A Chrestomathy of Christmas Books
A C Tr :Dina: ay Psi al/1st-ma/8 Bo D /KS A 301" ANNIVERSARY SAMPLER OF RECOMMENDATIONS PAST E very year since 1976 we have invited eminences from the arts, scholarship, and politics to...
...He is so fine a journalist that I fail to understand how it is that some of the frauds and fakers, who today call themselves journalists, have not had him blackballed, blacklisted, and thrown out of the union...
...Preston Sturges by Preston Sturges (1990) is another great book (all the reviews say so) I want to read...
...The American Spectator • December 1997 JACQUES BARZUN (1976) Delicacy linked with power is rare in fiction at any time and today more than ever...
...I was reading Camus at 12...
...I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now...
...Every book the novelist grabbed inspired him to nab another two, and when the stack was almost head-high Wolfe was in tears...
...When the Kissing Had to Stop, by Constantine Fitzgibbon...
...Following are some of the best, but this list is hardly all-inclusive...
...It was published in 1984 but is worth hunting down...
...analyzes one of the most important political occurrences of our time with wit and deadly serious insight...
...His description at times rivals Jaroslav Hasek's famous Good Soldier Schweik...
...The Human Factor, by 51 Graham Greene (1978...
...An anti-Communist novel, almost a classic, one that should be reprinted by Conservative Book Club...
...And then I never really settled on any particular books, it's just essays and short stories and plays and doggerel of Robert Service and H. L. Mencken and James Thurber...
...PETER VIERECK (1978) Historical Consciousness, by John Lukacs...
...84 December 1997 • The American Spectator...
...Zola helped create such simple-minded notions among the bystanders, incidentally, by continually theorizing about his own work...
...It's a romp that can bring tears to the eye...
...That would put him in danger of physical assault throughout the journalistic world...
...MARIO M. CUOMO (1983) With homework always on hand, I tend to dip into an assoi tnient of books rather than read individual volumes in their entirety...
...Truisms on human motivation and mass movements by a self-educated working man with great insight...
...We identify them (and those still living) by the positions they held at the time they made their recommendations...
...Every great power in history has imposed law and order according to its values...
...Nor, for that matter, did the quality: by their book recommendations shall ye know them...
...in college he worked to pay his way, and afterwards finally landed a job as a sports announcer in Iowa...
...2. How Should We Then Live...
...RICHARD NIXON (1983) Of all the books I have read this year, one in particular deserves to be mentioned by itself: Modern Times, the one-volume history of the twentieth century by British historian Paul Johnson...
...There's the rub...
...The best book ever on urbanology, the "underprivileged," the inner city, the suburbs, city welfare, etc...
...This is the season of conspiracy theories...
...I can't help wondering whether his fictional hero Wintergrin is partly based on someone I admire in real life: Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn...
...Ralph Nader won't like this book...
...James T. Farrell is author of The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan...
...49 Endurance by Alfred Lansing: The story of Ernest Shackle-ton and his shipwrecked crew at the South Pole...
...Roger Rosenblatt is the literary editor at the New Republic and a columnist for the Washington Post...
...It just dawned on me that I'll be dead before I read all the books I want to read...
...She copes, not drearily, or wearily, but with verve and gusto supported, and sometimes preyed upon, by a loving, quirky, but never cranky family...
...Perhaps the most overwhelming book about war ever written, because it deals with the most overwhelming combat experience in history: the average German soldier on the Russian front, going through a meat grinder that produced io million casualties in an army of 12.5 million (Amer-ican figures were 800,000 in a military of 16 million...
...the story of the Dodgers in Brooklyn and Los Angeles...
...An honest book answering all the charges that had been made against her for eight years and she didn't feel she could answer at the time...
...the message emerges from the faithful account of the detail of real political life...
...It seems to me they have an awful lot of catching up to do...
...The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer...
...at fifteen he became a lifeguard to help work his way through college...
...have embraced left-wing totalitarian regimes while downgrading (and enjoying) the fruits of free enterprise...
...LEO ROSTEN (1983) The Unheavenly City, by Edward Banfield...
...Globalized corruption is a more elusive enemy to democracy than either Nazism or Communism, but quite as absolute and lawless in its own way...
...AUBERON WAUGH (1985) Alas, I can think of no advice to your fellow countrymen on their reading...
...The fascinating story of a young boy from Dixon, Illinois, who worked for a construction company as an 11-12 year old for 25 cents an hour...
...Gary Hart represents Colorado in the United States Senate...
...The last book by one of America's few great baseball writers of the last several decades...
...FLORENCE KING (1989) My "desert island" book is Nancy Hale's 1942 novel, The Prodigal Women...
...William J. Bennett is director of the National Humanities Center and co-author of Counting By Race: Bakke and the Great American Debate about Equality...
...Now for our 3oth anniversary issue executive editor Wladyslaw Pleszczynski has culled past recommendations that are at once representative of the times that we have passed through and suggestive of the thought and style of each eminence...
...Coping with one ally who is Jack Shafer is the editor of Washington City Paper...
...The last great statesman who cared for the regime of liberty and knew how to live within its constraints was Winston Churchill...
...James T. Farrell's presence demonstrates the literary link between us and the two men whose style and skepticism we admire to this day, George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken...
...This book will fry your eyes off...
...EDMUND MORRIS (1979) One of the trials of being a biographer is that I have to read billions of words of dry, dull prose in search of the odd phrase or anecdote that shines—much as a miner sifts rubble for specks of gold...
...A rare talent...
...They reveal the ethos of this magazine...
...Like Wolfe, I've compiled a bigger list than I have time for...
...Neither author is stuffy...
...Also love Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, Le Cane and Turow...
...Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh President of the United States, is author most recently of The Real Peace...
...Now maybe the "conservatives" can turn to trying to solve some problems...
...Then I met a beautiful woman, got married, had a child, built a house, started a garden, and got a life...
...If you are an Eskimo or Evelyn Wood you might be able to do that with Winston Churchill's magnificent six-volume history, The Second World War (Boston,195o, Houghton Mifflin...
