Books for Christmas
OOKS FOR CHRISTMAS Our annual list of holiday gift suggestions from distinguished readers and writers. JOHN A. BADEN Much of my recent reading is for a research project, Green Greed....
...I also commend the book because Frank says nice things about me...
...MARLIN FITZWATER From Beirut to Jerusalem, because it illuminates the road we're on...
...What of his equally decried analysis of the spiritual crisis of the West, as outlined in his 1978 Harvard Commencement Address...
...It may not change your opinion of Nixon but it will of Wicker...
...Finally, for those fascinated with the craft of intelligence, David Ignatius's Siro is a suspenseful tale of a rogue CIA operation in the Transcaucasian republics of the erstwhile Soviet Union...
...The left has draped the phrase "post-modem" over the usual modern statism...
...To borrow from Michael Kinsley, the real scandal is not what's illegal, it's what's legal lbday, the most morally and intellectually corrupt are those who defend the dehumanizing and incompetent bureaucratic structures that spend more and more and produce less and less, all the while refusing to consider any alternatives...
...My suggestions reflect this interest: James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Great Reckoning Garrett Hardin, Filters Against Folly Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac Richard McKenzie and Dwight R. Lee, Quicksilver Capitat How the Rapid Movement of Wealth Has Changed the World Robert Nelson, Seeking Heaven on Earth P. J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores Randy O'Toole, Reforming the Forest Service Mark Reisner, Cadillac Desert Michael Rothschild, Bionomics: Economy as Ecology Gordon Tullock, The Social Dilemma John A. Baden is chairman of the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment a classical liberal think tank with offices in Seattle and Bozeman, Montana...
...Ed Turner is vice president of CNN SANDER VANOCUR As I am somewhat sluggish about keeping up with publications of the moment, my submissions include two books that were published late last year but still stand the test of time: 1. There's a Country in My Cellar, by Russell Baker (Morrow...
...Current: Out of Thin Air: The Brief Wonderful Life of Television News, by Reuven Frank (Simon and Schuster...
...Not that I read all the stuff...
...Codrescu provides a gripping political detective story, using Ceausescu's regime as the background for the dark and still-unsolved mystery of what happened in December 1989...
...Gary Hart is a former senator from Colorado and the author, most recently, of Russia Shakes the World: The Second Russian Revolution and Its Impact on the West (Harper-Collins...
...But it takes so much time to remove the paperclips and to find the right -recycling bin that I've only now gotten around to digesting last year's books...
...That's not the problem, Wolfe bawled...
...3. The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev 1960-1963 by Michael Beschloss...
...And, because the "familiar essay" is an endangered species deserving of reverent protection: Joseph Epstein, A Line Out for a Walk (W...
...Nick Tosches's Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll (1984) pegs rock 'n' roll's beginning to the 1945 release of "Tell Me You'll Wait for Me" by Johnny Moore's Three Blazers and its end to RCA's 1955 signing of Elvis...
...And, in remembrance of my friend: Sidney Hook, Convictions (Prometheus Books...
...Like most Victorian novels they are too long: nothing would be lost if they had been reduced, say, by one-third...
...Part of the charm of Commander in Chief is that the Americans are referred to throughout as "we...
...Three movies have been made of it, but all merely skirt the edges...
...GARY HART May I simply submit books I am currently reading (rather than all-time favorites): • Vaclav Havel, Open Letters (because the author is the most creative literary-political figure around who is thinking beyond aging ideologies...
...A difficult book on the difficult subject of executive power, and a powerful antidote to democratic delusions, old and new...
...Jack Shafer is the editor of Washington City Paper...
...But even so, the books hold one's unflagging attention because of 11ollope's skill in depicting characters and the environment in which they live: they demonstrate once again that a narrative is possible only where protagonists are confined by and struggling against social or other external restraints...
...An important book from recent years that too many readers missed is More Like Us by James Fallows...
...Leslie Lenkowsky is president of the Hudson Institute...
...As a wit once wrote, one of Trollope's central questions is, "Will he Inherit...
...Many of today's philanthropists and corporate leaders throughout the country could profit from Mr...
...Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul DeMan, by David Lehman, explains why a pro-Nazi bigamist would feel right at home amidst the radical, relativistic nihilism of deconstruction...
...14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 E. J. Dionne, Jr...
...Once again, Calvin and Hobbes remind us that some things can LESLIE LENKOWSKY In an age that seems to prefer its heroes to be fictional or hyper-athletic, I Could Never Be So Lucky Again: An Autobiography by General James H. "Jimmy" Doolittle (with Carroll V. Glines) tells the inspiring story of a physically slight youngster who became a real-life hero...
...The last and, to my mind, the most compelling volume of Updike's tetralogy—and one chronicle of the eighties that's not a protracted rant about the "decade of greed...
...He drifted into alcoholism, divorce, and attempted suicide...
