Seeking Pleasure Far From Home
[The Wall Street Journal]
Tunku Varadarajan reviewing Richard Bernstein's latest book: '"The East, the West, and Sex" is the best sort of book about sex: It is replete with anecdotes from history that titillate as they inform and observations on human nature that amuse as they illuminate, all delivered in language and tone that is broadly moral without being moralizing and certainly far from prudish. To his credit, Mr. Bernstein strives hard to avoid prurience, or even the suggestion of it, although occasionally he does drop his guard, as when he writes of Western men being "powerfully drawn to the slim, small-boned, black-haired women of Asia, more plumlike than melonlike of breast, spare rather than full of buttocks and hips." Mr. Bernstein's survey of Westerners in the fleshpots of the East -- ranging from the 17th century to the present -- is actually cultural history with a point, an attempt to show that nonmonogamous sex in the Orient (at least for men in power) long carried no contingent connotation of sin and was, in fact, a natural part of the masculine condition.'

Rebuilt Rome
[The Times Of London]
Masolino D'Amico reviewing David Watkin's latest book: 'A caption in the exhibition on the Emperor Vespasian currently in the Colosseum describes the Arch of Titus – only a few hundred yards away – as one of the best-preserved monuments from the Flavian dynasty. Yet what we have now is largely a nineteenth-century reconstruction. In 1819–22 the neoclassical architects Robert Stern and Giuseppe Valadier pulled down the private houses that had encroached on the sides of the arch and thoroughly rebuilt these sides together with the attic, using travertine instead of the original Pentelian marble. The inside of the arch includes the famous relief celebrating the taking of Jerusalem, with the Menorah looted from the Temple prominently displayed. Indeed until 1846, when the ceremony was abolished, every new pope’s inaugural procession passed through the arch, where a Jew was obliged to stand and pay homage to the leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Both facts – the evolution, as it were, of Titus’ Arch, and its use in papal pageantry – not to be found in most guidebooks, are relevant to David Watkin’s excellent, handy new book, whose main object is to see the Forum not as it looks now – “a long, clean, livid trench”, as Émile Zola wrote in 1896, in which “piles of foundations appear like bits of bone” – but through its metamorphoses over more than 2,000 years, when every age has left its mark. The Forum only ceased to be lived in, by both people and animals, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it was turned into an open-air museum, and archaeologists imposed the view that whatever was Roman must be retrieved, and whatever they considered irrelevant, removed.'

Stinking, splendid Versailles
[The Times Of London]
John Rogister reviewing three books on the palace: 'Water was in great demand and caused enormous problems. The fountains used up half a million litres in three hours. In the eighteenth century they were rarely switched on, and in summer the basins emitted pestilential odours. A great reservoir at the end of the North Wing provided water for washing and for the kitchens and stables, usually in an insanitary way. A brisk washing of hands and faces was often sufficient for most courtiers, and perfumes seldom counteracted the remaining body odours. A bath was a sex aid rather than an act of personal hygiene. Before the water closet became a royal privilege, the chaise percée was the norm. There were 274 of them in Louis XIV’s time. The king and leading courtiers habitually gave audience while seated on theirs. The ambitious Parmesan diplomat Alberoni paid a compliment to the homosexual duc de Vendôme as the latter rose from his chaise percée by exclaiming ecstatically “O culo d’angelo”, as the duke wiped his backside. The gist of Newton’s findings is that Versailles stank, as courtiers and their servants urinated in corners and on staircases. Drains were inadequate, refuse and dead animals were simply thrown out in the public way, and vidangeurs had the unenviable task of cleaning out stinking cesspools. Newton and Spawforth come to the same conclusion: by 1789, most courtiers would have preferred to live in comfortable, well-designed Parisian houses or in country châteaux with modern conveniences than in a palace which no longer reflected changes in lifestyle.'

