Books for Christmas
Books for Christmas Our annual list of holiday gift suggestions from distinguished readers and writers. ELLIOTT ABRAMS For the non-fiction side, the best book around is Patrick Glynn's...
...A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind in the Renaissance by William Manchester...
...Gore's is a well-written alarmist tract that is highly selective as to both material and interpretation...
...This book The American Spectator December 1992 27 describes, in a humorous way, the appropriate and inappropriate signs and body language in different countries...
...A faux literary biography of the novelist as a steroid-enhanced, drug-fueled celebrity sex God...
...P. J. O'Rourke, is one of the funnier commentators we have, and his civics text, Parliament of Whores, has the most illuminating discussion of agricultural policy I know of...
...As good an overview of gays and lesbians in America as any, with a chapter devoted to former conservative activist and Republican congressman, Bob Bauman...
...Lenin...
...ORRIN G. HATCH The Tempting of America, by Robert Bork...
...Send one off to your son or daughter in college...
...White Jazz, by James Elroy...
...Finally, The Flight From Truth by Jean-Francois Revel offers a somewhat tedious, but nonetheless valuable, European insight into why the increased volume of information we are besieged with is not accompanied by increased emphasis on veracity...
...And all his books—besides being rip-roaring reads—remind us of the vital necessity of keeping America's military number one in high-tech weaponry and equipment...
...Davies is, perhaps, the last great novelist who spans the twentieth century...
...So I won't do that...
...His most recent book, Better Than Plowing, was published this year by the University of Chicago Press...
...Not so for this book...
...VIN WEBER My recommendations for active minds include: Modern Times by Paul Johnson, The Spirit ofDemocratic Capitalism by Michael Novak, Our Country by Michael Barone, any Sherlock Holmes mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and, of course, The Liberal Crack-Up by the editor of this esteemed journal and now R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s The Conservative Crack-Up, an even more important book in view of the future that faces us...
...Urbain's Horseman, and Cocksure...
...Of his many books, this is the best...
...I suspect that there are those among TAS readers who loathe the pretensions of academia and are infuriated by the pudd'n'head argot of the Lit Crit crowd...
...Castro's Final Hour...
...28 The American Spectator December 1992...
...He twisted the RICO statute into a rubber hose and held Milken's brother hostage to a plea...
...The End of Equality, by Mickey Kaus...
...I find Melville's Moby Dick to be probing, as it requires reading for not only rhetoric but a deeper meaning...
...is president & executive officer and editorin-chief of Forbes...
...Vin Weber is a U. S. Representative from the 2d District in Minnesota...
...Escapist reading by the best modern crime fiction writer in the universe...
...Van Sertima has uncovered a wealth of artifacts in Mexico that strongly support his claim that African explorers came to America centuries before Columbus...
...Trashing the Planet by Dixy Lee Ray...
...ELLIOTT ABRAMS For the non-fiction side, the best book around is Patrick Glynn's Opening Pandora's Box...
...An excellent book which has long been used as a basic primer...
...Kornbluth, a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, writes that federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani was "more ambitious than Madonna" and "hit the ground talking...
...Pete Wilson is the governor of California...
...It may prove to be a very practical gift as well, for those who see a Clinton-Gore administration looming on the horizon, and who may wish to put their money in a Swiss bank account or apply for Australian citizenship...
...This book will help you to understand why the U.S...
...The first book to lift the curtain on how our universities are vast citadels of waste, ruled with an iron hand by an oligarchy of arrogant tenured professors who are overpaid and underworked...
...Jumping Ship, by Kelvin Christopher James, is a collection of short stories linked by rhythm...
...Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg, which underscores our 22 The American Spectator December 1992 appreciation of Lincoln...
...This season, I guess, Bob Tyrrell's and Bob Bartley's books will be the easiest to find, but those who have a way to do some Christmas shopping in used book stores may find the others...
...Read Book and lose forever your ability to discuss Lit Crit with an "expert" without howling...
...The Secret History, by Donna Tartt...
...The most riveting word pictures of all time...
