Book of Christmas: Our annual list of holiday gift suggestions from distinguished readers and writers
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Books for Christmas Our annual list of holiday gift suggestions from distinguished readers and writers ELLIOTT BANFIELD Lately I've been reading C. S. Lewis's primer on theology, Mere...
...You can't read a line of Mencken's with-out pleasure and profit...
...The Churchillian flourishes about odds in the Germans' favor of "seven or eight to one," which he knew to be useful nonsense, are replaced by well-researched facts...
...Lewis is a clean and sober writer who has made his case in book after book, building his reputation as our finest scholar on the Middle East...
...STEVE CHAPMAN Thoroughbred trainer Bob Baffert once observed, "Nobody ever asks you if you won the Preakness...
...after she was insufficiently hostile about the McCarthy hearings, she was struck from the college canon...
...His fantasy about annexing California for the Crown is alone worth the price of admission...
...But I much prefer the landlubber Richard Sharpe, whose career in the British army is chronicled by Bernard Cornwall in 17 novels, from his first battle at the Siege of Seringapatam in India in 1799 through the Peninsular campaign, Waterloo, and Napoleon's second exile...
...The Pursuit Of The Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages by Norman Cohn...
...The result is breathtaking, and the book should be on the "must read" list...
...Peter Schweizer, Reagan's War, The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism...
...MATTHEW SCULLY The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush by David Frum...
...Even though it is out in paperback, buy the hardcover for a classier presentation: Last Man Standing by David Baldacci...
...representative to the United Nations, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and co-founder of Empower America...
...Literally, a book that changed my thinking from the day I read it forward...
...This activity is somewhat like traditional reading, but it overcomes the drawbacks of books...
...That it does all this and at the same time manages to be laugh-out-loud funny is nothing short of a miracle...
...This family favorite is essential reading for judges, prosecutors, and police officers who wonder what went wrong with our laws of search and seizure...
...Rich Karlgaard is the publisher of Forbes magazine...
...But I'm not much of a reader: I prefer to surf the www...
...one shudders to think what regulators, litigators, and ambitious pols would have done with Field today after his initial failures...
...Barnett, the highly regarded Boston University law professor, has written a comprehensive yet eminently readable guide to constitutional thought from a natural rights perspective...
...Timothy Noah writes the "Chatterbox" column for Slate.com...
...Not surprisingly he insists on calling his hero "Raleigh," as do many Americans, including North Carolinians, whose state capital, Raleigh, is named after him...
...RET's books include Public Nuisances, The Liberal Crack-Up, and Boy Clinton...
...Also The Discoverers, by Daniel Boorstin...
...Those of us who have prospered from it, which is to say practically every American, should read this book to find out how the fat years can continue...
...Two, it was a chance to exercise a secret pleasure I share with NASCAR drivers, snowmobile owners, and other real Americans—converting fossil fuel into noise...
...The newsroom that we never knew, but still miss...
...That's right up there with Voltaire's "To succeed in this world it is not enough to be stupid...
...Obst was at the center of the biggest stories of the two decades and was literary agent to authors who changed our lives (Woodward and Bernstein being the most sensational...
...In a nut-shell, Boaz has written the single most authoritative book on the single most provocative political philosophy...
...Books for Christmas Our annual list of holiday gift f suggestions from distinguished readers and writers ELLIOTT BANFIELD Lately I've been reading C. S. Lewis's primer on theology, Mere Christianity...
...A collection of essays from the complete series is now available in one volume, Prejudices: A Selection...
...Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos by Robert Kaplan...
...In my judgment, Epstein is among the 58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 nation's great essayists, and this book follows a long line of distinguished and entertaining volumes...
...Many were not in good health...
...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 55 LAUGH FAIRCLOTH Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen E. Ambrose...
...It won't make sense to a non-"Soprano"-head so stick to fans, and even if they can't boil water, it's a fun read...
...The book is a useful reminder that great advances are fraught with risks for those who finance them...
...Now, many swear by the nineteen-book Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian that painstakingly details the naval wars between Napoleonic France and England...
...STUART REID The miracle of the modern, secular Christmas (and that's the last time I'll use the C-word, promise...
...Second is Norman Podhoretz's The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are...
...Chief Justice Rehnquist once asked how it happened that modern Fourth Amendment law "brought to bear in favor of accused murderers and armed robbers, a rule which had previously been largely an application to bootleggers and purveyors of stolen lottery tickets...
...DANIEL PIPES Books on Middle Eastern and Islamic topics have enjoyed a special prominence this past year, thanks to the war on terror, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the expected military campaign against Iraq...
...This fun thriller provides a nice change of pace...
...The fact, as Weigel boldly asserts, is that if the Church is to survive, she needs to be more conservative, not less...
...Author Steven Saylor crafts clever murder mysteries around actual cases, and some of the dialogue in the cases comes from actual court testimony—as recorded by Cicero...