The Fawn Patrol
[The Weekly Standard]
Andrew Ferguson reviewing: 'Richard Wolffe covered the 2008 presidential campaign for Newsweek, and he really likes President Obama. No--I mean, he really, really likes President Obama. How much? Here's how much: Evan Thomas, a Newsweek editor, recently appeared on cable TV and said, "In a way, Obama is standing above the country, above the world--he's sort of God." And Evan Thomas says that Wolffe's coverage of Obama was too positive. That's how much. ...it's in the courtier spirit--ardent, assured, and completely reversible at the drop of a poll number--that Wolffe has written his new book, Renegade: The Making of a President, a soup-to-nuts account of Obama's campaign. The book is closely observed and handsomely written and, what's more, it makes a signal contribution to the literature of contemporary politics, for it presents the case that Washingtonians make to justify their swooning infatuation with their new president. If you want to know why Evan Thomas and his friends are warbling "Nearer My God To Thee," this is the book for you.'
Obamamania
[National Review Online]
Mark Hemingway reviewing: 'If there's one positive thing that can be said about Richard Wolffe's Renegade: The Making of a President - one of the more high-profile releases among the torrent of recent Obama books - it's that it succeeds as an exercise in stenography. The book is so loaded with details it can't help containing something of interest for nearly every reader curious about our enigmatic president. This, however, does not exactly make for a compelling read. While knowing what exactly Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod ate for lunch on election day and the name of the deli where he bought it could possibly be of interest to some future historian, there should be a notice for casual readers on the first page: "Warning: Slogging ahead."'

The Return of the Epigram
[The Smart Set]
Morgan Meis: 'Though Twitter may be guilty for promoting (or at least encouraging) a short attention span, forced brevity is not entirely a bad thing. Humans have been perfecting the art of keeping it short since the beginning of literature. I, for one, am starting to see Twitter as a modern day epigram generator. The greatest epigrams do their damage quickly; they hit and recede. But they linger. The ancient Greek poets did some good work in the area of short, clever poems, but it was the Romans who blew the game open. Martial (first century A.D.) was the acknowledged master of the epigram. He was never afraid to communicate the mundane. But he always managed to put some crackle in it. As Martial himself said, "It is disgraceful to make trifling stuff difficult, and hard work on frivolities is stupid."'

Why The Eyes Have It
[The Wall Street Journal]
Christopher Chabris reviewing: 'Why are we ­humans so good at seeing in color? Why do we have eyes on the front of our heads rather than on the sides, like horses? And how is it that we find it so easy to read when written language didn’t even exist until a few thousand years ago—a virtual millisecond in evolutionary time? Most of us, understandably, have never given much thought to questions like these. What is surprising is that most cognitive scientists ­haven’t either. People who study the brain generally ask how it works the way it does, not why. But Mark Changizi, a professor at Rensselaer ­Polytechnic Institute and the author of “The Vision ­Revolution,” is indeed a man who asks why, and lucky for us: His ideas about the brain and mind are fascinating, and his explanations for our habits of seeing are, for the most part, persuasive.'

Why Book Critics Go On for Inches
[The Wall Street Journal]
Cynthia Crossen: ' "I sometimes wonder why quality publications spend a lot of column inches on a book they think is terrible. One gets the message in the first two paragraphs. It's like the reviewer wasn't content with killing the beast but then had to chop it up into hamburger." —Marv Atkins, St. Petersburg, Fla. Once you kill the beast, you may as well make hamburger. The critic has, after all, presumably read the whole book, sometimes with mounting fury at the waste of his or her diminishing time on earth.'

Book Reviews/Appeciations By Paco
[Paco Enterprises]
-The Vulgar Tongue: Buckish Slang and Pickpocket Eloquence by Francis Grose
-The Superior Person's Book of Words by Peter Bowler
-The Dictionary of Confusable Words by Laurence Urdang