...The Sum of All Fears is a great gift...
...PHIL GRAMM Here are books I found to be stimulating and enjoyable, books that either provided a wealth of information or prompted me to consider a new perspective, or both: The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. von Hayek, a book which opened my eyes to the importance of freedom and opportunity many years ago...
...Three that I recommend are Earth in the Balance by Al Gore...
...Rich with Davies's empathy for Canadian history, redolent of craft, grace, fluency, a love of language, and fine story weaving, Murther and Walking Spirits stands out as a master's work...
...Gave me a chill...
...I can only add that reading it was not only a The American Spectator December 1992 23 pleasure, but left me in awe of the field of history itself...
...Richard S. Lindzen is Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences...
...Shylock, by John Gross...
...Boorstin also recalls how D.W...
...For politics, Bob Tyrrell's The Conservative Crack-Up is more timely today than it was on its publication date...
...JOHN N. DOGGETT While there are many books that I could recommend, I have selected these books because of their timeliness and relevance to some of the key policy decisions that the next President must make...
...The list I gave her: (1) The Education of a Poker Player, by Herbert 0. Yardley...
...Few who claim to be experts in this area have any idea of how we came to be in the mess that we are in...
...Finally, fleshed out female characters portray their unique anguish and lives in a mind-numbing century for women...
...In many countries out here, unemployment rates are around two percent and growth rates are around six percent...
...In Perfidious Albion: The Abandonment of Hong Kong 1997, McGurn details how Britain failed to protect its last great colony from easy Communist takeover by at least fostering some local democratic institutions that China would have to unravel...
...Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...The very best story of a great man's struggle with himself and with his worldspecifically Alger Hiss and the historic legal battle surrounding Hiss and Chambers...
...L. Gordon Crovitz, formerly assistant editor of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, is editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, a Hong Kong–based weekly published by Dow Jones & Co...
...It's the best and by far the most entertaining and readable history of our century available by a distinguished journalist and historian...
...He will convert you to his point of view...
...She asked me to suggest the ten that I thought would be most useful to her in seeking to gain an understanding of post-Communist Russia...
...The novel I'm packing for the long flight to Israel is Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient...
...9) The Downtown Jews, by Ronald Sanders, which I put on the list because it is largely a history of the paper for which she would be corresponding...
...Murther and Walking Spirits, by Robertson Davies...
...James M. Buchanan, of George Mason University, was the 1986 Nobel Laureate in Economics...
...the two best, in my view, the most recent: Skin Tight and Native Tongue...
...Nancy Astor thought Weizmann a great charmer...
...No honest environmentalist could conceivably remain a socialist after reading this impeccably documented tale of horror...
...CLINTON SMULLYAN, JR...
...LAWRENCE DOUGLAS WILDER I am very fond of Shakespeare's classics, especially Macbeth and Julius Caesar...
...I like large ideas and encompassing theses...
...Imitation of Christ, Thomas a Kempis...
...Andres Oppenheimer's brilliant depiction of life in fin de regne Cuba, much of which reads like a thriller...
...and Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, written in 1975 and still available in paperback, a superb Civil War novel...
...It is a tragic, noble, and heroic story, marvelously told...
...THOMAS SOWELL One of the most eye-opening books in recent years is The United States of Ambition, by Alan Ehrenhalt...
...The book of the year is Bob Bartley's The Seven Fat Years—And How To Do It Again...
...3) The Jewish War Front, by Vladimir Jabotinsky (the Jewish nationalist who proposed in 1940 that the Jews be listed as one of the Allies in the war against Hitler and wrote of Jewish hostility to Communism...
...I also like Tom Clancy...
...Damage, by Josephine Hart...
...ProfScarit, by Charles J. Sykes...
...Early supporters of Zionism, Balfour among them, were in fact anti-Semites who wished to rid their country of Jews...
...Elroy's fictional 1958 LAPD makes Daryl Gates and Co...
...Witness, by Whittaker Chambers...
...Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times's Man in Moscow, by S. J. Taylor...