...He gives you the facts, then forms the obvious conclusion...
...Michael S. Greve is executive director of the Center for Individual Rights...
...I continue to go back to read and admire these essays, especially in light of the time pressure under which they were written...
...a war of words...
...waging political war—and as Jones lays out the skull-cracking ways of the Persian light infantry, the wily style of Marlborough, and the blitzkreig bop of the Nazis it never fails to astonish me how much life imitates military slaughter...
...They will emerge chastened...
...The Japanese listened to his progressive interpretation of management and quality, and we didn't...
...RICHARD PIPES Apart from the many books on the Russian Revolution which I have read during this year in connection with work on my current book, I recall two novels and a volume of correspondence...
...In fact, you almost have to be a full-timer at the state and national level (often at the local, too) or you won't get elected and stay elected...
...An illuminating work now out in paperback...
...It just dawned on me that I'll be dead before I read all the books I want to read...
...The former president of NBC News, the man who paired Huntley with Brinkley, recalls the early days of television news, the days when you could try anything and no one knew what worked and what did not...
...George Steiner, Real Presences (new intellectual foundation for a religious aesthetic...
...I had several requests to honor the pledge...
...It's better protection than a receiving line of chaperones, a palace guard of eunuchs, and a posse of Southern brothers all rolled into one...
...continued on page 50) SCROOGE'S CORNER President Donald Kennedy has asked me to respond to your letter of September 19 in which you invite him to submit recommendations and short evaluations for some of his favorite books...
...ELIZABETH B LURIE MICHAEL L. KEISER Ben Wattenberg is the only author I've read who always writes from facts...
...Blistering prose (W...
...Philip K. Dick's 1969 novel Ubik is a sentimental favorite of mine, the only book the drug-addled science fictionist wrote that isn't marred by stretches of pulp awfulness...
...4. Hans L. Thfousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography (1989...
...But for the serious-minded readers who expect this sort of thing from an American Spectator booklist, I endorse Archer Jones's The Art of War in the Western World (1987), which has shaped my thinking as no other tome has in the last four years...
...My reading has focused upon ecology and the shift in Americans' land orientation from commodities to amenities...
...For sheer fun, this is hard to beat...
...Finally, a personal discovery: DawnPowell, the dry-martini novelist whose praises Edmund Wilson sang in a 1962 essay and whom I finally caught up with this year...
...This change is largely a function of security and prosperity—not only ecological understanding...
...Anyone who shakes his head at the airlines today, puzzled by the fare structure or the bankruptcy news, will find in this excellent, multifaceted railroad history the comforting evidence that things were handled no better before, when we built and wrecked a great system of transport...
...Because they are human, scientists are more comfortable working within than without a paradigm...
...Mostly liberals...
...Russia Shakes the World, by Gary Hart, for some fascinating inside stuff about the new power structure by somebody I did not realize was a reporter...
...The most important work of history was Gertrude Himmelfarb's Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians (Knopf), which contains, among many other good things, the best short discussion of the Fabians in print...
...Even if that paradigm doesn't work very well, they cling to it, because it's all they have...
...Four of her wickedly funny novels about Greenwich Village life are now available in paperback: The Wicked Pavilion, Angels on Toast, The Golden Spur (all from Vintage), and my favorite, The Locusts Have No King (Yarrow...
...Charles Peters is editor of the Washington Monthly...
...Larrabee's description of George C. Marshall's heroic effort to modernize the military while also expanding it more than fifty-fold is a reminder that effective leaders have always focused on outcomes, not inputs...
...The most interesting non-literary memoir was Francis Mason's I Remember Balanchine- Recollections of the Ballet Master by Those Who Knew Him (Doubleday), a collection of eighty-five reminiscences of the greatest choreographer of the twentieth century...
...With his usual light and deft touch, the well-known biographer of Flaubert and other French worthies exhibits for our pleasure the life of the circle gathered by a great Frenchwoman of the eighteenth century, Madame d'Epinay...
...It was something about the nature of politics in various places around the country...
...And why isn't she a feminist role model...
...5. Second Sight, by Charles McGarry...
...JACK SHAFER One evening in the 1930s Thomas Wolfe paid a visit to his editor, Maxwell Perkins...
...Perkins assented and the furious scribbler started making a pile—novels, biography, assorted non-fiction...
...Making Game: An Essay on Woodcock, by Guy de la Valdene: Everything to know about the elegant species gracefully laid out by a naturalist, hunter, and gourmand (Clark City Press...
...For me, the best literary memoir of 1991 was, hands down, Kingsley Amis's Memoirs (Summit), not least for the chapter about Philip Larkin...
...P. J. O'Rourke's books do not I loved Parliament of Whores and Holidays in Hell, but not everyone does...
...Also post-modern and philosophical is Lisa Grunwald's The Theory ofEVery- thing, which grapples with some of the most important questions of this or any other time in an accessible and amusing way...