...Perfectly timed to address the expanded "post-imperial" requirements of the United States in a sullen, jealous, and unruly world, the author has made the case that, far from being anomalous, small wars have had a decisive and positive effect upon our history—and we've fought them effectively...
...Call me mad, if you like, but here's what I think: The Church in America is full of sodomy, heresy, and disobedience because, after the Council, Rome ditched the ancient Latin rite and replaced it with 60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 a sentimental service of praise and thanksgiving, conducted by a minister facing the "People of God" and speaking in the vernacular...
...A balm for hard times and a book for the ages...
...I found Geoghegan's idealization of his client somewhat irritating (the kid surely deserved some jail time), and readers of this magazine will probably find it more so...
...Montague Brown is an immensely civilized man who gave loyally a large chunk of his life to this very amusing monument...
...A kick in the rear for defeatists, cowards, and German chancellors who embody both of the preceding character traits...
...I couldn't resist a book that begins, "These are, I should warn you, the words of a dead man...
...It tells the parallel stories of two protagonists, a contemporary academic lost in mourning for his late wife, a beautiful actress, and a 19th-century ancestor whose loss of religious faith bitterly estranges him from his wife and children...
...There are great characters, solid plotting, requisite violence, and rich detail...
...No effing ziti...
...Read this book and you'll see why...
...Happy Holidays, and may all your loved ones survive 2003...
...I can only hope that 2003 reading proves to be as rewarding as what preceded it...
...voluntary exchange...
...An The Man Who Would be King...
...For the Foodies and Mob-Obsessed in your life: The Soprano Family Cookbook...
...CONRAD BLACK Because I've done a lot of research on Franklin D. Roosevelt in the last year, my selection is from that general field...
...On the Churchill scene let me suggest something old and some-thing new...
...FICA, who takes so much of one's first paycheck...
...What Went Wrong...
...Horse of a Different Color: A Tale of Breeding Geniuses, Dominant Females and the Fastest Derby Winner Since Secretariat tells how James Squires, fired as editor of the Chicago Tribune in 1990, embarked on a new career breeding horses on a Kentucky farm and achieved a distinction that makes the Pulitzer Prize look inconsequential...
...Cross-roads of Freedom: Antietam by James M. McPherson skillfully recounts the political, social, and military events leading up to the Civil War's most pivotal battle, as well as the battle itself (the loss-es vastly exceeded those of September 11) and its momentous after-math as Lincoln decided he could issue the Emancipation Proclamation...
...The original self-help book...
...imagine a self-effacing, much more intellectually nimble Michael Moore...
...Mind you, it would take a brave priest to say Mass in the old rite in a Jesuit seminary, with his back to the congregation and wearing a lace alb...
...HERBERT LONDON Christmas book recommendations are like vendor handouts: rarely are they read and most often they end up in a trash barrel...
...And in the Christmas gift-giving business, if you can hook a sibling or parent on a particular series, you have solved the question of what to buy them for Christmas and birthdays for several years to come...
...Norman's prodigious output is nothing short of dazzling...
...Some are shocked by Mr...
...What goes around comes around...
...Roger Kimball serves up essays as platters of tasty intellectual morsels...
...All the macho techno-thriller stuff is here in spades...
...But pick any of Lewis's books from the shelves, from any year, and you will not be disappointed...
...Then he developed the entire east coast of Florida...
...Matthew Scully, a speechwriter in both Bush administrations, is author of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy...
...Few have doubted Kipling's literary genius, but for much of the twentieth century progressive opinion has caricatured him as a racist and a militarist...
...The relations among terNOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57 rorism, human rights, and peace—part of the American Enterprise Institute's Essential Essays series...
...56 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 LUCIANNE GOLDBERG For an aunt, your mom, or an older female friend whose remote is frozen on PBS...
...The Battle of Britain: The Myth and the Reality by Richard Overy, 54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 is another thin but groundbreaking book...
...The story has been told before, but Zimmermann tells it with great zest and fairness...
...The Old Limey by H. W. Crocker III...
...Web London, a member of the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team, finds himself the sole survivor of a botched drug raid and takes off to find the bad guys...
...A wonderful critique of the economy under Ronald Reagan...
...Here's the answer for the perpetual Christmas question: What should I get Dad...
...The books' hero, Gordianus the Finder, is the Roman precursor to Sherlock Holmes...
...His analysis of voting patterns is interestingly presented amidst an impressive array of great and small facts, such as that Woody Guthrie wrote and sang the famous song "This Land Is Your Land" in support of the Roosevelt candidacy for a third term in 1940...
...Another "golden oldie...
...A nice Christmas present for someone not quite sure of his/her intellectual status...
...Perhaps Sean Connery or Michael Caine for the title role, updating their heroic Victorian soldiers from past movies such as The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin...
...Where else are you going to see Indian self-sufficiency debunked...
...Also, A Train of Pow-der...
...He covers its history, its philosophic foundations, and the libertarian future...
...Here he is, in 1917, on the soldier in the guard room howling and weeping and beating his chest: And, all because his brother had gone west, Raved at the bleeding war...
