BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS
42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Books for Christmas TINA BROWN TROUBLESOME YOUNG MEN: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England by Lynne Olson...
...He has prejudices that might seem dated, but in my experience they are just as powerful today filtering the perceptions of Americans abroad as they were when first published...
...1966...
...It is also impossible to ever walk away from it completely...
...But there are so many...
...But that doesn’t mean you can’t think more nimbly or more DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 4 3 Our annual list of holiday gift suggestions from distinguished readers and writers...
...You can’t read this book without loving the Say Hey Kid...
...John Heilpern absorbed Osborne’s DNA—literally...
...to allow that couple back into the White House would be a clear sign that moral degeneracy faces your nation...
...Translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden...
...Practical Intelligence, Karl Albrecht...
...The Blair Years: The Alastair Campbell Diaries by Alastair Campbell (Knopf...
...Not wild about Berlioz’s music...
...This book expresses that ecstasy with unparalleled power...
...I do not mind admitting that, without fail, every reading of the Unicorn book has tearfully moved me and made me reflect on my feelings toward others...
...A Navy SEAL’s firstperson account of battlefield valor as measured by tactical courage and moral suasion that is uniquely American and, in this case, unimaginably tragic...
...MICHAEL YON BRAVE MEN by Ernie Pyle...
...Adventures of Morris the Moose, by Bernard Wiseman, the classic trilogy of children’s stories about a slightly madcap moose who learns about new things (he can’t read or write so he goes to grammar school with children) and how to accept and learn from mistakes— or “Moose-stakes,” as Morris says...
...Pyle had no equal or contemporary then and he certainly doesn’t now, although it humbles and flatters me whenever someone suggests my work reminds them of Pyle’s incredible columns...
...This book, in the hands of a boy, will create an urge for travel and adventure that will never be satisfied, not even by the real thing, which in my experience always pales in comparison to just about anything Stevenson wrote...
...H Kevin Lynch, former articles editor of National Review, lives in Arlington, Virginia...
...MIKE HUCKABEE War Footing, by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr...
...A More Perfect Constitution by Larry J. Sabato (2007...
...Equally revelatory are his witty accounts of his conducting tours through Europe...
...A truly sumptuous book, which shows that for all the pomp and circumstance attached to those historic regiments, they are still tremendously effective fighting machines today...
...Anything by Mark Twain is better than just about everything from everyone else...
...Our very own Bob Tyrrell has also written about a president, but in The Clinton Crack-Upone realizes how far superior Nixon was to Bill Clinton in every possible way (not excluding personal honesty...
...That’s why this book’s for you...
...Berlioz fought relentlessly against the shameless mauling of scores by publishers, conductors, and performers...
...Like combat, it leaves a mark on all who pass through it...
...Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depressionreveals how little FDR (and Herbert Hoover) knew about economics and how the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression...
...Nothing, of course, is static in history...
...Finally, two other books have fetched my admiration...
...Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences...
...This is not only a good book for people who are fascinated by words, it is just a really good book, period...
...This epochal human narrative of the Cold War should be read by every American, and I shall always put it on my Christmas list...
...In my extensive travels around the world, I have seen the power of myth...
...Nonfiction Books...
...JOHN GIZZI TEAM OF RIVALS, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, is the masterful account of how Abraham Lincoln selected nearly all of his political rivals for his Cabinet and saved the union...
...By no means a whitewash since Black points out some pertinent character failings of the president, this hugely well-researched, fluidly written, and above all highly intelligent book was a complete pleasure to read...
...This is a fascinating account by a leading legal affairs writer and a history professor of the scandalous performance by a runaway prosecuting attorney...
...Its wisdom is sturdy, unflinching, and raw and, thus, authentically American...
...The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay (1787 & 1788...
...Derived from a cache of new letters, interviews, and unseen videos, it’s a luxurious winter read, full of Russian theatrics...
...The ultrashort version of my list, in alphabetical order by author, is as follows: Whittaker Chambers, Witness...
...H Major Garrett is a congressional correspondent for Fox News and author of The Enduring Revolution: The Inside Story of the Republican Ascendancy and Why It Will Continue...
