prescient than, say, the rhetoric of the '60 campaign suggested—much as Truman-asPresident grew wondrously in stature as the acrimony of his era cooled...
...Send No Money...
...The volume stresses work of the last two decades but goes all the way back to the 1930s...
...A superb evocation of the perceptions and recollections of a dying historian, at many levels of professional and personal experience...
...Eric Knight's Lassie Come Home is not really about a dog, it's about the difference between thoroughbreds and curs...
...Make this a Christmas present for your pastor...
...BOB KNIGHT The Chip Hilton Series by Clair Bee...
...An entertaining but nevertheless informative novel about the three-cornered struggle between life, literature, and literary criticism...
...Or, Life in a Putty Knife Factory, or Low Man on a Totem Pole...
...Governing the $5 Trillion Economy, by Herbert Stein...
...Alasdair Maclntyre is McMahon-Hank professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame...
...Agents of Influence by Pat Choate...
...but even as a series of I'll be happy to mention some of my current favorite books that might 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 crime stories the work is enthralling...
...Wilt, an implacably literal professor at a typical British technical college, is the vanishing point of an apparent uxoricide, a corpus delicti which undergoes simultaneous sex change and implosion, middle-class conspicuous consumption among the suburban lesbian-rights in-activists, and a riotous assembly of unconfused gasfitters, plumbers, butchers, policemen, academics, and other commoners...
...For a cheap, riotous, recession-year vacation, with no risk from Montezuma, slump on your couch and read P. J. O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell, especially "The Revenge of the Euroweenies," which is the funniest, most uproarious, probing, galvanizing, emetic essay I have ever read that was neither written nor published by Bob Tyrrell...
...Tom Wolfe is the author of The Right Stuff, From Bauhaus to Our House, and The Bonfire of the Vanities...
...Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov...
...Joyce Carol Oates) provides a satisfyingly well-plotted tale as well as amusingly ironic commentary on those who inhabit the postmodern campus...
...is a real estate developer, hence, in the current market, a fiction expert...
...Symposium is short and casual-seeming, but in the end devastating: part social satire and part thriller, a dinner party counterpointed with violent death...
...In The Altruistic Personality (Free Press), Samuel and Pearl Oliner present the findings of psycho-sociological studies of those who rescued Jews from the Holocaust...
...Basically an extended sermon about reason, social duty, and selfishness in an industrial state...
...The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy—an American "existentialist" novel that is meant to address secular readers in such a way that spiritual matters become as important as the familiarly pressing material ones...
...And, "What I fear most is to surfeit my readers...
...UnionSquareware 27 St...
...An attractive selection of the essays and poetry of one of America's distinguished men of letters...
...Bate's Johnson is about as good as the biographer's art gets...
...Only she could pull it off...
...It should be required reading for all business professionals in corporate America...
...The Edge by Howard E. Ferguson...
...Feminists hated it—need I say more?—because the author found too much chivalry and natural aristocracy in the white working-class male...
...Send a copy to Alice Walker...
...I reread it every two or three years, and never fail to find something new and wonderful...
...After 30 days of use, if you want to keep it, send us just $99, (rather than our list price of $199...
...BERNARD LEWIS David Lodge, Nice Work...
...Flashman, by George MacDonald Fraser...
...1. The Holy Bible...
...A collection of articles published originally in the New York Review of Books, about events in Eastern and Central Europe at the end of 1989...
...Little is original, but the presentation makes for delightful reading...
...ALASDAIR MACINTYRE J. M. Cameron is well known as a Catholic philosopher in whose essays Nuclear Catholics and Other Essays (William B. Eerdmans, 1989)—imagination, insight, and intelligence bring literature and philosophy together, but his poetry has yet to find the readers it deserves...
...The George Will of Shakespeare's era touched as many bases perceptively as either Mr...
...According to the New York Times Book Review, she has "the mouth of a truckdriver and the mind of a Jesuit...
...A basic, essential tool for anyone doing research...
...Acts of Recovery by Jeffrey Hart...