...He developed an entirely new field of study, Industry and Competitive Analysis, that has revolutionized how managers analyze, develop, and implement competitive strategies...
...and Environmental Politics, edited by Michael S. Greve and Fred L. Smith, Jr...
...he's so dark and unsentimental he makes Raymond Chandler look like a . . . can I say 'pussy' in a conservative magazine...
...I thought I knew all there was to know about Chappaquiddick, but this book about the Chappaquiddick cover-up is a real spellbinder...
...Lord Cecil noted "the extraordinary impressiveness of [Weizmann's] attitude," which, he added, "made one forget his rather repellent and even sordid exterior...
...Lemann does a masterful job of helping us understand how a previously ignored combination of technological and economic changes and the development of governmental policies in a factual vacuum has led to the current mess that our cities are in...
...I am wondering if there is anything about big-government activism that inevitably yields an erosion of values...
...Few authors would dare send a James Bond–like character into the desert to eradicate pollution and in the process have him find Abe Lincoln, Amelia Earhart, Tutankhamen's yacht, an antique automobile, a host of villains, The Girl, a lot of modern gadgetry, blood, sex, and last minute rescues, in a crockpot of fact, faux history, and science fiction...
...Book imaginatively deconstructs the university profession in a comic rendering, using every deliciously vacuous weapon of the Lit Crits themselves...
...Orrin G. Hatch is a United States senator from Utah...
...For those who would rather transplant Hong Kong's entrepreneurial spirit back to the U.S...
...Sahara, by Clive Cussler...
...William Manchester's slim new work, A World Lit Only by Fire, makes the Middle Ages read like a novel...
...TOMMY G. THOMPSON Do's and Taboos of Public Speaking, by Roger E. Axtell...
...It is a pity that Daumier was not alive to do the illustrations, for his series on the Parisian courts captures many of the same characteristics Tyrrell skewers in these pages on American politics: greed, ambition, sloth, stupidity, betrayal, ignorance...
...Reading these three volumes won't answer all your questions, but it will leave you with the recognition that the environment is not the source of all our problems...
...The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, by Nicholas Lemann...
...He shoots down most of the explanations and excuses, and shows how big government has once again created a bigger problem than it tried to solve...
...Arturo J. Cruz, Sr...
...Since writing that list, I've read (and reviewed) Bob Tyrrell's The Conservative Crack-Up, which is on my own holiday list for friends...
...Some "experts" have denounced these historians as being "politically correct" propagandists...
...MARY MATALIN Reading is my number-one therapy and salvation...
...Laurence Snelling is a writer living in New Orleans...
...PETE WILSON When I was in the Senate I made a habit of giving one book in particular as a gift to many friends—Michael Shaara's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about the battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels...
...and Eisenhower by Stephen E. Ambrose...
...In the Thereafter, a mundane movie theater, not only does the critic's life unreel before his eyes but so does the seminal history of his ancestry...
...It is one thing to talk about "urban problems" or "race relations...
...Any of the Flashman novels by George MacDonald Fraser, but especially Flashman at the Charge, a hilariously revisionist account of the charge of the Light Brigade and other less notorious events during the Crimean War...
...Every reading list should have one piece of junk food escape literature...
...This year, I unfaithfully followed Lewis's admonition, but along the way I nonetheless had two memorable experiences with great, timeless literature: Dostoevsky's The Idiot is a rich study of the good, innocent man in a less-than-good world, and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice proved to be the reading-aloud-to-children gem of the year...
...Nothing that the Bush campaign committee could come up with on Al Gore could possibly condemn him as thoroughly as this book of Chicken Little hysteria about the environment...
...His classic trilogy The Americans captured the spirit of the country better than did any of the three presidential candidates this year...
...A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character, by Charles Sykes...
...Except for some reason Mark Leyner calls his hero Mark Leyner...
...and (10) The Elements of Style, by Strunk & White...
...Certainly no one can be intellectually and spiritually fulfilled without a thorough study of the Bible...
...Somewhat arbitrarily, I'll restrict myself to nonfiction, since I hardly regard my taste in fiction to be much of an example for anyone else...
