Books For Christmas Our annual list of holiday gift selections from distinguished readers and writers
B ks For Christmas Our annua! list of holiday gift suggestions from distinguished readers and writers. Jed Babbin T HERE ARE TWO KINDS OF CHRISTMAS BOOKS. First are those you want to read...
...Still, these biographies are very informative...
...FDR comes off none-too-well...
...The foreword by Richard Norton Smith is worth the price of admission, but what follows should dramatically twist your thoughts on the World's Most Powerful Office...
...salt" (melach...
...So forget I mentioned it...
...Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite, by Bernard Goldberg: We of the Vast Right Wing Media Conspiracy condemn left-wing media bias all the time...
...As be falls he screams out in impotent and incoherent rage and it is not quite clear what he is getting at...
...Because liberals so shape our culture, there will probably never be the level of disgust and horror associated with Communist atrocities as with their cousins', the Nazis...
...I have," he writes in his latest contribution to your home library, "put everything I know and deeply feel into this book...
...Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul...
...His voice charged with emotion, the first thing he told me was that Gruff had been found aboard another helo, unhurt...
...It is elegantly written, as is the case for all C.S...
...Pitirim Sorokin, Crisis of Our Age—I read this marvelous work, first published in 1952, because it offers so many insights into the present state of cultural degradation...
...an editor of the Washington Post, should be part of every educated person's library...
...This is a brilliant description of the US...
...Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, by Victor Davis Hanson...
...Fraser took Harry Flashman, a child-bully character in the Victorian classic, Tom Brown's School Days, and made him an officer in Her Majesty's Army in the days the Empire was in its prime...
...A great read...
...The man who introduced me to the McKinley Phillips captures was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who took me on for a seminar in historical source writing (I was 45 and trying to satisfy the upper division writing requirement for my BA—long story...
...This volume chronicles his years on Capitol Hill...
...Largely interchangeable, the list includes Dude Where's My Country, by Michael Moore, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, by Al Franken, Big Lies, by Joe Conason, The Lies of George Bush, by Nation writer David Corn, Bushwhacked, by Molly Ivins and The Book on Bush, by Eric Alterman and Mark Green...
...They're all here...
...Third, most novels based on the Civil War are like professional wrestling...
...His son, James Wight, who followed his father into veterinary medicine, writes in his memoirs of a reallife man whose experiences will be of great interest to those who have already read his fictional accounts...
...Written with humor and verve...
...Dip into the deep pool of RR's thoughts in this big volume...
...Lewis lived his...
...His letters, beside being a great literary classic, are a delight to read...
...It's enough to give hope...
...This is not cheery reading...
...And Fever Pitch, nominally about soccer, is another Nicholas Hornby exposition of the painful process by which men reluctantly grow up...
...Phillip Johnson is a columnist for Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity...
...The Gwendolyn story is subtle and brilliant—perhaps the greatest example of character development I've ever come across...
...Anyone reading The American Spectator who doesn't know the work of the English historian Paul Johnson shouldn't be allowed to read The American Spectator...
...James Scott Bell is a Los Angeles trial attorney who has become successful as an author of Christian thrillers.A Greater Glory is set in early twentieth century Los Angeles, before that once-rustic town was engulfed by the automobile...
...Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1966, Perennial Classics, 2002...
...Second are the books that you want to give as gifts to members of the gaggle and friends who live too far away to come by for t e festivities...
...I hope you will have your copy ofArt: A New History by then...
...Transformation Under Fire shows why the Army, left DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 43 BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS to itself, may soon be an irrelevant force, consigned to peacekeeping and garrison life...
...Who says the times always change for the worse...
...James Bovard is the author of the newly-published Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to Rid the World of Evil (Palgrave Macmillan...
...I had thought of including this indispensable volume of witty and perceptive commentary on art and the machinations of the art world, but decided it might seem like shameful self-promotion to do so...
...He argues powerfully for a universal moral truth, which is indeed written on the human heart, a truth which cannot not be known...
...Next, two "sports" books by living authors, funny as hell but sneakily profound: MoneybaIl, nominally about baseball, is another Michael Lewis exposition of how the information revolution shatters conventional wisTerence P. Jeffrey FEW SUMMERS AGO my daughter Maria was given a summer reading assignment: James Herriot~s ll Things Bright and Beautiful...