...Peter Huber, Galileo's Revenge Junk Science in the Courtroom...
...Structure is slow going: it helps to have an encyclopedia and a dictionary handy...
...The student of the American pastime, baseball...
...Newsweek $23.00 LI DA CHAVEZ Out of the Barrio 15 The "must" book of the year is The Promised Land by Nicholas Lemann...
...Also love Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, Le Carre, and Turow...
...Then I met a beautiful woman, got married, had a child, built a house, started a garden, and got a life...
...Ickes started out as a Bull Moose Republican, served as FDR's secretary of the interior, immortalized himself in 1940 by calling Wendell Willkie a "barefoot boy from Wall Street,"and was fired by Harry S. Truman...
...Fortunately, his life's work is summarized in Out of the Chaos...
...DAVE McCURDY I recommend two books which were recently recommended to me: Robert Reich's The Work of Nations and Henry R. Nau's The Myth...
...2. Herbert J. Muller, The Uses of the Past (1952...
...War is our most enduring metaphor—the war of the sexes...
...Of course, if you don't you're probably not reading this...
...Scholarly and judicious, beautifully proportioned and written with great narrative art, Mr...
...James Wolcott is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair...
...a biography on classical lines of one of the great figures of this century...
...The change: full-time politicians have driven out part-timers...
...The interwoven story of American inventiveness in mechanics is comfort of another sort...
...At an advanced age I have encountered two writers I should have sampled earlier: Anthony Trollope, in The Way We Live Now, paints an ironic picture of finance, politics, society, and journalism in Victorian England that could be 1990s America...
...The author's highly informed innocence should be duly noted...
...I'm such a fan that I often recommend two of his early bad novels, Raditzer and Partisans...
...Attention GOP...
...Now I'm doubly awed...
...My thought would be, after a certain point, stop reading your ten-thousandth book and start living...
...Book, because this dog knows how to write...
...Even today, no producer would dare portray the horrors of dependency that Fannie Hurst lays on with her relentlessly objective but always controlled pen...
...News & World Report, is a brilliant analysis of the last half-century of American politics...
...CHARLES PETERS Others that are useful for any student of Washington are The Man to See by Evan Thomas, The Crisis Years by Michael Beschloss, and Counsel to the President by Clark Clifford...
...It wasn't always that way...
...Make No Law, by Anthony Lewis, for some needed reassurance about what we can get away with...
...He shows the inadequacy of the main lines of cavil and vindicates the work of the Commission by applying the standard of the law courts instead of the academic cubicle...
...The subject in this case is electoral politics...
...Like Huckleberry Finn, Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo invites rereading and I'll wager that its wild satire wins it as many readers in the year 2091 as Erehwon and Candide...
...TERRY TEACHOUT I didn't review many books last year, mainly because I spent most of my spare time working on a couple of my own, but I did manage to read a pile of them, and several have found permanent places on my shelves...
...Dave McCurdy is a US...
...WILLIAM SAFIRE Here's what I recommend to stretch the mind over the holidays: The Outcast State, by Elaine Sciolino, to figure out how to deal with Saddam next year...
...Brown's book was slightly overshadowed by a book on roughly the same subject: Chain Reaction, by Tom and Mary Edsall...
...Old favorites—Montaigne, Yeats, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Rilke, Emerson's journals, Thoreau, Whitman, Frost, Dickinson, Eliot, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Keats's letters, Lawrence, Jarrell, Blackmur, and a lot of other fairly conventional classics...
...So I recommend anything by these three: 1. Donald Westlake...
...From this year's nonfiction list: WalTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 13 ter Olson, The Litigation Explosion...
...If the rise of Japan in the second half of this century counts for anything, then the little-known W. Edwards Deming must rate as one of the more significant figures of our time...
...Tosches writes like a runaway Toro, hopping the picket fence and snarfing up the neighbor's poodle, blowing bloody bits of bone across the yard...
...An inspiring tale of God's work in our world...
...Alan Reynolds, Forbes columnist and Director of Economic Research, Hudson Institute $23.00 STEPHE CARTER Reflections of a Affir ative Actio Baby "Powerfully written and persuasive...Likely to be extremely influential...
...I very much enjoyed the book Hakusai: Life and Work by Richard Lane (Dutton, 1989...
...He is at work on a biography of H. L. Mencken...
...The book, written with Beth Spring, tells of their struggle and, finally, their Christian conversion, reconciliation, and remarriage...
...Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison: Heroic novellas, as modern and thrilling as they get (Doubleday...
...6. Flannery O'Connor, Three: Wise Blood A Good Man Is Hard to Find, The Violent Bear It Away (1965...
...and an expanded edition of Michael Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Liberty Press...
...If you think Margaret Thatcher was heroic, Maggie by Chris Ogden is the book...