...An unexpected page-turner about the group of young Tory MPs whose tenacious rebellion against the despotic hand of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and the appeasers leaves you longing for such political courage today...
...Another book I recommend purchasing this season is James Piereson’s Camelot and the Cultural Revolution...
...As long as we are on the subject of authors who died this year, two wonderful children’s authors did so, and their books are well worth re-reading...
...Give it to someone who thinks his own boyhood is a distant memory...
...The language was denser and more flowery than is my usual taste...
...They find it, but what heart-stopping adventures they have on the way, facing the evilly seductive Old Man of the Sea, the terrifying Dogfighters, and the wicked Enchantress of the Fjord, to name just a few...
...H Larry J. Sabatois Center for Politics founder and Robert Kent Gooch Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, and the author of over 20 books on the American political process, including Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics...
...And for the last word on Arthur Schlesinger, read his delightful Journals: 1952-2000...
...You have strengthened the movement, amused and inspired, put lead on the target, and always remembered to direct fire toward the other team...
...This book has received enough B O O K S F O R C H R I S T M A S 5 2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 To Bob Tyrrell, Wlady Pleszczynski, Al Regnery and all those who created and built The American Spectator over 40 years – Congratulations...
...The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester...
...What is a busy Christmas shopper to do...
...There are more precise observations about the strengths and weaknesses of man and mankind in this volume than any book I’ve ever encountered...
...When I was handed a paperback copy of this book, it felt at first like assigned reading...
...I saw, I understood, I felt… that I was alive and that I must arise and walk...
...Journalist William L. Riordan published the series of interviews with George Washington Plunkitt, New York state senator and Tammany Hall ward boss...
...Kipling’s stories also capture the dissonance of the experience of India for Westerners, even when they themselves have failed to recognize it...
...M. STANTON EVANS NOT HAVING DONE MUCH current reading for a while, I’m pretty well disqualified from making recommendations of that nature...
...In The Prince, Machiavelli conveys the problems with the ruling class and suggests a series of solutions to bring about the reunification of Italy B O O K S F O R C H R I S T M A S 50 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 under the Medici family of Florence...
...In one splendid volume, Edward E. Ericson Jr...
...My recent visits to many of the places he wrote about confirmed how amazingly accurate and uncanny his observations were of the places he visited and the people he encountered there...
...The former Green Beret was embedded in Iraq for nine months in 2005 and returned to Iraq in 2007 to continue reporting on the war...
...Check local listings for C-SPAN2...
...ROBERT D. NOVAK THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS: 50 Years Reporting in Washington by Robert D. Novak...
...Lords of the Land: The War For Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007 by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar...
...At the time of Solzhenitsyn’s speech close to 50 years had elapsed since the repatriations...
...Senate and the intrigues in official Washington, packs as powerful a wallop today as it did when it was first published in 1959...
...I was genuinely surprised when it turned out to be a real page-turner with more drama, plot, and character development than most fiction books...
...Making matters worse for Dominika and her struggling parents was the fact that the child’s grandparents did not only support the Communist regime, they were its top lieutenants and enforcers—even when it meant confronting family...
...While the papers were originally published in several New York newspapers to persuade New York citizens to ratify the Constitution, the papers remain perhaps the best documentation of the thinking of our Founding Fathers regarding the birth of American democracy...
...His latest book is The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President’s Life After the White House (Nelson Current...
...Until I read it again just a few years ago, I had not really noticed how astute a judge of character Stevenson is, especially perceptive on the dynamic between evil and weak, and the crippling grip with which the fear of the unknown holds so many people...
...While he was alive I enjoyed ribbing him...
...This is the eye-opening 2004 bestseller by two courageous Israelis, a prominent historian and a leading columnist...
...I wasn’t expecting to like this book when I first got it...
...2, noon ET Watch live on C-SPAN2 or anytime at booktv.org...
...H Quin Hillyeris a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...While Berlioz met musicians of the highest artistry (especially in Germany), he also found mediocrity and unprofessionalism that today would be unthinkable in even provincial orchestras...
...It’s not just odd tales that form points of common reference in ancient history...