...My daughter devoured this, too...
...The Way the World Works, by Jude Wanniski...
...In sharp moral contrast is God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, by Adam Nicholson...
...This book brings back more than one political crisis but the formative experience that restored the American Right as a thoughtful undertaking instead of just an inarticulate reaction against modernity...
...Robert D. Novak WITNESS, BY WHITTAKER CHAMBERS...
...When I finished Karl Zinsmeister'sBoots on the Ground: A Month With the 82nd Airborne in the Battle for Iraq, in one gigantic burst on a cross-country flight this fall, I wept...
...I admit it...
...This modern-46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS or postmodern—retelling of John Bunyan's classic story is so gripping that my wife asked me to read it aloud for her evenings after dinner instead of washing the dishes, which shows how much she appreciated the gift...
...Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (2003...
...But Parkinson will catch your attention on the very first pages with his observation that until quite recently when men promised that only "death will tear them apart," they expected roughly ten years of co-existence with their spouses...
...A Greater Glory, by James Scott Bell...
...Michael Horowitz is a fellow at the Hudson Institute...
...Shultz is no Jesus Christ either, and turns out to be too optimistic...
...Victor Navasky IN HIS INTRODUCTION to Hope Dies Last, the indefatigable Studs Terkel writes, "Hope has never trickled down...
...Go figure...
...But his skeptical, penetrating insights on Western Europe's and the media's mishandling of terrorism, the Middle East and much else in foreign affairs have much to say about both why we're back from triumphs to turmoils, and ways to tackle these same issues today...
...Svejk illustrates how laughter is the best way to destroy the pretensions of Leviathan...
...in World War I, the nation's bloody and unnecessary involvement in a bloody and unnecessary war...
...see www.laelarrington.com...
...Grover Norquist is the president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...A little known Samuel Langhorne Clemens would, by chance, write the first account of this harrowing voyage, making the crew famous and "Mark Twain" (Clemens' nom de plume) a household name...
...The greatest threat to civilized life in the West is not al Qaeda or terrorism but the erosion of freedom...
...Mind you, if Shackleton doesn't respond, you might try praying for Captain Josiah Mitchell instead...
...This is a fast-paced and impeccably researched story of the rise and decline of the critical relationship...
...Black admires Roosevelt yet presents him in all his weird deviousness...
...If you didn't like Woodrow Wilson, you'll detest him after reading this book...
...If you think I am wrong, make it a long one, and I only hope this does not look like bribery—to demand a short letter if you agree with me...
...And despite his best efforts he is always—complaining bitterly, of course—at the center of the biggest battles of his time, and covered with undeserved glory at the end...
...It will give Christmas a whole new meaning for many people...
...It's enough to cause you to rethink your stereotypes...
...The books tops the liberal hate list for 2003...
...Conrad Black's Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a huge book, over 1200 pages...
...A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat, by Zell Miller...
...One of the gravest lessons of World War I is that "idealism is not synonymous with sainthood or virtue...
...A few years back Kurlansky turned cod into interesting history...
...John Locke, 71vo Treatises of Government (1690...
...Herb s London 1 ERE ARE MY SUGGESTIONS FOR 2003: Joseph Epstein, Snobbery—a marvelous review of the condition that accompanies this trait...
...This is profound but accessible for readers at every level...
...In this book, he tells what it's like behind the scenes in Congress where the Republicans are not much better than the Democrats...
...The last part of the book is Goldberg's unintentionally-hilarious prescription, an adaptation of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-Step plan, this one for recovery of the liberal media...
...John McCaslin is a syndicated political columnist with the Washington Times/Tribune Media Services...
...Who is the first modern President, according to Gould...
...I bought her a volume that combined that book, and its prequel, All Creatures Great and Small...
...Instead, he has Lee's army head south, forcing the North to confront them on ground chosen by the South rather than fight uphill at Little Round Top...
...Meacham and I have both married Mississippi women (establish personal link to writer in question), but that's where the similarities stop (tell truth...
...Taken together these letters actually go beyond charming readers...
