Books for Christmas
Books for Christmas Our annual list of holiday gift suggestions from distinguished readers and writers. to ANNE APPLEBAUM There is invariably something selfish about choosing books for gifts: one...
...The president's erstwhile best gay friend, David Mixner, understandably vents his spleen in Stranger Among Friends...
...48 December 1996 • The American Spectator Christmas is also a time to shamelessly champion recent books of one's own: the best-selling Boy Clinton by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...I was honored to know him, even if he disappointed me, and I have fond memories of breaking bread with him in that seedy club he favored on Michigan Avenue...
...I have never understood why modern, educated readers turn to pop bestsellers when they can read and reread the masters of Western fiction with less pain than, say, Philip Roth or John Grisham to the reading mind...
...Though not for sissies, Brady brings the postwar West to life with astonishing skill...
...The faulty passages are taken from eminent writers of the day—e.g., T.S...
...Among older books, I read with great enjoyment Edith Wharton's The Reef twice...
...Curiously, I haven't been able to progress with his others—Blood Meridian or The The American Spectator • December 1996 Crossing...
...John Quincy Adams is the hero...
...I put off reading Primary Colors, by the no longer anonymous Joe Klein, until after I finished my own book on the Clintons, knowing that journalism has its limitations in trying to explain the Clinton operation...
...Soon after, I read A House for Mr...
...During his time in Europe he displayed a side of America too often overlooked by haughty Europeans...
...They tend not to be the sort of people who easily take offense...
...The last paragraph of his introduction to "All What Jazz," on p. 298, is as good as it gets...
...Bellow's...
...A wonderful, evocative look back at the great World's Fair, and what it meant for America's view of the future...
...Curiously, on one count there were about fourteen Jews on the convict ships that arrived in 1788 to set up the colony—in contemporary language, the Jews were over-represented in the prison population...
...Robert V Remini is author ofThe Life ofAndrew Jackson and Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union...
...The American Spectator • December 199 6 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison...
...If we, as a nation, are to avoid the fate of having to both sustain and contain a volatile, combustible, and expanding dependent population of poor people, we all would be advised to begin by understanding and taking to heart these latest insights and proposals offered by Professor Wilson...
...Modern man has for the most part lost touch with the truest and highest aspect of himself...
...Nick himself...
...Worth a look...
...Classical Black Nationalism: From the Revolution to Marcus Garvey, edited by Wilson Jeremiah Moses (New York University Press, 1996), and W.E.B...
...On those grounds alone, Bob should be categorized as a true American hero...
...and How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs (Simon & Schuster...
...Fortunately, however, my colleague David Brooks, unknown to him, has presented me with a way out...
...Australia has had a Jewish population right from the start, and by 193o it was about 20,000...
...O'Rourke, Joe Queenan, Richard Brookhiser, John Podhoretz, Christopher Buckley, Florence King, Fred Barnes, Dave Shiflett, and — just so no one gets ticked—all the other contributors, too...
...Ellison showed that black writers did not have to write another protest novel, and that his insights into the American character are meant for all Americans...
...R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...I was reading Kim again the other night...
...Written in the early 1950's, Ellison's tale of a young black man's quest for identity untangles the hidden realities of race, class, and power in the old South and the postwar North...
...An unexpected offering a year or two ago was Victor Davis Hanson's The Western Way of War, convincingly arguing that the Greeks invented war as we know it, and very nasty too...
...Fowler wrote with his brother twenty years before his magnum opus...
...But in this age of narcissism national and personal, I would also urge you to give your friends and children books about other places...
...It has often been said in Washington that he who has the power writes the history...
...So I was going to lie...
...Because of its Eldorado-new frontier character, Australia became a place of hope for European refugees from Nazism...
...David Brock, an investigative writer for TM, is most recently the author of The Seduction of Hillary Rodham (Free Press...
...I hated this book when I was obliged to read it in high school, only to discover its brilliance in later years...
...I enjoy the fictional works of Robert Ludlum, particularly The Bourne Identity, as well as the great works by Dostoevsky...
...ROBERT V. REMIN1 The Age of Jackson by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., one of the most seminal books in American history of the past fifty years, highly readable, vastly informative, and enduringly provocative...
...Democracy on Trial by Jean Bethke Elshtain...
...Read them and be both forewarned and forearmed...
...Acting on that principle, I choose to start with the best history book to be published this generation: Norman Davies's Europe, just out in Britain, out soon in the United States...
...I have been counting them up and have reached fifty before the end of Act III...
...The Truly Disadvantaged and When Work Disappears by William Julius Wilson are two volumes that together should at 44 December 1996 • The American Spectator long last establish this scholar as perhaps the preeminent thinker of this decade on the problems of urban poverty and its related ills...
...Want to know what a billion Catholics are supposed to believe about everything from abortion to Israel, prayer to war...
...It's titled The Knowledge of the Holy...
...Finally, a short treatise by A.W...
...No American novel has ever better described the phenomenon of the great American Eastward migration, from the humble, honest Midwest to the glittering, corrupt East Coast...