...Lame is the author of Diet for a Small Planet and the founder of the Institute for Food and Development Policy...
...Muriel Spark, Symposium...
...54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990...
...Rethinking the American Experience: Politics and History Since 1917...
...The Oliner study is of premier importance to the rethinking of moral and ethical formation in our schools...
...What sets Trillin, wife Alice, and children apart from, say, de Tocqueville, is a gentle fixation on comestibles and a saucy disregard for greater issues...
...The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith...
...A quirky history of the English language, packed with fascinating tidbits and written with great style...
...In this 1962 book, Angell fore-fathered Summer of '49 and Men at Work: weighty and still whimsical cerebral study of a game, by a master writer, reporter, and watcher...
...It was a lot easier than writing, I can tell you...
...This is for George Bush and James Baker so they can learn about the limits of power exercised without reason...
...This Present Darkness, by Frank Peretti: an absorbing novel about the struggles between good and evil in a typical American small town...
...Czechoslovakia's former playwright, dissident, and now President answers questions by journalist K. Hvadala about his life and beliefs, long before he ever thought he would become President...
...Characteristically, the altruistic personality is a personality shaped by traditional moral beliefs transmitted through religious faith...
...Being one of the contributors, I say nothing about the quality of the essays...
...22, nos...
...FLORENCE KING This was the year I swam with the tide...
...JESSE HELMS How about these five...
...Some of America's most exalted and politically correct Lit Crits called two new biographies "simply compelling...
...and New Woman...
...Against the Night, by Chuck Colson: a penetrating and alarming analysis of American culture...
...In seconds, you can select out certain notes, order them in fourdifferen t ways...
...Probably the best and certainly the funniestpresentation of current French structuralist and deconstructionist philosophy...
...but you might try his latest collection of coruscating columns, Compassion Versus Guilt, which is the greatest collection of columns ever published...
...A book of magnificent pictures and wonderful words (many of them from the epic television series), The Civil War will provide hours and hours of fascination and instruction...
...Vaclav Havel's major essays from 1975 to 1985 are collected in Living in Muth (Faber and Faber...
...Sovieticus: American Perceptions and Soviet Realities...
...BOB HAMELL Assuming, of course, that Orthodoxy is on all shelves: 1. The Summer Game, by Roger Angell...
...In Ireland no praise has been too high for Tim Robinson's Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (Penguin Books, 1990), a book which breaks through our conventional categories in its understanding of how geological and botanical landscape, human history and tradition, and the resources of art and memory can all contribute to a relationship with the particularities of place...
...So I'm going to go back to writing again, now . . . tomorrow, some year soon . . . George Gilder is the author, most recently, of Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology (Simon and Schuster...
...Whenever I had the chance I also orated passages from Tom Beth-ell's The Electric Windmill aloud to guests and other intruders, causing them to seize the book and sulk away to read it, assuring me hours of peace and quiet, interrupted only by an occasional gasp or cackle at Tom's elegant ironisms and deadly apergus on the foibles of America's establishment of the death-wish left...
...0 Gives you instant access to any bit of information on any index card...
...Sybil Bedford, A Legacy—an unforgettable picture of life in the aristocratic, pre World War I Rhineland...
...Tired of reading these estimable right-thinking tomes, you might want to find one to throw...
...This book reveals how Japan's lobbyists in the United States manipulate America's political and economic system...
...based on inscriptions and objects as well as the great texts, and translated with style...
...Living Philosophies, edited by Clifton Fadiman (Doubleday 1990), brings together thirty-four statements answering to the title description...
...Essays by this century's most influential natural philosopher...
...I also found some fun books...
...But don't despair...
...While many of the personal stories are moving, the enormous value of this work is in its definitive debunking of the tendentious theories of Adorno et al...
...Send a copy to Danielle Steele...
...Then I would sneak off to the snows of Medieval Scandinavia, into the densely realized realm of Sigrid Unset's Kristin Lavransdatter, a monumental trilogy which—like every great novel, from Les Miserables to Anna Karenina—expounds on the imperious presence of God in the world...