Media Takes Whitewashing of Islam to a Whole New Level
[Pajamas Media]
Bruce Bawer on his new book: 'In the days since President Obama’s highly touted “speech to the Muslim world,” a number of commentators have pointed out that Obama, a self-described “student of history,” managed to serve up a pastiche of half-truths, exaggerations, and utter nonsense about Islamic history, and that even in his supposedly gutsier moments — as when he criticized the treatment of women in Muslim societies — he was hardly as forceful as the circumstances warrant. It’s no coincidence that the commentators who have made these points have done so, almost without exception, not in major media organs but in places like Pajamas Media. For the flattering account of Islam that Obama served up in Cairo — the celebration of imaginary Islamic achievements in science and culture, the evocation of a golden-age Andalusia where Christians and Jews were treated with respect and equality, and the references to the Koran that made it sound like the Sermon on the Mount — are of a piece with the fictions about Islam found regularly in the mainstream press.  This is certainly true of the New York Times, and it’s equally the case with the Washington Post — a fact that will be obvious to any reader of my new book, Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom, in which the index includes the following entry: Washington Post, 66, 102, 103, 149-51, 156, 163-64, 238, 262, 263-64, 276. Now, with the single exception of the very last Post reference (the one on page 276, which is a thumbs-up for columnist Anne Applebaum), my mentions of the Post in Surrender all point to the reliability with which the newspaper clings to what one might call a wishful-thinking view of Islam — as if Islam were, say, nothing more than Episcopalianism with prayer rugs and burkas.'

Learning from other countries' mistakes
[National Review Online]
Thomas Sowell rewiewing: 'In an age that values cleverness over wisdom, it is not surprising that many superficial but clever books get more attention than a wise book like The Character of Nations by Angelo Codevilla, even though the latter has far more serious implications for the changing character of our own nation. The recently published second edition of Professor Codevilla’s book is remarkable just for its subject, quite aside from the impressive breadth of its scope and the depth of its insights. But clever people among today’s intelligentsia disdain the very idea that there is such a thing as “national character.” Everything from punctuality to alcohol consumption may vary greatly from one country to another, but the “one world” ideology and the “multicultural” dogma make it obligatory for many among the intelligentsia to act as if none of this has anything to do with the poverty, corruption, and violence of much of the Third World or with the low standard of living in the Soviet Union, one of the most richly endowed nations on earth when it came to natural resources. The Character of Nations is about far more than the fact that there are different behavior patterns in different countries — that, for example, “it is unimaginable to do business in China without paying bribes” but “to offer one in Japan is the greatest of faux pas.” The real point is to show what kinds of behaviors produce what kinds of consequences — in the economy, in the family, in the government, and in other aspects of human life. Nor do the repercussions stop there. Government policies are not only affected by the culture of the country, but can in turn have a major impact on that culture, for good or ill.'

Fathers and Sons
[The American Spectator]
Wlady Pleszczynski: 'Who knows why individuals act the way they do. By all accounts, Christopher Buckley is as wonderfully— regally—polite, kind, generous, and warm as those Buckleys I have met over the years, not just his father, Bill, but also his uncle Reid and aunts Priscilla and Trish. Yet he seems insecure enough in his princeliness to blurt out, about his parents, “They had—how to put it?—class.” But having class means never having to talk about it. Sadly, there is much in this memoir that isn’t classy at all. One will notice that in the New York Times Magazine’s splashy excerpt from Losing Mum and Pup, the words “National Review” do not appear. They hardly appear in the book itself. Clearly, as some of Christopher’s friends might put it, the flagship magazine of the conservative movement has never been where his head is at. That can’t be said about Richard Brookhiser, a longtime National Review editor and writer once assumed to be heir apparent to William F. Buckley at the magazine. Then for some reason, by the early 1990s, although he continued to write for NR, he drifted away to become an independent (and respected ) author and contributor to mainstream publications. One assumed the decision was his. But we learn it wasn’t. In a sense, Rick (he used to write for us a lot) is another Buckley son taking advantage of Bill’s death to settle a long-standing score with him. Yet despite everything, his heart was and remains forever National Review’s. How can that be?'

