Christmas Books Supplement
Christmas Books Supplement Thanks to postal confusion nationwide as well as to jammed FAX lines, secretarial walkouts, the deepening Darman recession, and other pressing matters of state, the...
...one is Minority Party by Peter Brown (Regnery Gateway), a fine journalist I have had the pleasure of knowing for some years now...
...Our legal system has much to learn from this eXample from the past...
...DANIEL PIPES The Rise of the West, by William McNeill, is a tour de force—the only true world history by a single author...
...I wallow in the Victorian characters and language...
...But when silks and satins come of it, and with the silks and satins general respect, the net result of honesty does not seem to be so secure...
...Joseph I. Lieberman is a U.S...
...Two classics are The Venture of Islam, by Marshall Hodgson, a three-volume survey of Muslim history that is original, quirky, and brilliant...
...Besides being extremely funny and smart, it's the best thing I've ever read about the process of psychological transference by which aspiring writers gather odd bits of information about established writers and then freight them with absurd significance, as a way of finding their own literary identities...
...The most unusual novel in verse: The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth...
...they may even be what we need to turn this economy around...
...Last-minute shoppers, however, will find them no less helpful...
...and Islam in Modern History, by W. Cantwell Smith, who explains the profound trauma of Islam during the past two centuries, and why it continues...
...Baker has the courage to try something inherently weird and embarrassing, and the talent to bring it off...
...I also enjoyed Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism, by Michael Rothschild...
...He explains how the Democratic Party lost much of its traditional base of support because it is being perceived as a party that takes money from people who work and gives it to people who don't work...
...Peter Huber is as usual witty, articulate, and sensible, and his Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom was fun to read...
...The second book is The Great Hartford Circus Fire by Henry Cohn and David Bollier (Yale University Press...
...Daniel Pipes, director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, is the author of seven books...
...Muravchik turns what might appear to be a dry and self-evident topic into something fascinating and deep...
...Very stimulating and Hayekian (though he seems not to have read Hayek...
...He compares the evolutionary nature of biology with market capitalism...
...The Closed Circle, by David Pryce-Jones, is a virtuoso indictment of what's wrong with politics in the Arabic-speaking countries...
...John McCain is a U.S...
...Joe Klein is New York magazine's political columnist...
...senator from Arizona...
...It tells the story of a major disaster that occurred in my state during the 1940s and of the way in which people of good will were able to settle the damage claims resulting from the disaster in a short period of time, with no need for lengthy court battles...
...My own speciality, the Middle East, inspires more bad books than good ones (and they, of course, dominated the bestseller lists during the war with Iraq...
...16 The American Spectator January 1992...
...And, since we'd better know more about tribes, I recommend a re-reading of Beyond the Melting Pot, by Moynihan and Glazer, particularly the introduction to the second edition (1973), which predicts the next twenty years of race relations in America...
...But: The Borderless World, by Kenichi Ohmae (HarperBusiness), because the 1990s will see the decline of the nation-state, a consequence of globalization on the one hand and tribalization (third world) and market segmentation (first world) on the other...
...JOE KLEIN Sorry for the delay (I plead Clarence Thomas...
...it changed my understanding of history...
...Rachel Carson was all heart and no head...
...An unalloyed pleasure by an incredibly verbal and witty author—even more of a pleasure for a resident of the San Francisco bay area...
...U and I gives rise to the rare sense that a writer has successfully invented a new way to write...
...The Image, by Daniel Boorstin, explains the difference between reality and image in politics and daily life in a way that allows others not to be confused...
...Bruce N. Ames is professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley...
...Nicholas Lemann, author of The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (Knopf), is national correspondent for the Atlantic...
...JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN There are two new books out this year that I would recommend (and not only because I am quoted on their dustjackets...
...I also reread Silent Spring...
...NICHOLAS LEMANN The book published in 1991 that impressed me tremendously but impressed a small enough number of other people that some of your readers may not have heard of it is U and 1, by Nicholson Baker (Random House...
...The Last Lion, Winston Spencer Churchill (Volume II: "Alone 1932-1940"), by William Raymond Manchester: A factual and illuminating account of the critical period in the life of the most influential man of the twentieth century...
...It's a strange work, and difficult to describe precisely—in theory it's a short book about John Updike, but what it's really about is Baker's obsession with Updike...
...BRUCE N. AMES Reading the six Palliser novels by Anthony Trollope was one of the major pleasures of the year...
...Exporting Democracy, by Joshua Muravchik, is a recent book that stands out...
...Christmas Books Supplement Thanks to postal confusion nationwide as well as to jammed FAX lines, secretarial walkouts, the deepening Darman recession, and other pressing matters of state, the following Christmas Book Recommendations reached us too late for inclusion in last month's annual list...
...Here is a very Trollopian quote from The Prime Minister: "It is easy for most of us to keep our hands from picking and stealing when picking and stealing plainly lead to prison diet and prison garments...
...senator from Connecticut...
...Unlike Spengler and Toynbee, this is not one man's quirky vision, but an accurate summation of the human experience...
...I also recommend two recent studies: Culture and Conflict in Egyptian-Israeli Relations may not sound exciting, but this little-known study is Raymond Cohen's dazzling interpretation of political culture in diplomacy and the relations between states...
...continued on next page) The American Spectator January 1992 15 CHRISTMAS BOOKS (continued from previous page) JOHN McCAIN Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry: An emotional and, at the same time, hilarious page turner which I could not put down...
...The Spanish Civil War, by Hugh Thomas: A gripping and definitive account of the carnage that served as a curtain raiser for the Second World War...
...This is, by the way, the book's 30th anniversary...
Vol. 25 • January 1992 • No. 1