...Objectivity and truth too often await the scholarly work of those who research their subjects rather than repeat the untruths of their contemporaries...
...In those grim early days of the Cold War, life for Americans throughout Europe was enriched by the hilarious columns of Art Buchwald in the Paris-based Herald Tribune...
...Clinton, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, by David Brock...
...Bellow—Augie March, Humboldt's Gift, More Die of Heartbreak, for starters—and to hell with the burnt-out critics who have suggested whatever it is they have suggested about him, since it is false...
...The bible in these matters is, of course, H.W...
...It is easy to tell publishers that I do not want to write an endorsement, more difficult to tell authors I don't like their work...
...is a former NATO supreme commander and a former secretary ofstate . MICHAEL HUFFINGTON "Most of us have forgotten that we are not only brain and will, senses and feelings...
...Finally, there is The King's English, a book H.W...
...The Mackerel Plaza, by Peter DeVries...
...But not enough...
...For my twin brother Roger and me, the prospect of trayRALPH KINNEY BENNETT is a senior editor in the Washington bureau of Reader's Digest...
...Having devoted my last three years to writing the biography of the most wholesome political leader since Mussolini, I decided to spend the ensuing months immersed in biography and autobiography...
...Erich Eichman is books editor of the Wall Street Journal...
...and Restoration, the novel by Rose Tremain that inspired a splendid 1995 movie...
...For anyone who has ever pondered the "whys" and "wherefores" of America's expanding tribalism and increasingly strained intergroup relations, or the material fetishes and spiritual emptiness of our secular life, or the shameless incivility and contentiousness apparent in virtually every institutional setting and context, or what all of these developments and more say about what we have already become as a people and where we are headed as a society and as a nation, these books present invaluable insights, propose reasoned remedies, and expose some frightening prospects...
...Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms, Ed Rollins's rough and tumble memoir, made me wonder why anyone would want to run a political campaign...
...Both keenly point us to understanding...
...I must ask her if she has the same feeling about Kipling, whom I always keep in reserve (the Stalky stories excepted...
...That is not really the appeal...
...and the result of this inward alienation can be seen all too plainly in his restlessness, his lack of identity and his loss of hope...
...Alexander M. Haig, Jr...
...It had a tremendous impact on the historical profession when it appeared, and completely turned around my research interests in graduate school...
...Too many of my acquaintances, friends, and colleagues have brought out books in the last couple of years...
...John Keegan's most recent book is The Wars for North America (Knopf...
...Alone in the high offices of the Justice Department during the Watergate crisis, my friend, Bob Bork, chose to serve the American people rather than himself...
...While it may indeed be true that in some proportion "the poor will always be with us," their increasing numbers as a proportion of the American population, and their relegation to circumstances of increasing social desperation and material degradation, must be viewed as nothing less than alarming...
...HENRY E. CATTO Having just gotten back from a trip to Albania, Romania, and Bulgaria, I nominate Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan...
...Anthony has the gift of turning a visit to the dentist into a literary event...
...Indians love the book just as much as the British...
...But, as Mr...
...In the early thirties there was no practical anti-Semitism andthe important newspapers urged a compassionate response to the refugee question, but anti-Semitism, xenophobia, and labor union fears did arise as the inflow grew...
...Joy in the Morning, or any of the other Jeeves novels by P.G...
...the volume itself speaks truths worth hearing...
...Reread this book every few years, and you will know that it is the long sought after great American novel...
...That its critics haven't bothered to read it speaks volumes...
...eling to Pittsburgh was a rare enough event...
...Prefer the short word to the long...
...Thus encouraged, I have been rereading the Works, beginning with Hamlet...
...There was his germanophilia, for instance, and his associations with some of the more, ah, old-fashioned types of conservatives from the, shall we say, more remote regions of the American hinterland...
...A revealing case study of how the federal bureaucracy really works, as told by a fantastic scholar who's been there, done that, and knows that government can't be "reinvented" (sorry, Al Gore...
...Finally, I have indulged my appetite for fiction upon finishing my own severely factual account of the life of our celebrity president...
...Henry E. Catto, a former ambassador to Great Britain, is diplomat in residence at the University ofTexas at San Antonio...
...Wodehouse...
...His prose is a monument to probity, judicious judgment, colorful detail, and subtle wit, and has carried me on to three related books: Pepys's Diary...
...Three Strikes and You're Out: A Promise to Kimber, Mike Reynolds (Quill Driver Books, 1996...
...Biswas by V. S. Naipaul, the life story of an Indian born on a Caribbean island who struggles all of his life to make ends meet, to find respectability, to own his own home...
...This was finally rejected by the Australian government only after the Second World War...
...Fire From Heaven, by Mary Renault, will entrance any lover of the classical age...
...His conclusion: "Life is a plague...the tortures of the damned...
...Preston makes one regret that an enemy of Communism died peacefully in his bed...
...New Democrats (and Republicans, too) should listen to what this true Democrat (but cultural conservative) has to say about everything from the sanctity of life to the future of party politics in America...
...Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis by Stephen A. Ambrose (Simon & Schuster...
...Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History, by Mary Lefkowitz, is a brilliant refutation of the revisionist histories of our democratic civilization being written by P.C...
...The best book I read in a language not English was Garcia Marquez's new novel, Noticias del Secuestrado...
...It is a masterpiece of wit, suspense, and sensitivity...
...I admired her earlier novels about Frederica Potter, The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, and was disappointed that here Byatt interrupts her story with chapters from an allegedly pornographic, actually insufferable, novel being written by one of the characters...
...None of the recent fiction I have read approaches either book...
...Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982, by Philip Larkin (Farrar Straus Giroux...
...I also greatly enjoyed William Lee Miller's Arguing About Slavery, the absorbing story with documentation of the determination of a tiny minority in the House of Representatives to put the issue of slavery on the agenda of the legislature in the 1830's...
...Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline by Robert H. Bork (HarperCollins/Regan Books...
...to ANNE APPLEBAUM There is invariably something selfish about choosing books for gifts: one always chooses the subject matter which interests oneself, on the assumption that the recipient will be equally fascinated by the same thing...
...REmrnettTyrrell,Jr...
...What I like best about this season is that Mr...
...Books that mean anything are books you can read again and again, of course, so you have to give Huckleberry Finn, The Sun Also Rises, Light in August, books by Americans about America...
...It is Shakespearean in its language and its deep understanding of the human condition...
...My younger sister says, "It was one of those days when the only thing to do was read Buchan," and I know the feeling...
...Although it appeared before all the facts were known, this account of the Soviet purges has been proved largely right...
...The modem "literary novel" defeats me...
...There was, for instance, the difficulty with the chimney...
...ROGER EBERT Richard Dawkins's River Out of Eden has had an enormous impact on me, explaining Darwinian evolution as a series of pass-fail tests in which the underlying objective is to preserve successful DNA codes...
...Pope John Paul II is the man, and this is the book...
...Are you keeping all this straight...
...Fowler's Modem English Usage, first published in 1926...
...The Leopard, the 1958 novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, is the best fiction I have read this year...
...This is what academics at their best can do—but rarely do...
...The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky is another classic with a unique style...
...Occasionally something good pops out of the scrimmage...
...For all who have wondered how great artists, writers, musicians, scientists, and other extremely creative people differ from Joe Lunchbucket and Jack Sixpack, from Sally Soap-opera and Tina Talkshow, Creating Minds is illuminating...
...Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance...
...I personally feel it ranks in importance with Frederick Jackson Turner's The Frontier in American History...
...This book shows how an English-speaking nation of four million people, in existence for only thirty years, coped with the international repercussions of Nazism...
...Epitaph for American Labor by Max Green...
...Aldrich's book, too...
...ROGER KAPLAN I doubt Henry Regnery was an anti-Semite, though there were those—gentlemen do not name names—who thought he was...
...For many, it awakened interest in the contemplative life...
...Only true scholarship and solid research can approach the truth...
...Ending Affirmative Action, by Terry Eastland, which explains why a return to colorblindness under the law was the one issue GOP pols couldn't botch this election year...
...Renault, in her accustomed elegant English prose, "outs" the young Alexander the Great...
...And Stendhal can tell a story even better than O.J...
...Those of you who receive Borders or Brentano's gift certificates will be well advised to save them for Thomas Mallon's sad and sweet and unpredictable new novel, Dewey Defeats Truman, out from Pantheon after the holidays...
...Unlike the intelligentsia of today, they worried a lot about how to handle the "sex drive," they toasted "literature and World Peace," and Brittain despaired at the unfashionable dressing and lack of make-up of her fellow feminists...
...As is To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee...
...Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville...
...Conor Cruise O'Brien's The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke, first published in 1992 and available now in paperback, explains how Burke could defend both liberty and authority while standing on firm, consistent principles...
...Brevity is the soul of wit," "generates more heat than light...
...The 1965 updating and revision by Ernest Gowers (Oxford University Press) offers barbed, The American Spectator • December 19 9 6 erudite, authoritative instruction in idiom, etymology, diction, syntax, and a thousand other categories of linguistic and rhetorical possibility...
...Roger Ebert is co-host of "Siskel& Ebert"and author ofRoger Ebert's Video Companion (Andrews and McMeel...
...I think it is one of the author's best works...
...His book actually may be read as a history of the last half of that struggle, and I can think of no similar tome to equal it...
...David Brudnoy has just published Life Is Not a Rehearsal: A Memoir (Doubleday...
...Its characters are alive and engrossing...
...From the beau47 tiful prose in Psalms to the weighty wisdom in Proverbs, this book is for me the manufacturers handbook for mankind...
...The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton, the story of a young man's search for God and the peace and fulfillment he found in a Trappist monastery...
...Despite efforts to discredit Aldrich's accuracy, this literary effort should remind the American electorate of just how far we have declined...
...This is bad news, for they present the most sardonic and accurate view of upper-middle-class suburban life in the 1950's and '6o's that I know of...
...Those unaware of Trane will be converted...
...So of course, since you are giving gifts, you should prove to your friends this country once was a country that had integrity, beginning with literary integrity (since we are talking about books...
