Books for Christmas
Books for Christmas Our annual list of holiday gift suggestions from distinguished readers and writers. LAMAR ALEXANDER All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren. For the person who gets to...
...It provides a very useful account of the development of both Roman and Anglican liturgies...
...Stephen L. Carter's The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion is so unimpeachable that even Bill Clinton has "promised" to take it seriously...
...A riotous, ribald translation of the morals and mores of the South that tells us more about the colorful natives and their funny ways than they ever wanted us to know...
...I don't read much new fiction, but Dominick Dunne's A Season in Purgatory, consumed in one thoroughly enjoyable sitting, does a better job of defining the pathologies of the Kennedy clan than any biographer to date...
...Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz...
...The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, by Leo Brady...
...Ellis,' said Jack, smiling at his great round eyes and solemn face, 'is not that they are shy, for they are not, but that they are never, never ready.'" So writes Patrick O'Brian in Master and Commander, the first of the Aubrey-Maturin novels...
...In the meantime, Jane Jacobs's first book remains a fresh and useful analysis of what about modern cities works and doesn't work—and why...
...Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations...
...Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality...
...To pass some pleasant hours on an otherwise dull trip, once again read (this time in paperback) one of the best of the genre, The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy...
...A brilliant scholarly discussion of celebrity tracing the idea of the hero from Homer to Hemingway, from Joan of Arc to John Lennon, from religious icons to the modem media: "Many seek fame because they believe it confers a reality that they lack...
...Now nearly everyone, even Mr...
...This is an eloquent, indeed poetic, report on young men in battle...
...Making It, by Norman Podhoretz—yes, he's my father, but I had occasion to reread this once-scandalous 1968 confession for the first time in years and am convinced that people will still be reading it long after he, and I, have left this mortal plane...
...For the person who gets to thinking he or she knows something about politics or about writing, this will bring you down to earth...
...McCoy shows Madison looking back on his long public life from old age (he lived to be 85...
...The Brownsville Raid (just reissued by Texas A&M University Press) is by John Weaver, an old friend of mine who has been engaged in good writing full-time for fifty-three years...
...Otherwise, I would recommend any collection of Bill Watterson's comic strip, "Calvin and Hobbes," which puts the world in proper perspective...
...flag) to any and all world trouble spots, take along Evelyn Waugh's Scoop...
...In this slim volume, Thomas brings anthropomorphism to new and interesting heights...
...Follow this with another of Vidal's classic novels, 1876...
...Oh, no thank you, Judy, I have to do things for myself...
...King's 'I Have a Dream...
...It is written by an intriguing man, who writes from outside the academy in a Texas version of the classic Southern tradition of a gentleman scholar...
...The best short biography of Lincoln...
...Market: Ten Years on Wall Street with Grant's Interest Rate Observer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...JAMES GRANT "'The pleasant thing about fighting with the Spaniards, Mr...
...Walter A. McDougall is professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of . . . The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, which won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize in History...
...It is simply the best exegesis I have seen of how our political culture is set, to the detriment of both the truth and democracy...
...The story has wit, salacity, and the fantastic in equal amounts...
...My admiration for it knows no bounds...
...Bridge to the Sun, by Gwen Terasaki...
...Martin's Press...
...Wodehouse...
...Military friends and all those that way inclined can be given a gift of stratagems by Frontinus, and whatever variety of military history they might fancy, coolly analytical (Polybius), detailed and technical (Ammianus Marcellinus), stirringly dramatic (Xenophon), or bitterly revisionist (Tacitus...
...Another great read from Ford is The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion...
...PETER SKERRY Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities...
...If you agree with Mark Twain's assessment of Cooper's hideous fictional style (I do), wait till you savorthese crisp, merciless essays...
...Frank J. Fahrenkopf, Jr...
...EDWIN J. FEULNER, Jr...
...Outstanding action novel—you won't be able to put it down...
...HENRY J. HYDE Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, selected and introduced by William Safire...
...William A. Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State...
...Scary: not one, but two nuclear holocausts...
...It deserves to be read and enjoyed by a wide audience...
...See if you don't sit up straight when slave traders snatch Kunta Kinte from the canebrake...
...DAVID BROCK I thought I would start by recommending three books by younger writers...
...Spectator readers won't be surprised to learn that Michael Fumento has followed The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS with a new book elucidating the blatant politicization of science by both the scientific and media establishments, Science Under Siege...
...I have recently benefited greatly from rereading Virgil's Aeneid and The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky...
...A fresh and tough-minded critical analysis of feminism with gems of insight: "Strangely, few feminists have couched their political vision in terms of what it means to be an 'American' or a 'citizen' save . . . 'How to get yours.' Where is a feminist analogue of Dr...
...The Loss of Virtue: Moral Confusion and Social Disorder in Britain and America, edited by Digby Anderson, is very much worth reading...
...Having diagnosed in The Conservative Crack-Up a conservative weakness that has badly debilitated the movement, namely conservatives' inability to recognize each other's work or role in a conservative counterculture, I would be a cad were Ito ignore recent contributions to Western thought by our own American Spectator writers...
...This biography is every bit as good as Barzun asserted, revealing Mr...
...Still, there are other fine books that have pleased me of late...
...Classics" suggest Homer & Co...
...Turmoil and Triumph, by George P. Shultz...
...William F. Weld is the governor of Massachusetts...
...Lon Fuller, The Morality of Law...
...I have read a dozen of them and am hoarding the last three or four against the possibility of a long illness or incarceration...