...Two Peter Matthiessen books now collect dust in my Thomas Wolfe Memorial Pile: Killing Mister Watson (1989) and African Silences (1991...
...Or L'Annonce faite a Marie, if you can find it...
...For patriotic thrills try Margaret Coit's 1950 Pulitzer Prize biography, John C. Calhoun, which inspired my motto: If at first you don't secede, try, try again...
...Bauer...
...Schandler is Specialist in National Defense at the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress...
...It's unmatched and unmatchable...
...Incredible story...
...It wasn't to me or anyone else...
...He has, in my opinion, the most perfect style in twentieth-century English literature, with his flawless rhythms and enchanting command of metaphor...
...Instead of funneling your hard-earned money to an institution that holds you and your conservative values in contempt, why not sign up for a one-year subscription to Campus Report...
...The last book that did that for me was Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder a decade ago...
...The Mind ofthe South, by Wilbur Cash...
...Henry James wrote The Ambassadors...
...conrad direct Direct Mail Strategy Group 300 Knickerbocker Road Cresskill, NJ 07626 (201) 567 - 3200 daughter-in-law, but that doesn't make it any less good...
...It combines trenchant description with brilliant historical judgments and establishes the indispensable criteria for assessing and managing social undertakings...
...a war of words...
...is a thoughtful critique of the doom-and-gloom school of educators by an iconoclastic teacher who understands that the prospects for material and spiritual growth are becoming brighter and suggests that education should be better balanced by presenting the optimistic view of the future as well as the gloomy view...
...Which brings us to a final point...
...Non-governmental bodies are colonizing more and more areas of public life...
...Frost has a gentleness and a reverence for nature that The American Spectator December 19 97 refreshes the soul...
...H. J. KAPLAN (1983) A Christmas book list...
...It tells who was doing what at any given age in history...
...The author, who died in 1907, says things about "the fantasy of universal enlightenment" that you will never find in an NEA press release...
...Donations then recouped from individuals and companies in pursuit of their own advantage have mired the White House in unprecedented scandal...
...However, I was tremendously impressed with a short little paperback, Adams and Jefferson, a Revolutionary Dialogue (Merrill D. Peterson, Oxford University Press, 1976...
...Hiss is demonstrated to be the psychopathic liar, not Chambers...
...And on more contemporary problems: Marguerite Higgins: Our Vietnam Nightmare, to understand what really went wrong, and why The Best and the Brightest, etc., etc., had to be written to obscure history...
...No book lover should let a year go by without rereading this humanistic masterpiece...
...A Trumpet for Reason, by Leo Rosten...
...Kaplan, having retired from the foreign service, the corporate world, and GEO magazine, now lives and writes in New York...
...JAMES T. FARRELL (1976) Indonesia: An Underdeveloped Freedom by Sal Tas...
...Tom Wolfe is author ofRadical Chic, The Painted Word, Mauve Glove & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, and The Right Stuff (forthcoming...
...But they may have some incidental uses today...
...I hate her...
...Norman B. Ture: Tax Policy, Capital Formation and Productivity (1973), to understand America's most pressing immediate problem...
...This study contains a concise political and historical account of Indonesia, an incisive analysis of the role of the Chinese in that country, and a brilliant treatment of the contemporary problems of the process of decolonization...
...The Snopes Trilogy, by William Faulkner...
...Of course, my wife reads a novel a week...
...A sometimes tedious book about "Teedie" from his birth to his ascendance as president which provides much to ponder as we re-examine what it means to be a leader in this country...
...Francis A. Schaeffer, now deceased but one of the most remarkable men I ever met...
...and here we prove that we can take it—but only once a year...
...All of these original stories appeared in Accuracy in Academia's alternative newspaper Campus Report, an indispensible guide to an academic world enslaved by quotas, multicultural excess and identity politics...
...The total spending in the 1996 elections has been estimated at $4 billion...
...Let's keep this between ourselves...
...He gives his complete account of statesmanship in Marlborough, His Life and Times...
...Gilbert Murray: Four Stages of Greek Religion, to understand that a whole civilization can suffer a "failure of nerve...
...GEORGE BUSH (1985) Yeager...
...Something in-between—I still think of The Spike, by Robert Moss and Arnaud de Borchgrave, when I read of the activities of IPS, government officials and bureaucrats, media types, and of belated apologies from aging actresses...
...JACK KEMP (1984) This past year has seen a river of optimistic, progrowth, and pro-democracy books...
...He informs a witty and arresting narrative with passionate introspection...
...Farrell wrote for both of these editors and for both incarnations of The American Spectator, Nathan's in the 1930's and our later rendition...
...It shows that a philosopher's life is not necessarily a dull one...
...The Tao of Physics by Prof...
...Yep, I've always been fascinated by Churchill—and Jamie's book is delightful...
...The Telephone Book by H.M...
...Amazing how it stands up despite first publication in 1960...
...Tom Cullen's 1954 study of Jack the Ripper, When London Walked in Terror, is not only a classic of the true-crime genre but a fine wine of wishful thinking to be sipped after watching Molly Yard and Eleanor Smeal on television...
...What else have they been HIDING from you...
...War is our most enduring metaphor—the war of the sexes...
...That's a real pleasure and one of the greatest of treats for me...
...My Turn, by Nancy Reagan...
...Workers' Rights —East and West by Adrian Karatnycky, Alexander J. Motyl, and Adolph Sturmthal...
...Tom won two Pulitzer Prizes for himself and the New York Times and is in danger of winning a third for this excellent book...
...Allan Bloom is a professor at the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago...
...Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion, by P.T...
...George Gilder's new book, The Spirit ofEnterprise, restores the forgotten yet all-important role of the individual entrepreneur to the center of technological progress and economic growth...
...The man who in this century has best penetrated to the core of authentic religious experience is Gershom Sholem...
...Best thriller since Red Dragon, which he also wrote, back in 1981 (out in paperback...
...In any event, his most recent essay, Sociology as an Art Form (1976), shows his critical and historical powers in brief compass...