...Watson, by Peter Matthiessen: Simply the best book ever written about an American Frontier (Random House...
...Michael L. Keiser is a golf course developer...
...Desierto: Memories of the Future, by Charles Bowden...
...I haven't read a book since, and I like it much better this way...
...7bward a Religious Ethic of Wealth Creation (ICS [Institute for Contemporary Studies] Press...
...Fiction: John Updike, Rabbit at Rest...
...Killing Mr...
...The correspondence between Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck is a remarkable exchange of love letters over a period of years between a man and a woman who deliberately avoided meeting face to face...
...Ehrenhalt discovered a structural change in politics that should have been obvious...
...Its prominent male figure is the Abbe Galiani, the lively ambassador from Naples, but the book is not a love story...
...Both offer refreshing blueprints of how we might restore a sense of sanity and national purpose to America's economy...
...This is a brilliant summary of the liberal assumptions about history and the meaning of life that dominate intellectual life in our time...
...Ed Abbey meets cyberpunk in the desert...
...When he points out failures of logic or common sense, he does so like a candid student, without favoring any point of view or hinting at his sympathies...
...Betty Ann Kevles, Los Angeles Times $23.00 JAMES P PINKERTON Everyone who thinks that the status quo needs to be challenged should start the New Year with a little light reading: Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which will celebrate its pearl (thirtieth) anniversary in 1992...
...Return them any time you like...
...PETER HUBER Galileo's Reve ge Junk Science in the Courtroom In today's courtrooms, lawyers have set off in pursuit of scientific cranks...
...Would Scrooge...
...The Eustace Diamonds reveals the mystery of the allegedly stolen jewelry early in the novel and yet manages to keep the reader fascinated by having the mystery revolve around not lifeless objects but living human beings...
...My Thaitor's Heart, by Rian Malan: Brilliant, soulful writing about conscience and race...
...Thomas Boswell, sports columnist for the Washington Post, is the author, most recently, of Game Day: Sports Writing 1970-1990 (Doubleday...
...Give Back Street to your daughters this Christmas...
...The novels were Rollopes The Prime Minister and The Eustace Diamonds...
...The wisdom in these papers is remarkable, and far exceeds that in most contemporary discussions...
...How and why Americans are so able and willing to spin the litigation wheel of fortune...
...There's the rub...
...Posner delivers a unique combination—part biography of an illustrious jurist, part sociological inquiry into the general meaning of reputation...
...This all may seem abstract until you get to page 67, when Kuhn writes that "the state of Ptolemeic astronomy was a scandal before Copernicus" (emphasis added...
...Two are by Joseph Epstein...
...Whether he is making up stories or writing about elephants, Matthiessen produces prose that is self-contradictory, fruity, and spare at the same time...
...Helen Schulman's Out of Time (Atheneum), in which the repercussions of a car accident (or was it suicide...
...A tough read but worth the effort to learn why they are the way they are...
...Francis Steegmuller: A Woman, A Man, and 71vo Kingdoms (Knopf...
...After reading the first four chapters of Parliament I sent fifteen copies out as gifts with the promise that "if you don't LOVE this, I'll eat the book...
...Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation Dispelling the notion that Hispanics are a permanently disadvantage minority, Chavez considers the radical implications for bilingual education, immigration policy, and affirmative action...
...Patrick O'Brian, The Aubrey/Maturin Sea Novels (simply the best series of historical novels around...
...New York Times Book Review "Trenchant as a legal brief, compelling as the best fiction...
...FERDINAND MOUNT For conservatives and liberals alike this Christmas, the approved corrective reading is Harvey C. Mansfield's America's Constitutional Soul (Johns Hopkins...
...Sander Vanocur is senior correspondent with ABC News...
...The last book that did that for me was Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder a decade ago...
...Who are the folks willing to work full-time at politics...
...Then the analogy hits youKuhn's description of the intellectual decadence of old scientific paradigms applies with equal force to the decadence of outmoded political belief systems in our time: to wit, the faith that centralized monopolistic bureaucracies can effectively deal with the challenges of today's blooming, buzzing, changing culture...
...A devastating indictment of the ever-increasing use of "expert" witnesses in trials, and its effects on society...
...Thus medieval astronomers were blindly loyal to the "geocentric" paradigm propounded by Ptolemy a thousand years before...
...His "Letter to the Soviet Leaders" (1973), ridiculed at the time in the United States as well as in the Soviet Union, has proved uncannily prescient...
...1 hate her...
...The Goldin Boys (Norton) may come as a surprise to readers unaware of his great gifts as a writer of short stories, some droll, others poignant...
...spread through the characters' lives like the windshield's spiderwebbed shatter...
...and Killer Diller (Algonquin), a fine comic rip by Clyde Edgerton...
...2. Bill James...
...Robert Inchausti's The Ignorant Perfection of Ordinary People is a good place to start...