...This book, by one Robert James Waller, a Jimmy Carter look-alike, has American women by the millions all atwitter for reasons not fathomed but well worth exploring by those more qualified...
...Bill Clinton, at least, must devoutly hope so...
...All respects of "mind" are covered, from religion, history, and sexuality to politics, language, and the arts...
...experience at the expense of any intimacy with the original text...
...I did...
...I am not sure this book succeeds in giving a sounder philosophical footing to a reformulated contemporary liberalism...
...Churchill begins with Caesar gazing out over the Channel, and wraps up just before the Great War...
...For your grandchild, your legislator, or yourself...
...Boorstin is the best teacher today of the idea of America...
...Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the classic work on Yugoslavia, which shows that this is a country one never wants to invade...
...You can read Cooper as a page-turner...
...Scientist friends can receive marvelous summaries of Diogenes Laertius as well as Galen or the appropriate volumes of Aristotle, and if anyone has friendly feelings for a lawyer, he can give him Cicero for the prosecution or the defense, as the inclination goes...
...News & World Report...
...you wouldn't know it was the same writer...
...Lamar Alexander's Six Months Off is a good tale of a different sort...
...DAVID HALBERSTAM David Remnick, Lenin's Tomb, an extraordinary book by an uncommonly gifted young writer on the last days of the Soviet Empire and the painful birth of the new Russia...
...The Discoverers, by Daniel Boorstin...
...Both of these books ought to be mandatory reading for everyone who thinks they know how to design a better society...
...Hugh Hewitt is a Southern California lawyer and co-host of PBS's "Life & Times" newsmagazine...
...Not the least of the book's grown-up virtues is its ability to look at the world through the eyes of a loving parent, rather than merely through those of a son or daughter absorbed by the mysteries of self, as in so many other novels...
...Connell's account of the events leading to the slaughter of Custer and his 7th cavalrymen by an enormous encampment of Cheyenne, Sioux, Sans Arc, and Oglala Indians underscores the dramatic and colorful lives of troopers, and their names alone make you want to read about them—men like Many Lice, Hump Nose, Rectum (well, I don't know about Rectum), and Chasedby-Owls are well worth knowing, and Connell makes them come alive...
...Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions...
...Jacques Barzun is University Professor Emeritus at Columbia University and the author of many books, including The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going, published this year in a second edition by the University of Chicago Press...
...Those who share my dislike of recent attempts to bring liturgies into line with secular fads will find many reminders of the splendor of what is being lost...
...The century's greatest man writes history that thunders and rolls...
...Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comedie Francaise, by Rachel M. Brownstein, is an ingratiating look at a French-Jewish good old girl...
...Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, by Judith Viorst...
...This is the story, written in a self-conscious, almost juvenile, and manipulative style—with a hint of what sounds like homosexual envy to it—of a middle-aged housewife's affair of four days...
...The current crop of much-acclaimed new verse translations of both Homers, the Aeneid, and much else are all very well (or almost so, the eager acclaimers usually having neither Greek nor Latin), but they provide a satisfying contemporary English Lit...
...Of Susan Sontag, Paglia wonders, "I don't know what the hell she's been doing for twenty years...
...The tone is not that of apology, much less of propaganda...
...Most of Twain's gripes are true, and all of them are beside the point...
...J. CHARLES KING I believe that the best reading I do is the reading (or rereading) of traditional great books...
...From their accounts, Madison emerges as a vivid figure, with a passion for both liberty and order...
...Henry J. Hyde is the U.S...
...Finally do not miss John Podhoretz's Hell of a Ride...
...For people too busy to finish a book, you can't do better than a gift subscription to Ben Stein's Diary—that is to say, The American Spectator...
...I recently read it again, following my peculiar experiences publishing my own book this spring...
...Graham Wallas explores the relationship between human nature and the empirical art of politics in his volume, Human Nature in Politics, first published in 1908...
...Don't though...
...I found the seventeenth-century politics obscure, but Halifax, always trimming between devotion to principles of hierarchy and right, is a sympathetic figure, and his letters, copiously quoted, are written in a straightforward seventeenth-century prose that rings clear as a crystal wine glass...
...Jonathan Yardley is one of my favorite newspaper writers and book reviewers...
...Crozier's autobiography gives us some masterful insights into the Cold War from the perspective of a "good spook...
...James Grant's latest book is Minding Mr...
...Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution, which is a superb introduction to Russian political culture as well as a narrative of the revolutions of 1917...
...This situation leaves me in the unenviable position of being able to recommend only two books...
...To exercise your indignation, Impostors in the Temple, by Martin Anderson...
...The reader is swept along by the beauty and precision of the language that he does understand...
...Joseph Epstein, Pertinent Players...
...The text of Paglia's public lecture at MIT, in which she insults the intelligence, competence, and physical attributes of various women writers, is worth many times the cover price...
...This is the story of a pol who deduces there is more to life than being governor of Tennessee and takes his wife Honey and their four kids off to Australia for six months to get reacquainted...
...Crozier's role—both official and unofficial—on both sides of the Atlantic as linguist, analyst, and above all strategic thinker deserves telling to a much wider audience and he does it in a chipper and clear-cut way...
...O'Brian depicts the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic wars (start with Master and Commander...
...Too many of us did most of this reading when we were still little more than children and do not realize how much more, as adults, we can find in great books...
...Now this is the spirit of enterprise...
...Wilson as a far more sympathetic figure than I had remembered, though still a statesman greatly flawed...
...KENNETH Y. TOMLINSON To those beautiful people in and around the White House who are panting over the prospects of national health care and a return to 90 percent marginal tax rates, I would prescribe Alec Waugh's The Fatal Gift...