...The Arab Mind by Raphael Patai...
...Fabulous at articulating doctrine behind Falklands...
...Books don't answer your questions...
...Great reading too...
...Best coming-of-age book I've ever read...
...I have been dipping again into the second series of H. L. Mencken's Prejudices...
...To remind yourself that war can be a lot more deadly and chaotic than even Black Hawk Down managed to suggest, turn, as I have been doing lately, to Siegried Sassoon: The War Poems, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis...
...CNN's Cold War series, for the footage...
...The book benefits from sources in six languages and is the first account to rely on recently opened state archives, which provide his account with the previously unknown inside story, including a number of scoops...
...But it shows, from an insider's unique vantage point, the squabbles within the official family, such as that between Thomas Corcoran and Felix Frankfurter...
...Okay, really lastly, Why the Left Hates America by Daniel J. Flynn is a wonderful book documenting that with the collapse of the Soviet Union and socialism, the American left is left alone with its one motivating idea: hatred of America...
...In horse racing, there is only one important race: the one run on the first Saturday of May in Louisville...
...Bob Tyrrell has invited me to join this admirable band...
...To take only one example, Kipling was perfectly aware of the foibles of his fellow Anglo-Indians, and he often paid tribute to the nobility of ordinary Indians...
...Steve Chapman is a columnist for The Chicago Tribune...
...West recognized the link between Nazism and Stalinism and paid for it...
...Some suffered syphilis...
...If he isn't a thriller buff, he just doesn't know it, because this will change his mind...
...Augustine to Key West had his imprint on it, to great profit and comfort for the citizenry...
...Man's Search for MeaningbyViktor E. Frankl...
...He was instrumental in putting Standard Oil together, but he also had an especial understanding of shipping, which allowed Standard Oil to gain control of the rail-roads at an enormous profit...
...Well, this delightful album makes up for it...
...This book is, in a sense, a return to his study of religious thought, albeit his analysis combines literary criticism with deep historical understanding...
...But two law professors, Daniel Farber of the University of Minnesota and Suzanna Sherry of Vanderbilt, have written a clear and concise volume that makes the major issues intelligible while offering a piercing critique of grand constitutional theories of both the right and the left...
...Fourth is Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong...
...Although millenarian, apocalyptic thought appears in virtually every culture (in times of great systemic stress), it appears especially virulent in monotheist religions...
...Anyone who wants to understand libertarianism—the political philosophy that embraces private property, free markets, individual rights, and limited government—must read this powerful book by David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute...
...First published over four decades ago, this splendid intellectual achievement has never been out of print...
...And let us not forget the most engaging of the historians still around, Paul Johnson...
...Flashman is a cad, a rake, a poltroon, and coward who tries to flee danger only to appear the perfect hero to those around him...
...Tuck it into an inexpensive basket of soaps and bath powder and treat her to a vicarious, bawdy time-capsule trip to Victorian England: The Crimson Pedal and the White by Michael Faber may at first repulse, then rivet...
...Fascinating history too...
...A persuasive new account of how a conviction politician who knows what he wants to achieve can rise to the apex of American politics and change the world...
...But Weigel is a good and honest man, and he has written a book conservative Catholics should have on their shelves...
...David somehow manages to be both modest and brilliant, and this first book from the second Bush administration is certain to be insightful, witty, and masterfully written...
...Lauch Faircloth has served in the U. S. Senate and is considered amongst Clinton diehards to be one of the founders of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy...
...he warned the country with his 1994 PBS documentary, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59 Jihad in America...
...Each book is based on solid history and a wonderful re-creation of the collapsing Roman Republic...
...The Death of the West by Patrick J. Buchanan, impressed me, as Buchanan's stuff always does...
...The way Crocker breaks up the text with Nigel's occasional day-dreams is inspired...
...He begins his story ruing his forced departure from journalism and ends it with a theological rumination—wondering why God has chosen to reward his family in such an extravagant way...
...Last, is Roger Kimball's Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence...
...Finally let me recommend Judge David Sentelle's Judge Dave and the Rainbow People, an amusing and thoughtful chronicle of this conservative judge's amiable confrontation with a pack of aging hippies who want to experience nature in the North Carolina out-back despite the laws of the land—the judge kept the law but left rather liking these 1960s deadbeats...
...H. W. Crocker has pulled off one of the hardest (yet most underrated) challenges in fiction: to write a satirical novel that is both funny and well plotted...
...The writer, well known to conservatives, has Tom Wolfe's eye for status competition with a prose style dryer than $40 gin...
...No End of a Lesson, 1980s editorials by the late Charles Douglas-Home of the London Times...
...For the Baby-Boomer-Media-Junkie on your list, whether they are a Wing-Nut or Weary-Liberal, here's a golden oldie that was grossly overlooked when it was published in 1998: Too Good to Be Forgotten: Changing America in the '60s and '70s by David Obst...
...Not the most pleasant holiday reading, but a model of good reporting and a truthful account of human industry unhinged from human conscience...