...Richard Brookhiser carries off the black turtleneck, NY conservative intellectual thing better than anyone I've seen...
...Midge Decter, Donald Rumsfeld—a biography that describes the characteristics of a Middle American DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 47 BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS whose cultural roots influence his policy perspective...
...Its twentieth anniversary edition, published in 1998, is still in print...
...Alf Wight was a veterinarian in Yorkshire, England, who converted his life experiences among the farmers of that region into a series of well-written, easily read, always-humorous stories...
...LBJ was a gargantuan figure en route to becoming the most disastrous president of the twentieth century...
...Robert A. Caro in his Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson achieves the same effect with Johnson...
...We all know about the wisdom of Paul's biases, and incidentally Paul promises to reward us with more of those biases next issue with a comparison of Presidents Reagan and Bush II...
...You knew it was coming: William McKinley, Kevin Phillips...
...The Politics of Prudence, by Russell Kirk...
...Flashman at the Charge, by George MacDonald Fraser: Christmas is a time to escape the pressures of the world, and few books provide the escapist fun and detailed immersion in history that the Flashman series does...
...Arriving in Washington in 2000 as a lifelong moderate Democrat, Sen...
...King James didn't write this Bible: an able, eclectic army of high and low churchmen, organized in six companies of "translators," did...
...The book, placed in the Anglo-Boer War, is a series of six dreams by Lieutenant Backsight Forethought (BF) who has been left in command of a 50-man unit to hold Duffer's Drift, the key ford for the Silliassvogel River...
...In short, it is essential reading for anyone not related to an ostrich...
...Miller describes how his ancestral party's excesses turned him into a George W. Bush backer...
...Armand Nicholi, an eminent psychiatrist has been teaching at Harvard for the past twenty-five years...
...In 1939, FDR asked World War I Army boss Gen...
...but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton...
...Sad for Art, but good for us, Phillips gets McKinley right (or mostly so...
...Originally the desire arose after reading John Julius Norwich's two volume history of the place...
...Paul Greenberg M INDING THE SOUTH, a collection of essays about the South, or Souths, by the Tocqueville of Dixie, John Shelton Reed of Chapel Hill...
...Gingrich avoids the cliched ways of refighting the three-day battle and argues that the traditionally assumed missed opportunities would not have shifted the battle...
...By the time I got to the studio (I was subbing for 011ie on his radio show) I'd heard he was unhurt, but our friend and his field producer, Gruff Jenkins, was missing, possibly lost on the downed bird...
...Everyone," Pliny writes to the historian Tacitus, "is prejudiced in favor of his own powers of discernment, and he will always find an argument most convincing if it leads to the conclusion he has reached for himself...
...Because the first step to the cure is recognition of the disease of liberal bias by those who suffer from it...
...In three terms as a Republican Congressman from a heavily Democratic district in Oklahoma, country doctor Coburn raised hell with the pork-loving establishment...
...It'll never happen, of course...
...Roger Kimball is managing editor ofthe New Criterion...
...Great novel of course...
...In their amazing struggle to survive, the complement of men who mirrored all the prejudices and nuances of Industrial Age America, faced ferocious seas, sharks, waterspouts, starvation, insanity, and the biggest threat of all—one another...
...Charles Colson is chairman of Prison Fellowship Ministries in Washington, D.C dom...
...Budziszewski is an outstanding thinker...
...Caro is a fine historian, though a dreadful statist...
...John McCaslin UNTIL NOW, no better story is written than of the last expedition (1914-17) of Sir Ernest Shackleton...
...This book, soon to be made into a PBS special, is based on the course which Dr...
...Jed Babbin is the Loose Canons columnist for The American Spectator online and a talking warhead on MSNBC...
...The book is full of the type of low-life police informants, junior boot lickers, and natural born underlings who inevitablyproliferate and prosper at times when a government is dragging a society to ruin...
...What judges have wrought," Bork observes, "is a coup d'etat—slow-moving and genteel, but a coup d'etat nonetheless...
...You'll find some surprising judgments here: Johnson lets a bit of air out of the French Impressionists and post-Impressionists, for example...
...When's the mini-series...
...earning, by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom...
...Parkinson's other books, sure makes some of that sixty years seem shorter...
...Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee) by, well, me...
...I found both of their books immensely informative about the eras covered and the men that dominated the eras, FDR and LBJ...
...Herbert I. London is president of the Hudson Institute and John M Olin Professor of Humanities at New York University...
...But sharing the fun with your spouse, when reading this and Mr...
...Whereas the Mr.'s laws became classic, the Mrs.'s are less known...
...Paul Greenberg is the editorial-page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and a nationally syndicatedcolumnist...
...After all, until well into the twentieth century, a large percentage of women died during childbirth...
...It only sound that way," as Fleming observes...
...This history, by (surprise...
...and Gary Gallagher (what can you say about a Civil War scholar who knows where they buried Stonewall Jackson's arm...
...In his own way, Budziszewski is following in Lewis' steps...
...It shows on every page...
...Political movements that see themselves as moving forward produce tedious books about their wild hopes and aspirations...
...Though originally published in 1966, it sheds a bit of light on what went wrong since in many countries 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS around the world, and not just in the Middle East...
...Flashy's "memoir" of the Charge of the Light Brigade is worth reading—or re-reading—from Christmas to Boxing Day...
...When 011ie called in to the show that day, he didn't manage his normal deadpan delivery...
...At that point, I thought I'd better get in on the action...
...One can prolong the sense of listening to impotent and incoherent rage this Christmas season by reading one or all of a series of books apparently part of a general series under the headings "Bush Sucks" and "Conservatives Suck...
...The Free Press has just published this fall five-time Pulitzer nominee Joe Jackson's (the Virginia Beach author of Leavenworth Train) extraordinary new page-turner, A Furnace Afloat: The Wreck of the Hornet and the Harrowing 4,300mile Voyage of Its Survivors...
...Sir Martin Gilbert (anythingby him, anything), Paul Johnson (see above), Gabor Boritt (Hungarian refugee arrives in U.S., goes to Yankton College, the only college in South Dakota that will accept him in, becomes leading scholar on Lincoln and Civil War—is this a great country or what...
...Old friends: Pliny's Letters and Panegyrics (The Loeb Classical Library...
...Operation Iraqi Freedom is 011ie's diary of the soldiers' war, told by a no-foolin' combat veteran who cares about the troops in a way those of us who haven't been under fire can never fully understand...
...Shameless self-promotion...
...It is not widely known, however, that Johnson's real cultural vocation is art, not history...
...But his relief at Griff's fortune was colored by sadness for the Marines who had died in the helo crash...
...Phillip Johnson H ERE ARE MY TWO RECOMMENDATIONS: Pilgrim's Progress Today by Lael Arrington...
...He told us that it is the Basques who discovered America...
...Daniel Deronda, by George Eliot...
...He actually sees nothing wrong with President Harry Truman's plea for legislation allowing him to draft striking mine workers into the military...
...The legislation was only stopped by what Caro considers a reactionary Senate...
...In each dream he tries to hold the Drift against Boers and loses, learning from each defeat and incorporating his lessons in the following dream...
...Still, if you are looking for the ideal stocking-stuffer for that special friend...
...There will be many books about this war, but none will be better than this one...
...Buy any book by one of these authors which is pleasing to the eye and the contents will be so, too: David McCullough (must you fall in love with all your subjects, and hey, what about Adams and the Alien and Sedition Acts...
...This book, based on lectures at the Heritage Foundation, updates and refreshes much of that written in The Conservative Mind...
...Mona Charen Y CHRISTMAS AND HANNUKAH book gift suggestions: No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in...
...The son of an artist, Johnson is himself an accomplished watercolorist...
...One appreciates Kirks lasting legacy when we see his impact on the present occupant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue...
...Never been there, wanna go there...
...More than half a century after its publication, it is still food for the soul and must reading for all Americans...
...This would be an especially appropriate gift for lawyers, or those who loathe lawyers, or those who might want to become lawyers...
...Pershing chose one-star general George C. Marshall, who catapulted to fourstar rank overnight, fired dozens of generals and set the army on the path to Berlin...
...50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004...
...His seventeenth century English prose is both eloquent and insightful—with gems such as "Tyranny is the exercise of Power beyond Right" and "He who attempts to get another man into his Absolute Power, does thereby put himself into a State of War with him...
