Books for Christmas
Books for Christmas Our annual list of holiday gift suggestions from distinguished readers and writers. Stephen E. Ambrose I have three favorites for Christmas gifts, two new and one old. David...
...A warm and illuminating account of how the armed services opened the way to a wide view of American opportunities...
...it continued with The Scarecrow of Oz, Ozma of Oz, and another eleven books after that...
...This is another triumph of the Nazis...
...We're back in Hemingway country, Italy in the First World War, and just as Hemingway made the pebbles in the fast-moving stream his forever, so Helprin establishes a good claim to the stars...
...I believe this little book of essays may be our last best hope of saving written English...
...If one could choose only one novel to read in a lifetime, this would be my choice...
...Start with the best, A Soldier in the Great War...
...He personified what the world so sorely lacks today—a towering political leader with extraordinary courage and vision...
...This is the best and last word on the "character" issue for the 1996 election campaign...
...The Rainmaker, by John Grisham...
...You relax too much...
...He simultaneously portrays the greedy behavior of the ambulance-chasing tort lawyer and the great need for lawyers like that to correct the excessive greed of some business people...
...Daniel J. Boorstin, a historian, is author of The Americans, The Discoverers, and The Creators...
...I read this torching of pop Marxists late at night at poolside in a Los Angeles hotel in July 1989, and was laughing so hard that the hotel manager came out and asked me to stop annoying the other guests...
...I recommend it to everybody, particularly to my business friends who invest the fruits of American democratic capitalism in building up the economic and military structure of a regime that has every intention of profiting by the latter, and none of instituting the former...
...All of Wolfe's books hold up, but this one really holds up...
...What passes for conservatism today is not conservatism...
...He proves in his person that the American dream is still alive and gives us a great read as a bonus...
...A timeless and timely explanation of the way real people live and work in a real economy...
...How does a 160-page bibliography grab you...
...5) For any casual student of the newest Balkan wars who wonders about ethnic, religious, and tribal explosions 2,000 years ago, I recommend Caesar's Commentaries during his two years in Gaul...
...I recommend The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau (Paris perfume-shop owner accepts bankruptcy with nobility), Eugenie Grandet (miser's lust for gold destroys his family), and Cousin Pons (relatives and friends scheme to acquire ingenuous musician's great art collection...
...Though I was tickled by Franco's decision to ban his awful Iberia in Spain—dictatorship has its privileges, after all—I remain a fan of Michener...
...Coogan's chronicle of Collins's exploits and struggles vividly demonstrates why British oppression and duplicity have caused so many generations of Irish men and women to take up arms against British misrule...
...He has visited the countries of the former Evil Empire and come back with the Solomonic judgments of such swinish collaborators in totalitarianism as General Jaruzelski and Milos Jakes...
...Madame Bovary...
...Together with Captains Lewis and Clark you cross the continent, meeting Indian tribes that had never before tseen a white man, see.: ing buffalo herds incomprehensible to us today, along with grizzly bears, coyotes...
...Richard Kimble and Lt...
...A Bully Father: Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to his Children, by Joan Paterson Kerr...
...Sigh...
...William Kristol Raymond Chandler, Stories and Early Novels and Later Novels and Other Writings—these Library of America volumes provide an occasion to re-read the great American expositor of "the simple act of murder...
...Further proof of John Updike's view that Mallon is "one of the most interesting novelists at work...
...Harris writes the novels Newt Gingrich might write if Newt Gingrich had a handle on plot, structure, dialogue, scene, etc., etc...
...Streetwise, Anderson's artful synthesis of observations about urban life and interviews with residents of his "Village-Northton" neighborhood is a must read—particularly for anyone who thinks that police presence alone can restore order in troubled communities...
...Great stories, keen insight into matters financial...
...The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, by William Manchester...
...Moreover he has some very fine and funny stories to relate...
...Pick it up once and you will read to the end with hardly a stop, I guarantee...
...James K. Glassman This is the year I discovered Balzac—better late than never for someone who writes about money...
...More than a century after they were written, these extraordinary prose poems retain their power to move, disturb, and inspire...
...is editor-in-chief of The American Spectator and author of Public Nuisances, The Liberal Crack-Up, and The Conservative Crack-Up...
...Shooting an Elephant, and Other Essays, by George Orwell...
...But he is really a narrative historian in the grand style...
...Dan Quayle We may not be living in a literary golden age, but if every book were of the same quality as the following, we would be: Henry and Clara, by Thomas Mallon...
...First published in 1954, it is still the quintessential work on the final days of the Civil War...
...The intolerance and imbecility of reigning dogmas there explain why so few burning issues in the Republic are ever discussed intelligently...
...After a few pages I could see, hear, smell, touch, and almost taste the physical and social life of Paris of 150 years ago...
...Stephen Goldsmith Fatherless America, by David Blankenhorn, gets right to the point: "Unless we reverse the trend of fatherlessness, no other set of accomplishments—not economic growth, or prison construction, or welfare reform, or better schools—will succeed in arresting the decline of child welfare and the spread of male violence...
...Smith is as humane, funny, moral, and unaffected as any Southern writer going...
...L. Brent Bozell III I propose three books and one series, the former for adults primarily, the latter for children exclusively...
...A must for any American individualist, rugged or otherwise...
...Much more than a great stone face on Mount Rushmore or a stair-charging maniac from Arsenic and Old Lace, Theodore Roosevelt was the most captivating figure of the early twentieth century...