...It is humbling to think of myself as a DNA carrier, rather than, as I had always assumed, the triumph of evolution...
...If one wants to have a better understanding of ourselves and God, then I highly recommend reading this book...
...Finally, I thoroughly enjoyed Joan Brady's novel, Theory of War...
...Actually, the contributors are not as various as I'm making it sound...
...Nash's seminal book will remind today's hotheads that the modern conservative movement was made possible by a coalition of traditionalists and libertarians with enough common goals to get along splendidly...
...Stendhal wrote The Charterhouse of Parma after he served as an officer in Napoleon's army...
...Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor ofthe Weekly Standard and author ofFools' Names, Fools' Faces, a collection of essays published this fall by Atlantic Monthly Press...
...An important reconsideration of the role of the labor movement in America...
...Simpson Got Away With Murder...
...One of the startling novellas titled "Old Maid" shows the way the upper classes of old New York dealt with single parent families (to use a contemporary expression) —to put it briefly, they did it in a very complicated, hypocritical, though satisfactory, way...
...This book will no doubt appear in English soon...
...The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, a book of wonderful imagery with several layers of meaning, and a smashing fishing story as well...
...JOHN DilULIO Catechism of the Catholic Church (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, English Translation,1994...
...Too violent—but, then I am a military historian and have led a sheltered literary life...
...Unlimited Access by Gary Aldrich (Regnery...
...True, our desires ofthe heart, carefully mailed to the North Pole after hours of poring over the Sears Roebuck catalogue, had always shown up under the tree...
...Some of the best Algerian novels, for instance—why not...
...DAVID BRUDNOY Now that the election is behind us and the Clintonistas are once again in control (until the indictments and impeachment process begin), we turn to matters of greater import, like the number one topic not discussed intelligently in public, race...
...I was almost dizzy at the prospect...
...Sure, Roger and I always left cookies and cocoa on the piano stool for him, and we always found an empty cup and crumbs on Christmas morning...
...Here, Gardner makes it clear that perhaps the greatest obstacle to the optimal fulfillment of human intellectual development is the failure to appreciate and understand its multi-faceted potential...
...As a sequel, the Collected Short Stories of William Trevor provide an equally dismal, equally accurate, and equally uplifting portrait of modern Ireland...
...the battle to keep thrice-convicted violent felons behind bars for life in California...
...Michael Huffington is a former Republican congressman from California...
...1939: The Lost World of the Fair by David Gelernter...
...Vying with D'Souza's as the most reviled book of the mid-1990's, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life is also now in handy paperback form...
...The radical but media savvy anti-incarceration advocates who opposed the law, and the national journalists who continue to lie about its positive impact, are, to employ a technical term, scumbags...
...Roger Kaplan is editor of Freedom Review...
...and What's Right, David Frum's sharp new collection of essays (some of which, as in the case of some of Mr...
...Among the several groups that Bubba screwed in marching toward Dick Morrisite triangulation, the homosexuals are perhaps the most aggrieved, having fallen for the notion in 1992 that he gave a damn...
...To my mind it is a book, like Don Quixote by Cervantes, that is best appreciated by older readers...
...It is elegantly written, falls for little or none of the bosh heaved up by both sides in the Nixon saga, and embraces most of the very latest scholarship...
...Among the many worthy books, my favorite, to date, is Vincent Bugliosi's Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O.J...
...and On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy Through an Age of Unreason by Conor Cruise O'Brien are three volumes that look critically at the state and potential fate of civil society in developed democracies—with a principal focus on the United States...
...Dinesh D'Souza's stunning The End of Racism, a huge hit and deservedly so, is out now in paper, and Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton's The New Color Line: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy is perhaps the best of a handful of new books on Active Retribution (aka Affirmative Action...
...Green argues cogently that a once vibrant institution has become "reactionary" in terms of the national interest in the 199o's...
...STEVE LARGENT My personal taste in literature has been as varied as my professional background...
...They publish only the best...
...Major reason: incompetence all around...
...Finally, for something really thought-provoking, whether or not you're into censorship (I'm not), the esteemed Boston University professor, Roger Shattuck offers a book for the ages, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography...
...The descriptions of France, both in Paris and in the country, are dazzling...
...Otherwise, almost anything by John Buchan...
...The writers collected in Backward and Upward are united by their distaste for do-gooders 45 and busybodies, their love of the old virtues, or some of the old virtues, anyway, and by their robust relish for life as it is normally lived...
...It's a work that should be read slowly and deliberately, for it will touch your life...
...Barbara Ledeen is executive director of the Independent Women's Forum...
...Larkin was not only a great poet but a great literary journalist, too, and every article in this collection is clear, funny, and true...
...A wonderful revelation is that almost all catchphrases are quotations from Hamlet...
...Similarly, Frames of Mind reveals fascinating parallels between different intellectual penchants that objectively place an Albert Einstein and a Jerry Rice or Michael Jordan, a Frank Lloyd Wright and a John Coltrane at the very apex of equally valid intellectual achievements...
...Over the intervening years, Art has been all of that and more...
