THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books Worth Giving This Christmas BY J. BOTTUM Every year, as the passing seasons I rest again in winter from their i autumnal labors, and Christmas nears anew with its bright...
...Then there's the catalogue to the Metropolitan's show, El Greco (Yale Univ...
...Perhaps they harbored the hope that someday they might be invited to go on those pundits' shows, but my failure is probably just as well, for The Weekly Standard's contributing editor Tucker Carlson has managed to violate the canons of his genre and write a real book, a book book...
...Around 75,000 new books get published in English every year...
...Hardly anyone seems willing to identify nonbook books, but it's an important category for reviewers to remember...
...For history buffs, the coffee-table book of the year is probably the reprint, now with 700 illustrations, of James M. McPherson's 1988 Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford Univ...
...And for the comic-strip buff, there's really only one choice: The Complete Far Side (Andrews McMeel, 1,250 pp., $135), Gary Larson's two-volume set with every one of his Far Side cartoons—4,300 of them, drawn from 1980 to 1994...
...Frederic Brenner's photographic account of Jewish life, Diaspora: Homelands in Exile (HarperCollins, 508 pp., $100) is also worth a look...
...Stranger even than Finnish furniture and fabrics, the Far Side remains an American classic...
...Roderick Beaton's George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel (Yale Univ...
...And while teaching at Yale, Donald Kagan penned The Peloponnesian Wir (Viking, 511 pp., $29.95), the best gift for a classical-history buff...
...More books by people on The Weekly Standard's masthead: Contributing editor Max Boot published the paperback edition of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (Basic, 384 pp., $16), and Joseph Epstein wrote two small classics: Envy (Oxford Univ...
...Edward P. Jones received enormous praise, and deserved much of it, for his novel of a slave-owning black man before the Civil War, The Known World (Amistad, 400 pp., $24.95...
...Norton, 160 pp., $60), and Franklin Toker's study of Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater Rising (Knopf, 496 pp., $35...
...It's not something one can really explain to one's employers...
...The great unwritten story of art books is what a rip-off many of them are: badly researched, badly printed, and poured out for the Christmas market...
...This book would be a joy to give for Christmas—except for the fact that much of it is about the life Dirda found in books as he moved from a family of blue-collar nonreaders to the literary life...
...While not quite Michael Bender's 1995 Waiting for Filippo—^perhaps the best children's pop-up book ever— the British Museum's The Ancient Egypt Pop-Up Book (Universe, 6 pp., $29.95) will be welcomed as a present by some lucky child, as will Arlene Seymour's The Moon Book: A Lunar PopUp Celebration (Rizzoli, 10 pp., $9.98...
...Meanwhile, Werner Hof-mann's set of reproductions in Goya (Thames & Hudson, 344 pp., $75) looks just the thing to go with Goya (Knopf, 448 pp., $40), a study by Robert Hughes, and Francisco Goya (Counterpoint, 272 pp., $26), a biography, due out in February, by the novelist and history writer Evan S. Connell—assuming that you wouldn't mind having three volumes on the violent Spanish painter in the house at the same time...
...The best reprint of the year...
...Fortunately, after the Christmas rush, my drunken rage about the publishing world tends to dissipate, and around the middle of January I begin to think—in that fragile, tentative way known to the slightly hungover—that I might feel well enough to get up around noon and skim, say, an old Perry Mason mystery, if it isn't one of the complicated ones...
...The farmer and classics professor Victor Davis Hanson, for example, has published two books this year...
...Just don't make me look at any more of the blasted things...
...Press, 368 pp., $65), the final of a three-volume series about Sargent...
...Frum is ending the year with another book, cowritten with Richard Perle, a call to arms entitled An End to Evil: What's Next in the war on Terrorism (Random House, 284 pp., $25.95...
...I read perhaps five hundred books this year, looked at reviews for probably three thousand more, and held in my hands somewhere around an additional two thousand new volumes, each of them left unread and unreviewed...