...Tivo Peter Matthiessen books now collect dust in my Thomas Wolfe Memorial Pile: Killing Mister Watson (1989) and African 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 Silences (1991...
...Robert Hamrdla Assistant to the President Secretary, Board of Trustees Stanford University Stanford, California THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 17 BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS (continued from page 17) JAMES WOLCOTT In a year of forest-pounding fiction by such Bigfoot authors as Norman Mailer, Harold Brodkey, and Mark Helprin, a number of nifty smaller novels have been given polite pecks on the cheek...
...An illuminating treatise that manages to say something new on the havoc wrought by lawyers...
...Structure has never gone out of print...
...3. Bernard N. Nathanson, Aborting America (1979...
...Richard Pipes is Baird Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of The Russian Revolution...
...Among the overlooked: Lewis Nordan's Music of the Swamp (Algonquin), a rich sample of Southern soul-ache rivaling Harry Crews's A Childhood...
...Not much contemporary stuff can hold me more than 100 pages...
...FLORENCE KING Leave it to the women's studies crowd to miss the greatest feminist novel ever written...
...THOMAS C. REEVES 1. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (revised paperback ed., 1982...
...The wealthy widow fell in love with Tbhaikovsky's music, but the composer's homosexuality barred any intimacy, even of a platonic nature...
...P. J. is for neo-cons only...
...Nonfiction: Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Taming the Prince...
...Stupid competition, wild diversity of rates, rare instances of good management, and the clever policy of the-public-be-damned brought on regulation, over-regulation, and final strangulation through Enterprise Denied...
...A thrilling nightmare (Atlantic Monthly Press...
...In any case, Solzhenitsyn's return to Russia will be a moment for all of us to cherish...
...It is especially recommended for fans of black comedy and people who believe in Santa Claus...
...Gary S. Becker is professor of economics and sociology at the University of Chicago and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...earlier volume on the development of the idea of poverty in nineteenth-century Britain...
...Heckscher's work will remain a model of the genre, latterly corrupted by love of gossip and the tape recorder...
...A gifted writer who is also a scholar continues the chronicle of the most brilliant politician-writer and fair country painter of this century...
...The years since have revealed why Baker is the right successor to E. B. White...
...A fascinating biography of one of this century's most colorful figures...
...We have a new governing class...
...James P Pinkerton is deputy assistant to the President for policy planning...
...Our Country, by Michael Barone of US...
...Because of the relatively short notice and because Stanford's Centennial falls directly in the intervening period, he regrets that he'll not be able to accept the invitation...
...This collection of writings by one of the most original and interesting minds of this century is consistently delightful, unpredictable, and unfashionable...
...In a straightforward, understated fashion, he recounts his role in a host of important areas, ranging from the early days of instrument flying to the shaping of American national security policy...
...However, it tells the story of a remarkable man who combined business acumen with a well-developed sense of public service...
...The book is a collection of Baker's columns, going back to 1962, when James Reston persuaded the powers that be at the New York Times that giving Baker a column was the only way to prevent him from returning to the Baltimore Sun...
...Walter K. Olson, The Litigation Explosion: What Happened When America Unleashed the Lawsuit...
...The United States of Ambition: Politics...
...Scandal, by Suzanne Garment, for some provocation about what we should not get away with...
...His work included over 30,000 designs...
...JACQUES BARZUN August Heckscher: Woodrow Wilson (Charles Scribner's Sons...
...Innate sexual differentiation is a post-modern rediscovery of a pre-modern truth...
...Living in Washington as I do, I get my fill of the policy debate so I'd rather ban books on politics, sociology, economics, and race relations than hype them...
...An atheist physician agonizes here over the foremost moral issue of our time, concluding that he can no longer execute the unborn...
...Ferdinand Mount is editor of the Times Literary Supplement...
...Dinesh D'Souza, Washington Post "Out of the Barrio is urgently needed common sense—in an area where sense is far from common...
...Like Wolfe, I've compiled a bigger list than I have time for...
...2. Righteous Pilgrim: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, by T. H. Watkins (Henry Holt...
...WILLIAM KRIS7OL Great writers don't write bad books...
...Until age 36, I didn't do much except read and write...
...ED TURNER 1. The Last Lion, by William Manchester...
...Alex Kozinski serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit...
...It is a tale of friendship and conversation that brings in other thinkers and idlers of the period, as well as some of the vagaries of two kingdoms, France and Naples...
...There weren't many great political books in the 1980s, but the 1990s are different...
...GARY S. BECKER I very much liked The Structure of Everyday Life by Fernand Braude' (HarperCollins), the first and best of a threevolume series by the eminent French historian...
...Sober, eloquent, and politically incorrect...
...FRED BARNES I had lunch with Alan Ehrenhalt, then an editor with Congressional Quarterly, several years ago, and he told me of a book he was just beginning to research...