...Abounding with beautiful pictures and an informative narrative about art from its earliest stages to its present condition, this book will be your companion for years to come...
...There's plenty to enjoy...
...Hoffer offers insights into what might lead many people to bet on crazy ideas having such effect...
...Two female lawyers battle over a murder that grows out of woman's need to conceal her scandalous past...
...T0 BIOGRAPHERS have shed the revitalizing light of history on two giant characters of the American presidency...
...C. Northcote Parkinson: Mrs...
...She read them both and started reading them over again...
...The younger Pliny (AD 61113) was one of the most urbane and civilized figures ancient Rome produced...
...Swinton, that was originally published in Infantry Journal in April 1905...
...The book has been taught for generations in war colleges but it is more 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS than a book on infantry tactics, it is about learning the right lessons from experience...
...Michael Horowitz T WO TRIFECTA WINS from a year's, feast of Victorian novels...
...The Illusion of Victory, by Thomas Fleming...
...Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders, by Tom A. Coburn and John Hart...
...They can be very exciting, but you kind of know ahead of time how this is going to end...
...Full of insights, humor, illuminations, little irruptions and epiphanies, all of them the result of his one great scholarly/folldorish realization: View Southerners as an ethnic group and so many things become clear that were once covered by ignorance, superstition, and regional blinders...
...is editor in chiefofFhe American Spectator and the author of Boy Clinton, The Liberal Crackup, Public Nuisances, and other books...
...they, in fact, demonstrate the development of the great man's thought and policy...
...The California classicist focuses his laser-like mind on immigration...
...It has always sprung up...
...His letters to Russian leaders beginning with Brezhnev are particularly important, revealing as they do how Reagan took a personal hand in ending the Cold War in the face of the State Department's unimaginative dithering...
...Robert Bork's brief, passionate, and learned analysis of how unelected judges have usurped the power that democracies had hitherto invested in the people and its political representatives is a tour de force...
...I am also almost through Jay Budziszewski's new book What We Can't Not Know...
...Reading it reminded me of the fact that in Hebrew the root for the word "war" (milchama) is...
...Still abully and now a lovable cad, Flashy is always scheming, womanizing and doing his cowardly best to stay out of danger...
...The latest proof of his amazing abilities is Gouverneur Morris: The Rake Who Wrote the Constitution, about that constitution-writing, ladies man with a peg leg...
...The book shows how the Big Green Machine can be changed into what America needs it to be: a primary instrument of national defense...
...and promising a sequel...
...ner MARK KURLANSKY, Salt: A World History (Penguin 2002...
...It was a great confirmation that I was on the right side in the two DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 45 BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS years of arguments I had had with my political science professor...
...Karl Rove HERE TO BEGIN...
...Robert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a CNN commentator...
...The Question of God, by Armand Nicholi...
...It is one of the most powerful expositions for the Christian faith ever...
...Her grandparents bought her The Real James Herriot--A Memoir of My Father, by James Wight, son of the late Alf Wight, the pseudonymous James Herriot...
...And perhaps the chief emissary of that erosion is the rise of bureaucratic political correctness, managed and enforced by an imperial judiciary...
...Best short biography of a near-great President and even better political leader...
...I knew then that Reagan: A Life in Letters had to be on my Amazon.com wish list...
...Surprising though it is to have it taught on the Harvard campus, it is clear to the unbiased reader that Lewis wins hands down...
...Then, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda, cornucopias of insight into the human condition that still reveal the power of goodness to prevail over all...
...She read these, and started back with All Creatures Great and Small and read through the cycle again...
...These books are well worth reading and reading again-and are suitable for teenagers as well as their fathers...
...Art Schlesinger says to himself, who will savage McKinley for me and get the dog-bites-man headline for our series on American Presidents...
...The administration should grab MacGregor and do with him something like what Pershing did with Marshall...
...DECEMBER 2003/JANUARY 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 49 BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS Ah, Venice...
...OK, first Franklin & Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, by Jon Meacham, managing editor of Newsweek...
...Michael Fumento, Bioevolution—a remarkable analysis of the "gee whiz" developments just over the horizon in the pharmaceutical world...