...Wladyslaw Pleszczynski is executive editor ofThe American Spectator...
...As a young U. S. Army officer serving in the Federal Republic of Germany, I became indebted to the one-of-a-kind American humorist, Art Buchwald...
...The Mackerel Plaza, for example, opens with the pastor of People's Liberal Church in Avalon, Connecticut, phoning the local zoning office to protest a billboard recently built within view of his study...
...Gates may have been a spook, but before that he was a trained historian and this book shows a historian's respect for his art...
...FRANK MOORHOUSE Anything serious done about the Holocaust is revealing to all political theory...
...The sign reads, "Jesus Saves," and he is appalled...
...In the end, John Coltrane stood virtually alone, estranged from most of his fans and fellow jazz musicians alike, but yet unyielding in his quest to express in and through his music nothing less than the "Mind of God...
...There is a historical, intellectual, and political alternative to anti-white, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian black nationalism...
...Christmas, finally, is a time to forget about politics—even if there's not enough time for anything longer than a short story...
...Time's Lance Morrow has aptly described Art as a "pseudonaif American Trickster, like Bugs Bunny with a cigar in his mouth instead of a carrot...
...Regnery's life-long efforts (and Mr...
...Social history at its best, the way it should always be written...
...Oxford has just brought out a new edition, edited by R.W...
...But this time, Mom said, there was a "good chance" we would get to meet 01' St...
...HARRY EDWARDS The Demon-Haunted World is Carl Sagan's bare-knuckled, noholds-barred assault upon the persuasive resurrection of irrationality in response to a postmodern world where scientific and technological power exists in explosive counterpoint and contradiction to pathetically abysmal popular ignorance of virtually all matters scientific and technological...
...He has edited, and Times Books has published, a collection of essays badly titled Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing...
...And now to the dead...
...Ferguson's pieces, originally appeared in these pages...
...I could promote the dead exclusively...
...Tyrrell is continuing his chronicle of the crackup of this country's basic integrity...
...Its scenes are vividly depicted...
...But they'd be ticked...
...Simpson...
...Another John Silber gift to B.U...
...A journalist who writes with a novelist's flair, Freedman shows why the best history is now being written by journalists...
...this is what old age and the far edge of life are all about...
...Founding Father, by Richard Brookhiser, is what the author calls a "moral biography" of George Washington...
...The inspiring story of the political and medical miracle of Pennsylvania's former two-term Democratic governor who believes that life begins at conception but does not end at death...
...Tyrrell's Boy Clinton, give it often...
...Different writing style, but an inspirational story of true leadership...
...Tozer is one I would recommend reading annually...
...Burchfield: avoid it...
...A really solid read was Paul Preston's Franco, a thousand pages, begun in Toronto in 1994, not quite finished yet...
...My third book of the year is Vera Brittain's Chronicle ofFriend- ship (Victor Gollancz, 1986), which is set in the thirties and tells of the life of an intellectual woman writer with children, a husband, and a live-in female companion (together with passionate attachments to other female friends) and servants...
...With verve and personality, Gates reveals much of how we won the Cold War...
...John Dilulio is professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University and most recently coauthor (with William Bennett and John P. Walters) ofBody Count: Moral Poverty...
...These untruths are too often repeated by the Fourth Estate...
...Prefer the concrete word to the abstract...
...After watching last year's movie of the year, Braveheart (nine times), I picked up Nigel Tranter's work entitled The Wallace...
...I am deluged with military history...
...Do we have any books through which Americans and British can sublimate the imperial relationship...
...This is the book that the valiant Jack Kemp allowed Charles Rangel to savage on one of the Sunday morning chat shows, making up a "Bell Curve" that Murray, on the same show, hadn't written, and, in typical Kemp fashion, burbling on about what a magnificent creature the good Charles, Rangel, is, compared to the wicked Charles, Murray...
...Nicholas" and reached the point where "down the chimney" he "came with a 50 December 1 9 96 • The American Spectator...
...He hasn't entirely convinced me of his thesis, but Green has produced the first serious study that attempts to deal with what happened to the once powerful big labor unions, and to trace their shift toward the political left...
...But can you blame him, knowing what he was up against...
...Like the old French Radical Socialist Party, notoriously neither radical nor socialist, it seems to me to be neither literary nor novel...
...With the license of fiction, Klein doesn't disappoint...
...Bork has again shown his mettle, this time through a brilliant philosophical critique of modern American liberalism...
...That way, I could omit my friends altogether...
...The above quote comes from my favorite book, The Orthodox Way by Bishop Kallistos Ware...
...His analysis is must reading for those of us who decry the contemporary trends in American society...
...Top of the list, however, has to be the Bible...
...French books include Remembrance ofThings Past by Proust and Man's Fate by Malraux...
...The five practical rules of vocabulary on the very first page are worth quoting: "Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched...
...It is a history (from Neolithic man to Gorbachev) of my sort of Europe, meaning not only boring old France and Germany, but Central Europe, Ireland, Iceland, and other odd backwaters as well...
...is editor-in-chiefof'The American Spectator and the author most recently of Boy Clinton: The Political Biography (Regnery)• Santa's Shoes What a rural Pennsylvania boy discovered when he traveled to the big city...