...What have you heard about, Shane...
...Agnon, it is a book about prayer and atonement and the roles they play in the lives of Jews...
...enough, an obvious candidate for the Charlie Rose show...
...It's hard to conceive of one more tense or more gripping...
...R.W.B...
...Entertaining reading when you reach policy work overload...
...I had never read anything by Balzac until my book discussion group assigned this...
...Great for anyone who appreciates sports, good writing, wisdom, and creativity...
...34 The American Spectator December 1995 But the lives of all three are about revelation, a subject ever more current as we see the ugliness of the life of non-belief...
...They may no longer be in print, however, and they will be difficult to find in any library, but these treasures are well worth the search...
...But this graceful essay is not just an argument of interest to Jews...
...The gambling mastermind is a man called Rosenthal...
...But it is the biography for our time...
...My edition, always kept handy by bedside, is Julius Caesar, the Battle for Gaul, translated by Wiseman and Cunliffe and published by David R. Godine, Boston, in 1970...
...Grisham does whatEugene D. Genovese For superior assessments of the twentieth century see, from the right, John Lukacs, The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age, and, from the left, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, which could profitably be read in tandem...
...Under cover of a guide to "The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made," Marsh teaches more about the aesthetics of American popular music than anyone I know...
...The best science book: A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, by John Allen Paulos...
...How many children (or parents, for that matter) even know one exists...
...It may pleasantly surprise some readers that there are plenty of genuinely good ideas coming from Republicans and Democrats alike at the local level...
...Dan Lungren is the California attorney general...
...Two delicious books for holiday giving are John Feinstein's A Good Walk Spoiled, about a year on the pro30 The American Spectator December 1995 all hard-boiled detective films, dialogue taken straight from Dashiell Hanunett's book, except for one last line: "What is it, Sam...
...The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of...
...Clifford Odets's The Sweet Smell of Success, with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis film noir at its most riveting...
...hours of speeches in Congress about tort reform could not do...
...Panther in the Sky, by James Alexander Thom...
...Christine Todd Whitman If I were to provide an overview of books that I think represent a diversity that I enjoy, I would recommend the following: Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo...
...This suitably titled life of one of this century's authentic giants is the finest one-volume account available of the man who said, "I am France," and made the rest of the world believe it...
...I do not agree with everything he says, but his message that we face a very different tomorrow on the work scene needs attention...
...They lay against the sides of the gondola cars, their rifles leaning with them, sheathed bayonets extending above the steel bulkheads and whistling in the wind . . . it was as if they were high in the air, running with the constellations...
...Maurice Isserman is a historian at Hamilton College...
...that ends with a call for reviving the kind of patriotic, bottom-up coalition FDR built...
...Like many practitioners of the art, Helprin is a conservative (Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind and Walter Edmonds's Drums Along the Mohawk, for example, can both be read as anti–New Deal polemics...
...E. O. Wilson, Naturalist...
...Big to get overthrown...
...Decide for yourself, and I know Brimelow has given me reason to think this matter through at greater length...
...First is Lynne Cheney's Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense—and What We Can Do About It...
...Naipaul with energy, Hunter Thompson with talent, or Norman Mailer doing his own research, and you have Ryszard Kapuscinski...
...Martin: "Some men are born to fail...
...Friedrich Engels said, "I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together...
...As all readers of this journal know, Heston is the rare individualist in Hollywood...
...That James Salter is not a household name in America shows that, civilization-wise, this country still has a lot of work to do...
...Modern Times: From the Twenties to the Nineties, by Paul Johnson...
...Eugene D. Genovese is author of The Southern Tradition: The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Harvard University Press) and The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War (University of Missouri Press...
...Peter Pan appeals to the child in all of us and is one of those wonderful books to be read with young people of all ages...
...But after reading his sublime enthusiasms about the best of Motown, James Brown, and the Beatles, you'll never call them "oldies" again...
...Parting the Waters, by Taylor Branch...
...First read Hobsbawm on the effects of World War I and the revolutionary quarter-century that followed the end of World War II...
...But, for the most part, they seem loath to do this...
...Martin Peretz I reread Days of Awe every year...
...He was wrong on some important things, but he kept his eye on the ball and was never wrong about the crucial things, which were to defend the British Isles and get America into the war...
...Evans states his case unapologetically and very persuasively...
...David Donald's Lincoln is an absorbing read, no matter how many previous biographies you have read...
...Then come up with a more persuasive interpretation of either...
...Shah of Shahs, by Ryszard Kapuscinski...
...David Pryce-Jones calls himself a journalist...
...Colin Powell's My American Journey is a superb autobiography and a perfect gift for fathers to give their sons, or mothers to their daughters...
...A.B...
...Philip Gerard, this one's for you...
...Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is one of the world's most learned men and this is his opus, guaranteed to be one of the most thought-provoking books you will ever read...
...But it may also dominate the Jewish future, which would make the Nazi triumph even worse than it already is...
...More than seven decades since publication, it remains the greatest novel of the twentieth century: simultaneously passionate and analytical, introspective and political...
...He wrestled with the problem of combining freedom with justice, both of which he considered essentials of the libertarian good society, and while his answers may not all fit 1995 the questions are still here...
...But given a seven-day reprieve, I would ask for the other half-dozen literate movies I've found worth watching, time and again, these latter years...