...The best proof of the pudding is in eating, so goes the old expression, and so it is with worldviews...
...R Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...They are alternately chatty, informative, thoughtful, and humorous...
...Thus, over the past year, I have recapitulated my daughter's reading patterns...
...Yes, that Brown...
...Second, I recommend a classic, The Defense of Duffer's Drift, by Captain E.D...
...Not that The American Spectator has any ideologues among its subscribers, but just in case I recommend that they—and all of you—read Studs's latest ideology-buster...
...To read Pliny is to make a new friend and confidant...
...It is precisely as Seth Lipsky said in last month's review, "beautifully crafted, packed with information, and illuminated by his own biases...
...He is an accommodating and sympathetic companion, demanding only when you disagree with him...
...The above chroniclers of the decline and fall of the American Left have produced more interesting reading but should not be allowed near sharp objects...
...Yet it abounds with information about America in the last century and a presidency in need of something other than adulation from Roosevelt's court historians and excoriation from us libertarian conservatives...
...Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor of Human Events...
...MartyAnderson emerged from his cabin at the top of the gully at the Bohemian Grove last summer bearing a wide grin and a sheft of letters...
...Here's my list for both: War Stories: Operation Iraqi Freedom by Oliver North: Early on the third day of the Iraq campaign, I got the news that one of the helos of the Marine squadron 011ie North was flying with had gone down...
...As he should...
...The Conquerors, Michael Beschloss...
...In his first book, Bias, he proved that the Dans, Toms and Peters are unrepentant libs, blinded to their own biases...
...for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen...
...A humane, honest, balanced, and above all necessary look at what we are permitting in America in the name of multiculturalism...
...But also very interesting to see how prescient Eliot was, preDreyfus, about the need for Israel...
...I only wish Alf Wight were still around, so he could write more of them...
...On the contrary, it is an admonitory tocsin: a wake-up call that is by turns frightening and infuriating...
...Now the desire has been rekindled byhis Paradise ofCities: Venice in the 19th Century, a delicious view of Venice as it slid into decadence and decline as Europe's pleasure spot...
...Douglas MacGregor: The fight to transform the American military from a Cold War force to one ready to fight the wars of the twenty-first century is far from over...
...In Arrogance, Goldberg recounts how the libs responded to Bias—not by remedying the problem, but by attacking those who don't conform to their bias, such as Fox News and the Washington Times...
...Finally, if you're the kind of person who buys books for friends based on the size, jacket cover, or color of the volume, I offer this simple rule...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...AmSpec readers will discern the fact from the heresy and marvel again over two gaudy characters...
...Since President Bush labeled our time as "the age of liberty," John Locke—who mightily inspired the Founding Fathers—is more relevant now than ever...
...Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has the right idea, but many of our generals, especially in the Army, don't get it...
...Now Kurlansky looks at history through salt and brings us similar surprises...
...Grover ,quilt THE SECOND TO THE LAST SCENE in Bruce Willis's film Die Hard has the master criminal with the cool German way of smoking cigarettes falling to his death from a much abused skyscraper...
...Karl Rove is an adviser to President Bush...
...Roger Kin DMONITORY: Robert Bork's Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges (American nterprise Institute...
...Not surprisingly, Locke's work has never been a favorite of the Weekly Standard crowd...
...I think that makes my fourth reading...
...If you, like me, are a fan of Shackleton, if you enjoyed reading Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm, you will be set adrift with the 31 ill-fated sailors of the clipper ship Hornet, who escaped into three small boats on May 3, 1866...
...Copiously researched, Gulag has much to teach even those who know a great deal about the Soviet Union...
...Well, FDR comes across a little better in this one, though there are some surprisingly short-sighted figures in this drama...
...But because we are who we are, we can't say it with the credibility of longtime lib and former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg...
...This book won't give you advice...
...Black Jack Pershing to return briefly to choose a new leader to make the Army ready for the coming war against Hitler...
...Douglas MacGregor clearly does...
...Art ranges from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the latest postmodern charlatan...
...Finally, for AmSpec readers, the secret to bounteous "reading": move to the suburbs and let Books-on-Tape make traffic jams regular opportunities for intellectual, moral and spiritual growth...