...Iraq is "undoubtedly on the precipice of nuclear power," Hamza recently said, and he will have "between three to five nuclear weapons by 2005") Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia and author most recently of Militant Islam Reaches America...
...Ben Stein should give one to his son...
...Paul Johnson's succinct biography of Napoleon makes clear the Corsi-can was the prototype of the twentieth-century totalitarian...
...Trevelyan has traveled in Ralegh's footsteps in the Americas as well as Spain and Ireland (where he was a merciless "Planter" of Protestant settlers), and his book is full of curious new information...
...Another fine biography is Sir Walter Raleigh by Raleigh Trevelyan, who is distantly connected to the great man...
...Ambrose has written an interesting and exacting account of the Lewis & Clark Expedition...
...As readers of this magazine know, Paul never makes that blunder...
...The disparity between Western and Middle Eastern cultures is laid out in provocative and incisive detail...
...The book's critics have attacked it rabidly, but have yet to refute it...
...This book gives the complete story of an enormously colorful businessman's life, most notably his empire-building in Florida...
...Cohn grasps the demons that haunt the souls of religious fanatics, and the parallels between his anti-heroes and Osama are striking...
...Elliott Banfield is an artist in New York...
...first possession...
...First, the Roma Sub Roma series of seven murder mystery novels and one book of short stories that all take place in Rome during the life of Cicero...
...I first ran into the unacceptable face of statism at the Weston Public Library, where "they" told me that "we" don't carry Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys or Tom Swift as young readers should not read all the books in such series...
...The Long Recessional by David Gilmour...
...Any spy novel by Frederick Forsyth...
...Sadly enough Lewis himself committed suicide a few years after the expedition...
...I'm like a bumblebee, moving from one site to another...
...limited privilege for cases of necessity...
...author of a popular history of the modern Middle East once told me that his book sales spiked every time there was a crisis in the region...
...PAUL JOHNSON I have read no outstanding book this year, but many good ones...
...This final disadvantage is not frivolous: one of the nice features of many sites are little downloadable animations and videos...
...Videos: The Commanding Heights, Daniel Yergin's 2002 minis-eries, a primer on the triumph of capitalism and decentralization over socialism and top-down management...
...The Bloomsbury set jeered his views, but he was proven tragically right after Indian independence, which resulted in a bloodbath...
...In 2001, that distinction went to Monarchos, who was blessed with great speed, a competitive fire, peerless endurance—and a breeder who could immortalize him with verve and humor...
...It underlines the misfortune that Davis, like Arthur Schlesinger, Geoffrey Ward, and Frank Freidel, did not finish their multivolume Lives of FDR...
...Toss it in an inexpensive basket with a DVD or video of some of the shows, a decent bottle of red, and some dried pasta, and fuggetaboutit...
...But a series allows you to visit Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes again and again...
...Pandemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics by Daniel Patrick Moynihan...
...It baffled the Spaniards, for whom Ralegh, after the death of Drake, was Public Enemy Number One, so they settled for a form of his Christian name, Gualteral or Guatteral...
...Lukacs is one of the most engaging of the serious historians to survive...
...Natan Sharansky, Democracy for Peace...
...The Seven Fat Years by Robert L. Bartley...
...RICH KARLGAARD I spent the better part of 2002 flying a small airplane around the country, for two reasons...
...Renowned University of Chicago law professor Richard A. Epstein disagrees...
...There are at least seventy different ways of spelling the name recorded in the archives...
...Anyone who wishes to understand the mind of Osama bin Laden and his ilk would be foolish to ignore this book...
...it traces the history of the oil industry back to nineteenth-century Pennsylvania...
...In his own times, however, Raw-ly was more common, hence James I's sinister pun when they first met: "I have heard right rawly of thee...
...My own decomposing copy has a scribbled "my book" note inside the front cover: "Captain Ralph Peters, Austin, Texas, Dec...
...FLORENCE KING As a history aficionado, I welcome Christmas as the season of peace on earth and good will to everyone except Doris Kearns Goodwin, who never saw a giant she couldn't whittle down to her own size...
...We can only hope that Nigel returns for future adventures and that Hollywood will MAX BOOT Max Boot, former opinion editor at The Wall Street Journal, is a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power...
...Ralegh himself used Rauley, then Rauleygh, then settled for Ralegh once he got his knighthood, and this is the form followed by mod-ern British historians...
...British intelligence thought the odds against them to be two to one, and the real number was five to three...
...The first is Joseph Epstein's Snobbery: An American Version, a book of rare wit and insight...
...Fiona MacCarthy's Byron: Life and Legend is the best and fullest account of Byron's life since the great Leslie Marchand's three-volume account half a century ago...
...In my belief Such men have lost all patriotic feeling...
...Anyone with a settled view of these matters will find something to disagree with in Desperately Seeking Certainty: The Misguided Quest for Constitutional Foundations...
...Having written a powerful polemic against the decadence of the West in general, and the United States in particular, he is able to write that America is still "the last best hope of earth...