...Bill Safire's latest book, also Bill Buckley's...
...The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, by Russell Kirk...
...Then read the Chapter Notes...
...Crossing the Threshold of Hope, by John Paul H. With brilliance and clarity the Pope speaks the eternal truths which repudiate the dysfunctional psychobabble that passes as serious thought in modern society...
...In a wonderful exchange between the brothers, Ivan shouts out: "If there is no God, everything is permissible, crime inevitable...
...Reason in the Balance, Phillip E. Johnson...
...He is pessimistic about the future of the Founding Fathers' contrivance if immigration is not slowed...
...RN's life is illuminated by his Yorba Linda boyhood, days of hard work, love, and faith...
...Prudential-Bache Securities gets away with the crime of the century in this electrifying account of an $8-billion gang rape of hundreds of thousands of mom-and-pop investors...
...Intimate Worlds: Life Inside the Family is Maggie Scarf's fourth book...
...into a deal that probably saved Britain from Hitler...
...Parting the Waters gives us insight into a period in American history for which we need to have a true appreciation...
...A personal, richly allusive history for the inquiring visitor...
...Just give the bookstore clerk the name of the author and have a good time...
...This account of his opponents' relentlessness should remind us that similar tactics could be used against Gingrich himself by his own desperate ideological foes, and for similar reasons—to try to bring the Gingrich era to a premature end and discredit the principles he embodies...
...Stephen E. Ambrose's books include multi-volume biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon and, most recently...
...Journalist John M. Barry observed the rise and fall of Jim Wright from the inside and produced a classic study of power and folly, The Ambition and the Power...
...Edward 0. Wilson is Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University and the author most recently of Naturalist (Shearwater Books–Island Press...
...If you do not have a strong heart and stomach, all the more reason to read it—this book will make you look The American Spectator December 1995 35 instead of turning away...
...Not all the savages are noble...
...For now I can recommend four very interesting reads...
...Can economics be turned into a true science...
...A Stillness in Appomattox, by Bruce Catton...
...has the will to act, the Communists will pay attention...
...Natalie Zemon Davis brings the past to life, to d2771ingly dense life, in her biography of Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth Century Lives...
...The Politics of Prudence, Russell Kirk...
...3) For a titillating history of sex, love, and power, Evangeline Bruce's Napoleon and Josephine is an eye-popper, particularly in the longer view of history, i.e., the present condition of post-Soviet Russia which awaits its own Napoleon...
...Lately I've been reading Mark Helprin's novels...
...A ripping good novel set during the Allied struggle to crack the Nazi Enigma codes, by the author of Fatherland...
...Even if it doesn't, you will be confronted with the relentless logic of one of the most formidable intellects of modern times...
...The American Spectator December 1995 31 Maurice Isserman As a child, I remember being addicted to the "We Were There" series of juvenile historical fiction, with its reassuringly unvarying formula of a young boy and girl caught up in some great historical moment (usually a battle), meeting all the principal historical players, and emerging exhilarated and, of course, unscathed at the end...
...Rowland Evans (1) If Clinton really wants to expand NATO, he should read Robert Shogan's Hard Bargain...
...Light Years, by James Salter...
...Augustus, by John Williams...
...Economics—Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns?, by Alexander Rosenberg...
...Lewis, The City of Florence...
...I don't always love the same songs he does—Marsh has a strange fondness for the gimmicky songs that Phil Spector wrote for mid-'60s "girl groups" like the Chiffons and the Crystals...
...From tears to laughter and David Lodge's witty send-up of the scholarly conference whirl, Small World, which exposes the vanities and insecurities of the ambitious modern academic without being spiteful—perhaps because the author, Honorary Professor of Modem English at the University of Birmingham, is an observant but compassionate insider...
...But there's a wonderful message for our time...
...I told him to give the book to the guests in question and ask them to try reading it without disturbing the other guests...
...For those in whom there is stirring some restlessness for a recovery of virtue, Dostoevsky gives us the answer...
...It changed my life forever...
...Smith is the quintessential Washington insider, who brings his considerable analytical skills to addressing how America works...
...A real gem, first published in 1967 and recently updated by the author...
...Donald's biographies are not necessarily the best, and this one certainly isn't the last...
...Peter Brimelow, in Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, discusses one of those burning issues that certainly is not discussed intelligently in Academe, immigration...
...Newt Gingrich, then ably serving as Wright's worst nightmare, mused to the author that unless the wily Texan was stopped, he could become the greatest speaker since Henry Clay...
...John H. Taylor The afternoon President Nixon suffered his stroke, he had just finished marking the proofs of his post–Cold War primer, Beyond Peace, and so the last view from the redwood deck of his home in Park Ridge, New Jersey, was of the far horizon...
...Timothy J. Russert Here's my list of books for Christmas and holiday giving: Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry—a classic that is both inspiring and emotional—and dedicated to my wife...
...The Book of Virtues, edited by William Bennett...
...Any man who proposes to trace the history of the left from the beginnings of Western civilization up to our present day had better do his homework, right...
...Another important and readable book on a fundamental enterprise in science: the search for simplifying new principles in complex systems, especially life and mind...
...Lind offers a wonderfully idiosyncratic history of the U.S...
...Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, by David Blankenhorn...
...He also is an actor who has much to tell us of the peculiar mix of demands and amusements that go into being a Hollywood star...