...In fiction and nonfiction, his voice is pitched so wryly yet it maintains all the earnest, big-hearted (if ham-handed) notes that make it so readily identified as “American...
...Not surprisingly, John Adamson’s chronicle of the uprising against Charles I is a stupendous history...
...Recommended especially for younger readers —but for some older ones as well who could use a refresher course about the basics...
...If I Found a Wistful Unicorn, by Ann Ashford, a timeless book of moving verse and illustrations that, more than anything I have read, summarize both friendship and love beautifully...
...Really good stuff...
...The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes...
...Such joyous enthusiasms—for Beethoven, Christoph Willibald Gluck, and others—make the Memoirs a delight to read...
...A work of fiction that closely mirrors the political life of Governor Huey Long of Louisiana, the novel tells the story of the rise and fall of southern governor Willie Stark...
...This is a narrative on Justice Thomas’s growth from poverty, through 1960s radicalism, and on to public service at the highest level—a struggle that has left him the most noble figure in American public life today...
...I am often frustrated trying to explain the groupthink that distinguishes tribal cultures from ours...
...John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Manby John Heilpern (Knopf...
...But more than just a well-written book about his adolescence and real coming of age, Hickam’s book is a testimony to the unrestrainable force of curious minds and the incredible power of good teachers to channel it in safe and productive directions...
...All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946...
...If Oprah’s endorsement (her first literary classic designee) dissuades you, don’t give Oprah that much power...
...Offered as a Public Service...
...Also, as long as we are in the subject area of the Supreme Court, I heartily recommend Jan Crawford Greenburg’s Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court, and also Originalism: A QuarterCentury of Debate, edited by Federalist Society cofounder Steven G. Calabresi...
...Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson...
...Klitzman does it better than almost anyone I’ve ever read in this book detailing his experiences as a medical researcher living among the Fore peoples of Papua New Guinea...
...By far the most emotionally gripping scene of many is when Dominika comes face-to-face with her grandfather, a renowned Czech surgeon, which in itself would have ripped apart the Iron Curtain had it somehow played out for all the world to see three decades ago...
...H John Gizzi is political editor of Human Events...
...I am reading it this year and find it an invaluable political primer on making friends with one’s enemies from the last battle...
...This was mandatory reading for anyone who was planning to work with LTC Erik Kurilla, commander of the Deuce Four platoon with which I was embedded for nearly seven months in 2005...
...TV Book on C-SPAN2 This Month on In Depth: Newt Gingrich Sunday, Dec...
...If fact, thinker’s thinkers always can...
...Yes, you know Abraham Lincoln’s assassination story...
...To anyone who has come up against the glass wall of magical thinking, Klitzman’s telling of how tribal leaders built their own airstrips in order to make the planes that drop all the boxes of supplies reappear in the sky will provoke a grin and groan of familiarity...
...This book is like the PBS series: a collection of conversations that range across all of human experience in search of the themes around which people gravitate...
...B O O K S F O R C H R I S T M A S DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 5 5 Created by Cable...
...Witness by Whittaker Chambers...
...But as more and more of the “Greatest Generation” pass, Pyle’s work becomes increasingly important because it also captures the spirit of that time, that war, and the men and women who fought it...
...For two more books on the fundamental civic values that shape this great nation, read Democracy and the Constitution, a set of wonderful essays released last year by the American Enterprise Institute’s esteemed Walter Berns, and The Theme Is Freedom, a 1993 study, by legendary conservative journalist M. Stanton Evans, of the mutually supportive roles of faith and freedom...
...The story is narrated by Jack Burden, Stark’s political right hand, who is able to maintain his integrity while watching Stark rise to political power through dirty politics and back-room deals...
...It is more than an historical account of the Battle at Thermopylae...
...Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom...
...One reviewer noted that the book reads almost like a fairy tale, “replete with a menacing dragon of sorts,” except in this case the dragon is the Communist fist that controlled Prague during the 1970s and 1980s...
...Having whetted the appetite with Pearce’s book, the thoughtful giver would naturally want to include a book by the master himself...
...Machiavelli suggests a variety of tactics for the prince to secure his power and argues that because humans are inherently evil, the ends are able to justify the means...
