Books for Christmas
This is the background image for an unknown creator of an OCR page with image plus hidden text. BOOKS for CHRISTMAS Our annual list of holiday gift suggestions from distinguished readers and...
...In the latter category, Marquis James's 1 939 Life ofAndrew Jackson, while perhaps not the "definitive" biography, is surely among the most readable ever written—about a truly heroic American as great as Washington as a man, leader, and warrior, if not as a president...
...Conquests and Cultures (Basic Books) is a highly original survey of what happens when one people subjects another to its cultural domination, written with great knowledge and assurance by Thomas Sowell, America's greatest living philosopher-historian...
...Corelli's Mandolin (1994), by Louis de Bemieres...
...For a brief and tough-minded critique of Theodore Roosevelt's neo-imperialism and Woodrow Wilson's internationalism, which makes the case for an America First "Continentalism" that may— after some debacles and tragedies—become U.S...
...He was also a womanizer on a scale which makes Clinton look very amateurish, but, unlike Clinton, he really liked women and understood them, and enhanced their lives...
...While the writing style is decidedly upscale, and frequently requires college-level reading skills, Judge Bork's treatise remains the best road map for understanding American society on the dawn of the twenty-first century...
...A fine and thorough account of a formidable but flawed political giant...
...Were all American histories used in our colleges written as well, our people would not be so broadly uninformed as to the glory and greatness—and follies—of America's past...
...The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement, 1945-1995, by Robert J. Samuelson, and The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass, by Myron Magnet, each provide food for thought and discussion...
...The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame...
...The essay "The Intellectuals and Socialism" is the most perceptive look at the adversary culture, outside of Von Mises's The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, that I have ever seen...
...An Experiment in Criticism, one of Lewis's less wellknown books, is a cogent inquiry into the principles that should inform literary criticism...
...Terry Eastland is publisher of TAS...
...STEPHEN HESS The madness of World War I is the fitting subject of English novelist Pat Barker's riveting trilogy...
...I wound up giving my copy away...
...Patrick J. Buchanan, co-host of CNN's "Crossfire," is author of The Great Betrayal: How American Sovereignty and Social Justice Are Being Sacrificed to the Gods of the Global Economy (Little, Brown...
...Three of these are sermons, so here you can see the preacher in Lewis, and the preacher is excellent indeed...
...instead we get Resenters who call themselves feminists, Marxists, New Historicists, Deconstructors —the usual rabblement...
...Two memoirs that I truly would never have read without the help of friends and which gave me new insights into language are Lost in Translation, by Eva Hoffman, and The French Lesson, by Alice Kaplan...
...I still enjoy books about history, especially Texas history: The Raven: A Biography of Sam Houston, by Marquis James, is one of my favorites...
...She has written six books starring Commissario Brunetti, including Death at La Fenice and The Death of Faith...
...A wonderful treat if you don't know her work...
...Johnson, Hazlitt, and A.C...
...And, of course, our seventeen grandchildren would be disappointed if I did not include How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Littlest Angel on the list of must reading...
...It is a beautifully written story...
...I give interpretations of all the plays, centering upon Shakespeare's invention of personality as we continue to know it...
...December 19 9 8 The American Spectator...
...His analysis of "the age of assaultive politics" that led to Watergate is worth recalling as the president, a son of that era, faces impeachment...
...3.Boy Clinton, by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...I also like studying forces that helped shape today's economy and social structure...
...foreign policy by default early in the new century, let me commend A Foreign Policy for America (194o), by Charles A. Beard...
...His books include Energy in the Executive and Ethics, Politics, and the Independent Counsel...
...Susan Estrich, a nationally syndicated columnist, teaches law and political science at the University of Southern California...
...Robert Remini, who has written so well about Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, has brought it off again with his Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (Norton...
...Required reading for all who seek to understand the debate concerning impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton...
...By re-establishing the culture of Western democracy in its actual historical development, he provides insights into the contemporary culture wars that no one else has...
...People actually stopped me when I was reading this book to tell me how good it was...
...DAVID HOROWITZ From Plato to NATO, by David Gress, is a brilliant history of the Western idea, which is currently under assault from the left...
...And the highest morality almost always is the morality of process...
...Paul Johnson's most recent book is A History of the American People (HarperCollins...
...Lewis, given that this is the moth anniversary of his birth...
...Bickel's thoughts defy easy summary, but they confront both the ethically challenged in the White House and their critics...
...congressman from Georgia...
...Orrin G. Hatch is the senior senator from Utah...
...Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which he had to write for money, and I had to read for the Mayor's book club, lucky for me...
...For one overview of U.S...
...His book is ultimately addressed to especially evangelical churches, which in his (I think correct) view have absorbed many of the corruptions of the culture...
...3 December 19 98 • The American Spectator This is the background image for an unknown creator of an OCR page with image plus hidden text...
...Speaking of moral chaos, David Wells's Losing Our Virtue, out this year from William B. Eerdmans, is an excellent analysis of morally adrift postmodern man (and woman...
...They start digging in Moscow's KGB files and end knocking on a door in Cambridge, England, where they coax a virtual confession from Ted Hall, an American who delivered atomic secrets to the Soviets...
...PATRICK J. BUCHANAN TERRY EASTLAND In the course of writing a book on foreign policy, I have come across scores of useful volumes, some of which were also delightful...
...ORRIN G. HATCH I highly recommend the recently released novel The Locket, by fellow Utahn Richard Paul Evans...