...In The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire Pryce-Jones also deposits shrewd observations from less complicitous observers of the demise in Russia and the The American Spectator December 1995 37 Russian satellites as to why Communism fell in the weird way that it did...
...A great biography, written by a fan of Truman...
...A New World: An Epic of Colonial America From the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec, by Arthur Quinn...
...Colin Powell, My American Journey...
...It fits especially this year...
...Applying the lessons of personal morality to the international scene...
...It not only gives us insights into what has happened, but how we can improve our conduct...
...Get the 1991 edition, with the new chapter written after the fall of Communism and the Persian Gulf War...
...Emerson's Essays, especially "Self-Reliance," "Compensation," and "Character...
...Written by the one Hebrew-language Nobel laureate in literature, S.Y...
...It is an adventure - story never surpassed and hardly equaled...
...A recent example is Richard Rhodes's Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, the successor volume to his much-honored 1986 book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb...
...The lone piece of fiction on my list, Clockers, is an insightful portrait of drug dealers and cops, and just a plain old good story...
...The End of Work, by Jeremy Rifkin...
...This is the first book I've read conscious of the coming of the next millennium...
...Nobody does gallantry in the face of incredible odds, endurance in icy settings, fierceness of parental love, or recognition after long absence scenes better...
...Well, it helps when the mutual fund company in question happens to be Fidelity Investment, which literally owns the world...
...The Collapse of Chaos, by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart...
...Cheney's is a lively and informed discussion of that vast anti-intellectual tundra upon which we march our youth, Academe...
...Not yet Balzac, but an eye-opening introduction to the world where the fast lanes of media, espionage, and high finance intersect...
...The Official Fan's Guide to "The Fugitive," by Mel Proctor...
...The Wizard of Oz Series, by Frank Baum...
...The autobiography of an enterprising ant-loving naturalist...
...Hermit of Peking, by Hugh Trevor-Roper...
...All of these novels are easy to find in paperback...
...Truman, by David McCullough...
...Tad Szulc, John Paul H. An intimate, admiring biography exploring the significance of the Pope's Polish origins...
...Serpent on the Rock, by Kurt Eichenwald...
...Rethinking America, by Hedrick Smith...
...So, by default, I became a historian...
...Herbert Stein is a Senior Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and &I-author, with Murray Foss, of The New Illustrated Guide to the American Economy (AEI Press...
...when people are yearning for heroes and a sense of national unity...
...While not a fan of Helprin's politics, I love the way he writes...
...Thoughtful and well done...
...Crucial, and entertaining, reading for anyone who cares about the roots of American philosophy...
...My own literary toil has made it difficult this year for me to read as many books as I wanted...
...The last time he was captured again, and released after strong American pressure—one more piece of evidence that when the U.S...
...Homero Aridjis is a Mexican poet who has written novels with apocalyptic resonance...
...Michael Lind, The Next American Nation...
...Dianne Feinstein is a United States senator from California...
...Don't give this one to your broker, though...
...If we truly hope to rid ourselves of the epidemic of youth violence, we had better pay attention to the message of this book—ultimately, the way to remove violence from our society is to return fathers to their families...
...A first-rate, Christian apologetic, recommended unapologetically...
...I'd read in and about one of these women, and so the other two are complete revelations to me...
...So will readers of A Bully Father...
...Donald Westlake, Smoke—light and funny, and, therefore, deep...
...An interesting book about a mutual fund company...
...It is the story of the greatest of all American expeditions, told by the men who made it happen...
...Thatcher's Minister: "I kept looking sideways at Rose and thinking how remarkably pretty is her mouth: so cupidic, like those coquettish maidens hidden away in the upper corners of a Tintoretto ceiling...
...A tour de force by one of America's finest financial writers...
...Forget the regionalism...
...Every elected official who makes decisions on budgets and taxes ought to read this first...
...After or before this book, read Bitter Winds by Harry Wu...
...He has gone back more than once, risking his liberty, to make sure that neither he nor the world forget what goes on in this hell...
...An absorbing novel, centered upon actual events far more astounding and strange than most fiction...
...Powerful and eloquent is Pope John Paul II, The Gospel of Life, his encyclical on abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty...
...Just try it, buster...
...Your Honor, with all due respect, if you're going to try my case for me, I would appreciate it if you wouldn't lose it...
...Her latest is the story of a snake-handling preacher and his daughter's search for grace...
...Though you'll probably find The Last Shot in the sports section of your favorite local bookstore, it is clear what the book is really about when the star player on Abraham Lincoln High School's basketball team tells Frey that the Coney Island projects where he lives are "like a disease—of the mind...
...The Joy of Sports, by Michael Novak...
...Michael Andre Bernstein has written an argument against Foregone Conclusions...
...Dan Lungren The Federalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favor of the Constitution of the United States, As Agreed Upon by the Federal Convention, September 17, 1787, by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, Jr.: As we have embarked on the conservative revolution led by the Republicans in Congress, reference to the Federalist Papers will ensure that we are grounded in the spirit of the American Revolution...
...The Crasher, by Shirley Lord...
...It makes you lazy...
...It should concern everyone who thinks we are trapped in the past...
...Read Rhodes on physicist and spy Klaus Fuchs, and see what happens...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...The Latin original, available in many editions, may present a problem to some readers...
...Every once in a while it's important to be able to read wonderful writing that truly uses language well and allows for the full spectrum of human emotions...
...Black Boy, by Richard Wright...