...It is precisely because of those reforms that the Church is in the grip of what Weigel identifies as "the culture of dissent...
...Yergin offers important historical perspective on the coming war with Iraq, through the prism of the area's only major industry (other than terrorism...
...economy was performing post-boom, particularly in those red counties that get little attention from the coastal media...
...This superbly researched and incisive book tops my personal list for 2002...
...rift: "A generation of peace has led to a secular conclusion among European young, and not so young, that peace is a natural condition threatened only by those whose professional business it is to prepare for war...
...Graham Swift is best known for his novel Last Orders, which won the Booker Prize and was made into a well-regarded film...
...For the official record, I read books...
...He notes their foibles but also gives these five their due...
...A very fine old book that narrates life with Churchill from 1951 to his last cigar in 1965 is The Long Sunset: Memoirs of Winston Churchill's Last Private Secretary by Anthony Montague Browne...
...he and his wife finally condude that the Almighty was not rewarding them, but punishing someone else...
...Libertarianism: A Primer by David Boaz...
...In their view, these constructs inevitably end up distorting the Constitution, violating crucial values, and collapsing in self-contradiction...
...Reading a single book is like having a short-lived pet turtle...
...RALPH PETERS The Savage Wars Of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power by Max Boot...
...For the friend who has studiously avoided any and all of the 150 books already published about 9/11 here's one they can't resist: American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center by William Langewiesche...
...Even if the advantage of home skies and swift refueling are taken into account, the odds, and the battle, were close enough without exaggeration...
...But he was also aware that British rule over the Subcontinent was a great force for peace and stability...
...The single indispensable work on the Arab mentality, this no-nonsense analysis long has been hated by apologists for the Arab world's failures and by those who blame the West every time a flea bites a bandit in Yemen...
...Jeane J. Kirkpatrick is former permanent U.S...
...John Maddox Roberts's five novel SPQR series tracks the same time period and centers on the Roman Senator Decius Caucilius Metellus the Younger...
...First Great Triumph by Warren Zimmermann...
...There are wonderful pages on the ten famous food scenes in the series plus "Soprano" trivia tidbits for the truly obsessed...
...It traces the strange connections between primitive art, at its most sophisticated, and high art at its most primitive, and like all Gombrich's work opens our eyes to new works and teaches us to look at familiar ones with fresh vision...
...He has written a splendid brief biography, Napoleon...
...Conrad Black is chairman and chief executive officer of Hollinger International, Inc...
...Bambi: A Life in the Woods by Felix Salten...
...This work originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and is an antidote to the overload of emotion found in most other 9/11 offerings...
...It was in the grate of the first-floor drawing room that the only manuscript copy of Byron's memoirs was burnt by motives of prudery...
...The future of the famous drawing room, where I have attended many robust literary parties—the Murray Martinis were notoriously potent in the days when publishers still served them—is now in doubt, for the House of Murray, the last independent publishing firm of historic importance, has been sold, and this volume has therefore a certain poignancy...
...Ghost Image by Joshua Gilder...
...Josh Gilder was a leading Reagan speechwriter, who has now penned his first novel...
...In times of madness and war, particularly of war madness, it is not a bad idea to turn to the wellsprings of sanity and compassion...
...Or one's first introduction to "civil servants" maybe at the Department of Motor Vehicles...
...Lucianne Goldberg is publisher of the cNews Forum and a Talk Radio Network host...
...Florida's Flagler by Sidney Walter Martin...
...Robert A. Levy is senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute...
...JEANE J. KIRKPATRICK Alexandar V. Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia...
...Michael Oren's Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East is the finest book ever on this turning point in the region's history...
...Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response by Bernard Lewis...
...You don't want your holiday gifts to be too weighty...
...Every town from St...
...dummies...
...A brilliant new treatment...
...In a frontal challenge to conventional history, my father shows that the two major cases establishing the exclusionary rule—Weeks (1914) and Mapp (1962)—were contrived test cases brought before the Supreme Court by dishonest means...
...Some accuse him of sentimentality, but I think he is saved from that by his bitter irony...
...He now pursues the retirement pastimes of the late Thomas Jefferson on his land in North Carolina, until his country calls again...
...Our Children and Our Country: Improving America's Schools and Affirming the Common Culture by William J. Bennett...
...Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser...
...SARKES TARZIAN INC Sarkes Tarzian Television Sarkes Tarzian Radio Broadcasters Making a Difference NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61...
...The plots stand on their own...
...Let us hope that Kipling is not proven even more correct in the event of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan...
...I enjoy the late Robert Ludlum as much as anyone—he certainly wrote more books than Forsyth—but Forsyth is tops...
...But the authors make a plausible case that foundationalism, as they call it, "is doomed to failure no matter how brilliant the theorist or how important the foundational idea...
...It's a long time since I've read a book that engaged or moved me more...
...They cost a lot, they take up space, and their pictures don't move...