...The revisionism contained in this deeply disturbed, shamefully thin volume is so intense it would make Noam Chomsky flinch...
...ALEX KOZINSKI Andrei Codrescu, The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile's Story of Return and Revolution...
...a priest and a rabbi read scripture together...
...At last...
...The First Universal Nation is a rarity: a book that will enlighten your most opinionated friend, regardless of his persuasion...
...The Bible and Us, by Jacob Neusner and Andrew Greeley...
...Henry Sidgwick: Outlines of the History of Ethics (reprint of the 5th ed., Hackett Publishing Co...
...I'd describe Barone as a former liberal, and he writes like one Minority Party, by Peter Brown, a political reporter for Scripps Howard, tells how the Democratic party hurt itself on the race issue...
...Poverty and Compassion gives the answers, and much more...
...This suggests that conservatives should take another look at post-modernism...
...What distinguishes this work is not only the author's meticulous historical research and graceful writing style, but also her effort to illuminate how the Victorians understood the nature of poverty (and the steps that should be taken to deal with it...
...Then I read Maggie...
...The author, admittedly not a fan of the ex-President, reassesses the Nixon presidency and fmds himself reaching some surprising conclusions...
...And in the Age of Debt, what writer could be more apropos than Anthony Trollope...
...5. William S. Lind and William H. Marshner (eds...
...The Perkins library was awash with books, and Wolfe, a prodigious reader, asked his soon-to-become-legendary editor if he could borrow a few...
...I highly recommend One of U% by Tom Wicker, a revisionist view of Richard Nixon by the liberal columnist and onetime Nixon basher...
...Perhaps there really is, as Solzhenitsyn claims, "a mistake at the very foundation of modern thought" that accounts for many of our ills, East and West...
...John Stover: American Railroads (Chicago Press...
...It is needed because Wilson is still maligned and misunderstood, despite an enormous amount of archival, political, psychological, and medical writing about him...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 A Division of HamerCoilinsPublishers Toll-free with credit card 1-800-331-3761 Available in Canada from HarperCollinsCanadaLtd model or paradigm...
...Wolfe's reading list was abbreviated much sooner than he could have imagined: he died only a few years later...
...Parliament of Whores, because it's fun and it's all true...
...The denouement of this peculiar affair is stunning and, to me, inexplicable...
...MICHAEL S. GREVE A serious professional hazard of life in the policy lane is the destruction of ones reading habits through breathless newsletters invariably entitled "Backgrounder," "Forefronter," "Sidewinder," etc...
...Eric Larrabee's Commander in Chief FDR, His Lieutenants, and Their War reminds us of a time when the whole country worked together to overcome the Axis...
...But hewasn't headed for the ministry when he and Elsie first married...
...Tam Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream...
...I have read a few books recently, ones that are worthy of a few tears from every emotional, list-building bibliophile out there in American Spectatorland...
...Written very clearly, with many illustrations, it provides a fascinating glimpse into what ordinary life was like in different parts of the world between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries...
...It shouldn't have been...
...A gem of a work...
...Deconstructionist English Professor, Labor Lawyer, Commodities Rader, Free-market Environmentalist—this book speaks to all in the spectrum...
...In fact, the direction of post-modern, post-industrial nations has been towards freedom and free markets...
...For people who believe that the basis of Right and Wrong is obvious and stable, this compact and lucid exposition of Western moral philosophies from Plato to Mill and T. H. Green should be an enlightening and sobering corrective The author, himself a famous Cambridge theorist, is here the impartial historian...
...W. Norton...
...Hakusai was the greatest print-maker ever to come out of Japan...
...If you don't like politics, I've got a book for you...
...Florence King's new book, With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy will be published in February by St...
...Their belief that the sun revolved around the earth was so strong that they ignored the inevitable "anomalous results" that resulted from better instruments and measurements colliding with the old theory...
...Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence undoubtedly contains a moral but is to be appreciated mainly for its charm...
...he worked in the latter part of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries...
...An Episcopalian, I read it biannually...
...HERBERT STEIN Jacob Viner, Essays in the Intellectual History of Economics In essays that are at the same time highly entertaining and deeply instructive, a master puts today's pundits into perspective...
...In addition, three invaluable reissues deserve mention: Peter F. Drucker's Adventures of a Bystander- Memoirs (HarperCollins...
...Fortunately for progress, truth eventually prevailed...
...The old-paradigm orthodoxy was so hostile to the new thinking that it even used the Inquisition to stifle the heretical "heliocentric" paradigm of radicals like Copernicus and Galileo...
...Environmentalists and the Political Economy of Crisis Entrepreneurship...
...I was reading Camus at 12: I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now...
...only be understood through the eyes of a child (or a stuffed tiger...
...representative from Oklahoma and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence...
...The stories he tells are so good that Hollywood should make a movie of the book—but probably won't...