...Mandeville was partially right in his Fable of the Bees, when he wrote that "Envy Itself and Vanity/Are Ministers of Industry" Mandeville forgot that frustrated people too can be occasionally mobilized to much industry—too much industry, and of a devastating nature...
...They also contain a fund of what one might call uncommon common wisdom...
...Marvelous...
...Nicholi compares how Freud lived out his worldview against the way in which C.S...
...Just read this for the first time this year...
...Of course, Kevin Phillips...
...Mona Charen is nationally syndicated columnist and author of Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First Ides W. Colson T HAVE JUST REREAD Mere Christianity...
...A blunt and passionate plea for reform of education...
...Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum...
...My apologies to the guy next to me whose cocktail napkin I filched to dab my eyes...
...since they were only interested in money and not glory, they kept their extremely profitable, regular fishing trips to the eventual New World a secret...
...Lewis's work, and the logic is unassailable...
...James Bovard AROSLAV HASEK, The Good Soldier Svejk (1921...
...There is a book of letters out that also sheds the revitalizing light of history, Reagan: A Life in Letters, edited by Annelise and Martin Anderson and Kiron Skinner who collected them, two of which were sent to yours truly...
...Transformation Under Fire, by Col...
...It is a deeply felt (and bracingly written) celebration of plastic beauty and the visual world...
...Great man, great flaws...
...Lionel and Diana Trilling, Eric Breindel, Hilton Kramer, Rebecca West, Chambers himself...
...If you're like me and don't know good art unless you see it, Paul Johnson's Art: A New History will help you understand what it is...
...Then I bought her the sequels, All Things Wise and Wonderful and The Lord GodMade Them All...
...It puts flesh on the bones of George W. Bush's eloquent denunciation of the "soft bigotry of low expectations...
...George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph (1993...
...See above...
...Even Jesus Christ couldn't answer that question," is Gorbachev's answer...
...Parkinson's Law Some more cheerful notes...
...How to manage now 60 years together— with the same person...
...Former Speaker Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstechen have written a very readable novel of the Civil War, Gettysburg, that avoids this problem by refighting Gettysburg so that the South wins the battle and ends the novel in a strong position to threaten Washington, D.C...
...If you think I am right, you need only tell me so in as short a letter as you like...
...Anthony Trollope s Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux and The Warden, hilarious romps, better describe today's Beltway life than anything since written...
...This is the primer for supply-side economics, explaining how governments cause so much pain and suffering for ordinary people...
...Finally let me recommend Paul Johnson's magisterial Art: A New History...
...Johnson's many books and prolific journalism are a monument to industry and clear-sightedness...
...Informative: Paul Johnson's Art: A New History (HarperCollins...
...Now, in their opium-addled hallucination, it is the libs who are in the minority fighting against a conservative media bias...
...This novel about a Czech anarchist drafted into the Austrian army during the First World War is the greatest anti-government satire ever written...
...Fleming vividly re-creates the political and moral atmosphere of the period when America entered World War I, showing how political chicanery fanned intolerance at home and blunders abroad...
...The patron saint of modern conservatism published his seminal work The Conservative Mind in 1953, the year I graduated with my honors in political philosophy from Brown University...
...But you'll search far and wide to find a more engaged and engaging encounter with art...
...Reuven Brenner is a member of McGill University's Faculty of Management...
...First are those you want to read yourself in the quiet moments you can steal from the assembled gaggle of kids and elders who have to be entertained and fed...
...I have read it in full a half dozen times, and dipped into t countless times...
...As Sir Edmund Hillary said, "For scientific discovery give me Scott...
...Victor Navasky is publisher and editorial director of The Nation...
...Now that prof, Lewis L. Gould, has written The Modern American Presidency...
...Like Lewis, he is an atheist turned Christian...
...The book is full of surprises, such as the role of the Irish-American lobby in the political destruction of Woodrow Wilson and his League of Nations...
...But the book is no standard history of art...
...There have been some great reads the last year...
...What is it going to be like in the Soviet Union three or four or five years from now?' asks then Vice President George Bush of Mikhail Gorbachev on one of the pages of the Secretary of State's memoirs...
Vol. 36 • December 2003 • No. 7