...The American Irish by William V. Shannon...
...We have all met the players in Wolfe's absorbing book, and no author today draws them with so fine a pen...
...Mostly liberals...
...Bicycles and Tricycles: An Elementary Treatise on their Design and Construction by Archibald Sharp...
...Of the little contemporary fiction I've seen recently I like best Nadine Gordimer's Selected Stories and V. S. Naipaul's melancholic A Bend in the River...
...waging political war—and as Jones lays out the skullcracking ways of the Persian light infantry, the wily style of Marlborough, and the blitzkrieg bop of the Nazis it never fails to astonish me how much life imitates military slaughter...
...A. M. ROSENTHAL (1989) All books I give for Christmas must meet three strict criteria...
...Edmund Morris is the author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and the forthcoming Theodore Rex...
...Saul Bellow is author of Herzog, Humboldt's Gift, and, just published, To Jerusalem and Back...
...2. The subject matter must particularly interest me...
...Wlady's choices are inspired...
...Tyrrell honors me, and confirms my suspicion that he is an editor of genius...
...Kife: The Lives and Dreams of Soviet Youth, by Nancy Traver...
...Dick Scaife is, they say, behind the conspiracy, and he even hornswoggled The American Spectator into participating in what the White House believes is a "media food chain...
...Don't worry yourself, Perkins told Wolfe...
...A truly superb reference book...
...Ready to start overnights right away" may well be the words on President Clinton's tombstone...
...His most comprehensive work of scholarship is Sabbatai Sevi, the Mystical Messiah, and the story of the extraordinary life which informed that scholarship is told in From Berlin to Jerusalem...
...it is a book full of political lessons for serious persons, East and West...
...Above all I love P.C...
...Proust's Remembrance of Things Past demonstrates the benefits of staying in the closet...
...A clear and orderly presentation of all the remarkable machines that have kept civilization at a standstill...
...I haven't read a book since, and I like it much better this way...
...and the speed limit on automobiles in Great Britain was zo miles per hour...
...Face it, the school you left behind is now but a mere shadow of its former glory, as 1960s holdover radicals and their progeny have turned your pride and joy into a Holiday Inn for left-wingers...
...Henry Ford raised $ioo,000 to start an automobile company...
...Robert L. Bartley is editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal...
...It shows, demonstrates, establishes, the full strength of the philosophy upon which the Republic stands...
...It is a delightful analysis of the greatest friendship in American history...
...He fits the same bill in many ways...
...A C Tr :Dina: ay Psi al/1st-ma/8 Bo D /KS A 301" ANNIVERSARY SAMPLER OF RECOMMENDATIONS PAST E very year since 1976 we have invited eminences from the arts, scholarship, and politics to proffer book recommendations for our readers' Christmas gift lists...
...Anyone who has read his masterpiece Eleni about his mother should read this book about his father...
...3. The Last Lion, by William Manchester...
...Whether he is making up stories or writing about elephants, Matthiessen produces prose that is self-contradictory, fruity, and spare at the same time...
...LARRY KING (1988) Absolutely read Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs...
...All those years of compulsive underlining and endless margin comments to myself have made it easy to dip back into a whole library for a few minutes at a time...
...George Bush is Vice President of the United States...
...The Divine Milieu: An Essay on the Interior Life, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin —Christian theology presented in a form that for me is pure poetry...
...the first recording of an opera was made...
...Thomas Boswell, sports columnist for the Washington Post, is the author, most recently, of Game Day: Sports Writing 1970-199o...
...1-800-448-7241 (Visa, MasterCard, AMEX accepted) *Bonus to new subscribers: A free copy of David Thibodaux's "Political Correctness: The Closing of the American Mind.The American Spectator • December 1997 53 Christmas Books (Continued frompage 53) valuable insights into the perennial crisis in the Middle East...
...Now, after reading four of his novels, I regard him as one of the great virtuosi of the medium...
...The White House whines that a cabal of conservatives is engaged in a conspiracy to spread conspiracy theories about the White House...
...These five ought to suffice, at least for the month of January...
...give it to a friend...
...James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary...
...Old favorites — Montaigne, Yeats, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Rilke, Emerson's journals, Thoreau, Whitman, Frost, Dickinson, Eliot, Henry Miller, AnaIs Nin, Keats's letters, Lawrence, Jarrell, Blackmur, and a lot of other fairly conventional classics...
...I can't wait for the film...
...a picture of what life was like at the White House and her relationship with her husband...
...Perhaps they should start with the Bible and move on to Shakespeare before tackling Joyce and Milan Kundera...
...The Princess Casamassima by Henry James: About the passions of political dreamers and the realities that elude them...
...Mario M. Cuomo is governor of the state of New York...
...Who are the folks willing to work full-time at politics...
...Both are in paperback, and together they tell you most of the important things you need to know about our century...
...I also enjoyed The Fords, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz...
...Nabokov's Lolita stands as evidence that sexual desire need not be treated as pornography, and Henry Miller's "Tropics" stand as proof that pornography can be literature...
...I never read him while he was alive, and since we met a few times, I regret it so much now...
...His very readable and moving account touches on such topics as the national question in the USSR, racism, and the growth of dissent...
...I find it intelligent, well written, and a "good read...
...That is why I suggest reading the novels—six of them—written a quarter-century ago by the late Anne Goodwin Winslow, a New Englander transplanted to the South and widely traveled besides...
...Fred Barnes is a senior editor at the New Republic...
...The subject in this case is electoral politics...
...Plyushch's book is an account of a Soviet dissident's intellectual odyssey...
...Peter Viereck is a poet and historian...
...The Politics of Oil, by Robert Engler (1967), to begin to understand the relationship between business—at least in one major industry—and government in the American political economy...
...WALTER GOODMAN (1977) The books I'd give—or keep—need no advertisement...
...I can tell you: It doesn't help a bit...
...MARK HELPRIN (1985) When The American Spectator asked me to provide "a list of my favorite books," I thought I had it made, because I have already done this for the New York Times, its sister publication on the Eastern Seaboard...