...FrankMoorhouse's latest bookis Grand Days (Pantheon), a historical novel set at the League ofNations in 1920's Geneva...
...Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot, by Antonia Fraser...
...Ascension reveals the power and price of commitment in the creative life and the role of faith in sustaining the pursuit of excellence and mastery...
...BARBARA LEDEEN Though Christmas is not one of the chapters in Jewish Literacy: The Most Important Things to Know About the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History, by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, this book is one of the most useful reference guides for anyone interested in Christianity's antecedent...
...are: The First Man, by Albert Camus (very well translated), Nedjma, by Kateb Yacine (don't know about the translation), The Big House, by Mohammed Dib (ditto...
...For those of my British friends who have not yet fully comprehended how naive, how enthusiastic, and how lacking in a sense of history we Americans are, I recommend Graham Greene's The Quiet American, the book which predicted everything about Vietnam before Vietnam happened, as well as (hoaryand predictable though it is) F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby...
...ANDREW FERGUSON I have —or had —a bit of a problem...
...Ronald Radosh, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is author of Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic Party, 1964.- 1996 (Free Press...
...Much of the book's wisdom found its way into Modem English Usage, but it has pleasures all its own...
...Fighting for Life, Robert P. Casey (1996...
...The single best novel about the experience of the Americans who fought with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930's...
...Nixon: A Life by Jonathan Aitken is by far the best biography of the thirty-seventh president...
...scholars and taught in the schools as gospel...
...Eliot, Bertrand Russell, and even the leader writers of the London Times—and so should impose a certain humility on all of us...
...I'll Always Have Paris by Art Buchwald (Putnam...
...Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest by Eric Nisenson is much more than a biography of one of the premier artists involved in forging the modern history of "America's classical music...
...RONALD RADOSH The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved From Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond, by Samuel G. Freedman...
...Thirdly, I most heartily offer my independent recommendation of Michael Ledeen's important new book Freedom Betrayed: How America Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away...
...Rediscovering Washington, whose lifelong concerns were courtesy and reputation, seems especially timely as we enter a second Clinton term...
...The contributors list comprises almost all my friends who have published books, as well as many people I don't know who have published books, and other friends who haven't published books at all...
...Not only is it funny, it scans, rhymes, and makes sense as well...
...Nixon looks better every day, his pulse-challenged condition notwithstanding...
...He also rekindles literary enthusiasms, particularly by his commentaries on Shakespeare, whom he keeps by his bed...
...Regnery was a gentleman, if a bit unreliable...
...Anne Applebaum, a columnist for London's Evening Standard, is the author of Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe (Pantheon...
...Only the truly obsessed —or unemployed—can find time to read all the O.J...
...ERICH EICHMAN The decline of civilization is everywhere evident, but it is often best measured sentence by sentence —in the way the English language is misused...
...Robert Graves and Alan Hodge's The Reader Over Your Shoulder (first published in 1943, republished in abridged form by Random House in 1979) concerns itself less with grammatical error than with the blunders in logic and confusions in point of view that damage sense in the arc of a paragraph or two...
...we are also spirit...
...The government struggled to formulate a refugee and immigration policy while the Australian bureaucracy all but collapsed under the flood of applications for entry...
...A new discovery is Doyne Dawson's The Origins of Western Warfare, arguing the same case from a philosophical rather than a historiographical standpoint...
...What every American should know about what the Founding Fathers thought they were doing...
...But shadows and doubts were starting to rustle in the back of my six-year-old mind...
...It outsold Bill's book Between Hope and History by a factor of more than ten—and for good reason...
...Having stayed at the Gramercy Park Hotel I found the book had piquancy because so much of it is set around Grammercy Park—when New York stretched from the Battery to Union Square...
...The Coltrane devotee will revel in this work...
...Chillingly well written, it was a revelation when I first read it, and I would want anyone receiving it as a gift to feel the same way...
...By Ralph Kinney Bennett We were sitting around the kitchen table, finishing up turkey croquettes two days after Thanksgiving, when Mom announced that we would soon be making a trip into Pittsburgh for Christmas shopping...
...the definitive biography of Mrs...
...You really should buy this book...
...The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg and The Last Three Minutes by Paul Davies, two popular and accessible books that clearly bracket and put into perspective that "wink" in cosmic time spanning the onset of human evolution to the inevitable extinction or speciation of Homo sapiens...
...Hugh Thomas's last bookwas Conquest (Simon & Schuster), anew study ofthe conquest ofMexico by Cortez...
...Creating Minds and Frames ofMind: The Theory ofMultiple Intelligences by Howard Gardner are companion volumes that explore the character and dynamics of human creativity and intelligences...
...The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values by Gertrude Himmelfarb is for those who want to know how we ended up in this moral mush and who prefer to read John Stuart Mill rather than Gloria Steinem...
...DeVries called him the greatest prose stylist in the English language, and who am Ito disagree with the author of The Mackerel Plaza...
...It must be good because Victor Davis Hanson gives it an endorsement...