...Here is one book recommendation in each of these subject areas: Steven Emerson was the investigative reporter who was the first per-son to realize that the United States faces a serious internal threat from militant Islam...
...Amity Shlaes is a columnist for The Financial Times...
...Reading Kaplan isn't about agreeing with the author so much as it is about engaging his propositions and emerging from the bout with greater clarity in one's own thinking...
...or 3. Read books...
...Obviously his first career was only a diversion from his true calling...
...My favorite stuff is tape of Zbigniew Brzezinski telling the mujahedeen that God is on their side...
...Memoirs of a 1966 summer when Buck, then fifteen, and his brother, seventeen, flew a Piper Cub from New Jersey to California...
...more, if you like, oppressive...
...A nightmare to academics who believe the world is best understood through library research alone, Kaplan consistently has gone out to see the world's troubled regions firsthand—and the world looks very different when you are splashed with its blood than when you examine it through the prison bars of a bibliography...
...Remember when A. J., Tony and Carmella's surly teenage son, learned that his grandmother wouldn't be coming for dinner and uttered the now famous line, "What...
...Florence King's books include Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady and The Florence King Reader...
...One of the best critiques of international policy I have ever read, written by one of the cleverest men I served with in the Senate...
...From Munich to Pearl Harbor by David Reynolds is a meticulously researched and engagingly written little volume...
...He focus-es on constitutional legitimacy—that is, whether we are bound by the document even though we did not expressly consent to it—the Ninth Amendment, theories of constitutional interpretation and construction, the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, and state police power...
...History has a way of marching over authors, but in this case, the tide of events carried Mr...
...For those of us who didn't develop a judicial philosophy in law school, getting familiar with this forbidding terrain is not an easy task...
...Foresees current European-U.S...
...This is the expertly told tale of San Francisco plastic surgeon Jackson Maebry, who finds that a seriously injured patient is his secret lover...
...By that reckoning Daniel Yergin's terrific book—terrific despite being a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the basis of a PBS series—ought to be finding many readers these days...
...Each book has dozens of historical notes that detail the actual history that fictional Flashman travels through...
...Bombers, Bolsheviks, and Bootleggers: A Study in Constitutional Subversion by Leon F. Scully, Jr...
...TIMOTHY NOAH The most unjustly overlooked work of nonfiction in 2002 was Thomas Geoghegan's In America's Court: How a Civil Lawyer Who Likes to Settle Stumbled Into a Criminal Trial...
...This is unquestionably the clearest and most profound explanation of what ails the Muslim world...
...Simple Rules for a Complex World by Richard A. Epstein...
...In this 2002 year, however, I sincerely hope my recommendations are taken seriously, for I feel confident in saying that prospective readers will find my book suggestions quite rewarding...
...On a tour like this, you spend lots of nights in Holiday Inns where you can: 1. Drink Jack Daniel's and beer till you fall off the barstool...
...To say any more is to give away the plot, but suffice it to say that Ghost Image grips the reader and never lets go...
...Kenneth S. Davis's fifth and last Roosevelt volume, War President, published posthumously, was his best and most original, especially in underemphasized fields such as the Torch landings in North Africa...
...People differ about how it is pronounced too: most people, including this author, call it Rally...
...In this amoral age it has become fashionable among historians to write morally neutral history...
...Michael Barone's Our Country is a readable encyclopedia of American electoral politics...
...Sir Harry Flashman is the drunken bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays who, expelled from school, finds himself smack dab in the middle of every godawful mess in the nineteenth century—the first Afghan war, the Indian Mutiny, the transatlantic slave trade, the American Indian wars, the Boxer Rebellion in China, the Sikh wars, and John Brown's attack on Harper's Ferry...
...A psychologist friend of mine hands it out to patients with teenagers...
...Roberts is less a classic murder mystery writer but he spends more time patiently explaining ancient Rome and its government and society than does Saylor...
...Geoghegan's is an entirely distinct voice on the left, blending moral outrage, Catholic guilt, and a ripe sense of the absurd...
...Finally I recommend a delightful series of essays by Roger Kimball, Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence...
...In an achingly romantic story, written with intelligence and ardor, Swift explores the question of which is more precious: truth or happiness...
...Even more lightweight than Ghost Image, but a lot funnier...
...But that could be a bit of a relief, really, when you think how the value of our pensions keeps dropping...
...Lastly, George MacDonald Fraser's entire eleven-book Flashman series is wonderfully funny history at its best...
...MacCarthy, who rose to fame when she discovered that the famous Catholic sculptor, Eric Gill, had had anal sex with two of his daughters, makes a point of stressing Byron's bisexuality, perhaps a little too much...
...In each he discusses great philosophical minds, both those that soar to the heights of cerebral Olympus and those that Ronald Reagan once described appropriately as "high I.Q...
...take note...
...This is essentially a celebration of five friends who made America a world power—Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay, and Alfred Thayer Mahan...
...Definitely a guy book and great escape reading...