...Galloway writes with such passion and precision that the resulting text is vividly detailed, giving the reader the closest experience to combat next to being there, including that of seeing it on film...
...The result of the interviews, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, shows the Russian icon chose his man wisely...
...Now after his death I shall go on the record...
...Not only do I regularly give Morris to the children of friends, but I have cited and quoted from the moose in articles and letters as an example of learning from error and going on...
...H R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.is the founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator...
...R. EMMETT TYRRELL, JR...
...Never before or since has a single month packed more perils or opportunities or revealed more about the tinsel strength of American individualism, American republicanism, and American resolve than April 1865...
...Berlioz’s gifts as a prose stylist are so endearing as to make one’s opinion of his musical voice irrelevant...
...I’m happy, however, to suggest a list of hardy perennials that ought to be in any well-stocked conservative library, or any other, and would make excellent gifts for people who don’t already have them...
...Following the Equator: A Journey Around the Worldby Mark Twain...
...I relished reading him...
...A truly gorgeous book for its sumptuous pictures, but also very well written, is Barney White-Spunner’s Horse Guards, a comprehensive 350-year history of the Blues and Royals, Britain’s two oldest and grandest cavalry regiments in the Household Division...
...Drury’s insights on the Washington press corps in this and the five successor novels in the A&Cseries were critical to my own pursuit of a career in reporting and as a White House correspondent...
...All his stories resonate with some aspect of Indian sensibility, but my favorite is “The Man Who Would Be King,” which is a cautionary tale about crossing borders without really knowing the terrain...
...Because baseball this summer was so badly marred by Barry Bonds’s tawdry climb atop the all-time home run list, it is worth going back to find 1979’s Willie’s Time, by San Francisco sportswriter Charles Einstein, who died in March of this year...
...We, too, might never have heard Mozart’s genius uncorrupted had publishers and performers continued the desecrations that Berlioz so decried...
...Had he never written a note, this book would have earned him a place among Europe’s great Romantic spirits...
...And what will the children do while the adults are immersed in Solzhenitsyn...
...White Read Aloud Award for Older Readers, it tells the adventures of an orphaned ten-year-old survivalist—and in doing so, celebrates the virtue of self-reliance throughout, while gradually showing the virtues of community and family in the long run...
...But if I did, it would be “Timshel...
...Black convinced many conservatives that Roosevelt deserved a more favorable appraisal than they had given him for generations...
...Join us for the latest nonfiction books and authors in biography, history, current events, the media, and more from book events across the country...
...The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers...
...a fascinating thesis strongly argued...
...It failed miserably, while the book is an utter triumph...
...She provides a first-hand account of growing up under a Communist regime that even the sympathetic Ronald Reagan couldn’t come close to describe when he set out to tear down the wall...
...But until I do, readers will have to rely on Kipling for communicating the utter essence of the place...
...By the way, not all conservatives are willing to reassess FDR in a rosy light...
...My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir is a powerful book about the racism that Thomas had to overcome both in the Jim Crow South and in the liberal Kultursmog: at Yale Law School, in official Washington, and before Senate confirmation hearings that were the most unjust assault on a B O O K S F O R C H R I S T M A S DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 5 1 40th Happy Conservatives Serving Conservatives for 40 Years Anniversary American Spectator...
...H Michael Yon, author of Danger Close, is an independent writer and photographer whose dispatches about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan are published at his online magazine: www.michaelyon-online.com...
...Capote is so good, in fact, that few who read this will be able to forget a hundred small but telling details about those few hours when evil visited a Kansas farmhouse...
...That this towering figure, 89 this month, is still among us is another reason for joy this Christmas...
...The Last Playboy, by Shawn Levy, is a lively pageturner on the life of Porfirio Rubirosa, the Dominican diplomat and international playboy, played out against the turbulent political scene and appealing social scene of the 1940s and ’50s...
...But this is the only memoir I will ever publish, and I hope it would be enjoyable reading for the many political junkies who subscribe to The American Spectator...
...On first hearing Shakespeare, for example: “The lightning flash of that sublime discovery opened before me at a stroke the whole heaven of art, illuminating it to its remotest depths...