...4. Churchill: Speaker of the Century, by James C. Humes...
...Victor Lasky is an author...
...Even the leading critics of conspiracies are themselves conspiracists...
...But for the serious-minded readers who expect this sort of thing from an American Spectator booklist, I endorse Archer Jones's The Art of War in the Western World (1987), which has shaped my thinking as no other tome has in the last four years...
...That's why you give him for Christmas...
...Therefore: From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas L. Friedman...
...Living in Washington as I do, I get my fill of the policy debate so I'd rather ban books on politics, sociology, economics, and race relations than hype them...
...A terrific history ofgraphology, especially useful for amateur detectives...
...A withering attack on the mewlings about underdeveloped nations, "racism," the African dilemmas, the moral blackmail of the backward...
...by Dr...
...The Great Train Robbery became the longest film ever made (12 minutes...
...A Place for Us, by Nicholas Gage...
...TOM WOLFE (1978) Nothing that I have read this year has given me more pleasure than three novels by Zola: La Bete Humaine, Nana, and L'Assommoir...
...Buckley, but it's his novel I'm here to praise...
...And I wasn't sure he knew what he was getting at...
...It was written by my 30 Years of Excellence Congratulations...
...I think that at a time when 44 Soviet divisions are concentrated on the Polish borders, when 85,000 Soviet troops are killing civilians in Afghanistan, and numerous Soviet military advisers are scattered in many parts of the world, it is interesting and, above all, instructive to look at the Soviet Army from within...
...A moving and true book for anyone who has an affinity with, or curiosity about, the career military...
...For the beauty of the prose and the strength of his "weak" characters...
...The new illustrations in this new college edition are all in the margins...
...Since this is not a full book, it should be read in conjunction with Robert A. Nisbet, "Rousseau and the Political Community" in his collection, Tradition Revolt...
...How many times can you read Der Mann ohne Eigenscha ften...
...First, you give the four-volume, paperback edition of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, which Harcourt Brace Jovanovich has packaged in a nice yellow box...
...Ehrenhalt discovered a structural change in politics that should have been obvious...
...Red Storm Rising, by Tom Clancy— throws back the Soviet army, navy, and air force, just barely, in 65o pages...
...The author has a marvelous ability to transport you into another world which you don't want to leave...
...Jesse Helms is a U.S...
...The Mass Psychology ofFascism, by Wilhelm Reich, written before the author lapsed into quackery and psychosis, to recognize the pathology inherent in some of our own society's mass institutions...
...Surely, Casey and Nixon must have had a hand in it, and from the dates of their appearances in our pages-1988, 1985, and 1983, respectively—you can see how long these guys have been at work in this occult effort...
...I love both men but the beauty of the book is that it gives one great insight into g the optimistic and pessimistic aspects of our heritage: The popular Jefferson, as Macaulay would have put it, was "all 31 48 December 1997 • The American Spectator sail" when it came to equality and democracy with a capital "D," while the unpopular Adams saw that even Democrats were subject to sin and needed an "anchor...
...ALAN K. SIMPSON (1987) I flog myself because I don't feel I have time to burrow into some good books...
...Call Today...
...and gay religious studies teachers fondly reminiscing about their hedonistic bathhouse days...
...Nick had the poor judgment to leave the Times but still remains a close friend and one of the most moving writers I've ever read...
...But I'm not so ambitious about my reading plans that I'm going to let it kill me...
...Edmund Burke: An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, ditto...
...Something new—everyone's favorite, Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities...
...I then blend those readings to complement my love of seeing and enjoying various galleries and museums wherever I may be...
...I read it in two nights...
...I don't know how she does it...
...RET E. DIGBY BALTZELL (1978) Unfortunately, I am rushing to finish a book and have not been doing much reading this year...
...It's a dandy...
...GARY HART (1984) Ironweed, by William Kennedy (1983...
...James Webb is the author of Fields of Fire and A Sense of Honor...
...People who shout 'All power to the people' want power to be handed over to—the people who shout 'All power to the people...
...Throughout society, the more or less accepted peddling of influence gives rise to the "sleaze factor...
...If you liked The Right Stuff, you'll love this book...
...I see that he has included Dick Scaife, Bill Casey, and Richard Nixon...
...so read it to ponder as well as enjoy...
...The best book I have read about the Dalai Lama and the ravaging of the Tibetan people by the Chinese Communists...
...Hedrick Smith's account of the second and third of these environments is as depressingly accurate as it is remarkable...
...It was something about the nature of politics in various places around the country...
...The most recent book about Norman Mailer is Peter Manso's Mailer: His Life and Times...
...I still can't see why economic Manchester liberalism (rootless, materialistic, atomizing) should ever be deemed "conservative" (which means a rooted, organic continuity) by Mr...
...The United States of Ambition: Politics, Power, and the Pursuit of Office is one of those books that forever change the way you think about a subject...
...Martin's Press, $14.95), a broad ranging book filled with his characteristic learning, offering a hopeful political and social strategy to realize the American dream in this generation...
...Lewis may have been muddled about some things, but the Namia series—in a boxed paperback collection — is a charmer...
...Herbert Stein is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Washington, as Senator Daniel Moynihan put it, "has become a fearsome place...
...H.J...
...A fine book on an important subject...
...The beautiful bluestocking heroine is a bona fide misanthrope, and the Great American Breast-Cupping Scene, which is about as stimulating as watching Julia Child construct a pastry cone, is absent from its pages...
...The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris...
...Jack Kemp is U.S...
...The American Heritage Dictionary...
...The Coercive Utopians, by Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac...
...Powerful, pithy, poignant, puckish, highly enjoyable stuff for me...
...JACK SHAFER (1991) One evening in the 1930's Thomas Wolfe paid a visit to his editor, Maxwell Perkins...
...How we could have talked...