...Ehrenhalt's book explains why liberals keep getting elected in a conservative age, thwarting realignment...
...Martin's Press...
...Elizabeth B. Lurie is president of the W H. Brady Foundation...
...They are very relevant still, in view of recent discussions about natural rights, the role of the judiciary, congressional terms, and other issues...
...Where anything goes, as in our culture, novelists can create neither convincing characters—characters about whom one cares—nor intelligent suspense...
...Anyway, Still Married Still Sober (InterVarsity Press) is about David and Elsie MacKenzie...
...7. Kenneth P. O'Donnell and David F. Powers, `Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye": Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1972...
...I don't know how she does it...
...In The Prime Minister, a powerful aristocrat feels he must resign from the premiership because his wife has imprudently asked the voters in their district to cast ballots for her preferred candidate...
...a public interest law firm that publishes a newsletter...
...TERRY McDONELL Dark Waters, by Russell Chatham: An outrageous celebration of "the sporting life" by the wild and brilliant painter (Clark City Press...
...I used to read fifty books a year before circumstance yoked me to the adult tedium of a real job...
...Bill Watterson, Scientific Progress Goes "Boink...
...And I wasn't sure he knew what he was getting at...
...Hence, I've been reading in the fields of ethics, ecology, and political economy...
...Gertrude Himmelfarb's recently published Poverty and Compassion: The Moral Imagination of the Late Victorians is the long-awaited sequel to her In observance of the season: Peter L. Berger, ed., The Capitalist Spirit...
...Theory and Practice (1991...
...So now I reread the hundred or so books I love best and forget the rest...
...You know this is the way it all works Closest we have to our own Le Carle...
...The comic chronicler of contemporary America...
...He had an enormous originality that influenced many of the Impressionists...
...It wasn't to me or anyone else...
...W. Norton...
...Cultural Conservatism...
...2. Prince of Tides, by Pat Conroy...
...Epstein's latest collection of American Scholar essays, is a predictable joy, since his prowess as a familiar essayist is no secret...
...4. The Russian Revolution, by Richard Pipes...
...The important truth that conservatives can be compassionate as well as reasonable is made crystal-clear in this splendid collection of essays sponsored by the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation...
...Thomas Sowell $23.00 At bookstores or from BasicBooks while it is superficially just a survey of the evolution of science, it is in fact the single most cogent description ever written about the sociological nature of intellectual change...
...It sounded imprecise and not very interesting at all...
...of America's Decline...
...His fiction is piled with unpaid bills...
...I was awed by all the accomplishments of Margaret Thatcher as her career progressed...
...Very little is known about his life, so the book is mainly a discussion of his work and includes reproductions of many of his prints...
...He and his family not only left their mark upon Indiana (not to mention this magazine—his wife Ruth was an early backer of TAS), but also demonstrated, much as Carnegie and Rockefeller did earlier in the century, what the idea of "stewardship" really entailed...
...Or maybe they know about it but have chosen to ignore it because it expresses in a gripping, edge-of-thechair narrative what they relegate to the droning slump of the seminar room...
...Millie's...
...Jacques Barzun, University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, is the author, most recently, of An Essay on French Verse —For Readers of English Poetry (New Directions) and Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Raching and Learning (University of Chicago Press...
...In this masterly work he stands out as an extraordinary thinker, speaker, and doer who changed university education before changing national policy and becoming the world champion of nationality and democracy...
...A Line Out for a Walk (Norton), Mr...
...Power, and the Pursuit of Office is one of those books that forever change the way you think about a subject...
...How many times can you read Der Mann ohne Eigenschciften...
...The prints give a good introduction to economic and social conditions in the Japan of his day...
...John Sparrow: After the Assassination (Chilmark Press...
...For all the experts and political professionals in this difficult century, the most profound progress has come from "ordinary" people, such as Lech Walesa, Mother Thresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...
...They deserve more...
...William Kristol is chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle...
...It's a great argument against graduate school...
...Incidentally, both novels show howfalse is the prevalent image of Victorian women as obedient pawns of their men...
...William Sqfue is the New York Times's right-wing pundit and language maven...
...Terry Teachout's latest book is City Limits: Memories of a Small:Town Boy (Poseidon...
...This helps one to tolerate the bad taste, intellectual vacuity, and general silliness of modern religious worship services...
...Huber shows how taking the bizarre seriously in court has bankrupt companies and deprived all of us of lifesaving therapies...
...The most readable policy book was Walter K. Olson's The Litigation Explosion: What Happened When America Unleashed the Lawsuit (Truman Talley/Dutton), which does the impossible: it's both informative and extremely witty...
...Doug Bandow, Fortune "A lively history of how courts have tried to come to grips with sophisticated medicine and technology...
...The most rewarding collection of criticism, both literary and social, was Jonathan Yardley's Out of Step: Notes from a Purple Decade (Villard), a powerful antidote to the current cultural nonsense...