...Islamic lore and mysterious Eastern characters interact with attractive Americans in the pursuit of the instrument from New York and Boston to remote spots in Oman...
...Dave Barry...
...So it is a surprise to find the former chairman of the Bank of America writing about situations in which actual human beings and clear predicaments are dealt with by a shrewd and experienced mind...
...Our "old truth" must be restated for a new world...
...Mad as Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box 1992, by Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover...
...If there has ever been a book that deserved a greater popular response, this is it...
...One of the very greatest novels of them all...
...But Galston certainly deserves high marks for a forthright, muscular critique of the mind-games that academic theoreticians have for some time now been advancing as their defense of liberalism...
...Although he almost never stops to explain the nomenclature of sail and seamanship, it doesn't matter to me (nor indeed to any other O'Brian fan I have ever talked to, whether seagoing or landlubbing...
...The authors attempt to show the disastrous social effects of the waning of the practice of traditional virtues...
...David Brock is the author of The Real Anita Hill (Free Press) and an investigative writer for The American Spectator...
...Jeffrey Bell, Populism and Elitism: Politics in the Age of Equality...
...O'Brien's Burke is just as passionate, determined to honor tradition and to pursue justice...
...I couldn't think of a syndicated columnist whose pieces from five years ago would be both highly instructive and pleasurable on rereading—until I was surprised by William F. Buckley, Jr.'s Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist...
...An American Family's Australian Adventure, by Lamar Alexander...
...Long-time Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger's books are published by Regnery Gateway...
...Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution, a wonderful study of France from the bottom up, showing that centralization preceded 1789 and that what the revolutionaries added was dedication to abstract principles over tradition...
...More likely, you saw the movie of The Last of the Mohicans, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and his hair...
...As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Hayek's demolition job on socialism, it remains one of the best reads around...
...Another anniversary—this time forty years—and celebration of the eighth edition of Kirk's magnum opus reminds us of the everlasting verities...
...Among other things, Remnick writes brilliantly about what happens to a country when totalitarianism causes it to destroy its own historical record...
...is editor-in-chief of The American Spectator and the author of The Liberal Crack-Up and The Conservative Crack-Up...
...In it he argues that science, with all its insistence on verification, be adopted to the art of political pronunciamento...
...The other is a western novel titled Tackett by a fine author of western fiction also named Lyn Nofziger...
...And for those who seek solace in culture, read Michael W. Harris's The Rise of Gospel Blues...
...Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End offers layers of insight about the bitter passage of a bygone era and the need for new symbols in a new age...
...Fowler—a treat for true readers...
...This is not ordinary couch-ball Francesca Johnson and Robert Kincaid are playing here, but an event Waller elevates to spiritual heights...
...This is a splendid compendium of speeches that have moved many people and even influenced the direction of history...
...Finally, Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought, by John Gray, proves that political stability need be neither arid and abstract nor totally cut off from real events, as it all too often is...
...Those who are puzzled by the social decay that envelops our society today and who are sincerely looking for answers that make sense should read this book...
...JACQUES BARZUN George Kennan, Around the Cragged Hill...
...Two powerful, first-hand accounts of just how bad things can get when society fails to solve that problem are: Elijah Anderson, Street Wise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community, and Bill Buford, Among the Thugs...
...Especially for Nixon fans (I am one), especially this year...
...James Q. Wilson is James Collins Professor of Management and Public Policy at UCLA and the author most recently of The Moral Sense (Free Press...
...Every family's struggle for freedom...
...The first is a description of street life among young blacks in a large eastern city that depicts in the impersonal language of social science what many years ago Claude Brown portrayed so vividly in the autobiographical Manchild in the Promised Land...
...Aurora 7, by Thomas Mallon, is a rare piece of autobiographical fiction that manages to be about a great deal more than the author—in this case, the mad rush of life in and around New York City on the 1962 day Scott Carpenter orbited the earth in a space capsule low on fuel...
...If you do nothing else, hunt down a copy of Jean-Francois Revel's The Flight From Truth: The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information...
...Bob Bartley's The Seven Fat Years...
...JAMES Q. WILSON We are becoming acutely conscious of how difficult it is to make good citizens out of energetic and thrill-seeking young men...
...It is a refreshing exercise that only occasionally makes the mistake of exalting science over all else in the foolish way C.P...
...You can even read The Pioneers as social observation, the ancestor of early James...
...Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character...
...I can't stress enough the importance of understanding the Reagan years...
...Mornings on Horseback, by David McCullough...
...The maddening Robert Kincaid (always called by his full name by the author) drives a truck named Fred, plays a guitar named Luke, keeps a dog named Smokey, and uses a penis named Mr...
...Snow did three decades back in The Two Cultures...
...In his novel Burr, Gore Vidal recounts the life and times of the black sheep of our founding fathers...
...This is a first-rate historic detective story...
...LYN NOFZIGER After much thought and rumination, I have reached the disturbing conclusion that I didn't read a damn thing worth reading in the last year...
...This iteration serves as an aid to memory about a complex and unfamiliar subject...
...Richard Price, Clockers...
...and Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, which will spell, pronounce, and define almost any obscene, vulgar, or just plain dirty word or phrase extant, essential knowledgethese days, especially for older folks overwhelmed by a unique younger generation, both sexes of which are largely identifiable by their foul mouths...
...A brilliant novel about the battle of Gettysburg, from which the current film has been made...
...Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, by Jean Bethke Elshtain...
...An old man's book, the product of a lifetime of learning and action, written with the passion of a man determined to pass on his wisdom and insight...