...Few institutional books by or about colleges are worth the paper they are written on, but anyone who thinks that it is inherently impossible to produce anything intelligent in this genre is urged to read In the First Place, a collectionof essays from Hillsdale College's Imprimis series...
...In this election year, there is a need for fiction that does not present itself as truth...
...A gentle sense of the ability of the human spirit to triumph molds all these tales...
...MORDECAI RICHLER For the past few months I've been doing homework rather than reading for pleasure, in preparation for my first trip to Israel since 1960...
...As one goes back to read the entire series of The Making of the President, by Theodore White, they are good as well as almost predictable...
...Those building cranes that went AWOL from Houston and Manhattan can be found in Hong Kong and Taipei...
...Both a moving account of that turbulent epoch and a fascinating work of 26 The American Spectator December 1992 detection which illuminates the events surrounding the butchery at Ekaterinburg...
...Nominally thrillers, they are in fact works of comic genius...
...The Little Prince, by Antoine de St-Exupery...
...Drucker is one of the most influential business thinkers and observers of this century...
...To understand the corruption by power of false redeemers...
...Lawrence Douglas Wilder is the governor of Virginia...
...Anything by Peggy Noonan...
...For fiction, it is time to turn back to some wonderful novels by Paul Horgan...
...James has found a voice that is hypnotic in conveying tropical settings and tropical characters...
...Phil Gramm is a United States senator from Texas...
...Edward A. Capano is the publisher of National Review...
...If your scouts manage to turn up an extra copy of Yardley at a reasonable price, the Forward would be happy to acquire the first copy we're offered so that we can put it in the Channukah pouch to Miss Singer...
...Ostensibly about the author's friendship with those two prickly characters, Hemingway and Huston, but the author seems to have known everyone and this entertaining and evocative memoir has a marvelous supporting cast, including Orson Welles, Irwin Shaw, Dominguin, Aly Khan, and Ava Gardner...
...It's a tour de force about thoughtful, honorable men in blue and grey meeting each other in bloody combat that set the course for our nation's history...
...Bartley reminds us that economic growth is not a magic trick—and the 1980s were not voodoo...
...RICHARD S. LINDZEN Recommending a handful of books is inevitably a harder task than it seems...
...Navy is now in full retreat before the Pat Schroeder feminazis...
...LAURENCE SNELLING The Last Czar, by Edvard Radzinsky...
...A Distant Trumpet (1951) is simply the best book I've ever read about the extension of national power into the Old West, telling the story through the lives of extraordinarily vivid characters...
...KENNETH W STARR This wonderful piece of advice once issued from C. S. Lewis: when inclined to pick up a newspaper, resist the temptation and turn instead to a piece of fine literature...
...The Cycles of American History by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Before the Mayflower by Larone Bennett, Jr., are books that are enjoyable and educational...
...L GORDON CROVITZ Everything you may have heard about Asia during these recessionary times in the U.S...
...A lesson on the historical consequences of ill-fated decisions...
...Read it once, then read it again...
...Senatorial Privilege, by Leo Damore...
...Fukuyama provides these in spades...
...Leyner's prose is a packrat hybrid of lit-crit, techno-speak, ad copy, and pop cultural references...
...Cole S. Brumbeck, Congress, Human Nature, and the Federal Debt...
...I am now reading Joe Califano's The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson and Bill Bennett's The De-Valuing of America, both very interesting and well-told...
...The environment has been an issue of concern in recent years...
...James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom has been widely acclaimed as the definitive single volume history of the Civil War...
...Not coincidentally, marginal tax rates are in the teens and bright people are too busy marketing cellular telephones to bother with law school...
...Other worthy reads: William Safire's The First Dissident, which will do to secular-minded baby-boomers what Robertson and Buchanan could never do—enable them to re-appreciate the Bible...
...ROBERT CONQUEST I'm in England as I write, so the first two may not be available in the U.S...
...PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY The Way Things Ought to Be, by Rush Limbaugh...