...A third book I am reading with great pleasure and profit is The Preference for the Primitive, the last work, I imagine, to emerge from the papers of the great Ernst Gombrich, who died full of years and honors not long ago...
...Derided by generations of sport hunters, the little deer endures in this beautiful story about death, suffering, cruelty, and the love of innocence...
...I'm not a Nazi) is that the journalists I see working (and sometimes sobbing) their hearts out during the year, and drinking their livers out, and conducting implausibly complicated and time-consuming affairs, and fixing up the little farmhouses they have bought in Le Marche (or bait shacks in Louisiana), and staying one jump ahead of the taxman and the commissioning editor . . . all these extraordinarily busy people find time to read big, grown-up books—some of more than 200 pages—with footnotes and maps and words you have to look up in a dictionary, and then, at year's end, with the booze and babes flowing as never before, have the strength of character to put aside the bottle (or pull up their pants) and write holiday books roundups in magazines such as THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR...
...Steve Forbes is president and CEO of Forbes and editor in chief of Forbes magazine...
...From American imperialism to the original,100-proof British version, Gilmour offers a sympathetic portrait of Rudyard Kipling, the bard of the British Empire...
...Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response...
...Joseph P. Lash's last book, Dealers and Dreamers, suffers somewhat from rushed and spotty editing and from the author's very engaged partisanship in favor of the New Dealers...
...John Steele Gordon's A Thread Across the Ocean chronicles one of the nineteenth century's greatest technological feats: laying telegraph cable across the Atlantic...
...You might want to treat yourself to the trip as well because whoever you give it to will want to call you up to discuss it—several times—and to say thank you...
...In his The Courage to Be Catholic, George Weigel uses rack and thumbscrew to see off the pious agnostics—many of them Catholics—who blame the recent sex scandals involving priests on the Church's oppressive teaching on sex...
...If you share my distaste for the best-girlfriends style popularized by Her Perkiness, I have the perfect antidote...
...A new book by the architect of glasnost, who understands Soviet tyranny and its collapse better than anyone...
...But nothing he has written surpasses his 1992 work Ever After, which has no connection to the movie of that title...
...AMITY SHLAES Rebecca West's The Meaning of Treason, portraits of criminals and spies from William Joyce ("Lord Haw Haw," the propagandist who served Hitler) right through to cold war spies...
...I am flattered, but be warned: I have little to bring to the party in the way of new stuff...
...He proposes, then applies, six simple rules—self-ownership, or autonomy...
...A brave, acute observer, a crisp writer, a clear thinker, and a more incisive reader than any hundred professors, Kaplan uses this book of essays to examine our present international endeavors through the writings of a series of very great dead white males...
...A very fine new book, John Lukacs's Churchill: Visionary, Statesman, Historian—wherein a monument meditates on a monument...
...But the second half of the book is essentially a chronicle of how the Middle East came to be the way it is...
...translated by Whittaker Chambers...
...So I recommend five different series of books...
...Third is a book filled with wisdom and sound judgment, Midge Decter's An Old Wives Tale...
...Decter's trajectory from an insulated Minnesota background to the Glen Oak housing complex to the debates over Commentary's commentary is a fascinating story filled with lessons for young women, and even some not so young women...
...one must have good manners as well," and is a source of a endless comfort to those of us who sometimes find it difficult to follow the superficially impeccable reasoning of the gang of four: George E Will, Charles Krauthammer, Christopher Hitchens, and Andrew Sullivan...
...Epstein's prolific writings have been enormously influential in law and public policy...
...His new biography of the Marquis de Lafayette combines a thoroughgoing account of the age of revolution, a probing psychological study of a complex man, and a literary style that goes down like cream...
...Oren tells his story in a spare, direct, and gripping way, replete with punchy quotations...
...It brings to light the tremendous problems members of the expedition had even before crossing the country...
...His Nigel Haver-sham is an inspired creation, and his adventures in Southern California are a hoot...
...Flight of Passage by Rinker Buck...
...Politicians on the left contend that a pervasive regulatory state is necessary in today's complex modern society...
...Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography...
...In between is a story as funny and inspiring as any you'll read this year...
...Gilmour focuses on Kipling's complex relationship with the British Empire and shows that these caricatures do not do justice to the poet's nuanced views...
...All your new friends die and go away after 300 pages...
...The master has retired from the game, so we are left to enjoy Day of the Jackal and other classics...
...In the course of the expedition their health worsened and their trials increased...
...Only in Sharpe's Trafalgar does Richard Sharpe get in a ship, and then Cornwall does not bombard you with a bunch of unexplained seafaring jargon...
...The best: Bobos In Paradise by David Brooks...
...This book recounts Geoghegan's experience assisting the defense of a teenager whose role in a stickup got him a forty-year sentence...
...Lafayette is a worthy successor to Unger's splendid earlier biography, Noah Webster, which I raved about in a review in this journal three years ago...
...It underestimates the methodical pattern of Roosevelt's Byzantine progress to war, but this could only be guessed by a Roosevelt specialist, steeped in his practices...