...This one is an account of the minds and activities of the Las Vegas gambling crowd...
...Mostly known as a smut merchant and all-around lowlife, Bukowski here has written a roman a clef about the making of Barfly—a movie based on his autobiographical writings—that is easily the funniest book about the movie industry ever written...
...Clark Clifford's knee was the place to learn the art, much of which, the authors show, was invented and kept secret by Clifford...
...They are so talented and disgustingly energetic that by the time this appears there will be another one I do not know about now...
...His latest, The Lord of the Last Days, is set at the first millennium of the Christian era...
...Martin Peretz is editor-in-chief and chairman of the New Republic...
...Winston Churchill was an extraordinary politician, orator, writer, and historian...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky...
...Since she is a seasoned reporter of the complex the reader will welcome her sensitive case studies, some of which actually read like the great novels of truth...
...Herbert Stein The Churchill War Papers, Volume 2, May 1940-December 1940, edited by Martin Gilbert...
...Safire convinces you that he knows this world well...
...Why can't anyone write like that to describe life in America today...
...A masterful work...
...A poignant tale of the role of an imaginative (and imprudent) publisher in fostering modern literature...
...and Donald sees him through the eyes and with the concerns of people of the end of the twentieth century...
...Revolution at the Roots, by Reason Foundation scholars Bill Eggers and John O'Leary, is a hopeful and interesting survey of state and local efforts to make government smaller, more efficient, and more responsive to its customers...
...Creating Minds, by Howard Gardner...
...Timothy J. Russert is the moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press...
...Yes, the series...
...Hollywood, by Charles Bukowski...
...Edwards's detailed account of the Goldwater movement reminds us just how small a minority conservatives were in the 1950s and '60s and how many of today's conservative leaders were inspired to enter politics because of Barry Goldwater...
...Saving Grace, by Lee Smith...
...Charles W. Colson is president of Prison Fellowship Ministries...
...Before Shelby Foote there was Bruce Catton, and before "The Civil War" on PBS there was A Stillness at Appomattox...
...and so much you perceive to be the result of Michener's renowned historical research is, in fact, his creative genius at work...
...Wish I could do that...
...I can see why...
...Finally, may I recommend Charlton Heston's autobiography In the Arena...
...Read two pages a night to your children and you will really be teaching traditional values...
...The End of Jobs, by Jeremy Rifkin...
...It will move you because your youth was like that, or because it was not...
...Leftism Revisited, by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn...
...The sequels are like the original—magnificent—and ideal for children...
...He brings class-consciousness back to the public arena, almost daring the Democrats to wake up...
...It is an inspired and inspiring story—the son of immigrants...
...John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, with Bogie, Mary Astor, Peter Lone, Sidney Greenstreet—the granddaddy of *All movies credited, rightly, to their screenwriters...
...Joe Queenan is the author most recently of The Unkindest Cut: How a Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7,000 Movie and Put It All on His Credit Card (Hyperion...
...President Clinton should read Dostoevsky instead of Conroy...
...Anthems of Defeat, published by Asia Watch...
...The Rainmaker, by John Grisham—Grisham makes even trial lawyers look good...
...Michael Collins was a military genius who led Ireland in its war of independence against Britain, which led to the creation of the Irish Free State and autonomy for Ireland's twenty-six southern counties in 1921...
...Brimelow foresees chaos in our future, David Pryce-Jones has seen it in the present...
...Remember, 60 million Americans watched the last episode...
...Belief and heresy are the protagonists, embodied in men and women only a daring imagination could invent...
...And for the intellectual crisis of American Protestantism, written by a first-rate, theologically grounded historian, himself an evangelical Protestant, see Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind...
...In this work completed just before his death, Richard Nixon effectively argues that the 32 The American Spectator December 1995 world is still a very dangerous place and that American leadership is needed more than ever...
...Edward 0. Wilson Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot, by Jim Stockdale...
...The crowning work by the greatest living historian who writes in English...
...senator from Illinois...
...Catton brings both superb historical research and a unique narrative style to the table...
...From the opening words: "He was a great thundering paradox of a man, noble and ignoble, inspiring and outrageous, arrogant and shy . . . the most protean, most ridiculous, and most sublime," Manchester re-creates Douglas MacArthur in all his majesty...
...The Next Century, by David Halberstam...
...We have to stop talking and start doing to fill the void left by bankrupt government programs...
...Peter T. King Goldwater: The Man Who Made A Revolution, by Lee Edwards...
...These are four swell gifts for Christmas, but forget not the Kissinger and the Donald books...
...Rarely has a fictional American boyhood been painted in such magical hues as in Robert McCammon's coming-of-age whodunit Boy's Life...
...You're a cookie full of arsenic...
...Among other things, Rhodes offers the most detailed—and at the same time responsible and non-sensationalized accounting available anywhere of Communist espionage in the Manhattan Project...
...yet not a four-letter word in it...
...There is also VCR...
...It is one of the best books of 1995...
...Just when I thought no current author had anything new to say, along comes the wonderful, feisty, Berkeley law professor, Phillip Johnson, who skewered Darwin in Darwin on Trial, and has now skewered social Darwinism...
...From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas Friedman...
...Those will come later when I have finished my works on Clinton...
...Poland, by James A. Michener...
...Cause all you ever see is other guys relaxing...
...Stephen Goldsmith is the mayor of Indianapolis and chairman of the Manhattan Institute's Center for Civic Innovation...