...Tom Sowell had another great year making the rest of us look lame and lazy, and I am sure not going to tell you about his recent serious masterpiece on affirmative action around the world...
...Rediscovering America's Values, by Frances Moore Lappe...
...Among choice examples: "Eloquence that diverts us to itself is unfair to the continent...
...by Dr...
...Addison-Wesley Publishing, Reading, Massachusetts...
...leachout's projected biography of H. L. Mencken...
...Dragon by Clive Cussler...
...The English manages to convey the compactness, the muscularity, and the rhythmicality of Homer's verse, all in fluent idiomatic language...
...Use this book to learn how you can become a "native American" fully inhabiting the place you live...
...The greatest novel about love ever written, and the greatest novel about postwar America as well...
...ROBERT ALTER Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton University Press...
...First published in 1983, it was updated and expanded in 1987, and is even mare relevant today...
...of authors, there is a great scarcity...
...The Churches and the Third Reich by Klaus Scholder (two volumes, Fortress) is among the most thorough examinations available of how Christians and church leaders in particular, coped and failed to cope with the rise of Hitler...
...Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth...
...Paint, Gold, and Blood, by Michael Gilbert (1989), shows a cluster of youths in an English school drifting, from love of adventure, into evildoing—art thievery and worse...
...5. A Turtle on a Fencepost, by Allan C. Emery...
...Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, was the National Endowment for the Humanities' 1990 Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities...
...Grant and Lee by Major General J.F.C...
...Katrina vanden Heuvel (ed...
...I know those are full-sized important books that require your entire attention...
...Alice Monroe has a subtle perception of the complications of human relationships, and a deep sympathy without sentimentality for the plight of lonely women...
...Democracy and the Ethical Life by Claes G. Ryn...
...IRVING KRISTOL Here are three recommendations...
...in The Authoritarian Personality...
...allows you to collect all your research information into one accessible, printable, sortable index card file...
...Korea remains America's forgotten war, ignored by memoirists and by the war-writing industry...
...What Squarenote does for you: 0 Gives you great organization and control of your research notes...
...Eric Utne is editor-in-chief of the Utne Reader...
...He then became a star in movies, the Governor of California for eight years, and finally President of the United States for eight years...
...Clinton Smullyan, Jr...
...This book describes what the excellent company in corporate America looks like, and it is one of the best written management books of all time...
...This is a brilliantly illustrated book that teaches children all about the ABC's and the animal kingdom...
...Then snuggle down on a corrugated carton with your favorite landlord and read Bill Tucker's Excluded Americans, a lucid and enraging work on government rent-fixing and other housing scams, including the "homeless" and the predatory socialization of housing by liberal bigots, housing lawyers, and fairness creeps...
...Water Music, by T. Coraghessan Boyle...
...September, by Rosamund Pincher...
...A rare talent...
...This is for Robert Bartley so he can learn about how markets are really supposed to work...
...Nemesis by Rosamond Smith...
...Will or Mr...
...The Shell Seekers, by Rosamund Pincher...
...Claude Lanzmann, Shoah...
...Emery offers some realistic and uncomplicated suggestions about how to live constructively and happily...
...A catalogue of a wonderful collection of Jewish objects and art from the State Jewish Museum in Prague, which were on exhibit in many American cities several years ago, but were never seen in Prague...
...The world is swarming with commentaries...
...Like Elie Wiesel, Levi is a necessary writer for our time, an historian of our century's worst crime...
...4. Vaclav Havel: Disturbing the Peace (Alfred A. Knopf...
...Finally, I plunged into Michael Rothschild's Bionomics, a pathbreaking critique of conventional economics, adopting a sophisticated biological theory as his economic analogy (big government, for example, emerges as an ordinary, parasitic tapeworm...
...Or return it and you owe us nothing...
...This is a novel about the Japanese and their quest for economic domination in the world...
...Senator from North Carolina...
...Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger...
...The Roots of American Order, by Russell Kirk: a dense and provocative classic thoughtful people ought to reread every few years...