...All those years of compulsive underlining and endless margin comments to myself have made it easy to dip back into a whole library for a few minutes at a time...
...Now in his nineties and best known for the thirty seconds he spent over Tokyo during the Second World War, General Doolittle's active career went from the early days of manned flight to the beginning of the space age...
...Thomas C Reeves is the author of A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy (The Free Press...
...A writer of great insight and sometimes illuminating wit has created the best work of fiction of the 1980s...
...has assembled in his aptly titled book, Why Americans Hate Politics, an excellent account of how Americans have been failed by the false ideological choices of the last twenty years, and offers some good advice on how to make our politics more responsive to the needs and aspirations of middle America...
...A valuable and timely look at a crucial aspect of America's litigation explosion...
...Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae contains more insights and outrages than any book since The Liberal Crack-Up...
...Inchausti calls it "plebeian post-modernism...
...THOMAS BOSWELL Doubt I can help much...
...Of course, my wife reads a novel a week...
...He's a fact-master...
...A couple of television talk shows have lately revived the sport of denouncing the Warren Commission Report...
...Scored to the sound of money, The Eustace Diamonds is absolutely enthralling, with fox hunts worthy of Tolstoy...
...The prophetic figure of our time...
...My third recommendation is The Federalist Papers by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay...
...3. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...
...For those of us who lived through the period, a fascinating account by this splendid scholar-historian-writer...
...Before judging for oneself the merits of the (unagreed) attackers' views, it is a help to read this little book—an essay, really—by an English scholar and lawyer who put his acute intellect to work on the case...
...I would rank him among the greatest print-makers from any country...
...I have no intention of telling you what happens to Ray Schmidt in the end because I don't want to spoil the story for you, but I will say this: If every teenage girl in America read Back Street, we would have a nation of virgins...
...James H. Madison's Eli Lilly: A Life, 1885-1977, published by the Indiana Historical Society in 1989, may seem like a book that would interest only Hoosiers...
...Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, in a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Velokhonsky (tremendously enlivened version of a classic with renewed relevance...
...Irving Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism (Transaction...
...I wasn't sure what he was getting at...
...Herbert Stein is senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...How touchingly his agony contrasts with the cynicism of modem democratic politics...
...Must reading...
...Boy, was I wrong...
...This should remind us that objective, first-class history is still being written, and largely ignored...
...But I'm not so ambitious about my reading plans that I'm going to let it kill me...
...Richard A. Posner, Cadozo: A Study in Reputation...
...However, Kuhn shrewdly captures how knowledge-workers actually work: scientists are "puzzle solvers," working in incremental steps within the framework of their operating • DA IEL K. BE JA I R ER LER Y ILLER Undoing Drugs Beyond Legalization "The authors' innovative solutions to endless and escalating drug warfare should be as compelling to conservatives, who understand the importance of federalism, as it surely will be to libertarians, who deplore the rapid proliferation of police-state tactics...
...Fannie Hurst's 1931 bestseller, Back Street, tells the story of Gay Nineties charmer Ray Schmidt, "the toniest girl in Cincinnati," who becomes a kept woman...
...Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...Would Bob Cratchit have been better off if his family had gone on welfare...
...The book 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1991 should also give pause to the advocates of "a course of ethics in the public schools," in hopes of improving behavior in the schoolyard and beyond...
...I've always admired the screwball-comedy auteur of The Great McGinty and Sullivan's Travels for having staked the opinion as a youth that his mother's friend Isadora Duncan was a bore and that his businessman stepfather was the coupe de ville...
...Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges (1990) is another great book (all the reviews say so) I want to read...
...We have only lately—and by no means everywhere—begun to rediscover what the Victorians, she reports, well knew: that poverty is as much a moral condition as an economic one...
...Every book the novelist grabbed inspired him to nab another two, and when the stack was almost head-high Wolfe was in tears...
...The most recent additions to my list include Martin Amis's London Fields (1989), a book that I'm sure I'll enjoy as much as his new Time's Arrow (1991), if only I get around to reading them...
...David is now an Episcopal priest in Portsmouth, Virginia...
...Although only lawyers will fully appreciate the appalling truth of his indictment, Olson does a marvelous job of explaining the catastrophic consequences of arcane legal procedures and practices to the few non-lawyers left in America...
...Beyond that, I have do interest...
...Proves analytical rigor is compatible with appreciation of excellence...
...Lilly's example...
...To buttress his argument from other sources, one should glance at Mostly Murder, by the veteran CID expert Sir Sydney Smith: he shows, long before the Kennedy killing, that nobody can tell what a single bullet will or will not do...
...Updike can write but hasn't got much to say...
...Don't worry yourself, Perkins told Wolfe...
...Terry McDonell is editor in chief of Esquire...
...Marlin Fitzwater is the White House press secretary...
Vol. 24 • December 1991 • No. 12