...Dan Quayle served as the 44th Vice President of the United States (1989-1993...
...The best novel you've never heard of...
...38 The American Spectator December 1995...
...If you don't like or believe the facts he presents and conclusions he draws, which you probably won't, it will at least infuriate you enough to think of good answers and maybe even solutions...
...But since these texts define a particular and particularly problematic relationship between God and his faithful, Agnon's elegant and grave interpretative essay should speak to all who ponder the mysterium tremendum of the universe...
...His plots are, by design, a little too imaginatively loopy to sustain the illusion of historical verisimilitude, but share many of the characteristics of the historical fiction genre: period setting, recognizable historical events, and political themes...
...This book abounds with information on the cause of the Soviet collapse and the curious events that accompanied that collapse...
...I could not compile a list of recommended books without putting this at the top of my list...
...In this time of power and momentum on the right, this masterpiece is a useful reminder that there's more to being Conservative than cutting taxes and trashing Hillary...
...Guthrie, Jr.'s* Shane, with Alan Ladd and Jack Palance—for my money, the most memorable of all Westerns...
...The renewal of the social sciences depends on social scientists being willing to study biology, especially genetics and the biology of the brain...
...His most recent book, The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire, is as learned as it is well-written, as fresh as it is deeply rooted in the sources...
...Not the sort of question Sam Donaldson would ask...
...It is the best book on Communism's fall thus far...
...But are they still breathing...
...Peter T. King is a member of Congress representing New York's third district...
...William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience...
...Also, a fascinating insight into how a government works...
...Following Churchill's words and deeds almost hour-by-hour in those critical days, one can see what makes a truly great man...
...Consider this gem: When the Shah fell from power and the many statues lionizing him were pulled down over Iran, Kapuscinski wanted to find out: Where did these Shah-haters hide those huge ropes all those years while they were waiting for Mr...
...A Parkman for our times—beautifully written, provocatively argued, and peopled by a fascinating cast variously addicted to greed, prayer, conquest, and resistance to change...
...The liveliest and most readable, most insightful history of the twentieth century by the finest mind of modern times...
...John Paul II truly stands as a living symbol of lasting values in a world of self-absorption and false gods...
...Halberstam has carefully analyzed so many aspects of contemporary American society that he is superbly qualified to put down his thoughts in this surprisingly short book on where America, and the world, is headed after the millennium...
...If you want to understand the Middle East, the tensions and the possibilities that exist there, this book is one of the best ways to develop that appreciation...
...Not so philosophers, one of the most provocative of whom, Paul M. Churchland, has written The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul, a book about how the mind works (and why it often doesn't) which is at once very complicated and very vivid...
...I've gone back to this book many times over the years...
...Before I had read Poland I had no idea this country possesses one of the world's richest histories, and Michener brings it alive like few others can...
...A new book on Lincoln by David Herbert Donald has fetched my gaze, and Henry Kissinger' s Diplomacy deserves a more attentive reading...
...Beyond Politics: Markets, Welfare, and the Failure of Bureaucracy, by William Mitchell and Randy Simmons, is a useful handbook on public choice economics that would make a great gift for elected officials who believe that government knows what it is doing when it interferes with the marketplace...
...He would discover how FDR, by artifice and cunning, converted entrapment from the bad bargain he had made for the U.S...
...Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Invisible Allies—an account of some of the brave men and women who helped Solzhenitsyn speak truth against brute power...
...Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes...
...This is an old standard paperback, kept in print by Houghton Mifflin for forty years...
...For fiction, try Gail Godwin, The Good Husband...
...Sleeper Spy, by William Safire...
...Be careful reading it because it has the capacity to do that to you...
...Must reading for anyone concerned about the role of lawyers and judges in America's democracy...
...Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, by Tom Wolfe...
...Beyond Peace, by Richard Nixon...
...fessional golf tour, and Burgundy Stars, about a year in the life of Bernard Loiseau's La Cote d'Or, a restaurant in Saulieu, France, that earned the top rating from Michelin...
...This remarkable book brings Ralph Waldo Emerson to life—the Olympian essayist of American individualism gets some compelling human flesh...
...And his characters—Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Stanislaw Ularn, David Greenglass—air every bit as memorable (and variously tragic, pathetic, and heroic) as those you'll encounter in A Soldier in the Great War...
...This is fifty years old, but it is highly relevant today, when we are all conservatives but there is no argument on just what that means...
...Here's a quartet that moved me this year: Marcel Proust, La Recherche du Temps Perdu...
...Victor Gold Dragged kicking and gouging into the last half of the twentieth century, I conceded some time ago that man cannot live by books alone...
...It was the book, coupled with the witness of a close friend, that led to my conversion to Christ...
...This book should remind them not only of the everlasting books he has written but the everlasting books he is writing still...
...Dead Right, by David Frum—the best insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the Republican Revolution...
...The theme of both is how difficult it is to be the best at something professionals make look easy...
...Rowland Evans is co-host of CNN's "Evans & Novak...
...But so am I. An Ethics for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics, by Donald Shriver...
...Schocken has just reissued it in a new edition...
...Why can't Americans write books like this...
...The multiple-intelligence theory of mind extended brilliantly in sketches of Einstein, Picasso, and other premier modernists...
...born in Harlem, who grew to become the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the only immigrants' son, the only ROTC graduate, and the only black man to reach that height...