...Yes, I have broken the unwritten rule against an author recommending his own book (though I am told Jacques Barzun committed the same offense...
...Every Weekend...
...Einstein does a fine job weaving in an account of the career of the incomparable Willie Mays (Bonds’ godfather) with a pretty decent thumbnail social history of the times in which Mays played...
...You probably are...
...His lacerating description of the “fixes” imposed on The Magic Fluteis hilarious—but also terrifying...
...Drawing on a wide array of materials, Piereson offers an intriguing explanation of how the dominant American political movement in the 20th century, liberalism, declined into the adolescent anger that is now its essence...
...Korda makes a highly readable case that Ike’s particular brand of charm, concealing his secret ambitions, kept prima donnas like Monty, Patton, and Bradley—and Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle—on the same team...
...Not to mention he is one of the few writers who can always make me laugh out loud...
...But he remembered and paid homage...
...Yes, you know the Civil War...
...Everyman’s Library, 2002...
...Chesterton and J.R.R...
...It is long, but Nixon’s astonishing life deserves nothing less, and in Black he has found a generally sympathetic but above all judicious and engaging biographer...
...In sum and in fine, Piereson believes that the Kennedy assassination was a blow from which the liberals never recovered...
...I did not know about Ernie Pyle when I first went to Iraq and began posting my observations and photographs on a blog...
...For the U.S...
...continued on page 54 accolades and awards to more than amply convey the quality with which it was crafted...
...H M. Stanton Evans is author most recently of Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joseph McCarthy...
...After a few pages I knew the comparisons were wrong...
...ANDREW ROBERTS IREAD BIOGRAPHIES AND HISTORY BOOKS for a living, and one of the best I have read in the past decade has been Conrad Black’s Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full...
...Through 85 essays, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay explain how the government would function and explain the theory of democracy...
...Francis S. Collins...
...Whatever Happened to the Human Race...
...When he visited the widow—whose cooperation he received—she lent him Osborne’s boots for a ruminative walk on the moors...
...From your friends at: Celebrating 60 Years of Great Conservative Books presidential nominee in American history...
...A story of the barbarism of our enemies and the soul-searing virtue of the warriors we’ve asked to confront them...
...Also included are many of his essays and speeches, some famous (including his Nobel acceptance speech) and others little known, such as one he gave in Liechtenstein in 1993 in which he paid tribute to the tiny country’s World War II leader, Prince Franz Joseph II, for providing what Solzhenitsyn called a “lesson in courage...
...HEATHER MAC DONALD IF YOU LIVE FOR CLASSICAL MUSIC, you must not die before reading Hector Berlioz’s Memoirs...
...Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case by Stuart Taylor Jr...
...JOHN MCCASLIN NONE OF THE BOOKS CONSUMED by this reader in 2007 was as powerful or eye-opening as Dominika Dery’s childhood memoir, The Twelve Little Cakes...
...Hickam’s book reflects on the difficulty inherent in taking a really different path from that traveled by family and friends, and as such it is a navigation guide for any young person on the edge of his or her own life, and perhaps a source of consolation for the family and friends about to be left behind...
...it will be the fork that tells if the imagination has been cooked to leather, or if there is any pulse of life remaining...
...H Tina Brown is an editor and author (most recently of The Diana Chronicles...
...Although there are many more books that might be added from these and other authors, these five provide a good conspectus of the conservative-libertarian thought that fueled the counterrevolution of the 1960s and led to the Goldwater and Reagan political movements...
...and KC Johnson...
...Lone Survivor, Marcus Luttrell...
...His insights into the minds of combat soldiers and his wry observations of what they experience so close to danger and so far from home are timeless...
...At the end of the war British and American officials agreed with Stalin to repatriate hundreds of thousands of anti-Communist Russians, Ukrainians, and other Soviet-bloc refugees who wrongly believed they had found safety in the West...
...I was a rocket boy, but it wasn’t Sputnik over the Appalachian coal mining town that spurred me and my friends to blow things up—it was Apollo rockets launching close by...
...Finally, Norman Podhoretz’s World War IVplaces the War on Terror squarely into its proper historical, political, and military perspectives, and provides a powerful reason for electing as your next president only someone who instinctively understands these vital truths...