...At 40 inches, 75 pounds, and $6,000, its publishers call it the "biggest, heaviest and most expensive" book in the world, and they may be right...
...Books these days are like the rain: Catch the ones that fall on your head, and let the others wash down the storm sewers...
...Adam Nicolson penned a surprise bestseller with God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (HarperCollins, 281 pp., $24.95), and, by God, it deserved all the praise it received...
...In the meantime, however, here are a few books I wouldn't mind giving this Christmas...
...In Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News (Warner, 256 pp., $24.95), Carlson gives an autobiographical account of his transition from political writing to cohosting CNN's Crossfire...
...The Standard Reader Books Worth Giving This Christmas BY J. BOTTUM Every year, as the passing seasons I rest again in winter from their i autumnal labors, and Christmas nears anew with its bright promise of friends and family, calling us to recollect for one brief moment our better selves, I realize with sudden freshness—like a child, face pressed to the frost-nipped window and cheeks aglow with innocent wonder—just how much I hate books...
...For something a little different, try The Beautiful Boy (Rizzoli, 256 pp., $45), a collection of classic paintings of good-looking young men chosen by Germaine Greer—and who should know the topic better...
...In fact, there's a great new—um—^book on the topic, So Many Books: Reading and Polishing in an Age of Abundance (Paul Dry, 160 pp., $9.95), by Gabriel Zaid, a Mexican writer who claims that ironic enjoyment is about the only possible response to J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...But he's on to something when he argues we need to let go of any impulse to master the things...
...The weirdest, but possibly the best, novel of 2003 is Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Doubleday, 226 pp., $22.95), a literary tour de force posing as a murder mystery narrated by an autistic fifteen-year-old boy...
...A fun, first-rate read...
...I tried earlier this year to interest a number of reviewers in doing an omnibus essay about all the recent nonbooks produced by television's political pundits, but I couldn't find anyone willing to do it...
...It's always around October when review copies begin pouring in for the Christmas rush—a function of the delusional optimism of publishers, who think, in defiance of anything resembling ordinary business sense, that they can lose money eleven months of the year and make it all back in December...
...Arbuthnot as The Pop-Up Kama Sutra (Stewart Tabori & Chang, 48 pp., $22.50...
...see, for example, Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling (Norton, 426 pp., $25.95...
...Still, all these are at least useful volumes...
...This was not a great year for books on architecture, but you can take a stroll through the history of American build-ing—before it all turned into indistinguishable glass boxes—with Hugh Howard's Thomas Jefferson: The Built Legacy of Our Third President (Rizzoli, 204 pp., $40), Samuel and Elizabeth White's McKim, Mead & White (Rizzoli, 304 pp., $75), Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker's The Architecture of Delano & Aldrich (W.W...
...Collections of newspaper columns are always nonbook books...
...Press, 928 pp., $50...
...There's also bitter, unremitting hatred...
...Press, 528 pp., $40) is not an earth-shaking biography, but there's so little in English about the Greek poet that it's worth more than a look...
...Just out from Kass, as well, is Beyond Therapy (Regan, 352 pp., $13.95), a disturbing examination from the President's Council about what would happen if the biotech revolution actually succeeded at its claimed improvements of the human condition...
...The first is Mexifornia: A State of Becoming (Encounter, 150 pp., $21.95), a controversial, fascinating argument about immigration from Mexico and the effect it has on both California and the immigrants...
...Among coffee-table books, Peter Collier's Medal of Honor: Portraits of Valor Beyond the Call of Duty (Artisan, 272 pp., $40) is the clear winner, an impressive and moving volume of essays and photographs about American heroes...
...The truly cultured," Zaid observes, "are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure...
...Macaulay's new entry is Mosque (Houghton Mifflin, 96 pp., $18), another triumph in explaining to children how things get built...
...Press, 286 pp., $60), about America's peculiar 1960s obsession with the fashion designs of Finland...