...For starters, grab story collections by any of the following—Irwin Shaw, William Trevor, Louis Auchincloss, Flannery O'Connor, Wallace Stegner, Paul Theroux, or John Updike—and you'll quickly discover that some presents are too valuable to be given away...
...The Federalist Papers, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay (any edition...
...His confrontation with the forces of Communism and black nationalism could have been written today...
...For those of my American friends who have not had the opportunity to become acquainted with the slightly sardonic, slightly nasty, sometimes profound, and usually downbeat English national character, I would encourage them to be pleasantly depressed by Philip Larkin's Collected Verse...
...A few lucky people have a gift for clear, logical writing and speech...
...It is to the Balkans what Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem is to the Middle East...
...Is the corrupt liberal state not enough to keep this unity intact...
...There are others too but those are sure values...
...Prefer the single word to the circumlocution...
...Regnery and I were both from Chicago, like Saul Bellow...
...Freedman takes the lives of three immigrant families at the turn of the last century, and tracing their story to the present, brilliantly shows how politics shaped their lives, and how their descendants moved from the New Deal coalition to the ranks of the Republican Party...
...Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century by Zbigniew Brzezinski...
...That has certainly been true in my experience...
...Loyal readers of TAS will recognize many of the Reaganesque themes and long for the days of real foreign policy leadership...
...On my last return to Australia from New York I read Edith Wharton's four novellas published under the title Old New York (Scribner's, 1995...
...On Christmases past, this mythic, elusive figure had thwarted my most determined efforts to meet him face to face...
...I am referring of course to The Brothers Ashkenazi by I. J. Singer...
...I much admired England Under the Stuarts, by George Macaulay Trevelyan, in the handsome new edition from the Folio Society...
...But most of us must school ourselves in grammar and syntax and proper usage —and be ever vigilant against the little errors and corruptions that threaten to ruin even the simplest attempt at expressing a thought...
...He was tan, rested, but not quite ready—Nixon, that is—for the 1996 election, and there is, perhaps, something unintentionally semi-crypto-necrophiliac about Monica Crowley's wonderfully revealing Nixon Off the Record: His Candid Commentary on People and Politics, but it is a pleasure to read something The American Spectator • December 199 6 not touching on the current inhabitant of the White House or on the hopeless character whom the GOP saddled themselves with to run against him...
...Nisenson draws the reader into the creative processes and motive influences that propelled "Trane" down a track of musical creativity with no "switchbacks," no return routes...
...DAVID BROCK Two unorthodox biographies top my list...
...His portrait of an aging Sicilian noble, looking back in bittersweet farewell over an eventful lifetime, is wonderfully conceived and written...
...Just begging to be gift-wrapped is George H. Nash's great peace offering, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, now available in a handsome reprint with new epilogue from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute of Wilmington, Delaware...
...These are fine books...
...Steve Largent is a Republican congressman from Oklahoma...
...I was afraid that if I recommended two or three of them, the authors of the rest would be deeply—well, not offended, exactly...
...It was an extraordinary experience, therefore, during a visit from the country, to stumble on, among all the literary novels with which our children clutter our London house, Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses...
...Gates began in the late 196o's as an analyst at CIA and rose to major positions at the National Security Council, eventually becoming CIA's top banana, to coin a phrase...
...Civilization would decline a little less if we observed such rules a little more...
...Facing the Bureaucracy: Living and Dying in a Public Agency, Gerald Garvey (Jossey-Bass, 1993...
...On the values trail, so many and so many quite good, among them Stephen L. Carter's Integrity, the first of a planned trilogy on values from the thoughtful Yale law professor...
...Follett set out to enforce...
...I believe it is Tozer's finest work...
...I started the first page in the expectation that I would throw it down as I throw down Booker Prize finalists' offerings...
...Next would come the best history book to be published in the generation just passed: Robert Conquest's The Great Terror...
...It is the biography of a genuinely nasty man...
...It is true that we are neighbors, and on visiting terms, so know many of the people who feature, including ourselves...
...You should give Mr...
...Moby-Dick by Herman Melville...
...The intellectual profundity of both these books—and their sharp critical judgment and moral force —are at odds with everything in our culture today and thus indispensable...
...By the second paragraph I heard myself muttering, 'This is like reading the young Hemingway...
...JOHN KEEGAN I search fruitlessly for novels that bring the thrill of the novels I read in my youth —when, of course, one reads, without realizing one is doing so, the books one's parents and grandparents discovered to be good, in a burst, spared the trivia and ephemera that clog the shelves of bookshops in one's long adult years...
...I was going to say that TAS bylaws, as I understood them, forbade Christmas Books contributors from recommending books by people still living...
...By looking back at the optimism and symbolism of the World's Fair, Gelernter reveals how much our world has changed, and how much we have lost in the process...
...Contrary to what the reader may think, the author identifies most sensitively with the kidnapped persons whose tragedy he chronicles meticulously and accurately (because it is in a sense a nonfiction novel...
...42 December 1996 • The American Spectator My list wouldn't be complete without the book I spent the most time with this year (for better and worse): It Takes a Village by Hillary Rodham Clinton...