...Incisive, blunt, masterfully written, and completely free of ideological cant, Modem Times depicts the rise of the modern totalitarian state and leaves the reader with a renewed sense of the twin dangers we face today: the aggressive ambitions of the Soviet Union in the East, and the moral listlessness that is exhibited all too often by leaders in the West...
...Auberon Waugh is a columnist for the (London) Spectator and other British publications...
...Once an Eagle, by Anton Myrer...
...It isn't every day, after all, that I'm presented with an opportunity to reach America's conservative intelligentsia, such as it is...
...Beyond that, I have no interest...
...Cook Books, Fly Fishing Books, Spy Novels—long may they wave, but not for Christmas...
...Senator from North Carolina...
...The drawings are wonderful...
...Otherwise, you will have to be content with many daily excursions into the greatest crisis in the history of the West, narrated with humor, vengeance, accuracy, and high enthusiasm by one of the greatest men ever to have lived...
...Alan K. Simpson is a United States senator from Wyoming HERBERT STEIN (1986) I suppose it would be unsporting for me to list Her Only Sin, by Benjamin Stein, Biz Speak...
...Jogger-haters and other enemies of health will be restored by the chapter called "Black Coffee" in Stefan Zweig's Balzac, which contains a truly inspiring estimate of the number of cups the great novelist drank during his sedentary career of 18-hour work days...
...In my school years I had somehow formed the impression that Zola was the earnest hardslogging naturalist of the lower depths, "the French Dreiser," and I had had about enough of the American one...
...Vladimir Bukovsky is author of To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter...
...Earthy, robust, tender, and real...
...Very puckish of you, Wlady...
...NANCY REAGAN (1990) An American Life, by Ronald Reagan...
...WILLIAM J. CASEY (1985) Street of Joy, by Dominique LaPierre — an inspiring tale of how folks in the depths of Calcutta sustain each other with love and hope...
...SAUL BELLOW (1976) Let's see now—I have been reading Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen and Onians' Origins of European Thought and a dozen more books per week...
...Well, we can dish it out...
...The Unmaking of a President by HerbertY...
...It would be the transformation of a boy who once thought that standing on a bank of the Hudson and throwing out crab traps was everything in the world, into a public relations jack-in-the-box...
...the reader will probably be too busy thinking to bother about classifying the author...
...Ehrenhalt's book explains why liberals keep getting elected in a conservative age, thwarting realignment...
...It wasn't always that way...
...A unique and enormously useful reference volume for the writer, thinker, student, or fact-nut...
...Evelyn Waugh's prose is almost as beautiful as the Master's, and his humor is at its most exquisitely savage in Black Mischief The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz are wonderful, whether one loves music or not...
...Many of those who made these recommendations are now dead...
...You may also give, to bright college students and up, Modem Times by Paul Johnson and Political Pilgrims by Paul Hollander...
...Thus, the new information below, not to be found in the New York Times or anywhere else...
...I must warn him, however, that I take a dim view of the custom that has grown up among us of submerging the significance of our highest and holiest of days under masses of trivia...
...The Time Tables ofHistory by Bernard Grun...
...Gibbon's Decline and Fall provides insulation against those tendentious comparisons of Rome 1700 or so years ago and the United States in our own time...
...It is made all the more fascinating by the fact that Plyushch, a Ukrainian mathematician who endured the living hell of three years in Soviet psychiatric-prison hospitals, remains a dedicated proponent of democratic socialism...
...That's the fun material for me and it contributes fully to my great relaxation and enjoyment...
...The Dodgers by Tommy Holmes...
...THOMAS BOSWELL (1991) Doubt I can help much...
...The best novel about passions, illusions, and politics I have ever read...
...For example, I find that in the year I was born, Edward VI was crowned King-Emperor at Delhi...
...Perhaps the one hope is that from the ashes of the bonfire there will emerge a reawakening of the need to change...
...Nor will the assorted mankind-saviors clustered in such leftist scams as the Institute for Policy Studies and the National Council of Churches...
...Words and phrases that make up the language of American politics...
...VLADIMIR BUKOVSKY (1981) Victor Suvorov, The Liberators: Inside the Soviet Army...
...Johnson says, and proves, that political movements are the curse of our times...
...ROGER ROSENBLATT (1977) Having few ideas, I enjoy amassing facts...
...Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain...
...This witty autobiography of a high-school dropout, who turned his back on his father's jewelry business and became America's foremost philosopher, is full of gems of art and wisdom...
...I do—so much so that when I'm not in the mood for reading prose I read string quartets and song cycles, preferably in old editions like Breitkopf & Hartel, now attractively reissued by Dover...
...My thought would be, after a certain point, stop reading your ten-thousandth book and start living...
...No one who reads one of these journals needs to read the other...
...E. Digby Baltzell is professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Philadelphia Gentlemen and The Protestant Establishment...
...Democracy and Mediating Structures, edited by Michael Novak...
...A cleansing, uncompromising expose of the absurd reasoning and cockamamy "facts" of the radical Left (the muddled middle) of the sixties and seventies, and their hysterical supporters in the universities and the media...
...These seem to be reasonable criteria...
...Wolfe's reading list was abbreviated much sooner than he could have imagined: he died only a few years later...
...So now I reread the hundred or so books I love best and forget the rest...
...I don't remember reading a line of Zola until last year, when I read Therese Raquin (and promptly advertised the fact in these pages in December...
...Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, by Allen Weinstein (1978...
...With all the diffidence appropriate to the situation, and without imposing any particular order, I'd suggest they read (or reread): Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, to acquire an appreciation of tilting at windmills as an exercise that is not only necessary but downright enjoyable...
...Richard M. Scaife is chairman of the Sarah Scaife Foundation...
...Soon to be a collector's item since nobody writes anymore...
...Hollander writes about the Western intellectuals who fell in love with the movements...
...The sad condition of New York City, and the hopelessness of its leader's institutionalized liberal thinking, are most depressing...
...I'm such a fan that I often recommend two of his early bad novels, Raditzer and Partisans...
...I used to read fifty books a year before circumstance yoked me to the adult tedium of a real job...
...peacenik instructors who drag their students to anti-war rallies...