...W.M...
...John Podhoretz is the author of Hell of a Ride: Backstage at the White House Follies 1989-1993 (Simon & Schuster...
...One day someone will explore how one of our most insightful social critics went off the deep end—and in so doing may well shed light on late-twentieth-century American intellectual life...
...Patricia Cornwell, Cruel and Unusual...
...FLORENCE KING On my good days, my definition of a conservative is someone who has ordered a book from Liberty Press and knows who Irving Babbitt was...
...is president of the Heritage Foundation...
...Florence King's first book, Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, published in 1975, has just been reissued in paperback by St...
...Lamar, former secretary of education, was not only a very competent politician but actually writes well...
...Finally, as I have said elsewhere, Vladimir Nabokov is the most brilliant writer I have ever encountered...
...My all-time favorite science fiction...
...the LP edition is beautifully bound and comes with a matching bookmark...
...To fans of serious fiction, give anything by Robertson Davies or the late Walker Percy...
...The literature of business management consists mainly of platitudes concealed by jargon and of statistical reports about imaginary entities—all this in the service of "strategic planning" and the like...
...Six Months Off...
...Richard W. Carlson is president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting...
...Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans...
...The longer we keep it on the best-seller list, the angrier Hillary gets...
...J. Charles King is president of the Liberty Fund...
...Cooper's great enemy over the years has been Mark Twain...
...You'll probably find them only in paperback, so use them as stocking-stuffers...
...The fact is that my angst-ridden Springer Spaniel pressured me to list The Hidden Life of Dogs by Elizabeth Thomas...
...Among the many recently published analyses of political correctness, Jonathan Rauch's Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought stands out as a thoughtful, provocative defense of civil liberties and liberal inquiry...
...The fascism of today's women's movement is exposed in Katie Roiphe's The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus...
...A highly entertaining and informative narrative history about a place—and a state of mind—that many intellectuals would do well to know more about...
...Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, by Julie Nixon Eisenhower...
...The best political reportage of its kind I've ever seen...
...I am not a Civil War buff, but it had the absolute ring of truth—a haunting beauty to it...
...Perhaps political oratory is overrated after all...
...She tells it like she sees it, and since the way she sees it is so congenial to my own outlook, this is my number-one pick for this Christmas...
...My favorite discovery: The great line from Clyde Moody's "Six White Horses" ("If you don't believe I'm leaving, you can count the days I'm gone") was, in fact, the title of Dorsey's first copyrighted composition...
...Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind...
...Anyone 16 years or older who likes swashbuckling, espionage, love, lust, and irreverence in superbly crafted historical settings will devour the Captain Aubrey novels of Patrick O'Brian and the Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser...
...His eloquent poems, short stories, and philosophical and literary essays reveal a mind obsessed with paradox, irony, and ratiocination...
...Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels...
...Abraham Lincoln: A Biography, by Benjamin P. Thomas...
...Literate gift-givers cannot miss if they gift-wrap for their friends (and the occasional enemy of resilient disposition) David Brock's The Real Anita Hill or Thomas Mallon's Rockets and Rodeos or Terry Eastland's anthology Religious Liberty in the Supreme Court or Micah Morrison's Fire in Paradise or new editions of P.J...
...It is from this novel that anthologists pull the popular short story, "Spotted Horses...
...Edwin J. Feulner, Jr...
...I am reminded that Woodrow Wilson would not share Meyer's enthusiasm for hard thinking—scientific thinking, that is...
...The veteran diplomat and doyen of foreign-policy scholars has written an intimate account of his long-matured conclusions about the place of the United States in the world, the role it should play henceforth, and the improvement of the means to that end...
...WILLIAM F. WELD Jorge Luis Borges's genius is expressed in small doses...
...An American classic, a tale of a 14-year-old girl's toughness, character, and derring-do on the Arkansas frontier, circa 1880...
...Shelby Steele manages to be his own person—quietly slicing through the cant about race among conservatives as well as liberals—without making himself the center of attention, which is quite a feat for any black intellectual these days...
...It is touching and funny...
...SUZANNE FIELDS True Grit, by Charles Portis...
...Willie...
...Margaret Thatcher's The Downing Street Years...
...A novel about the black gangs of the underclass...
...Elitists are pessimistic, and want to make decisions for the great unwashed...
...The reader is favored with Mr...
...the latest edition of the World Almanac, which attempts to do the same...
...Agitated by the blowsy thought of contemporary pols and political thinkers manqués, Herbert E. Meyer has written a brief and trenchant tract, Hard Thinking...
...My favorite is Democracy and Leadership, which will tempt you to write "Clinton...
...More scary: Once a civilization loses knowledge ("burns the books"), how does it get it back...
...The concluding chapter is a marvelous critique of my friend and mentor, the "anti-porn star" Catharine MacKinnon...
...HERBERT HOOVER III To obtain some insight on several rounds of political infighting and to provide some physical exercise (this book weighs over six pounds...
...Incidentally, were he around today, Wilson would be among the most politically incorrect of profs and doubtless a closet American Spectator reader...
...Yardley's considerable skill with prose caused me to order a book he wrote in 1989 called Our Kind of People: The Story of an American Family...
...Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, by Florence King...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...The ideal book to go with today's headlines...
...An inside look at how Clinton won and Bush blew the 1992 presidential election...
...Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes, the story of six men running for the presidency...
...incontrovertible proof that Bill Clinton is an anomaly...
...The book is a testament politique of immediate and permanent interest, written in prose of a quality one rarely meets in current books...