...It includes the classic manifesto of clear communication, Politics and the English Language, and a wide range of pieces demonstrating the principle...
...Without Barry Goldwater's lonely and courageous struggle against the liberal zeitgeist in the early 1960s, there would not have been a Reagan presidency or the 1994 Republican landslide...
...This just happens to be the latest tome I have delved into...
...Then again, some of the best historians do have the novelist's gift...
...Michael Kazin is author of The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Basic Books...
...Michael Kazin As an historian, I'm particularly attracted to books that explain and encourage change, both in individuals and in the worlds they collectively inhabit...
...Highly readable essays by one of America's foremost military heroes, who probes deeply into the wellsprings of honor and physical courage...
...I've heard a lot about you...
...Donald is especially good on the young Lincoln...
...A beautiful novel about a withering love affair written by a man who seems to know the territory...
...A Nation of Lawyers: How the Crisis in the Legal Profession Is Transforming American Society, by Mary Ann Glendon...
...In time, those gave way to fatter if no less formulaic novels by James Michener and Kenneth Roberts, and still later to Andre Malraux and Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Koestler and Boris Pasternak...
...He teaches history at American University in Washington, D.C...
...Peter Pan in the Kensington Gardens, by James M. Bane...
...Simons was, I believe, the first to call himself a "libertarian" in the modern political-economic sense...
...Casino, by Nicholas Pileggi, one of the very best books by one of the very best writers on American crime and criminals...
...Lancaster to Curtis: "I'd hate to take a bite out of you...
...This is about one of the more serious problems America faces—the loss of jobs in the downsized and outkicked middle class...
...Memoirs of the man who won a Nobel Peace award, which was fine as long as they give him a Nobel for literature too...
...Donald asks the questions we would ask of Lincoln...
...Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (Simon & Schuster...
...An outstanding effort to deal with the question: What is the proper role ofreligious values in American political life...
...deer, and other fauna and flora in uncomfortable numbers...
...Jeb Bush is chairman of the Foundation for Florida's Future...
...Walter Hill's Hard Times, with Charles Bronson, James Coburn, and Strother Martin—a lean, beautifully scripted story about a roustabout fighter and his hustling manager, set in 1936 New Orleans...
...The Theme Is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition, by M. Stanton Evans...
...Anything by Russell Kirk is worth reading...
...American Caesar, by William Manchester...
...To me, Panther in the Sky is an endlessly fascinating and often challenging book...
...Somewhere along the line I decided that when I grew up I would write historical novels too, but gave up the effort when I discovered that my feeble attempts at dialogue usually came off sounding as if they needed footnotes—long on exposition, short on life...
...The Holocaust has come to dominate Jewish history...
...He spent nineteen years in a Chinese slave labor camp...
...Richard Norton Smith The Last Great Frenchman: A Life of General DeGaulle, by Charles Williams...
...Pragmatic idealism" sounds oxymoronic, but was the essence of the Age of Nixon's central figure, and it glowed brightly in the last of his ten books...
...A conservative book that any serious leftist should love...
...Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis...
...L. Brent Bozell III is chairman of the Media Research Center...
...William Kristol is editor and publisher of the Weekly Standard...
...Michael Collins, by Tim Pat Coogan...
...Old Goriot, by Honorê de Balzac...
...If you grew up watching Dr...
...I was perhaps ten or eleven years old when I read this, and it has moved me as no book ever has...
...Conroy writes with a lyricism that brings images vividly to life, while at the same time taking on painful family experiences that are all too common in American society...
...People, not government, should take responsibility for our public assistance programs...
...It is also a compelling argument, at once political and ethical...
...The greatest novel of them all, this saga of an unhappily married provincial housewife who yearns for the bright lights of the big city makes an excellent gift for the emotionally unfulfilled women ready to step up from The Bridges of Madison County...
...Dreams of a Final Theory, by Steven Weinberg...
...Billy Wilder and A.L...
...others have failure thrust upon them...
...Enigma, by Robert Harris...
...So you're Jack Wilson...
...2) First in His Class, Clinton's biography by meat-andpotatoes reporter David Maraniss...
...I found it amazing...
...Richard Norton Smith is director of the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California...
...His arguments and statistics are extensive, but I believe a more basic problem is the laxness of laws and civics lessons that our immigrants experience once they get here...
...she's as good as anyone, anywhere...
...In this volume she touches on all the important problems which puzzle us as parents and as husbands and wives...
...The Emerald City didn't disappear after Dorothy awoke...
...If you have a strong heart and strong stomach, read this book on what goes on in Chinese prisons, the daily, hourly bestiality and torture...
...Imagine V.S...
...These letters to his children, edited by TR in the last months of his life, show why America's first modern president was also her most lovable...
...Economic Policy for a Free Society, by Henry Simons...
...And always the latest Dick Francis novel...
...it might give him ideas...
...Recommended for your politically correct friends: It will either convert them or infuriate them, or both...
...Writing about families is easy if you don't look closely at them...
...The best financial book (slim pickings): Stocks for the Long Run, by Jeremy J. Siegel...
...Victor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...Kirk sets us straight...
...Paul Simon is the senior U.S...
...The prospect is considered here in compelling style by one of the subject's foremost thinkers...
...John H. Taylor is executive director of the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation...
...The Almanac of American Politics, by Michael Barone, and Safire's New Political Dictionary, by William Safiretwo must references for any political junkie...