...Jean-Marie Perouse de Montclos's Paris: City of Art (Vendome, 700 pp., $85) covers much of the same history well and more affordably...
...I suppose I should aspire to that condition...
...Along the way, he revels in some of America's political types—James Traficant ("because he was willing to appear on television drunk"), John McCain, and, surprisingly, Al Sharp-ton—and howls against others: the publicity hounds, the pompous fools, and the self-satisfied personalities...
...Nothing short of Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit can really begin to describe the experience...
...William Kristol joined the New Republic's Lawrence F. Kaplan to pen The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission (Encounter, 153 pp., $25.95), an argument not only for invading Iraq but for thinking about what comes next: "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there...
...Harvard's Richard J. McNally declared victory in psychiatry's memory wars with Remembering Trauma (Belk-nap, 420 pp., $35), while Anthony Swof-ford proved that soldiers can write with Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (Scribner, 257 pp., $24...
...the fact that "the human race publishes a book every thirty seconds...
...When we look back, what passed for bawdy humor back in the those days may seem relatively tame—well, actually, no, it doesn't...
...to 1950 (HarperCollins, 668 pp., $29.95), a book so rich, so complicated, and so strange that it defies categorization...
...In the meantime, however, life is made more difficult by the fact that so many writers for The Weekly Standard publish books...
...To reach the true nonbook book, you have to go to the paste-up objects turned out by celebrity authors...
...Mark them up with yellow highlighting pens, and I'll...
...My Friend, the Author The main problem with hating books while working as the books editor of a magazine is . . . well, hating books while working as the books editor of a magazine...
...Press, 400 pp., $29.95), a study of the Church Fathers that serves as the intellectual companion to his standard-setting 1984 history, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them...
...No one would have predicted that books about architectural design could become children's classics, but David Macaulay managed the feat with such bestsellers as Cathedral, Pyramid, and Castle...
...And you might end the season with Eve Adler's Vergil's Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid (Rowman & Littlefield, 416 pp., $29.95), the most important book of the year for restoring a poet's reputation as a serious thinker...
...If you like such stuff, there are two new books on Hollywood clothing, Reeve Chace's The Complete Book of Oscar Fashion (Reed, 192 pp., $29.95) and Robert Osborne's 75 Years of the Oscar (Abbeville, 408 pp., $75...
...The equivalents for grownups may be Noel Riley's gorgeous The Elements of Design (Free Press, 544, $75) and Henry Petroski's much less profusely illustrated Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design (Knop^ 288 pp., $25...
...and A Tragic Honesty (Picador, 656 pp., $35), Blake Bailey's biography of Richard Yates, the novelist whose Revolutionary Road remains the best of the suburban genre Cheever and Updike became famous for mining...
...Finally, there's nonfiction...
...Actually, I'd enjoy receiving any of these books for Christmas...
...David Frum was prolific as well, starting 2003 with The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (Random House, 303 pp., $25.95...
...An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland (W.W...
...Modern Art: Revolution and Painting (Artmedia, 544 pp., $6,000) comes with its own hardwood stand to keep your bookcase from collapsing...
...Contributing editor Robert Kagan made the bestseller list with Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order (Knopf, 103 pp., $18...
...The Weekly Standard's mystery critic, Jon L. Breen, also recommends Stuart M. Kaminsky's Not Quite Kosher (Forge, 256 pp., $6.99), James Sallis's Cypress Grove (Walker, 256 pp., $24), and two imports from the British satirist Ben Elton: Dead Famous (Black Swan, 339 pp., $11.95) and High Society (Black Swan, 352 pp., $12...
...The third is the work with which O'Rourke began his career, the book that pretty much destroyed Western civilization, National Lampoon's 1964 High School Yearbook: 39th Reunion Edition (Rugged Land, 176 pp., $19.95...
...and taking up an editorial job at the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum published Gulag: A History (Doubleday, 720 pp., $35), the most compelling answer to the gulag-deniers since Robert Conquest's The Great Terror...
...Better on fashion are Dilys E. Blum's Shocking...