...Rubirosa was an unforgettable figure who lived several careers and lives until they were cut short too soon...
...Written during the years 1787 and 1788, the Federalist Papers eloquently argue for the ratification of the United States Constitution and explain why this new form of government was the best choice for America...
...Advise and Consent, Allen Drury’s epic novel about a controversial nomination before the U.S...
...42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Books for Christmas TINA BROWN TROUBLESOME YOUNG MEN: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England by Lynne Olson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux...
...Speaking of the polarity of evil and weak strains, this first book intended as a nonfiction novel also remains one of the best in that genre (and there is one now, thanks to Capote...
...8 am – Mon...
...Plunkitt of Tammany Hall by William L. Riordan (1905...
...The ones Santa really likes will be savoring The Saga of Erik the Viking, the spellbinding story of a brave Viking who sets off with his brave crew to find where the sun goes at night...
...In Cold Blood by Truman Capote...
...It doesn’t matter...
...Hayek, The Road to Serfdom...
...Nureyev: The Life by Julie Kavanagh (Pantheon...
...The latter is most famous, of course, for the wonderful (and sometimes controversial) A Wrinkle in Time, but a better book for conservatives to give to tweeners is her first children’s novel, the ode to faith and family called Meet the Austins...
...I refer to Lloyd Alexander, whose Prydain series is an evergreen for tweeners on the cusp of adulthood, and Madeleine L’Engle...
...The definitive biography of ballet’s greatest star whose ego was as supersized as his talent...
...How Democracies Perish, by Jean-François Revel...
...KEVIN LYNCH ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN is famous for minding his own business, both during the years he was creating literary bombshells inside the Soviet Union as well as during his 18 years of exile in the United States...
...8 am ET J129 AS Christmasbook:Layout 1 10/26/07 10:30 AM Page 1...
...I fully B O O K S F O R C H R I S T M A S 5 4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 intended to read it, as I am fascinated by words and their meaning...
...In Michael Barone’s equally thought-provoking Our First Revolution, it is passionately argued that the template for the Founding Fathers’ revolt of 1776 was the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 in Britain, and it puts that later upheaval into perfect perspective...
...Collected Short Stories by Rudyard Kipling...
...Yet there you have it...
...I came to this book when I was researching cannibal cultures, but I came away from reading it with much more than I expected...
...America and its allies would likely have lost World War II if any one of a number of generals other than Dwight Eisenhower had been in charge of the combined forces...
...But Franz Joseph refused to comply, thereby saving the detachment of Russian anti-Communists in his country from what awaited hundreds of thousands of others on their forced return to the Soviet Union: outright execution or slow death in a concentration camp...
...Rarely has the experience of great art been more eloquently conveyed...
...B O O K S F O R C H R I S T M A S DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 47 The idealChristmas gift 2 great American books and an exclusive CD celebrating the great American Ronald Reagan Top New York Times Best-selling Author William J. Bennett memorable years american spectator Congrats to 40 AmericaBxSetAmrcnSpc_Ad2:Layout 1 11/2/07 10:22 AM Page 1 Pollard is serving a well-deserved life sentence...
...But given a few hours uninterrupted by a combat mission, the powerful lure of the story itself took hold...
...It exposes the prolonged military occupation and massive construction of settlements that pose such an obstacle to peace...
...But there are variations in the velocity and frequency of moments freighted with national importance...
...It is out there right now shaping lives and increasingly determining deaths...
...LET ME BEGIN BY SAYING Clarence Thomas has written what I consider the Best Book of The Year, which is not an accolade that I confer easily, as my book on Boy Clinton’s ribald life in retirement (and Hillary’s rise to presidential plausibility) is now out, The Clinton Crack-Up...
...It is a wonderful spy story, an exposition of high-level politics, and an account of one courageous American surmounting pain and suffering in the Cold War...
...Never has the American character been so affectionately hoisted on its own collective petard, and yet somehow Twain’s stories and writings always reveal the best potential in every one of us...