...David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, is author most recently of The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America's Future (Free Press...
...Wells, of GordonConwell Theological Seminary, is one of the few outstanding theologians worthy of the title...
...By critiquing what he calls the Grand Narrative of Western liberalism, he shows how and why it folded so easily into leftism in the postwar period...
...Avery well-known Lewis book—and one worth rereading in our ongoing era of moral chaos— is The Abolition ofMan, published in 1943 and still the best argument in behalf of objective morality...
...A few more of my favorite books for children are: Sarah's Flag for Texas, by Jane Alexander Knapik...
...PAUL JOHNSON Graham Robb's Victor Hugo (Picador) is the best biography of a literary hero I have read in years...
...James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl...
...2. Rising Tide, by John M. Barry...
...There is nothing half so good in French...
...e",';'Lt HAROLD BLOOM As an archaic New Deal Democrat, not much esteemed by your American Spectator reviewers, I will be audacious enough to recommend my Shakespeare: The Intention of the Human, which was published October 26 by Riverhead Books of Penguin Putnam (75o pages, $35...
...It is also a fine meditation on good reading, "the necessary condition" of which, he reminds, is "to get ourselves out of the way...
...My gift for my Jewish women friends...
...Bradley...
...Hugo was one of the most creative people who has ever lived and, like many imaginative writers, a bit of a fraud too...
...GEORGE W. BUSH When I was growing up, I preferred reading biographies about historical figures and baseball players...
...Still the definitive work on understanding who Bill Clinton is and why he does the things he does...
...4. Without Honor, by Jerry Zeifman...
...Almost forgot politics, so I should mention Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, our greatest political novel...
...BOB BARR I am delighted and honored to have you solicit my recommendations for Christmas books for the upcoming season: Slouching Towards Gomorrah, by Robert H. Bork...
...Shakespeare particularly suffers from this nonsense: Our students are given "French Shakespeare"—the abominable Foucault...
...diplomacy and foreign policy that can be read and enjoyed at a chapter a night, I would recommend Robert H. Ferrell's 1959 American Diplomacy: A History...
...Here is the start of chapter four, with Jack Burden narrating the origins of this bit of oppo research: "[The Boss] said to me, 'There is always something.' And I said, 'Maybe not on the Judge.' And he said, 'Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud...
...Fellow mystery fans, discover Donna Leon, an American living in Italy, where Venice is the scene of her crimes...
...My favorite novel of the last two years is Philip Roth's American Pastoral, which confronts the American fifties with the radical sixties and is more ruthless in its rejection of the latter than anything even Peter Collier and I have written...
...Be sure to start with Regeneration, the first and best of the three, even though The Ghost Road won a Booker Prize...
...Thoroughly overlooked by conservative critics, it will make a satisfying gift for any conservative reader...
...Love Invents Us (1997), by Amy Bloom...
...We cannot survive a politics of moral attack," he wrote...
...Finally, I recommend Alexander Bickel's The Morality of Consent, published posthumously in 1975...
...I imagine many contributors will name Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, proving not only that it is a holiday staple, but also that its message continues to be important for our time...
...At a time of year when family relationships and the legacies of our elders mean so much, this book will be especially heartwarming...
...They are hard to come by (some are only published in London), but worth the effort From fiction to fact...
...For a change of pace, this book, which chronicles the massive changes to American society as a result of the massive Mississippi Flood of 1927, makes for an extremely interesting and reliable historical study...
...An education in itself...
...Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling...
...The real rush to judgment, and the crystal brilliance of what a legal mind can do...
...He comes vividly to life in this excellent book...
...Laura and I often read to our daughters when they were young...
...Both came out first in 1997...
...My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George...
...Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is author most recently of The Little Book of Campaign Etiquette (Brookings...
...My book is intended to dismiss all this, and instead address the common reader and common playgoer, returning us to the concern with Shakespeare's characters of Dr...
...BOOKS for CHRISTMAS Our annual list of holiday gift suggestions from distinguished readers and writers...
...The American Spectator • December 1998 Anything by C.S...
...Read Bombshell, by foreign correspondents Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstell...
...One of their top requests was The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle...
...Bob Barr is a U.S...
...There is always something.' And he told me to dig it out, dig it up, the dead cat with patches of fur still clinging to the tight swollen, dove-gray hide...
...Kaaterskill Falls (1998), by Allegra Goodman...
...Another less well-known work of Lewis is The Weight of Glory, a collection of five addresses that was first published in 1949...
...To round out the reading list, I commend two books of essays on the consequences of Wilsonism and imperialism, over which Americans might ponder, as we go marching into the New World Order: The Costs of War, John Denson, editor...
...Literary study, as you know, no longer exists in Anglo-American academies...
...Our capacity for discovery is never lost as long as we continue to read...
...George W. Bush is governor of Texas...
...SUSAN ESTRICH Royal Blood: Richard III and the Mystery ofthe Princes (1998), by Bertram Fields...
...and The Failure of America's Foreign Wars, published by the Future of Freedom Foundation in Fairfax, Virginia...
...0 Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and Berg Professor of English at New York University...
...Tuck Everlasting, by Natalie Babbitt...
...A great stocking-stuffer is The Glory ofTheir Times, Lawrence Ritter's account of the early days of major league baseball as told through the recollections of some old men who were there...
...Friedrich Hayek's Socialism and War (volume ten of the Collected Works published by the University of Chicago Press...
Vol. 31 • December 1998 • No. 12