...The book is called The Work of Nations, which rings a bell, and since the work of Reich tintinnabulates in the media, we can expect to encounter widely his form of labor nationalism, holding that U.S.-owned companies operating abroad have no more claim on American loyalty or support than foreign firms that train and pay a U.S...
...The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald...
...The Practice of the Wild, by Gary Snyder...
...The second volume, published posthumously and based on Scholder's notes, is not as strong as the first...
...Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice...
...Bob Knight is the Basketball Coach at Indiana University...
...Stanley Burnshaw, A Stanley Burnshaw Reader (The University of Georgia Press...
...The Best Way: On Your PC, With Squarenote TM Index Cards...
...For those who love mystery novels, Rosamond Smith (a.k.a...
...It surveys in full and dispassionately what has latterly happened to criminal justice in this country...
...W. Norton, 1990...
...Disraeli by Andre Maurois...
...Havel seems to me the spirit of the 1989 revolution—a reminder that it was an uprising not against Communism and certainly not for Capitalism, but against ideology...
...Very readable, with a wealth of information about life before the "velvet revolution...
...I also recommend a lot of other books that I don't have space enough or time to describe without warping woefully the Spectator's patience...
...The Party and Other Stories and The Duel and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: No one who reads these two books can doubt that, in fiction, realism is the wave of the future for this fin de siecle as well as for the last...
...RICHARD NIXON Prospects for Conservatives by Russell Kirk...
...The Five of Hearts...
...A classic of its kind...
...BENJAMIN I STEIN Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon...
...Richard John Neuhaus is editor in chief of First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 25 ROBERT COLES, M.D...
...Nothing is owe, no false heroics, and as usual we are given expert plotting and acute observation in superb narrative prose...
...Florence King is the author of Lump It or Leave It, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, and Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady...
...3 and 4, 1989) is a large and heavy book which, if you can pick it up, you will not put down...
...I keep meeting people who do not know these works, which I have recently reread...
...CLINTON SMULLYAN, JR...
...It fits on any PC...
...The creeps, bigots, and lawyers, however, refrained from buying his book (they're hard to please), so if you don't buy it either, The Excluded Americans will die and Bill will become a bond tout or something and all New York City will go down the tubes into Grand Central, doubled in no trump...
...described as "fascistic" or disposed to authoritarianism...
...Day has sounded the trumpet, with a witty and informative and no-holdsbarred argument for the restoration of the beautiful and ancient liturgies of the Church...
...Benjamin Harshav, The Meaning of Yiddish (University of California Press...
...The parallels with our own imperial and decadent condition are many, unfamiliar, and shocking too...
...WHIT STILLMAN How to Become an Assertive Woman: The Key to Self-Fulfillment by Bryna Taubman...
...New Society Publishers, Philadelphia...
...Lynne V Cheney is the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...We are making a special offer to readers of the American Spectator who have been our most loyal users and buyers for years...
...The most profoundly conservative yet radical book I know...
...5. Montaigne's Essays...
...Spark is the most assured English novelist now writing...
...Ben Stein is an economist, lawyer, writer, and actor...
...STEPHEN E COHEN Moshe Lewin, The Gorbachev Phenomenon: A Historical Interpretation, Expanded Edition (University of California Press, 1991...
...President Nixon's most recent book is In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal (Simon and Schuster...
...Squarenote 3.0 (new...
...Harry Flashman, plucked from the pages of Tom Brown's School Days, is a drunkard, lecher, coward, and bully thrust into some of the major events of the British nineteenth century...
...A meticulously researched biography that gives us a clear sense of one of the major figures of modern literature...
...She again illustrates the same ability...
...T Boone Pickens is a Texas oilman and entrepreneur...
...Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, translated and annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (North Point Press...
...A thought-provoking imagined dialogue between a liberal and a conservative about idealism, social change, and America's truelegacy...
...Wonderful short stories in a very good new translation of this turn-of-the-century Russian writer...
...A book that both Prince Charles and urban communards should love...