...Effortlessly erudite, original, and full of surprises...
...Fab, story of my life, babe...
...However, Paul Johnson's A History of the Jews turned out to be a rare pleasure...
...Then his "Richard Trilogy" (1951-77), telling in three compelling novels the life story of a man born at the turn of the century, has more to teach us about New York politics, family values, and American society than ten textbooks or four thousand speeches...
...My own story of my personal struggle with homosexuality and my involvement in the anti-Communist/Conservative Movement in the 1950s and '60s...
...His latest book shares the results of a four-year-long, tencountry-wide study of why some nations have been more successful at nurturing industry-leading global competitors than others...
...ARTURO J. CRUZ, SR...
...A charming and meaningful children's book, better read by adults, which talks of life and death and the meaning of it all...
...I have also enjoyed The 24 The American Spectator December 1992 Siege, Conor Cruise O'Brien's history of Zionism and Israel, and Norman Rose's definitive biography of the brilliant but difficult Chaim Weizmann...
...Ben Wattenberg is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a nationally syndicated columnist...
...For those more inclined to the here-and-now, two recent offerings loom large in my mind: Terry Eastland's superb book, Energy in the Executive, is a powerful reminder that conservative government must actively shape, articulate, and implement policies that embody philosophical commitments...
...7) Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith...
...Finally,, if any readers haven't read Paul Johnson's Modern Times yet, now's your chance—because there is a new updated edition...
...The subtitle tells the story: "Arms Races, Arms Control, and the History of the Cold War...
...To overcome distress...
...Drucker writes so well that reading this book is like drinking a cold drink on a hot summer day...
...The real-life story of an iconoclastic woman in a repressed society who stays true to herself...
...2) Poker, by Oswald Jacoby...
...The story of one of history's greatest frauds: how a New York Times reporter, under the patronage of the KGB, served for twenty years as a whitewash artist who concealed and excused Stalin's mega-murders...
...Seth Lipsky is the editor of the Forward, the successor in English to the famed Yiddish-language newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward...
...Bartley's irrefutable evidence will eventually triumph over academic ignorance and political myopia...
...is true...
...It is a readable book, and one does not have to be a lawyer to understand it...
...For times that try the optimism of Americans, the best antidote is a few chapters of anything written by Daniel J. Boorstin, the former Chicago professor and Librarian of The American Spectator December 1992 21 Congress...
...These books, particularly those relative to the American scene, not only give us an opportunity to determine the history and course of our country, but appreciate the destiny and to see some bit of it unfold...
...All but Porter's book are suitable for reading in any environment, including the normal chaos that exists on the day after Christmas: The Competitive Advantage of Nations, by Michael E. Porter...
...Surrealistically tormented people who cannot resist chasing their demons...
...Terry and Bill have provided both a sound theoretical framework and an effective historical example of how those in full-time public service can carry on the fight against self-satisfied immobilism on the one hand, and self-destructive arrogance on the other...
...A nearly seamless act of fictional ventriloquism, an artful dispatch from the blasted heart of the inner city...
...He is the only decent Jew I have met...
...This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to do something about America's "urban problems" on the basis of fact versus ideology...
...Now, how can you resist...
...This is Cussler's forte, and is delightfully, distractingly unserious...
...This first novel, written in the second person, is a technical tour de force, and a chilling journey into the sordid ecosystem of an American Army base in Germany...
...A splendid contribution to Shakespeariana, and to our knowledge of how Jews and Gentiles thought about each other over the centuries...
...Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky...
...Send for them: The Anatomy of Thatcherism, by Shirley Robin Letwin, Clear arid perspicacious...
...Robert Conquest, the poet and historian, is a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...A tremendous book discussing the judicial and legal philosophy of one of the century's greatest legal minds...
...A few favorites: The Journalist and the Murderer, by Janet Malcolm...
...He says that welfare, by discouraging the mobility that allows progress through the job market, keeps most of the poor stranded in inner cities...
...seem like choirboys...
...Any bookwith two essays by the late Warren Brookes is already halfway home as a top-quality publication...