...Ditto for medical friends & Hippocrates—they might even be surprised to discover that a text exists, merely because they will have heard that Hippocrates is a mythic name (it was not H. who wrote it but another man who claimed he was H...
...These addictive, fast-paced, beautifully written historical novels—the sixteenth of which, The Wine-Dark Sea, has just been published—are enduring minor classics, on a par with Conan Doyle or P.G...
...Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Great Melody is O'Brien's beautiful prose at its best, celebrating one of every conservative's real heroes, Edmund Burke...
...Is the corpse from the electric chair the convicted murderer...
...Dick Armey is the US...
...To those preparing to follow American troops (under the U.N...
...be ready to leave your reason on the shelf when you take down the book...
...Bridge, The Diary of a Rapist) is a fine writer...
...If you admired "Spotted Horses," I suggest you read the whole novel...
...McDougall's work will be best understood, though, if preceded by a reading or rereading of Churchill's History of the English Speaking People...
...Weaver's study of the treatment of the all-Negro 25th Infantry Regiment in Brownsville, Texas, at the turn of the century caused the soldiers, to be-posthumously rescued from dishonor in a case clearly driven by the racism of the times...
...The most moving novel of the year is Frank Conroy's Body & Soul, about the sentimental education of a musical genius...
...Now, after the ages of innocence and irony, try The Leatherstocking Tales...
...is the former chairman of the Republican National Committee...
...MYRON MAGNET Patrick O'Brian, the Aubrey-Maturin novels...
...Labyrinths: Short Stories and Other Writings provides a sampling of Borges's work...
...continued on page 30) JAMES C. MILLER III James M. Buchanan, Better than Plowing and Other Personal Essays...
...It is a fine and honest look at the fifty-year marriage of Yardley's own parents and the passing of an age dominated by WASP families—many of them well-mannered, literate, genteel, selfless, and often kindly—whose contributions to America have disappeared from collective appreciation...
...This would be a wonderful gift for anyone who hopes to preserve the thinking of this great economist who, I'm sad to say, passed away this year, just when we need him most...
...How a country boy from Tennessee grows up to become a world-famous economist, establish a new subdiscipline (public choice), and win the Nobel Prize for economic science...
...For genuine belly laughs, Dave Barry Does Japan, by (who else...
...Richard Bulliet, The Sufi Fiddle...
...They're also a tour de force from the conservative mind we've come to rely on for forty years...
...T.R...
...Finally, an obscure find from a used book store: H.C...
...Lenin's Tomb, by David Remnick...
...We all have these days—often during holidays: "I think I'll move to Australia...
...The most delightful and entertaining novel I've read in years is Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool, which turns Thanksgiving week in an upstate New York town into a vivid human comedy starring Russo's wondrously inspired creation—a 60-year-old hand-to-mouth working man called Sully whose manly wisdom transforms a failed life into something approaching a state of grace...
...Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind...
...About the Carters, but it could be the Clintons: "I've got the red neck White House blues/Jimmy's (Billy's) got me all confused/He's in all the right churches and all the wrong pews/I've got the red neck White House blues...
...R. EMMETT TYRRELL, Jr...
...O'Rourke's Bachelor Home Companion, Michael Fumento's The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, and George Gilder' s Wealth and Poverty...
...More recently, Larry Woiwode's Acts is a serious writer's serious attempt to put down a commentary for our times on the Acts of the Apostles...
...Crackers, by Roy Blount, Jr...
...Safire loves language and his skill and devotion have produced this rewarding, entertaining, and instructive volume...
...A novel for grown-ups, Vanity Fair gets better and more moving as the reader becomes older and, if not wiser, at least more experienced and therefore more interested in Thackeray's depiction of the interplay between chance and intention in shaping individual fate...
...My favorite book of 1993 is a biography of the actress with one name who always turns up in histories of the Second Empire...
...Another book that recently pleased me is the first novel of William Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet...
...A wonderful collection of some of history's finest speeches...
...Jack Aubrey is a fighting captain (and violist), and Stephen Maturin is a naval surgeon (and cellist...
...it is better, I've come to think, than The Red Badge of Courage...
...The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, by Douglas Adams, is a must for anyone with an appetite for science fiction...
...First published in 1960, Hayek' s thesis is no less relevant today...
...Or is the killer still on the loose...
...Populists are optimistic about the ability of people to make choices for themselves...
...One is a political memoir aptly named Nofziger,, about the political life, times, and trials (literally) of yours truly, written by the author (every last word) of the same name...
...It's particularly appropriate, given the eerie similarities between the Democrat Congress and the unconstrained visionaries Sowell fliscusses...
...His recent column in the Washington Post about Come Here: A Man Overcomes the Tragic Aftermath of Childhood Sexual Abuse was smart, incisive, very critical, and took a lot of guts, since the author, former American University president Richard Berendzen, is a media groupie of considerable social skill and has many influential friends in the town Yardley writes for...
...Virginia's chief medical examiner, Kay Scarpetta, in another thriller...
...indeed, the text relies on such a variety of opinions from historians, statesmen, publicists, and men of letters that one readily excuses the author's repetition of summarizing propositions...
...Edward N. Luttwak is director of the geo-economics program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the author, most recently, of The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the United States From Becoming a Third World Country and How to Win the Geo-Economic Struggle for Industrial Supremacy (Simon & Schuster...
...Michael Barone is a senior writer at U.S...
...Lamar Alexander is the former governor of Tennessee and the former secretary of education...