...4. The Compleat Practical Joker, by H. Allen Smith...
...Muriel Spark, Memento Mori—a wonderfully comic-ironic novel of elderly people still caught in the passions of their youth...
...Robert Fagles (translator), The Iliad (Penguin...
...The ideal bedtime book since any page can be read with interest while there's not much in the way of insomnia-inducing plot...
...Use it to organize your notes and ideas, plan your papers...
...Animalia by Graeme Base...
...The book of the film, retaining its gaunt magnificence and poetic power...
...An honest book answering all the charges that had been made against her for eight years and she didn't feel she could answer at the time...
...If you go to Mass in a parish where pop has replaced pomp, you already know: the music is awful...
...a picture of what life was like at the White House and her relationship with her husband...
...This classic tale of philosophy and faith, guilt and salvation, good and evil, can now be read in a new translation that reflects more accurately than older versions the dazzlingvirtuosity of Dostoevsky's prose...
...Mary's Court, Brookline, MA 02146 Telephone 617-277-9222 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 29 BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS (continued from page 29) TOM WOLFE Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis captures the psychology of the money fever of the 1980s beautifully...
...Clear and Present Danger, by Tom Clancy: a fast-paced, plausible novel of high-level international intrigue...
...Although it's fiction, readers will find the entire novel somewhat startling...
...In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman...
...Rita Klimova is Ambassador of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic to the USA...
...Senator from Colorado JACQUES BARZUN Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino (1940) is a remarkable work...
...Just bought this and it's not exactly a courageous recommendation since nearly all of its fifteen contributors are friends of this magazine...
...continued on page 54) Researchers, Writers...
...They are the ideas of people in Central and Eastern Europe who simply refused to become habituated to serfdom...
...Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar (HarperCollins...
...As one who ate the Mount Pleasant Branch of the D.C...
...An irresistible force of rich and wildly adventuresome language propels the unlikely protagonist, Mungo Park, on his search for the source of the Niger and for the glory of empire in pre-Victorian London...
...This program saved my neck when faced with teaching two new courses and only two months to prepare...
...I don't fully agree with Lewin's interpretation, but it is far closer to the truth than the triumphalist American outlook...
...Call now...
...Favorite page: 103...
...Turtle Talk: Voices for a Sustainable Future, edited by Christopher Plant and Judith Plant...
...His new book, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture will be published by Atheneum in May...
...Humphrey's piece, originally published in Esquire as "The Short and Unhappy Sex Life of a Salmon," is a classic of American humor...
...Travels With Alice, by Calvin Trillin...
...2. How Should We Then Live...
...It's full of contrarian insights and stiletto sharp, so be careful to throw it at a liberal...
...reminiscent of early Winston Churchill...
...ERIC UTNE The Media Monopoly, by Ben H. Bagdikian describes the growing concentration of ownership of America's mainstream media, and reveals the need to seek out other points of view from the largely invisible but nonetheless thriving alternative press...
...Not one of them has any political significance, which is a blessing...
...Bill, and handled none better than the art of all three: writing...
...If readers of The American Spectator believe in the venerable adage about there being two sides to every story, this anthology, edited by my wife on the occasion of the Nation's 125th anniversary, is a book for you...
...5. Robertson Davies: The Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore, and World of Wonders...
...I called them a swell read but otherwise we stand as one...
...It turns out that the thousands of rescuers who risked their lives to save others were typically the kinds of people whom Adorno et al...
...Summer of '49 by David Halberstam...
...Speculations on the Geopolitics of the Gorbachev Era by Walter A. McDougall...
...A re-issue of one of the finest accounts of the Holocaust, 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 by a scientist who saw and described the horrors of his concentration-camp life with a scientist's objective eye...
...Frank Yerby's The Foxes of Harrow proves that a black writer can get into the heads of white characters with unerring psychological insight and without a trace of reverse bigotry...
...Peter Kurth's American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson proves that some men really do understand women...
...The Genius of the System, by Eric Schatz...
...Jacques Barzun's most recent book is The Culture We Deserve (Wesleyan University Press...