...Crime fiction of the highest rank...
...His latest book, The Creators, is a celebration of geniuses and how their imaginations changed history...
...It explores and explains the changes over time in the kinds of people who have become dominant in American politics, from the local to the national level...
...It is most affecting when set off against the different rhythms of the American mainland...
...is an international development banker...
...Buffalo Soldiers, by Robert O'Connor...
...If we have to send young Americans to fight for our country, it's morally incumbent upon us to give them the best tools available to do their jobs...
...If you do not agree with his propositions, ask why...
...McPherson's thought-provoking discussion of the economic development of the early republic was a nice bonus...
...And those folks, when they disagreed, used to kill each other up good, in unique ways, like drawing and quartering, and boiling in oil...
...Sykes outlines the American's newfound respect for no-fault victimization, citing as examples: the New York drunk who jumped in front of a subway train and was awarded $650,000 because the train hit him...
...Kaus says that liberalism's PAwErx—point after which everything went to hell—was the 1960s, when it lined up with welfare rather than work...
...Boorstin traces the interconnections, weaving a composite that links Dante, Michelangelo, and Frank Lloyd Wright...
...Penguin has recently re-issued four of Mordecai Richler's novels, among them Solomon Gursky Was Here, St...
...Borrowed Time, by Paul Monette...
...Its account of the acting history of the part alone is more than worth all the doctoral theses of the year...
...At about five interesting facts per page, this 800-page tome is terrific value...
...No modern writer knows the real American soul as well as Peggy...
...Dangerous Friends, by Peter Viertel...
...In a darker vein, Solzhenitsyn' s The First Circle has lost none of its force despite the passage of twenty-five years and the disappearance of the Gulag...
...4) The Seven Fat Years—And How to Do It Again, by Robert L. Bartley...
...5) Ten Days That Shook the World, by John Reed, a feat, however flawed, of foreign corresponding...
...In Murther, his theater critic protagonist dies in the first chapter, killed in flagrante delicto by his wife's paramour...
...than have to emigrate, there is no better how-to than Robert Bartley's The Seven Fat Years—And How to Do It Again...
...Cleaning House, by James Coyne and John Fund, and George Will's Restoration, which together make an overwhelming case for term limits...
...and the FBI employee fired for embezzling $2,000, who was reinstated after a court ruled that his affinity for tardiness—"chronic lateness"—is a disease...
...Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, recalls the enormous economic growth between 1983 and 1990 when the U. S. never had it so good—the GNP growth of one-third and 18 million new jobs...
...Bob Tyrrell's The Conservative Crack-Up, which enables you to understand what's happened to conservatism in the past twelve years...
...It is a very elegant finishing of an empathetic character...
...Ecocide in the USSR, by Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr...
...I do feel a responsibility for relieving the burden of reality-based cerebration imposed by TAS...
...Exposes how the American people were the victims of a massive deception about the gross difference between JFK's impressive public image and his reckless, vain, selfish, and lecherous private life...
...A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy, by Thomas C. Reeves...
...The most penetrating and lucid analysis of the homeless problem I have seen is The Excluded Americans, by William Tucker...
...Just because you're tired of hearing about it doesn't mean it isn't good...
...Malcolm S. Forbes, Jr...
...While many prefer to reject anything that challenges what we learned in college, it is hard for readers with an open mind to discount Van Sertima's work...
...Tommy G. Thompson is the governor of Wisconsin...
...While Porter's writing can be stiff at times, his observations and suggestions about what managers, politicians, and educators must do if they want their countries to be more competitive make his book worth the work...
...I don't think so...
...EDWARD A. CAPANO WindFall—a poignant farewell from one of nature's noblemen, William F. Buckley, Jr...
...I thought his last novel, In the Skin of the Lion, was remarkable...
...The final tale, "Home Is the Heart," is a lovely, gentle, coming-of-age story...
...We do our disagreeing differently today, more subtly, with substantially less bodily harm, as Elliott Abrams records in Undue Process: A Story of How Political Differences Are Turned Into Crimes...