The Pioneer of Special Ops
[The Wall Street Journal]
Arthur Herman: 'People once knew ­Robert Rogers as the steel-eyed hero played by Spencer Tracy in the film “Northwest Passage” who leads his men, including Robert Young and Walter Brennan, through heartbreak and hardship to victory over Abenake Indians during the French and Indian War. Today Rogers is almost forgotten except by the U.S. Army Rangers, who revere him as their founder and role model. John Ross, the executive editor of American Heritage magazine, has taken it upon himself to bring this extraordinary man back to life. He ­succeeds with “War on the Run,” a lively, evocative and at times moving biography. Rogers is the godfather of modern ­Special Ops. His spirit still ­hovers over the elite units who do extraordinary things in ­Afghanistan and Iraq, from the Rangers to the Navy SEALs, Marine Recon and Delta Force.'

Crime Novels in a Cold Place
[The Wall Street Journal]
Tom Nolan: 'Viewers of "Masterpiece Mystery!" on PBS are this month being introduced to British actor Kenneth Branagh's compelling portrayal of Swedish police-detective Kurt Wallander, a man whose poor physical health and vexed personal life reflect the disarray and alienation of the society around him. ... Wallander is the creation of Swedish author Henning Mankell, whose books' best-selling mix of private angst and social ills has proven popular -- and contagious. Since the 1990s the Scandinavian countries have produced a host of driven cops with dysfunctional personal lives -- Hakan Nesser's Swedish Inspector Van Veeteren, Arnaldur Indridason's Icelandic Inspector Erlunder Sveinsson, Jo Nesbo's Norse Detective Harry Hole, to name a few -- in the wake of Inspector Wallander's international success. But a generation before Wallander and his fictional colleagues from Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Finland began giving English and American coppers a run for their kronor, another series of police-procedural novels put Scandinavia on the modern crime-fiction map. These were the books of the married Swedish authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö....'

The Best of the Story
[The American Spectator]
Nicole Russell: 'Almost everyone who hears the name Paul Harvey thinks of one of his most famous lines, said with a pause and crackly voice: "And now you know the ressst of the story!" Turns out, the rest of Paul Harvey's story -- told now in Paul J. Batura's first comprehensive portrait of the Norman Vincent Peale of radio -- has more to it than a five-minute narrative. Batura's timing and tone suggest a eulogy in book form. Harvey died in February at 90 and from page one, Good Day! paints Harvey as a patriotic American brimming with optimism. Unlike the lives of media personalities today which buzz with drama and controversy, Harvey's story forms a pleasant arc -- from rags to riches with few detours into sorrow, until the end.'

Victoria and Albert, Allies in Love
[The Wall Street Journal]
Martin Rubin: 'In "We Two," [Gillian] Gill makes it clear that the creation of the Victorian spirit, however one defines it, was very much a joint enterprise. Victoria and her husband, Albert -- the German-born "prince consort," as his royal position was known -- were famously devoted to each other; they had nine children together, and Albert's death in 1861 sent Victoria into a profound depression from which she never fully recovered. But their marriage, Ms. Gill claims, was not a real-life fairy tale of doting and pretty ceremony; it was "a work in progress, not a fait accompli, a drama not a pageant." Ms. Gill pores over letters and diary entries to confirm that many of the traits we associate with the word "Victorian" would have been impossible without Albert's partnership.'

Mark Steyn's new book warns Americans that free speech is under attack
[Examiner.com]
Kathy Shaidle: 'I’m giving Mark Steyn’s new book Lights Out: Islam, free speech and the twilight of the West a rave review, and not just because he mentions me in the Author’s Note. And on page 214. And somewhere else, I think. (Come on: did you really expect me NOT to mention that...?) No, its because Steyn is incapable of writing a tedious line. As reviewers noted about his last book, the demographic doomsday tome America Alone, reading Mark Steyn can be the most fun you’ll have getting depressed. In Lights Out, Steyn chronicles his year from hell.'

A Sleuth Goes to the Library
[The Wall Street Journal]
Charles Harrington Elster: 'In "Curiosities of Literature" John Sutherland takes his title and inspiration from Isaac D'Israeli's popular collections of anecdotes, published from 1791 to 1823. Like D'Israeli, Mr. Sutherland heartily indulges in what he calls "the unmethodical pleasures of the literary miscellany." The result is a grab bag of a book crammed with enough amusing trivia to fuel your cocktail-party conversation until Bernie Madoff's memoirs come out.'