...The Art of War by Sun Tzu...
...And, worthy of being remembered in the Christmas context: "There aremore books about books than about any other subject...
...Boyle has Conrad's ability to force your heartbeat to his rhythm and all your atavistic glands to his enveloping climate...
...If you fail to guffaw at Sharpe's ill-mannered, vulgar, underreaching, childish characters, see your doctor immediately...
...Herald-Times...
...11...
...Few dogmas of the left or the right will survive the evidence and explanations to be found in this masterful scholarly work...
...The Music in the Sadness (Toronto: Porcupine's Quill, 1988) provides a now rare kind of intellectual pleasure...
...Bob Hamell is the sports editor of the Bloomington (Ind...
...At the risk of putting the X back in Christmas, I urge you to find Rosemary Daniell's 1985 mating memoir, Sleeping With Soldiers: My Search for the Macho Man...
...These stories do an extraordinary job in involving the reader in the fates of their protagonists...
...My Turn, by Nancy Reagan...
...Beacon Press, Boston...
...3. The Collected Short Stories of A. P Chekhov...
...workforce...
...Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 Mark Twain...
...ECS, Ilion, NY...
...The British tradition of savage commentary borne by broad humor is alive and well, and it works: some of Sharpe's earlier efforts got him jailed in and expelled from South Africa...
...Sergei Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Khrushchev (Little, Brown, 1990), and Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Glasnost Tapes (Little, Brown, 1990...
...James Brady, The Coldest War...
...Robert Coles, whose books include the five-volume Children of Crisis series, is research psychiatrist at the Harvard University Health Services and professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard...
...I have a big pile of them here for you, either to read or to throw...
...The Wanderers by Richard Price is one of the best coming-of-age novels ever written by an American...
...An all-nighter...
...2. May Day, by Michael R. Beschloss...
...Try Squarenote 3.0...
...Must reading for every American legislator...
...There is abundant criticism of the fiction, some of it quite fine...
...Squarenote 3.0 is the easiest-tolearn, easiest-to-use software ever created for the PC...
...Iron John: A Book About Men, by Robert Bly...
...Whit Stillman, TAS's New York editor, recently wrote and directed the film Metropolitan...
...Simply the best novel about feelings I have ever read, and an extraordinary parable about another era's Michael Milken (if Michael Milken had had feelings...
...In debates about things Catholic, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is usually depicted either as the Grand Inquisitor redivivus or as the savior of Christian sanity...
...So much for new books...
...Excellent on how the once (justly) maligned studio system of the old Hollywood turned out so many films which now seem so good...
...His books include Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography 1888-1938...
...4. Churchill- Speaker of the Century, by James C. Humes...
...Yes, cosmic lessons might be learned by reading this book, but, face it, the fun here is in following presumably intelligent people as they make such boneheaded decisions...
...2. The Precious Legacy...
...Most American Spectator readers also probably remember Khrushchev only as the Soviet leader responsible for the Cuban Missile Crisis...
...This book is the fullest account and freshest reinterpretation of Stalin and Stalinism, from the onset of forcible collectivization in the late 1920s through the great terror of the 1930s...
...I take the liberty of ending on a non-Soviet theme with a modest act of nepotism...
...For these cathartic purposes, Harvard's Robert Reich iscoming through, just in time for Christmas...
...Fraser is a fine historian who takes the unacademic view that his histories ought to be read widely...
...Samuel Hynes is the author of Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War lino Aviator (Naval Institute/Pocket Books...
...His most recent books are The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (Simon and Schuster) and Necessary Angels, a study of Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem, which will be published in the spring of 1991 by Harvard University Press...
...at fifteen he became a lifeguard to help work his way through college...
...This is an extraordinary feat of translation...
...Tear open the Vietnam scab one more painful time and agonize over one man's view of what could have been, and what was...
...The negative feedback loops of diminishing returns in equilibrium economics give way to the positive feedback systems of the entrepreneurial learning curve, microchip physics, and Parkinson's parasite...