...and all such literary literature, but it need not be so: an architect friend can be given his Vitruvius to discover how buildings were designed in the days of Augustus—he will have heard the name, of course, but chances (99 percent) are that he has not read a word of the text, and there are further chances that he might find the text interesting, or even useful...
...MICHAEL BARONE For those to whom I have not already given it, Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke...
...in the margins of every page...
...Richard Nixon's former law professor at Duke, Lon Fuller went on to practice law in Boston and teach at Harvard...
...EDWARD N. LUTTWAK The gift of Loeb the banker to all of us, the still-expanding Loeb Classical Library, offers the best of gift books, solidly bound, handy octavo volumes in which the original Greek or Latin text is faced page-by-page by a rigorously accurate English translation...
...This readable book answers that stumper...
...Evan S. Connell (Mrs...
...I know...
...It is not easy to write about men like Bush, Dole, Dukakis, and Hart and turn it into hypnotic reading, but Cramer does it...
...Bill's books are such a joy because they represent a true distillation of the natural wit and good humor of conservatives...
...Little has changed...
...And Merry Christmas...
...This is the most honest and penetrating discussion of contemporary race matters that I have come across recently...
...HUGH HEWITT Walter McDougall's Let the Sea Make a Noise . . . is history in a grand style—the story of the scramble to control the North Pacific, now entering its seventh century...
...If you doubt that Boy Clinton is an accidental president bequeathed us by the Country Club Republicans of the last administration, read this lively portmanteau of preposterosities by a gifted journalist...
...With his characteristic blend of humor, irreverence, and astounding detail, Vidal creates the illusion of having been there...
...RICHARD BROOKHISER You've probably never read any James Fenimore Cooper, unless you were an American lit major, and even then, you'd have to be pretty old...
...congressman from Illinois's sixth district...
...Fraser lands his lovable coward in every scrape of the British Empire (start with Flashman...
...Sonnets, by William Shakespeare...
...His new book is Let the Sea Make a Noise . . . : A History of the North Pacific (Basic Books...
...Clinton, yearns for the kind of economic performance we experienced during the fat years of the 1980s...
...Hal Moore commanded the American battalion- that fought there and Joe Galloway reported on it for UP...
...Not only is he the master and commander of the English language, but also of character, dialogue, plot, and humor...
...Roger Masters's translation is superb...
...You will also find that such old-time country classics as the Carter Family's "If You See My Savior . . . [Tell Him that You Saw Me]" wereactually authored by Dorsey...
...This book, perhaps more than any other, describes just how real are the differences between the two primary political philosophies in America today, conservatism and liberalism...
...Another, but very different, venture into Islam forms the plot of this thriller by the Professor of Middle East History at Columbia University...
...Wilson's scrupling comes to mind for I have just finished a book that Jacques Barzun mentioned his 1991 Christmas Book recommendations, August Heckscher's Woodrow Wilson...
...Also a joy, after a weak start, is Michael Malone's Foolscap, a wild romp about universities, theater, sybaritic playwrights, and Sir Walter Raleigh...
...James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense uses social science to uphold ordinary people's common sense...
...Hard to decide which is more surprising—that Woiwode accomplishes his task so well, or that such mainstream and righteously secular organs as the Los Angeles Times Book Review gave the book the front-page reviews it deserved...
...Criticism of our habits and attitudes and of some of our institutions is matched by sympathetic understanding of difficulties and imaginative suggestions of reform...
...Epstein's collections of literary essays are fine, too, but the per-page enjoyment quotient of these is unmatched among contemporary offerings...
...Peter Skerry is the author of Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority (Free Press), nonfiction winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for 1992-1993...
...The editor of the American Scholar set out a dozen years ago to revive the literary essay, a genre distinct from the "critical piece" that fills our quarterlies from coast to coast...
...Kenneth Y. Tomlinson is editor-in-chief of Reader's Digest...
...she didn't even like neoclassical drama and never quite figured out what the plots were all about, but like a milk wagon horse who knows the route, she stopped and started in all the right places at all the right times and turned it into high art...
...This four-volume set is widely available, and is the perfect antidote to contemporary secondary education's refusal to provide any structure to history for fear of giving offense...
...One example: In free markets, people decide for themselves...
...James C. Miller, who served in the Reagan cabinet as director of management and budget, is chairman of the board of Citizens for a Sound Economy...
...A complete repudiation of the revisionist historians' contention that Ronald Reagan's economic policies were benign at best and destructive at worst...
...Liberty Press has all of Babbitt's essay books...
...Yardley sliced him up and packaged him...
...There you will find that gospel blues traces its origins as a musical form to the 1920s and 30s and an extraordinary bluesman turned religious inspirationalist named Thomas A. Dorsey...
...You may recall that Berendzen made serial obscene calls to women ,and, when he was caught, offered up the New Age mea culpa of the Judge Wachtlers of America by blaming others, in Berendzen's case his own mother, for making him do it...
...This fat tome is worth reading for its scope and detail as well as for its balanced judgments...
...Roots, by Alex Haley...
...Just about the best writing you can ever find about what it is like to sit on a porch in the warm evenings laughing and smelling the hoses spraying the lawn and watching the children put fireflies in jars...
...Brian Crozier's Free Agent: The Unseen War 19411991...
...In addition to belying the Democrats' economic revisionism, Bartley's book will become a history text of the "good old days" for Americans who will look back on the eighties with awe, reverence, and longing during the Clinton years...
...For another kind of reading, I recommend The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century: A Historical Introduction and Guide for Students and Musicians (Clarendon Press...
...you can read him as a mythmaker (every cop-buddy show descends from him...