...Underground to Palestine, by I.F...
...My favorite is his first, Appointment in Samarra, which describes the human condition under contrasting circumstances, and gives one greater insight into the compartments in which people place themselves—often to their own disadvantage...
...A story of heroism and human greatness...
...It is an excellent compendium on the status of free trade unionism and makes a compelling argument for the interrelationship between independent trade unions and democracy...
...Noam Chomsky's in, Shakespeare's out...
...He tells all you have never really wanted to know—but damned well should know—about America's disastrous involvement in Vietnam...
...Emery offers some realistic and uncomplicated suggestions about how to live constructively and happily...
...These and similar suggestions are timeless and proceed from my feeling that we must each do our bit in the ceaseless struggle to recover contact with the Logos...
...Why not do it...
...Their thoughtful selections reveal why...
...Return them any time you like...
...The Inventing of America by Bruce Norman...
...FRED BARNES (1991) I had lunch with Alan Ehrenhalt, then an editor with Congressional Quarterly, several years ago, and he told me of a book he was just beginning to research...
...This time, the available moral and political resources are sadly depleted before the coming cold war has properly begun...
...Give The Dartmouth Bible, a great companion to the King James, which everybody already has...
...The best and, I hope, the last word on what conservatism is...
...Faces, by Shirley Lord...
...Like my friend Corinna I have now become a bore on the subject...
...This is a gripping novel about the dangers of plastic surgery by the beauty director of Vogue...
...JAMES WEBB (1981) I offer the following five books, all of which I consider classics: The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer...
...Russell is only nine years old—talks to all of us whose parents are on that downhill slope...
...The exception this year was the novel Ironweed by William Kennedy, which I read in one evening-to-dawn sitting...
...1. They must be good...
...Endlessly challenging because Lukacs tells it not like it is but (less modish) as it is...
...A book that ascribes meaning to the experience without embracing the politics that engendered it...
...Today, the arguments Professor Wilson makes about the dominant role of social and economic factors in perpetuating the existence of the black underclass are beyond dispute...
...Caplow, as his other works demonstrate, is unique among sociologists in being a highly cultivated mind and a superb writer—witness the chapter in Two Against One (1968) where he applies to Hamlet his understanding of human alliances...
...The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris (1979...
...But when a 93-year-old friend whose critical judgment I much respect told me that I shouldn't miss it, I trotted off to the nearest bookstore...
...As in Europe, politics is becoming the playground of lobbyists...
...May be a seminal work...
...That they are gone and the books remain reminds us of the impermanence of life and the slightly more permanent nature of books...
...Unless perhaps, "You're smart...
...A little-known work on how Western intellectuals from George Bernard Shaw to William Sloane Coffin, Jr...
...He then became a star in movies, the Governor of California for eight years, and finally President of the United States for eight years...
...Fritjof Capra . A well-known Berkeley physicist helps to narrow the chasm between religion and science by describing how new discoveries in molecular physics validate the ancient insights of Oriental and Christian mystics on the nature of the universe...
...For the classic narrative of a gigantic personality...
...Baker's mother, a Depression-era widow with small children to support, dominates Growing Up...
...Even better, it raises unanswerable moral questions of ends and means...
...Kennedy is poet laureate of people in a Depression-era urban backwater...
...I understood one out of 5o pages, and enjoyed every hour of it...
...Then there are Wlady's choices from the other end of the political spectrum...
...While it wouldn't be plagiarism, it would be worse...
...Madame Curie won a Nobel Prize...
...Jacques Barzun is professor emeritus, Columbia University...
...The Money Rustlers: Self-Made Millionaires of the New West, by Peter C. Newman —tells an exciting story about the innovative men and bold spirit that won the continent...
...ROBERT L. BARTLEY (1976) Five books for reading at Christmas or otherwise: George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia, to understand that intellectual disillusion with the left is nothing new...
...Larry King's nightly TV (CNN) and radio (Mutual) shows are watched and listened to by na million Americans...
...its tedium testifies to its solidity...
...The most recent additions to my list include Martin Amis's London Fields (1989), a book that I'm sure I'll enjoy as much as his new Time's Arrow (1991), if only I get around to reading them...
...I will therefore go to the next highest level: Conservatism: Dream or Reality, by Robert Nisbet...
...Bayard Rustin is chairman of the A. Philip Randolph Institute...
...How about cross-dressing profs who teach children's...
...Don't be fooled by your alma mater's "Potemkin Village" attempt to lovingly recreate your college years during reunion weekend...
...Pryce-Jones/Corruption (Continued from page 28) gress...
...Texas...
...Although it is an uneven collection of essays, I do not hesitate to recommend this anthology because it contains a brilliantly argueddefense of the role of trade unions in American society by Tom Kahn, who serves as Assistant to AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland...
...there is no point in offending TAS readers' tender sensibilities...
...Still, they ought to learn something or what's the point...
...Schandler...
...Wodehouse, who is to tired eyes what Mozart is to the tired ear...
...Representative from the 3ist District, Buffalo, New York...
...For insight into another department of our unsatisfactory existence, turn to Theodore Caplow's definitive statement of the reasons why programs of social betterment fail of their object and waste our money...
...For a mere $30, AIA will bring you monthly updates on some of this country's worst PC offenders, including inspiring testimonies from students and educators who have decided to fight back...
...September, by Rosamund Pincher...
...Nancy Reagan, the former first lady, is the author of My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan...
...When, at the end of the day, I cast around blearily for something to read for pleasure, I usually end up with old favorites, books grown so familiar over the years that I can continue "reading" them through the first mists of sleep...
...We have always welcomed Democrats' recommendations at Christmas time, even when it means enduring some unconstructive criticism from the likes of the late Erwin Knoll of the Progressive...
...history courses delivering fawning tributes to Oliver Stone...
...Mencken, or any other of the master's works, to perceive the difference between the real thing and the labored imitations that often appear in The American Spectator...
...He explains in his own excellent English why in proportion to our help from gadgets and machines those of us from whose calm contemplation the world might conceivably benefit are driven like squirrels in a wheelcage...