...And Don't Forget...
...In the mystery field, Andrew Wilson's biography of Patricia High-smith, Beautiful Shadow (Bloomsbury, 534 pp., $32.50), was a compelling read, and Roger L. Simon's comic novel Director's Cut (Atria, 241 pp., $23) was great fun...
...Thomas Aquinas, George Washington, and your high-school principal stood for...
...Karl Shapiro's Selected Poems (Library of America, 197 pp., $20) resurrects the unfairly faded writer, and Anthony Hecht's Collected Later Poems (Knopf, 224 pp., $25) is a triumph of mature work...
...In science fiction, I liked Dan Sim-mons's Ilium (Eos, 592 pp., $25.95) and Neal Stephenson's history-as-sci-fi,Quicksilver (William Morrow, 944 pp., $27.95...
...Dance saw at least one good book this year: Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick's No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (Yale Univ...
...Tobias Wolff once wrote a great memoir, This Boy's Life, and he returns to that emotional territory in Old School (Knopf, 208 pp., $22...
...Norton, 288 pp., $24.95), and the fact that it's about baseball only makes it better...
...Definitely not for children, but worth noting as the strangest and possibly the worst idea for a book this year, is the new edition of one of Sir Richard Burton's translations, rendered by F.F...
...Press, 109 pp., $17.95), an elegant entry in a series on the seven deadly sins, and Fabulous Small Jews (Houghton Mifflin, 352 pp., $24.95), his latest collection of short stories...
...Although it's not a picture book, the architectural study of2003 is David Mayernik's Timeless Cities: An Architect's Reflections on Renaissance Italy (Westview, 274 pp., $26), a defense of classical models for the making of new architecture...
...Worse, the qualities that make them excellent magazine writers help them write good books...
...And then, of course, there's Leon Kass, who managed to finish, while heading up the President's Council on Bioethics, his work on the Bible, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 720 pp., $35), an analysis of the biblical text that compels the reader to contemplate and argue deeply with it...
...Norton, 320 pp., $24.95...
...Stephen Schwartz—The Weekly Standard's prolific writer on Islam and much else—saw into print the paperback edition of his bestselling The Two Faces of Islam (Anchor, 368 pp., $14.95), and he has a new book arriving shortly, Iron Rose: The Jewry in the Balkans (Anthem, 200 pp., $22.50...
...Frum, disguising herself under her maiden name, "Danielle Crittenden," published her first novel, Amanda Bright@home (Warner, 368 pp., $23.95), a romp through middle-class money and politics in Washington...
...Press, 312 pp., $65) and Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashion, Architecture (Yale Univ...
...But if you can possibly swing it, The A-rt and Spirit of Paris is the one art book to buy this Christmas— and keep for yourself...
...I've already set aside as gifts three other literary volumes: The Afterlife (Counterpoint, 320 pp., $26.95), Penelope Fitzgerald's posthumous collection of essays and reviews...
...Press, 216 pp., $55...
...Neither are cookbooks, or concordances, or anything you can't sit down to read from beginning to end...
...The art books worth buying for others begin with Paul Johnson's Art: A New History (HarperCollins, 792 pp., $39.95), a volume that promised to be a curmudgeonly rant against the modern world—and turns out instead to be an utterly charming, deeply informative history...
...Even though it begins as an attack on religious believers, James Wood's The Book Against God (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 272 pp., $24) proves a subtle and delicate read...
...But the year's most beautiful book within the realm of financial imagina-tion—not reality, you understand, but something an average book buyer could at least dream about—is The Art and Spirit of Paris (Abbeville, 1,654 pp., $385), exploring 2,000 years of Paris with over 1,400 reproductions...
...He's wrong...
...Maybe it's books like Murray's I need to jolly me back into book-loving again...
...Press, 786 pp., $65...
...Meanwhile—although the idea of an entire household of book writers terrifies me—Mrs...
...Living to Tell the Tale (Knopf, 496 pp., $26.95), the first volume of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's memoirs...