...The fiddle is a violin with a strange Arabic inscription inside it, which becomes the center of wild events caused by a "fiddle" in the slang sense...
...Great stuff...
...Borges transcends geopolitical boundaries to explore the questions that have haunted humanity since time immemorial...
...Robert L. Bartley, The Seven Fat Years: And How to Do It Again...
...William Safire's Lend Me Your Ears...
...Naipaul, A Bend in the River...
...No self-respecting office should be without Politics in America (Congressional Quarterly, 1994 edition) and The Almanac of American Politics (National Journal, 1994 edition...
...Eastland's sure hand in the selection, introduction, and annotation of these cases, but editorial comment from major newspapers plus informed comment from three of the most highly regarded legal scholars add to the immense value of this volume...
...So richly does O'Brian evoke the late eighteenth century that I returned to the great Edmund Burke, an old college flame...
...Description and advice are given in good, racy American English...
...Foxcroft, A Character of the Trimmer, Being a Short Life of the First Marquis of Halifax...
...The masterpiece—so far—of the greatest living English novelist (Trinidad-born...
...I include the next book with trepidation, as I suspect Bob Tyrrell thinks all dog-lovers, or even dog-likers, read the Nation...
...Recent events make this important book more relevant and informative today...
...Here the figures range from Hazlitt himself and Henry James to Mencken, Orwell, and H.W...
...Consider sending a copy of the smarmiest novel of this decade so far, The Bridges of Madison County, and the accompanying cassette of its author singing, to someone you really hate...
...Roiphe should be read alongside Camille Paglia's Sex,Art and American Culture, a book of essays published in paperback last year...
...Thackeray, Vanity Fair...
...To paraphrase Freud, who was speaking of another group every bit as mysterious in their thinking, "What is it that dogs want anyway...
...Buford's book puts the reader amidst the British toughs who regularly and systematically terrorize spectators and townspeople at or near a football game...
...WALTER A. McDOUGALL Torment students and other naifs with The Way Things Ought to Be, by Rush Limbaugh...
...A Death in the Family, by James Agee...
...These are remarkable encyclopedias of all things congressional, including insightful biographies of every member of Congress...
...If God truly resides in the well-chosen word, Pale Fire is a work of divine inspiration...
...I can't relinquish this space without advancing a proposal...
...And, by the way, the Loebs are not even that expensive...
...William Safire's Full Disclosure is still the best novel of manners and intrigue inside the Beltway...
...The stories are set in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars...
...Michael Hammer and James Champy, in Reengineering the Corporation, wisely warn that the United States will not lead the world into the next century unless we abandon business practices developed in the last...
...representative from Texas's 26th district and chairman of the House Republican Conference...
...I tell my girls that if you become dependent on others and let them do everything for you, you become ugly...
...In 268 words he gave us a chart and a compass . . . demonstrating that our nation's strength lies in rededication to those beliefs to which it was committed at birth...
...An old favorite—Teddy Roosevelt and the politics of "The Age of Innocence...
...It is an astounding fact of history that the American Revolution proceeded despite Burke and his compelling "Speech on Conciliation with America...
...Let me mention a couple of other books, neither new, that I've enjoyed recently...
...When government does the job, bureaucrats decide for you...
...For mold-breakers...
...Naomi Wolf is "Little Miss Pravda...
...For self-help, in almost any situation, The Prince, by NiccolO Machiavelli...
...Louis B. Lundborg, The Art of Being an Executive...
...This book is the most stimulating and elegant articulation of contemporary natural-law theory that I am aware of...
...Without Remorse, by Tom Clancy...
...well, you get the drift...
...In The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. Hayek examines the underlying principles of Western civilization, arguing that while the meaning is still intact, words such as "liberty" and "freedom" have lost their power...
...Myron Magnet is a member of Fortune magazine's board of editors and the author of The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass (Morrow...
...V.S...
...Admit it...
...The passage on Bob Dole's recovery from his war wounds alone is worth the price of the book...
...And John Podhoretz's Hell of a Ride: Backstage at the White House Follies 1989-1993 provides a more detailed sense of life in contemporary Washington than a dozen books by bigfoot political reporters...
...Finally, there is all of the literature as such, from Achilles Statius to Virgil, as well as the various anthologies ("Minor Latin Poets" is a particularly good one for the sort of friend who went astray and now teaches in a liberal arts college...
...Things haven't gotten better...
...Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and the author of The Way of the WASP: How It Made America and How It Can Save It, So to Speak (Free Press...
...The De-Valuing of America, by William J. Bennett, former secretary of education and one who served in several important posts during the Reagan/Bush years (of Blessed Memory...
...You've watched it but never read it...
...Read We Were Soldiers first and then follow it with Killer Angels...
...I've passed copies along to dozens of people and every one of the recipients has returned for more...
...Bill Bennett tells it exactly as it is, with not so much as a nod to political correctness...
...And while her critique of urban planners stands, so does her implicit critique of laissez-faire policies...
...Miller shows him methodically studying republicanism in 1786, when he was 35, in preparation for the Constitutional Convention he did more than anyone else to engineer...
...When he sees leaves on a tree or the dust swirling in a corral he does something with language that no novelist theretofore was quite capable of...
...I particularly encourage those with friends, relatives, and acquaintances working in positions of authority in the national Democrat party to give them this gift...
...A world of difference...
...Buckley has a rare gift among pundits for producing memorable pieces that are not attacking, but rather appreciating—luminaries ranging from Sidney Hook to Malcolm Forbes to Nancy and Ronald Reagan...
...Timely advice...