...The change: full-time politicians have driven out part-timers...
...Revel strongly supports democratic freedom, and his book is concerned to correct the weaknesses democracies are sometimes prone to...
...The American Spectator • December r997 83 your enemy and one ally who is your rival to defeat one enemy who will be your ally...
...For those like me I recommend the following books of information...
...Will whoever has my copy please return it...
...NORMAN MAILER (1985) I don't feel up to ransacking these old brains so will content myself with listing two books that gave me great pleasure this summer, The Stories of-John Cheever and M.R...
...Stained Glass, by William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Like the phone book, without commercials...
...For all the reasons ever given...
...Philosopher at Large by Mortimer J. Adler...
...The president faces trial or impeachment, the Speaker of the House is fined even for somewhat technical corruption, and state governors and senators who break the law go to jail...
...William J. Casey is director of the Central Intelligence Agency...
...For the music, the magic, and the laughter...
...All Russia is divided into three environments, that of the Gulag Archipelago, that of the people, and that of the elite who live, dine, and wine off the people...
...Until age 36, I didn't do much except read and write...
...I can pass up his New York Times column with the greatest of ease, so Growing Up was published and hit the best-seller list without my even noticing it...
...Florence King's essays on American life, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, will soon be followed by a companion volume, Lump It or Leave It...
...Boy, wac wrong...
...student journalists being drummed out of their jobs for daring to criticize ebonics...
...Honor, for one...
...Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman...
...This study, commissioned by the League for Industrial Democracy well in advance of the Polish strikes, is an examination of the status of workers' rights in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Eastern and Western Europe...
...A. M. Rosenthal is former executive editor of and columnist for the New York Times...
...Begin with It Was Like This (1949) or A Quiet Neighborhood (1947...
...Finally, Wlady has gathered the historic recommendations of some of the artists, scholars, and public figures we have admired...
...Handwriting: A Key to Personality by Klara G. Roman...
...BAYARD RUSTIN (198o) The Declining Significance of Race by William Julius Wilson...
...Montaigne's Selected Essays...
...Hello Transgendered Studies, goodbye Western Civ...
...Clare Boothe Luce is an editor, playwright, author, and former congresswoman and ambassador...
...Safire's Political Dictionary, by William Safire (1978...
...I call him unique, because I want to claim Robert Nisbet as an historian, despite his willingness to consort with sociologists and to be known as one of them...
...For those confused by PBS's fictional account of this case, this is the antidote...
...Finally, perennially, Plato's Republic and the Bible...
...Stone (the 1976 reissue containing the author's thirty-years-later afterword), to gain some (Continued on page So) Attention Alums...
...PRISCILLA L. BUCKLEY (1983) Russell Baker is not my favorite humorist, not by a long shot...
...Any informed discussion of the problems of the "culture of poverty" must begin with this book as its basis...
...Updike can write but hasn't got much to say...
...From my view, Adams in the long run had the greater half-truth than his dear friend Jefferson did, and it is my guess that he will come into his own in the next decade...
...Everybody should...
...The Shell Seekers, by Rosamund Pincher...
...Walter Goodman is a member of the editorial board of the New York Times...
...The lilt and the language of it is just my style...
...Whitewater, Mena Airport, the Rose Law Firm and other issues related to the Clintons are a murky complex of cutting corners, cronyism, and inexplicable death, apparently beyond accountability...
...ERWIN KNOLL (1984) I'm grateful for the invitation to contribute to TAS's roundup of Christmas book recommendations, and I've been giving the assignment careful thought...
...In composing the brief list that follows, I've tried to avoid the preachy and didactic...
...Orwell is important not because he tells us what to think (anyone can do that) but because he tells us how to think...
...A distillation of the wisdom, eloquence, and wit of the greatest minds in western history—all in one hefty volume...
...The Holy Bible...
...Another of my great loves in reading and literature are any and all books about art and artists from the "West" of Frederic Remington to the "East" of Jackson Pollock...
...Erwin Knoll is editor of the Progressive...
...A novel that follows a true American hero from the Mexican border wars of 1916 through World War Two, with an epilogue in Vietnam...
...Jean Francois Revel, a French socialist, has just published How Democracies Perish in translation...
...Eisenhower: At War, 1943-1945, by David Eisenhower...
...from the war on poverty to the avoidance of war itself...
...For those who want to understand the Irish in America, rather than to hate them, or regard them as clowns, this book is basic...
...The author of this penetrating and loving examination of the Southern mindset, circa 1938, committed suicide before the book was published, ostensibly because he feared the criticism of his fellow Southerners...
...Best Loved Poems of the American People, edited by Hazel Felleman — ideal for preparation of speeches and instruction of young people...
...Forget, meanwhile, the argument about whether Orwell was a man of the left or the right...
...50 December 19 9 7 • The American Spectator Yankees at the Court: The First Americans in Paris, by Susan Mary Alsop — how covert assistance from France enabled George Washington with a few thousand contras to defeat the strongest army in the world...
...Otherwise our holy days become nothing but marketing ploys...
...He is one of the world's profoundest psychologists of history (read also his Last European War), which is not the same as a psycho-historian (again: less modish...
...In many ways old Henry deserved the damage done by the Ford Foundation, but the rest of us should have been spared...
...ALLAN BLOOM (198o) A cautionary tale for our season: Telford Taylor's Munich...
...Add to these selections the increasing flow of materials from TAS, and the growing number of centers, institutions, think-tanks, which provide islands of sanity in a "Don't Worry—Be Happy" world...
...The age of the books did not matter...
...That's not the problem, Wolfe bawled...
...Toward Social Hope (1975) is again a small book...
...War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy...
...The most illuminating analysis of the "issues" I know— a remarkable and prophetic masterpiece that argues that capitalism will fail because of its remarkable successes, not its shortcomings...
...Not much contemporary stuff can hold me more than loo pages...
...Newspaper Days, by H.L...