...The authors present an illustrated encyclopedia of the things people love about architecture and what makes them succeed, ranging in scale from small communities to the details of individual houses...
...Primo Levi, If This Is a Man: Survival in Auschwitz...
...Isaac Babel, Collected Stories—as Lionel Trilling says in his introduction, these are among the very best short stories of the twentieth century...
...The most important book I've read this year...
...Scobie, the policeman protagonist, is one of Greene's most empathetic characters...
...Many American Spectator readers no doubt believe that American might and right produced Gorbachev's radical reforms in the Soviet system...
...The "glasnost tapes" are the third volume of Khrushchev's own memoirs, which are both a unique firsthand account of Soviet history and a powerful case for the importance of his Own historical role...
...For the well-known master of detective fiction, this is something of a departure in the sense that the treatment of the two principals is sympathetic despite a clear moral tone...
...They deal with Jews in Revolutionary Russia—bitter stories, tragic stories, some very funny stories, but not a taint of sentimentality...
...A new book on the emotional lives of men and the healing power of myth by the granddaddy of the nascent men's movement...
...North Point Press, Berkeley...
...Wilt, by Tom Sharpe...
...The fascinating story of a young boy from Dixon, Illinois, who worked for a construction company as an 11-12 year old for 25 cents an hour...
...Wick Allison is publisher of National Review...
...Better yet, for your bishop...
...Here are two books I'd recommend: The Diary of a Country Priest, by Georges Bernanos—a powerful and haunting story of a priest's struggle for faith amid the natural doubts of his humanity...
...GEORGE GILDER Having not written a book for some time, I spent much of the year reading them...
...They should read this little book, which argues that fundamental changes in Soviet society since the 1950s led to the political sequel known as Gorbachev's perestroika...
...Which makes me look forward all the more to Mr...
...Katherine by Anya Seton, about the fourteenth-century romance between John of Gaunt and Lady Katherine Swynford, proves that it is possible, entirely possible, for the female mind to construct a logical, coherent plot around historical figures...
...Yep, I've always been fascinated by Churchill—and Jamie's book is delightful...
...I don't think any young person should grow up without reading Mark Twain, and Huck Finn is a delightful start...
...Nancy Reagan, the former first lady, is the author of My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan (Random House...
...A lucid and illuminating overview of Yiddish as a distinctive cultural system, a rich language, anda vital modern literary tradition...
...I also read LeAnne Payne's Real Presence, which is the most telling and coherent summing up of the meaning and significance of the great corpus of C. S. Lewis, and I read Christ Is Passing By, among several works by Father Jose Escriva, the founder of the redemptive Opus Dei, a rapidly growing global movement often attacked by Catholics for its secrecy and unpopular belief in Catholicism...
...and Jim Castelli: a fascinating report of American religious attitudes over the past half century as measured by the Gallup polls...
...in college he worked to pay his way, and afterwards finally landed a job as a sports announcer in Iowa...
...It is a pity that the three words that make up the title, apt as they are for the analysis presented, should have got by the editor: the library browser is put off—unless his trade is to coach operatic stars...
...Send a copy to Joe Biden...
...Alice Monroe, Friend of My Youth (Alfred A. Knopf...
...Call us now at 617 277 9222, or write us at the address below...
...SAMUEL HYNES Frances Donaldson, ed., Yours, Plum: The Letters of P G Wodehouse...
...Stephen F Cohen is professor of politics and director of the Russian Studies Program at Princeton University...
...The Special Report on Criminal Justice issued by the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform (vol...
...Robert Alter is Class of 193 7 Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley...
...like the index card files you have used for years, but simple to cross-reference, and each card holds twenty times (1.] more information...
...T BOONE PICKENS The Last Lion: Alone by William Manchester...
...RITA KLIMOVA Here are five books I think are wonderful: 1. Timothy Garton Ash: The Magic Lantern 1989 (Random House...
...I would rather irritate them than weary them...
...Ballantine Books, New York...
...Irving Kristol is editor of the Public Interest...
Vol. 23 • December 1990 • No. 12