...But their most unexpected effect is to reveal that we are living today in the golden age of performance—despite the death of classicalmusic composition—thanks to reforms championed by Berlioz himself...
...Especially when he goes on to describe their ongoing efforts to pry from him the magic incantations they were obviously lacking from any white person they encountered...
...You may never have heard of this author and you may think you’re a thinker’s thinker...
...MAJOR GARRETT EAST OF EDEN, John Steinbeck...
...Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind...
...creatively...
...LARRY J. SABATO THE PRINCE by Machiavelli (1505...
...In this story, Westerners intent on using the locals’ magical thinking to their own advantage discover that more than technology separates some cultures...
...Revealing, funny biography of the playwright whose Look Back in Angerexploded on the British stage at a time when middle- class torpor and censorship were killing the theater...
...But a few years after his return home, the Nobel prizewinner opened his doors to Joseph Pearce, an Englishman whose previous works included biographies of G.K...
...H John McCaslin is the Washington Times’s “Inside the Beltway” columnist and author of Inside the Beltway: Offbeat Stories, Scoops, and Shenanigans From Around the Nation’s Capital...
...In addition to the insights he provides into Solzhenitsyn’s work, Pearce, an agnostic turned Catholic, asks questions that secular interviewers are more comfortable avoiding (if they occur to them at all) and Solzhenitsyn answers...
...The book is best in hardcover because that version does more justice to the spectacular illustrations of Michael Foreman...
...They are very angry...
...by Dr...
...The Trembling Mountain: A Personal Account of Kuru, Cannibals, and Mad Cow Diseaseby Robert Klitzman, M.D...
...Key made the case for rationality in voters’ choice and suggested that voters choose to re-elect incumbents based on their performance in office...
...Sat...
...Thomas’s memoir is also a powerful account of spiritual growth and the role faith can play in saving a man from certain destruction...
...Had Roosevelt had access to Milton Friedman rather than Rexford Tugwell, the Great Depression might not have been so great...
...Amazingly, Dominika was born in Prague in 1975, the same year Tiger Woods was born...
...H Grover G. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform and author of the forthcoming book Leave Us Alone (HarperCollins...
...Will Black’s case for a more charitable appraisal of Nixon persuade any liberals...
...it is the manifest of the warrior’s code and a testimony to the timeless power of a human soul whose truest essence is revealed in the sacrifice of mortal life for honor, country, and duty...
...H Heather Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal...
...Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield...
...So we remember Perry with his bum knees and warped sense of chivalry, putting a pillow under the head of a man whose throat he’s about to cut and blasting a teenage girl’s brains into her pillow before his associate can “bust her...
...H Mike Huckabee is former governor of Arkansas and author of From Hope to Higher Ground: 12 STOPS to Restoring America’s Greatness...
...In the end, Stark rises to political fame but pays a high price for his path to power...
...I say not surprisingly because in this very issue Andrew Roberts recommends The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I, and Andrew’s assessments of history are unassailable...
...Invaluable and juicy diary of day-to-day life at Number 10 Downing Street under the British Prime Minister who won an unprecedented three-time Labour victory but finally left office in June 2007 despised by his own people for his stand on the war in Iraq...
...He advises conductors to learn to read scores, and composers and conductors to learn the range of each instrument—skills that are now routine, thanks, again, in part to Berlioz’s influence...
...His latest book, A More Perfect Constitution: 23 Proposals to Revitalize Our Constitution and Make America a Fairer Country, is on sale now...
...The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, translated and edited by David Cairns...
...This book will ask readers to set aside their own political loyalties, to look past the current “values” debates and hot-button issues, to consider this very real possibility: that the failure of the nation to update the Constitution and the structure of government it originally bequeathed to us is at the root of our current political dysfunction...
...Winner of the 2007 E.B...
...The Responsible Electorate: Rationality in Presidential Voting 1936–1960 by V. O. Key, Jr...
...April 1865: The Month That Saved America, Jay Winik...
...I have my doubts...
...Candid, moving, and well written, it chronicles the life of a truly remarkable man who may well be the single greatest living American office-holder...
...I was thinking it would be like any other of the hundreds of dry reference books I’ve collected over the years: a clinical history of the compilation of a major dictionary...