...A wonderful and touching book about two men's struggle with AIDS which will provide the reader with the human side of that dread disease...
...Managing for the Future: The 1990s and Beyond, by Peter F. Drucker...
...The book title refers to the famous letters Drexel once sent to investors, saying it was highly confident that a transaction would succeed...
...Guaranteed...
...Clinton Smullyan, Jr., is a real estate developer, hence, in the current market, an expert in Fiction...
...John N. Doggett is the founder and president of the International Management Development Center in Austin, Texas...
...The narrative body is a murder mystery in which victims are either human or actively inanimate (footnotes, marginalia, and people are all victims of violent intervention...
...But Tyrrell gives us more: a wonderful depiction of conservatism's most recent decade, and a serious discussion of where it goes next...
...Animal Farm, George Orwell...
...McGurn notes that there are now more Yanks than Brits in the colony—including McGurn himself, formerly with National Review and now a senior editor at the Far Eastern Economic Review...
...Marvin Liebman is the author of Coming Out Conservative and someone who has been around for a long time and seen it all—twice...
...this is a surreal tale, told in machine-gun prose...
...Et Tu, Babe, by Mark Leyner...
...It is not a brief for any particular political philosophy, but its message is particularly chilling for conservatives who wonder why so many liberals get elected, even in conservative districts...
...Hence, with all due lack of seriousness, 1992 fiction, or, How to Enjoy Your Christmas Vacation: Book, by Robert Grudin...
...Disregard what the professional historians say and read this book...
...I would, therefore, urge anyone interested to spend a weekend reading several books...
...This book is destined to become a classic on the level of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations...
...The details are fascinating: as a sign of how times and poetry change, Boorstin notes that Walt Whitman, in his last poem, tried to "tone down his chauvinism, even admitting that America needed the world...
...Ray brings a genuine concern for the environment to a treatise on where real threats do and don't exist...
...Greve and Smith repeat the old morality tale of what happens when good intentions mix with politics using some disturbing examples...
...unusually, the character coming of age is a middle-aged man who has brought his son to his childhood home...
...6) The Road to Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek...
...8) The Federalist, by John Jay et al...
...Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, by Allan Gurganus...
...BEN WATTENBERG I thought' I had finished with Erasmus and Luther a long time ago, in college, when students were still commanded to learn about Dweems, but were bored by it, and barely did...
...Coming Out Conservative, by Marvin Liebman...
...MARVIN LIEBMAN Making History, by Eric Narcus...
...Tay McInerney is the author of the novels Bright Lights, Big City, Ransom, Story of My Life, and Brightness Falls...
...But the operation of the Independent Prosecutor's office is disgusting...
...Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute...
...It is...
...20 The American Spectator December 1992 JAMES M. BUCHANAN Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man...
...Abrams also has the narrative gift of novelistic non-fiction...
...Shows how much she did to change British politics (and how much remains to be done, in part because educational and other bureaucrats failed to obey the orders of their employer, the government...
...The Bible...
...Jesse Kornbluth's Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken reminds readers that the scapegoating of Milken and junk bonds was at least partly responsible for the abrupt close to the Seven Fat Years...
...George Steiner, Real Presences...
...Phyllis Schlafly is the author and editor of thirteen books and the editor of the Phyllis Schley Report, now in its twenty-fifth year of publication...
...His book on the Iran-contra prosecution, Undue Process, was published this fall by the Free Press...
...His book urges a new WPA to acculturate the poor to work...
...A few historians have suggested that Vikings, Africans, and other people came to the "New Land" centuries before Christopher Columbus was born...
...Anything by Elmore Leonard...
...Professor Porter of the Harvard Business School has become the most influential business school professor in the world...
...It didn't happen with Truman, as David McCullough's wonderful biography shows...
...However, the literature ranges from sober science to New Age mysticism, and "balance" becomes a matter of opinion and politics...
...Few are as highly confident this credit-crunched decade...