...What better recommendation could one offer...
...Cyrus Field, who orchestrated this feat, failed four times before achieving success...
...The voice is that of Sugar, an intelligent if anguished London prostitute, the scene and sense of life in nineteenth-century London is lush with details, and the writing is at whip-speed and brilliant...
...Mencken would have been as skeptical about Bush's war against Iraq as he was about the two great wars of the last century...
...This book should be required reading for any-one who lives in the Golden State, visits it, or heck, has heard of it...
...He argues persuasively that idealism explained their actions more than the sordid economic motives often ascribed to them by axe-grinding academics...
...2. Watch old movies on TV...
...Boaz explores every nuance of libertarian thought with passion, eloquence, and clarity...
...and takings of property for public use with just compensation—as a means of restoring individual freedom and resisting ubiquitous government...
...The series makes learning history fun...
...Harlow Giles Unger has cornered the market on muses to emerge as America's most readable historian...
...All in all, Barnett's book is a first-rate constitutional primer as well as a vital resource for legal scholars...
...Logic [is] the refuge of fools...
...Paul Johnson's books include Modern Times, A History of the American People, The Quest for God, and Napoleon...
...Herbert London is president of the Hudson Institute and the John M. Olin Professor of Humanities at New York University...
...protection against aggression...
...28,1986...
...A time-lapse video of clouds, for example, reveals a lot about clouds that can't be conveyed in a still image, much less in words...
...If that is the case, and with all respect, we are doomed...
...This is the antidote to CNN's Cold War series...
...Toward the End of the Morning, Michael Frayn's sendup of life at an English newspaper...
...Ralegh, one of the greatest adventurers England has produced, founded the abortive colony at Royanoke and would undoubtedly have had another, and successful, shot at colonizing what is now the USA had not the small-minded and weak-spirited King James I kept him prisoner for many years in the Tower of London and finally executed him...
...This means she is nowhere near as well known in this country as Mary McCarthy or Lillian Hellman, even though she is more interesting...
...Grover Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...Carmella's ziti is here (a piece of cake to make) and everything Italian from arancini to zabaglione, from baccala to quail...
...Ralph Peters is author of Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World...
...He deals with difficult cases, like Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, but also finds a place for Trollope's fox-hunting novels and the addictive fantasies of P. G. Wodehouse (pronounced Woodhouse...
...GROVER NORQUIST Conservatives tend to remember their first rude contact with the visible foot of government...
...Any book published by Lewis, who has been deadon-target about the Arab world for decades, would have to make a list of must-read books...
...this year, he provided an important update in book form with American Jihad: The Terrorists Living among Us...
...His chapter on Watergate and the real or imagined existence of Deep Throat is worth the price alone...
...Only one of them will grow up to win the Kentucky Derby...
...He will find the answer here...
...Again, he has few fans on liberal arts faculties, both because he writes objectively and because he writes well...
...When the voucher system for public education finally arrives, I hope to see a lot more of these things...
...She has been given free rein of the immense Byron archives held by his publishers, John Murray, at their splendid Georgian house in Albemarle Street where they have published books for over 200 years...
...Utterly unsentimental, tough-minded, and filled with page after page of astonishing observations, American Ground is the one-of-a-kind report on the men and machines it took to clean up seemingly insurmountable chaos...
...Stuart Reid is deputy editor of The Spectator (London...
...But Weigel is a bit of a company man and does not win my sympathy with his belief that matters can be put right if we "deepen the reforms of the Catholic Church begun by the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965...
...But I am troubled by his optimism...
...One, I wanted to figure out how the U.S...
...I have not seen an advance copy of this book, which with luck will arrive in stores by late December, but I can freely recommend it as the author's officemate at the White House—a yearlong makeup course in history, economics, literature, and general self-improvement...
...The Prize, available in a hefty trade paperback, isn't concerned exclusively with the Middle East...
...This is a book which super-intellectuals can enjoy to unwind at week-ends, or drop-outs to get started on the big shots...
...Since Robert Bork was nominated for the Supreme Court in 1987 and then rejected by the Senate, constitutional intepretation has been at the heart of every controversial judicial appointment...
...STEVE FORBES Novelist Harlan Coben's two most recent riveting reads, Gone for Good and Tell No One, will make you forget airport delays...
...Boot and his book along on its crest...
...Every year, some 30,000 thoroughbred foals are born in the United States...
...ROBERT A. LEVY Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty by Randy E. Barnett...
...R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...But the book is priceless for its novelistic depiction of assembly-line justice and its willingness to ask large, unfashionable questions about the law and society...
...Khidhir Hamza's book (co-authored with Jeff Stein), Saddam's Bombmaker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda, came out in 2000 but it remains the out-standing account of life at the top in totalitarian Iraq and the threat Saddam Hussein poses...
...his rampant grief Moaned, shouted, sobbed, and choked, while he was kneeling Half-naked on the floor...
...The most practical and commonsense approach to education that I have ever read...
Vol. 35 • November 2002 • No. 6