...National Lampoon's 1964 High School Yearbook is still outrageous, still hilarious, and still a threat to everything Aristotle, St...
...Right now, there are perhaps twelve hundred new books piled up in dangerous towers in my home and office, and if I never see another one, I'll be glad...
...Burn them for roasting marshmallows, and I'll be grateful...
...Press, 320 pp., $65), and Yale's usual run of good art studies also includes John Singer Sargent: The Late Portraits (Yale Univ...
...And the second is Ripples of Battle: How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think (Doubleday, 288 pp., $27.50), an account of the invasion of Okinawa, Sherman's march through Georgia, and the Greek fight at Delium—each a struggle that determined, by its horror, how future wars would be fought...
...Adam Bellow clearly had a lot of fun writing In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History (Doubleday, 576 pp., $30), and what better book to give your children...
...How is any one supposed to keep up...
...But almost any other cruelty is fine...
...I never know what to make of Jonathan Lethem, but his latest, The Fortress of Solitude (Dou-bleday, 528 pp., $26), is an intermittently brilliant piece of writing, spanning three decades of life in Brooklyn...
...The Washington Post's Pulitzer-prize winning literary journalist, Michael Dirda, has just published a memoir of his childhood in a steelworking Ohio town...
...Dictionaries, for instance, are not really books in the bookish sense of a book...
...And then there's contributing editor PJ...
...Use them for landfill, prop up table-legs with them: I don't care...
...Dirda manages to combine wist-fulness and comedy in the way all memoirists know they should but seldom manage...
...I mean, I really dislike the damn things...
...Reading at an average rate, you would need 250,000 years just to get through the books already published, while reading merely a list of their titles would take fifteen years...
...Two are his bestselling rampages through public life in the 1980s: Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S...
...Look as well for Botticelli (Skira, 336 pp., $65) and Leonardo da Vinci (Taschen, 600 pp., $150...
...Just not until after Christmas...
...He's great at that, of course, but when his father complains, "All that kid wants to do is stick his nose in a book," I found myself cheering for the father...
...Just what you might imagine could pop up does, in fact, pop up, through several of the possible and impossible positions of the famous Indian sex guide...
...The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli (Yale Univ...
...While moving to D.C...
...Government (Grove, 240 pp., $13) and Give WOir a Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind's Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer (Grove, 256 pp., $13...
...Still, some of them stand out, and if you really must oppress your friends and family with books this Christmas, you should start in poetry with Robert Lowell's Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1,200 pp., $45...
...CRourke, who brought three of his books back into print this year...
...The difference between America and Europe, Kagan notes, is deeper than most observers realize...
...And to finish the year, there's Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C...
...And so are most of the book-like things by television personalities...
...Art for Art's Sake The most beautiful book published this year—well, what is probably the most beautiful book is one I haven't yet managed to see...
...The scholar Robert Louis Wilken gave us The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Yale Univ...
...A fast-reading account of Frum's year in the White House, The Right Man is particularly good on the way in which the attacks of September 11 brought out the best of Bush's potential...
...While winning the national humanities medal, Midge Decter also produced Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait (Regan, 240 pp., $24.95), the story of the secretary of defense and his times, a great book to give any political junkie on your Christmas list...
...Among the few worth giving as presents are Marc Chagall (Abrams, 236 pp., $60) and Dirk de Vos's The Flemish Primitives (Princeton Univ...
...Meanwhile, our regular art critic, Thomas M. Disch, has two of his golden oldies back in print: A Child's Garden of Grammar (University of Michigan Press, 100 pp., $14.95), for which he won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' award for light verse, and The Prisoner (I Books, 256 pp., $6.99), his 1967 science-fiction novel that was the basis of the 1960s television show, a perennial cult favorite...
...well, no, some things are too rotten to contemplate...
...Who needs it...
...Michael Lewis wrote the business book of the year, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (W.W...
Vol. 9 • December 2003 • No. 13