...It goes with the territory, but now that I have slipped into minority status I should have a little more time to dabble in the pleasure of recreational reading...
...For the matchless literary style, his understanding of the human condition, and his treatment of the struggle between loyalty and love...
...A recent Roper poll found that 68 percent of voters believe that politics is more influenced by special interest money than twenty years ago, and over half those polled thought that special interests controlled the federal government...
...Finally, you give to children and imaginative parents the Chronicles of Namia by C. S. Lewis and Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame...
...As soon as my wife writes her next novel I will recommend that one too...
...Dean Herbert London's Why Are They Lying to Our Children...
...It sounded imprecise and not very interesting at all...
...I defy any human to put this book down...
...How TV is undermining democracy by converting what should be serious discussion into show business...
...VICTOR LASKY (1984) Political Pilgrims, by Paul Hollander...
...Wind in the Willows is a classic, of course, but try the 1980 Holt Rinehart and Winston hardcover, illustrated by Michael Hague...
...Leo Rosten is author most recently ofHooray for Yiddish...
...My favorites for "dipping" purposes: The Poetry of Robert Frost, collected by Edward C. Lath-em...
...This profound book aroused a great deal of controversy in civil rights circles when it was first published in 1978...
...The Liberal Crack-Up, by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Perkins assented and 82 December 19 97 • The American Spectator the furious scribbler started making a pile—novels, biography, assorted non-fiction...
...Or The Brothers Karamazov, ditto...
...Admittedly imperfect and cumbersome, the system nonetheless secures through primaries and subsequent elections genuine representation, and the separation of powers which is the best policing of corruption...
...It is must reading for all leaders and would-be leaders in the 80 December 19 97 • The American Spectator Western world...
...JESSE HELMS (199o) How about these five...
...CLARE BOOTHE LUCE (1977) Here are the seven that I found profitable in 1977: Great Treasury of Western Thought...
...The Russians by Hedrick Smith...
...Apart from the obvious respect this collection will evoke for Netanyahu, who died while liberating a hundred hostages in the famous Entebbe raid, these letters also reveal a great deal of thought about our world and offer an unforgettable image of a philosopher and soldier...
...3. They must be written by a friend or relative...
...Herbert Spencer, Whistler, Gauguin, Pissarro, died...
...Mark Helprin is most recently the author of Winter's Tale...
...Priscilla L. Buckley is managing editor of National Review...
...JOHN CORRY (1986) There is no question about what books to give for Christmas...
...I recommend Ukridge, a collection of stories equal to, if less familiar than, the delightful Jeeves...
...I have a copier in my study, I thought...
...Then modulate to the short study, The Harried Leisure Class (1970), by the Swedish economist and member of parliament Staffan B. Linder...
...Baker's first chapter, a visit to his aged mother in a nursing home—she tells him, querulously, that he, this middle-aged stranger, is not her son Russell...
...literature...
...Michener is America's prose laureate and this time he has written a book as big, sprawling, and fascinating as its subject matter...
...No theorizing, but the story is fascinating...
...A prolonged ad for the phone company, with lots of pictures of Bell, Watson, and antique phones...
...Then I also love Rudyard Kipling...
...Yet, I have no one to blame but myself—and yet they send me home at night with a "full bale of stuff...
...The New Testament—the majestic language of the old Douay version inspires in a way that modern texts, like those in the Jerusalem Bible, for example, cannot match...
...As a one-time Navy aviator I found this a real page-turner...
...I leave [my last] recommendation open, for even the reader should be allowed to exercise his free will and revolt against any recommendations...
...Cheever was the discovery...
...Self-Portrait of a Hero: The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu (1963-1976...
...She again illustrates the same ability...
...WILLIAM J. BENNETT (1979) The Federalist: Everybody nods to mention of it but hardly anybody reads it, especially in the schools...
...History's Carnival by Leonid Plyushch...
...Please forgive me for recommending only one book, but it is 4,987 pages long, which means that most people will not be able to finish it at one sitting, even those terribly irritating souls who are so fond of telling you (and I think of this as a disease) that they started a book when they went to bed and stayed up all night with it until the end...
...In Exile from the Land of Snows, by John F. Avedon...
...RICHARD M. SCAIFE (1988) Something old: I've always enjoyed anything by John O'Hara and, from time to time, go back and re-read him...
...5. A Turtle on a Fencepost, by Allan C. Emery...
...In fact, you almost have to be a full-timer at the state and national level (often at the local, too) or you won't get elected and stay elected...
...The congressional committees investigating illegal Democratic Party funding have evidence that access to the president is valuable and expensive, as in Moscow...
...We have a new governing class...
...I am enjoying a book called Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry...
...Julian Simon and the late Herman Kahn's The Resourceful Earth is a magnificent answer to the "small is beautiful" syndrome...
...John Cony is the nonfiction television critic of the New York Times...
...A must for political junkies...
...they show that resources are becoming more plentiful and the world is becoming less crowded as more land becomes habitable and arable...
...I don't think any young person should grow up without reading Mark Twain, and Huck Finn is a delightful start...
...the Sixth Zionist Congress refused an offer for a homeland in South Africa...
...by Rachel Stein Epstein and Nina Liebman, and Washington Bedtime Stories, by Herbert Stein as the three top books of 1986...
...My congressional colleague, Newt Gingrich, has just offered Window of Opportunity (St...
...My fondness for underlining really nasty sentences is more than satisfied by Reflections 52 December 1997 • The American Spectator of a Russian Statesman, by Konstantin Pobedonostsev...
...Boetfinger...
...Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, by Joseph Schumpeter...
...I wasn't sure what he was getting at...
...The book is 53o pages of diagrams, equations, and some words...
...the list is indisputable...
...Especially since the author, a former Soviet officer and a born writer, has saturated his account with black humor and some very vivid scenes...
...The Perkins library was awash with books, and Wolfe a prodigious reader, asked his soon-to-become-legendary editor if he could borrow a few...
...Elementary nothing...
...Thus my modest suggestions for a Christmas book list...
Vol. 30 • December 1997 • No. 12