...Stephen Ambrose is a classic scholar, and Undaunted Courage should be read by those interested in America's history as it actually unfolded...
...Neither my wife nor I could desist with Anthony Powell's second volume of memoirs...
...At the time I wondered about Art's private self...
...49 HUGH THOMAS Among new books which I read, the best were, first, Theodore Draper's The Struggle for Power, a fascinating study of the origins of the tragedy which led to the separation of Britain and the Thirteen Colonies...
...Moreover, it provided me with the perfect conclusion for my three-volume biography of Andrew Jackson...
...As for autobiography I turned to my friend Bob Gates's From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War...
...What is more, Nixon: A Life is published by my publisher, Regnery, a company I hold in high regard...
...For all its bumbling and xenophobia Australia did finally take more Jewish refugees per capita than any other nation...
...Every page is packed with powerful insight into the character of God...
...A must read for anyone who has ever watched more than one episode of "Star Trek" or any of its spin-off series, who saw the "blockbuster" film Independence Day more than once, who makes a conscious effort to see "The X Files" each week, or who has ever called or been tempted to call a "psychic friend...
...They're all there...
...by William Herrick...
...The tale of how a repeat offender out on parole brutally killed the author's young daughter, and how her dad then fought—and won...
...Depressing business that—the best biography of Richard Nixon is not written by one of his countrymen but by a Brit and a member of Parliament to boot...
...I was saying the same thing when I reached the end...
...WLADYSLAW PLESZCZYNSKI Christmas couldn't come at a better time for those conservatives who've spent the better part of the last year at each other's throats...
...No one has ever written more insightfully about the American people and their institutions, nor the dangers that can destroy them, than this foreign traveler who came to this country to inspect our prison system and produced a masterpiece of political commentary...
...Du Bois: A Reader, edited by David 43 Levering Lewis (Henry Ho11,1995...
...ALEXANDER M. HAIG, JR...
...Dooley said, "Politics ain't beanbag...
...So it is with one of the lesser known books published in 1994, Australia and the Holocaust (Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne) by historian Paul R. Bartrop...
...Harry Edwards is professor ofsociology at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley...
...It would be like working in the Dole campaign...
...Many lessons of life and people are tucked in this tale of Russian brothers...
...Each time Mother read Clement Moore's "A Visit From St...
...Answers, on a postcard, please...
...Regnery's company is getting some of the rewards it undoubtedly deserves, with two hits on the best-seller list, and I would give them both, 46 December 1996 • The American Spectator both books, to young friends who need to know what this country is coming to, despite Mr...
...So you should give books by Mr...
...One awaits eagerly the first of a likely deluge of books chiding him for his sell-out on welfare, from the welfare "rights" pimps, unless of course he "fixes" the law, as he has promised...
...Its protagonist, a very young white lad, is sold into slavery after the Civil War and the book tells of his life —and his revenge on the man who bought him...
...One plan which came from the international Jewish Freeland League was for a homeland or second Israel in the North West of Australia...
...This second of his memoirs fleshes out the character of the man who has brought delightful chuckles to American readers since the early fifties...
...Aldrich's book is almost a bad joke —the idea that our government should be staffed by punks with no manners —until you realize it's all too true...
...Read all about it, and visit one of America's tens of thousands of inner city black Christian churches...
...Garote y prensa" he used to mark against the names of his captured enemies during the Spanish Civil War—"strangulation and the fact to be published in the newspapers" was what he meant...
...Publishers send me all their latest offerings and so do authors...
...DeVries joined the departed only a few years ago, and I'm afraid that already his many novels are being forgotten...
...Modem American Usage (1966), by Wilson Follett—edited and completed by Jacques Barzun — applies Fowler's principles to American idiom, adding its own sensible rules and proscriptions, often in engaging essays that demonstrate exactly the principles of good writing that Mr...
...The year's biggest disappointment was Babel Tower, by A. S. Byatt...
...Herrick brings to life the betrayals, compromises, and needless slaughter suffered by these young idealists, in a manner that puts him in the company of George Orwell and inadvertently reveals how inferior was Ernest Hemingway's treatment of the same event...
...Hermanos...
...It's full of delightful and provocative writing by P.J...
...If men were angels, no government would be necessary—and we wouldn't have to worry so much about more Clinton appointments to the federal bench...
...And finally I would suggest a magnificent work by a writer of a civilization now lost, whose brother, who wrote in a different though no less brilliant manner, is far better known...
...Then Byatt bogs down in reports of two interminable court cases...
...Fools' Names, Fools' Faces, by Andrew Ferguson, the most intelligent, stylish, and engagingly witty essayist (as Bob Tyrrell has noticed) since Malcolm Muggeridge...
...Perhaps it is indeed the case that all we as a species really have is each other, for this time, our only possible triumph over ultimate individual, collective, and cosmic demise being to love and support each other not despite, but precisely because of, our shared fate...
...Simpson books, most (the moronic jurors and other apologists) have been having fun demonstrating the vileness of their points of view...
...And give Mr...
Vol. 29 • December 1996 • No. 12