Spinning Caesar's murder
[The Times Of London]
Mary Beard reviewing Remembering The Roman People: '[T.P.] Wiseman tries to unearth some aspect of the popular, democratic side of political ideology in the late Roman Republic, from the mid-second century BC on – whether public reaction to particular political crises, a forgotten hero of the popular cause, or a long-lost democratic slogan that was once the rallying cry of the Roman people. He has no time for the conventional view of Roman politics as “an ideological vacuum”, in which a small group of aristocrats fought for power without principles. And he has still less time for the view that Rome was a place where democratic ideals had no part to play, whether in its early history or (his main focus in this book) in the violent century that led up to the assassination of Caesar. His aim, in short, is to put some ideology back into our understanding of Roman political life, and to bring the important democratic traditions of Rome to the surface once more.' 

Suffering Orwell
[The New Criterion]
Michael Weiss: 'There has got to be by now a subgenre of literary journalism classifiable as "Orwell pornography" and devoted to every inch of his domestic existence. How many times the collected word count of Shakespeare have gone to deciphering whether the Bard wrote his own stuff, sat for some enigmatic portrait, or loved whichever sex?  But his life was so long ago that the mystery entices precisely because we'll never quite know the truth. In Orwell's case, however, the clock need only be rewound sixty years, and thanks to correspondence, memoirs and living eyewitness accounts, we have been able to cobble together an adequate picture of what it was like to be the moral genius of the twentieth century.'

The New Nuke Porn
[Slate]
Ron Rosenbaum: 'Something interesting is happening in the realm of airport "bookstore" best-sellers. I'm not talking about the self-help "You can become a sales genius" genre, but the thrillers. I've long been fascinated by their appeal and the shifting signals their subjects offer about often unspoken fears in the heart of our culture. Sure, some of their success undoubtedly derives from their surface glitter—the glaring, fool's-gold-loaded cover lettering on a background of what looks like high-tech, super-reflective, virtually radioactive titanium. Some of it lies in their size. (I wouldn't rule out the subliminal reassurance they offer the nervous traveler of their ability to serve as additional emergency flotation devices.) But I love airport best-sellers because I see them as our Nostradamuses, the literary canaries in the dark coal mines of our paranoia. They sniff out and serve up fictionalized but "realistic" prophecies of coming doom of one sort or another. Perhaps it's that in their visions of total world immolation they diminish in the mind of said traveler the possibility of something so trivial as a 757 engine malfunction. The nature of the doom these books threaten us with has recently undergone a subtle shift, especially in the realm of what I've called in the past "nuke porn."'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

Even Coach Was Nice
[The Wall Street Journal]
J. Lynn Lunsford: 'Once upon a time, traveling by air was fun. Passengers dressed in their Sunday finery. They were able to board their flights without disrobing at security checkpoints, and meals were still served on china with real silverware, including knives. In "Flying Across America: The Airline Passenger Experience," Daniel L. Rust traces transcontinental airline travel from its earliest days, when hopping into an airplane was considered a feat of bravery. Mr. Rust has assembled an impressive collection of illustrations, photographs and vintage airline advertisements, as well as first-hand accounts of passengers, to give readers a taste of airline travel through its evolution from being a novelty for a select few to a necessary nuisance for millions.'

Tolkien out-Wagners Wagner
[The Times Of London]
Tom Shippey reviewing J.R.R. Tolkien's The Legend Of Sigurd And Gudrun: 'As for the fate of the two poems here published, Tolkien fans will need no persuasion of their merits. Scholars will read them with close attention, to see what Tolkien’s famously original mind made of the old Königsproblem. The general reader? Many will stumble over the archaisms, for the poems are seventy years old at least, and written by a man closer in time and spirit to William Morris than to modern readers. Those who persevere will learn much about Eddic poetry and the great legend of the North, and feel something of the “demonic energy” they project and the “new literary sensation” they created on rediscovery. This is the most unexpected of Tolkien’s many posthumous publications; his son’s “Commentary” is a model of informed accessibility; the poems stand comparison with their Eddic models, and there is little poetry in the world like those.'