...Somehow the elite turned this into the Decade of Greed, spawning some primal need for self-abasement that turned the 1990s into the Decade of Envy, complete with the credit crunch, the criminalizing of high-yield bonds, and a suspension of disbelief about the most absurd government economic data...
...the heart is a pastiche of life and angst in the ivory towers...
...It would be wrong to characterize Lawrence Walsh and his little Walshniks as latter-day Torquemadas...
...The interaction between the son and his grandmother is the catalyst for the man's final reach for maturity...
...The short stories of T. Coraghessan Boyle, a wonderfully evocative, obscure modern author...
...Funds flowed to the startup Turner Broadcastings and MCIs that created jobs in a decade when the Fortune 500 lost workers...
...The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman...
...Well, you know what I mean...
...Mary Matalin is the political director of Bush/Quayle '92...
...The real story of the frightening seduction process of the press and their victims...
...The U. S. may have its problems, but William McGurn figures that Americans have a special opportunity when it comes to capitalist heaven Hong Kong...
...Axtell has traveled throughout the world...
...As we saw in the Gulf War, high tech saves lives...
...Of Robert McNamara's role with respect to Vietnam in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, and his efforts to undermine NATO strategy and promote a nuclear freeze during the Reagan Administration, Glynn has this to say: "In effect, having started a war that destroyed two presidencies, McNamara was now busily engaged in the de facto attempt to destroy a third...
...Griffith's racist film, The Birth of a Nation, became a favorite of one V.I...
...A breath of fresh air and deservedly a bestseller in spite of the attempt to bury it by the feminist and PC czars in the publishing and bookselling business...
...They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America, by Ivan Van Sertima...
...Add essays by Solzhenitsyn, Hayek, and the like, and you have a real gem...
...Treats Thatcherism convincingly as much more a moral agenda than a program or ideology...
...Contrarians who want to know what the other half is thinking—or at least talking about—should read Earth in the Balance by Senator (and aspiring Vice President) Al Gore...
...MALCOLM S. FORBES, JR...
...On War, by Karl von Clausewitz...
...Van Sertima's evidence is compelling, can be verified by anyone who wants to fly down to Mexico, and upsets the apple cart for all of us who were never taught that these artifacts existed...
...Kenneth W Starr is the Solicitor General of the United States...
...Our Country, a history of America "from Roosevelt to Reagan" by Michael Barone...
...Weak Link: The Feminization of the American Military, by Brian Mitchell...
...It is a vital document...
...It is a brilliant account of the never-ending fallacies of arms control, starting with the myths surrounding Sarajevo, and a fascinating reassessment of many "key players" (such as John Foster Dulles) of recent years...
...Terry's co-author from the 1970s, Bill Bennett, has offered a hard-hitting, sobering portrait of education in America in The De-Valuing of America...
...A post–public choice examination of the modern political psychology that produces the continuing regime of deficits...
...When those principles were abandoned, we got a prolonged recession...
...It is another thing to be able to talk about these subjects intelligently...
...Despite its somewhat mawkish title and an I-was-there preface that is eminently skippable, Tucker systematically tests the competing hypotheses as to why homelessness is suddenly a problem in urban communities across the country...
...Any novel by Carl Hiaasen...
...It proves how real the Reagan boom was and what policies made it happen...
...Portrait of a Marriage, by Nigel Nicholson...
...JAY McINERNEY For sanity's sake, and on the assumption that you have enough in the way of weighty Washington non-fiction, I will confine myself to 1992—and one early '93—fiction releases: Clockers, by Richard Price...
...This book is a collection of his essays from the past six years about a wide range of subjects that are central to America's ability to be competitive in the future...
...This small book packs a set of provocative ideas about man, God, and personal creation...
...As British influence and stature continue to wane," McGurn writes, "the U. S. remains the one country with enough at stake, and with enough leverage over both China and Britain, to create some insurance for Hong Kong...
...SETH LIPSKY When earlier this year the Forward's new Moscow correspondent, Natasha Singer, was about to depart on her assignment, she said she had room in her luggage for only ten books...
Vol. 25 • December 1992 • No. 12