...I have had a "sneak preview" of the Iron Lady's first volume of memoirs and they are a spectacular read, gutsy and opinionated, unlike so many other political memoirs...
...A Tennessee girl falls in love with a Japanese diplomat just before Pearl Harbor, marries him, is deported, and lives in the mountains of Japan during World War II...
...He leaves the story behind and penetrates the reading mind with fauvist brushstrokes...
...My literary agent recommended it highly when it was published two years ago in translation from the French...
...RICHARD W. CARLSON I came across a book about General Custer and the Big Horn Campaign called Son of the Morning Star (1984), and it is well worth reading...
...FRANK J. FAHRENKOPF, Jr...
...Herbert Hoover III is a private investor...
...When I was governor, trying to make schools better, I read a chapter each night...
...Bedtime reading...
...He offers up a fascinating portrait of the American West 125 years ago and a fair and balanced picture of handsome, brave, weird, egomaniacal, and wildly aggressive George Custer, Civil War hero, poster boy, and presidential aspirant, whose death horrified our nation of 40 million...
...Like Holmes and Watson or Jeeves and Wooster, the two protagonists are contrasting embodiments of British virtue, and the novels, while on the surface telling exciting, historically accurate adventure tales of the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars, underneath are highly intelligent meditations on such out-of-fashion values as honor, loyalty, friendship, courage, duty, steadfastness, and responsibility...
...The authors say it best: "This is a book about the future that is already here and a book for people who expect to be a part of it...
...Incredibly, O'Brian seems to hold the same high opinion of his readers as they do of him...
...If present-day readers read it as the first of Faulkner's Clinton trilogy, they will find it terrifyingly timely...
...Finally, treat yourself to any (really, all) of Joseph Epstein's collections of familiar essays: Once More Around the Block, The Middle of My Tether, and A Line Out for a Walk...
...In the literary essay the writer—Hazlitt is the great exemplar—does not pounce on symptoms and issue a diagnostician's verdict, but lets his experience of life and books play upon and around his subject—quite as if he liked reading and esteemed his author...
...Drew McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy, and William Lee Miller, The Business of May Next: James Madison and the Founding...
...If you're pressed by foul humor, or not wanting to waste even ten minutes, these essays are always the antidote...
...Ditto for David Brock's The Real Anita Hill, the brave, brilliant exposé by a prodigy who (I'm honored to say) was once a student of mine at Berkeley...
...Even the reader with only trace amounts of Latin and no Greek benefits from the pairing, easily acquiring more Latin by glancing over the parallel paragraph now and then, and often discovering recognizable meaning in the Greek too, given the growing Greek content of our own language...
...Suzanne Fields is a Washington Times columnist...
...There wasn't an arty bone in her body...
...This title is not some clever hippie metaphor like Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance but actually means what it says...
...Friedrich A. von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom...
...The plainness of Mallon's prose is a triumph of restraint, like the novel itself...
...David Halberstam's most recent book is The Fifties...
...Religious Liberty in the Supreme Court: The Cases that Define the Debate 'over Church and State, edited by Terry Eastland, is a valuable resource for the opinions of the court on perhaps the most contentious issue in all of constitutional law, save abortion...
...To those seeking escape from the 1930s rerun now playing Washington, take a trip to Josh Pons's Country Life Diary—three years in the life of a thoroughbred breeding farm...
...Rauch's unique perspective, derived from personal experience, lends to the poignancy of his thesis...
...Then watch the Ken Burns series on the Civil War...
...In whose behalf is the feminist dream being dreamt...
...A profound exploration of civilization and anarchy, and of the relation between the individual life and the social conditions that surround it...
...Anyone who loves bang-bang-shoot-'em-up western fiction will love Tackett...
...J.-J...
...Extravagant, maybe even dangerous, this nevertheless remains among the most profound, and certainly the most thrilling, of political treatises...
...Most important, you can read him for a somber vision of a world of transgressions and selfishness, through which the only pathfinder is character...
...When the movie came out, none of the reviewers had read the books, not even John Simon, though most of them seemed to know Twain's rollicking attack...
...DICK ARMEY My Christmas book list features some old favorites in addition to some new releases: Bill Buckley's Happy Days Were Here Again...
...Yeltsin, Gorbachev, and Sakharov up close and personal...
...Just about the best writing, period...
...The enemy of discovery is the profession...
...Faulkner creates memorable figures, or perhaps it is the South that does, but it is Faulkner's eye that transforms the South into art...
...Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom...
...They also have that festival of political incorrectness, The American Democrat, by James Fenimore Cooper, who was most gloriously against everything and never gave a thought to the self-defeating bromide, "conservatism with a smiling face...
...That many utopian intellectuals are blissfully unaware of these core cultural problems is tellingly shown in Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, and Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution...
...The arch-conservative literary critic, who died in 1935, was the special bane of Sinclair Lewis, who reputedly appropriated his name for a fictional jerk in a spirit of catty revenge...
...JOHN PODHORETZ I read books as entertainment, not homework, and in that spirit of hedonism I will recommend books I loved reading, not ones I think you should read...
...The story of the battle of the Ia Drang Valley, the first great main force battle of the Vietnam war, fought in November 1965, when both sides defined themselves and the NVA learned how to combat America's great technological superiority...
...A keen reminder of the power of passion when it's fused with the language of love: "So are you to My thoughts as food to life,/Or as sweet-season'd showers are to the ground...
...I like to read it because it is about our family...
...Hal Moore and Joseph Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once . . . And Young...
...Not surprisingly, elitists prefer government...
Vol. 26 • December 1993 • No. 12