...It doesn't matter what the rest is going to 36 The American Spectator December 1995 be," TR told a friend late in 1918...
...David Von Drehle is assistant managing editor of the Washington Post and author of Among the Lowest of the Dead: The Culture of Death Row (Times Books...
...As someone who is fascinated by American history and the outstanding leadership qualities of some of the native American chiefs, this book gives a wonderful insight into one of the most dynamic leaders...
...A.M...
...And while you're at it, get a hold of Lewis's Abolition of Man, a little book in which decades ago he forecast precisely what is happening today, our determination to eliminate our species...
...The perfect companion is Graham Robb's new Balzac: A Biography...
...Jeb Bush The Tragedy of American Compassion, by Marvin OlaskyOlasky is right on the mark...
...Ever think you might develop a sneaking sympathy for a Communist spy...
...Most of the time I don't get to read fiction but roll along in my professional groove reading history-as-history...
...David Von Drehle Emerson: The Mind on Fire, by Robert D. Richardson...
...Christine Todd Whitman is the governor of New Jersey...
...Charles W. Colson Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis...
...It is a well-written, thorough book of America during the King years and is a reminder not only of how far we have come, but of how far we need to go...
...The best political book I read this year was Alan Clark's amazingly candid diaries, Mrs...
...So you think the collapse of Communism means that Marxism, as a mode of explanation, is also kaput...
...The life and times of Sir Edmund Backhouse, the Babe Ruth of forgers and a world-class liar, who had everybody convinced he was pals with Paul Verlaine and had slept with the Dowager Empress of China...
...As you read each chapter try to separate the two...
...Alessandro loved the stars for being unassailable, and believed that each and every one of them was his ally...
...Biography at its best—so intimate as to border on claustrophobia...
...Rosenthal is a columnist and former executive editor of the New York Times...
...Modern Times, Paul Johnson...
...David Mamet's The Verdict, with Paul Newman and James Mason—the best court-room film ever made...
...elk...
...Daniel J. Boorstin Tom Dardis, Firebrand: The Life of Horace Liveright...
...A classic exploration of the psychology of belief, as suggesfive today as when it was written a century ago...
...A great thinker examines the lessons of the twentieth century...
...4) Douglas Frantz and David McKean's Friends in High Places is a microcosm of what later developed into today's high-fashion, high-priced Washington lobbying...
...Diamond's Some Like It Hot, with Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Marilyn Monroe—when Hollywood movies were made for adults...
...It is required reading for any Civil War buff...
...James K Glassman writes weekly financial and political columns for the Washington Post He is also the host of "Capital Gang Sunday" on CNN and "Technopolitics" on PBS...
...She is a superb story teller, also my wife...
...I would recommend this book to those conservatives who believe the United States has the option to disengage or retreat from the international arena...
...The fifth novel by this British-born writer and editor...
...First Things First, by Stephen Covey—How to prioritize what's important in an increasingly self-centered generation...
...Another perfect gift is the Bernard DeVoto edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark...
...Occasionally heartwarming but mostly chilling, this account of life on the playground courts of one of New York City's toughest housing projects is worth• a look...
...He argued for strong U.S-Russia and U.S.-China ties, rapped Bush and Clinton on Bosnia, and called for national renewal through spiritual reawakening...
...Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt...
...Dave Marsh, The Heart of Rock and Soul...
...I can think of no better illustration of how history is made through the minutiae of daily life—without which the grand movements of power and ideology would have neither weight, nor language, nor emotional texture...
...I have had fun the whole time...
...Joe Queenan Fidelity's World, by Diana Henriques...
...A terrific party guest, and, had he only lived long A. M. Rosenthal All Rivers Run to the Sea, by Elie Wiesel...
...Michener's trademark is the blend of fact and fiction...
...It is simply right-wing ideology, a preferable The American Spectator December 1995 29 form to left-wing, but ideology and utopianism all the same...
...It is not finished yet but I want to get it firmly in your mind so you can write it down and buy it immediately when it appears in 1996...
...Paul Simon In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, by Robert McNamara...
...So we know what to expect: she is the single most compelling writer we have about intimate psychological subjects...
...On political issues there are a number of valuable books to choose from, but, exposing my bias as a college professor, I especially recommend Lynne V. Cheney, Telling the Truth, a devastating exposé of the prostitution of our campuses and intellectual life...
...Maybe, with great difficulty, but it needs to take a new direction, according to this leading philosopher of science...
...Given a Death Row choice—One day to live, what movie do you want to watch with your last meal?—I would of course choose Casablanca...
...In one sense, the book is guidebook to the liturgies of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur...
...Finally, a trio of books about urban America: Streetwise, by Elijah Anderson, The Last Shot, by Darcy Frey, and Clockers, by Richard Price...
...Joe E. Brown, on being told his fiancée, Lemmon, is a man in drag: "Nobody's perfect...
...So much you assume to be rich storytelling is historical fact...
...Dianne Feinstein Beach Music, by Pat Conroy...
...Haley Barbour Modern Times, Paul Johnson To Renew America, Newt Gingrich Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brien 28 The American Spectator December 1995 A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin Almanac of American Politics, Michael Barone Haley Barbour is chairman of the Republican National Committee...
...Can theoretical physicists produce a "beautiful" •theory that explains the material basis of the universe in exact and unalterable terms...
Vol. 28 • December 1995 • No. 12