...Someday I will write about India...
...This book provides a look into the world of big city “machine” politics from the firstperson perspective...
...But almost from the beginning readers commented on similarities in our work, and when I acknowledged that I had not read his work, a thoughtful reader sent a first edition hard copy of Pyle’s Brave Men to me...
...Another great book for tweeners, this one a new 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 B O O K S F O R C H R I S T M A S continued on page 46 one, is Alabama Moon, by debut author Watt Key...
...Beyond that, it lays bare the politically correct hypocrisy of academia and the news media...
...Pearce’s passion is Solzhenitsyn’s passion, what the Russian has described as the “universal and eternal questions...
...The way in which Capote uses his prodigious storytelling skills to flesh out the drama and tension of actual events elevates the experience and gives it meaning in a larger context...
...QUIN HILLYER IAM CONFIDENT I WILL NOT be the only one recommending what surely is the conservative book of the year, My Grandfather’s Son, by Clarence Thomas...
...F.A...
...As a whole it is almost overwhelming in scope, but each chapter can also stand alone, and because of that it is a book that will be (or should be) revisited often over a lifetime...
...Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam...
...If the government weren’t busy running a national Endowment for the Arts, it might be able to focus on keeping our nation’s secrets and capturing spies earlier in their careers...
...His travelogues are fascinating...
...They are a 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 B O O K S F O R C H R I S T M A S thrilling expression of artistic passion and a fascinating chronicle of 19th-century European musical life...
...H Robert D. Novak is a nationally syndicated columnist and a commentator for Fox News...
...The Language of God, by Dr...
...H Andrew Roberts is most recently the author of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900...
...Through analyzing public opinion data and electoral returns, V.O...
...Machiavelli proposes that politics and religion are separate and that future rulers should be concerned with securing power, not adhering to a strict moral code...
...It is fascinating to see how much the musical canon has changed—few today know the operas of Gaspare Spontini, whom Berlioz ranked uncontroversially in a triumvirate of great modern masters, along with Beethoven… and Weber...
...John Adamson’s The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I posits the revisionist view that it was the aristocracy who destroyed the Divine Right of Kings...
...Since his return to Russia in 1994, the man whose pen proved mightier than the Soviet Union has done what he has always done, concentrated on his work and fended off intruders...
...This is the book of the year: a terrific journalist’s insightful, unsentimental look, without blinders, at Franklin D. Roosevelt’s mean-spirited onslaught on public utilities, chicken pluckers, and other businessmen that unnecessarily prolonged the Great Depression...
...After writing a superb biography of FDR, Conrad Black has now taken up the challenge of Richard Nixon and in an engaging style supported by wide-ranging research removed the prefix “disgraced” from the president’s name...
...We Were Soldiers Once… and Youngby Joe Galloway and General Hal Moore...
...This is the only book I’ve ever read three times, and it’s my answer to the ageold question, “Which book would you carry with you to a deserted island...
...Tolkien...
...C. Everett Koop and Francis A. Schaeffer...
...But what has not changed is the ecstasy produced by great music...
...Not in this life or any other would I subject myself to a tattoo...
...Ike: An American Hero by Michael Korda (HarperCollins...
...It is also one of the best true crime stories I’ve ever read...
...But here you discover and feel the pressures on our tender Republic at its moment of maximum vulnerability...
...Warning: Several years after Erik was published, Jones wrote and directed a dreadful movie called Erik the Vikingthat was aimed at an older audience...
...But where were they on the front end...
...and Daniel J. Mahoney have collected selections from Solzhenitsyn’s poems, short stories, memoirs (The Oak and the Calf), novels (The First Circle and Cancer Ward), and other works, such as the earthshaking Gulag Archipelago...
...Legions of would-be interviewers, especially those from the West, failed to gain access, no matter how impeccable their credentials...
...Answer: The recently published Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings 1947-2005...
...It’s a long read, but it is over too soon, because it is next to impossible to put the book down...
...Author Terry Jones is probably best known as a member of Monty Python, but in a better world he would be more renowned for his children’s stories, especially The Saga of Erik the Viking...
Vol. 40 • January 2008 • No. 10