How to Build A Reputation
[The Wall Street Journal]
Michael J. Lewis: 'Even among the scraggly ranks of 1960s counterculture gurus, Buckminster Fuller was an oddball: a rather elderly champion of rational architecture (he was born in 1895) who was equally famous for inventing the geodesic dome and for his day-long lectures. He had been a celebrity since 1929, when he unveiled his visionary Dymaxion House, a six-sided living platform impaled on a central mast and hoisted into the air. Fuller's story is widely known, not least because he kept exhaustive scrapbooks of everything he did. In 1939, he wrote an account of his life that has served as the basis of all later scholarship. But that account was something of a fiction, contrived by Fuller to conceal discreditable episodes and polish his credentials as a visionary. Such is the claim of Loretta Lorance's determinedly revisionist "Becoming Bucky Fuller."'

There's No Klingon Word for Hello
[Slate]
Arika Okrent: 'There's something missing from J.J. Abrams' reboot of the moribund Star Trek franchise, and that something is Klingon. I mean Klingon the language. If that sounds like a minor omission, consider this: The very first lines of the first Star Trek movie in 1979 were in Klingon: wIy cha'! HaSta! cha yIghuS! And those few words—which were subtitled as "Tactical … Visual … Tactical, stand by on torpedoes!"—have since blossomed into, if not a full-fledged language, one at least fledged enough to have a dictionary, a translation of Hamlet, and a small but dedicated community of (nonfictional) speakers, who'll feel miffed by Abrams' oversight. There is a logic behind it; a linguist doing field research among Klingon speakers would be able to work out the system and describe it as he would an exotic indigenous tongue. This is not surprising, considering that Klingon was created by Marc Okrand, a linguist whose dissertation was a grammar of a now-extinct Native American language.'
[tip of the fedora to Hot Air]

Defying Doom
[The Wall Street Journal]
Arthur Herman reviewing: 'The Western imagination likes doom by the numbers. The number 666 signifying the Mark of the Beast is the most obvious example: The 16th-century mathematician John Napier actually invented algorithms to calculate its permeations throughout history. And who can forget our own Y2K madness a few years ago, when doom was supposed to take the form of a computer meltdown? A more telling example of our tendency to assign fate to numbers is the year 1000. For decades preceding it, educated men convinced themselves that the millennium after the birth of Christ would mark his triumphant return and, with it, the Last Judgment and the end of the world. In "The Forge of Christendom," Tom Holland (whose last book, "Rubicon," traced the end of the Roman Republic) provides an entertaining account of the fraught last years of the Dark Ages, when a confused and suffering Europe contemplated the End of Days and yet, much to its surprise, woke up on New Year's Day 1000 to a brighter future than it could have imagined. For Mr. Holland, the year 1000 marks a hinge moment in history, when Europe arrived at clearer idea of itself and of its destiny, setting Western civilization on a new and better course.'

The work of generations
[The New Criterion]
Andrew McCarthy: 'It is a rarity that an important book arrives at its perfect moment. Such is the case with Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto. We are in the high tide of America’s Leftist ascendancy: the Obama evisceration of individual freedom and installation of authoritarian collectivism—at warp speed, driven by an ambition that would have made Woodrow Wilson and FDR blush. Against this tidal wave, Mark Levin offers not so much a defense as a plan of attack, a clarion call to roll back the seas of Change.'

The Final Triumph of Chiang Kai-shek
[The Washington Post]
Laura Tyson Li reviewing: 'Chiang Kai-shek ranks as one of the most despised leaders of the 20th century. Famously derided as "Peanut" and "General Cash-My-Check," the leader of China's Nationalist government bedeviled the Allied war effort in World War II with his lackluster defense of his country. His corrupt and brutal regime squandered billions of dollars in American aid and drove the Chinese into the arms of the communists. He died in exile a deluded despot, relegated to a footnote in modern Chinese history. Or so the conventional story goes. Now, however, Jay Taylor's new biography, "The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China," challenges the catechism on which generations of Americans have been weaned. Marshaling archival materials made newly available to researchers, including about four decades' worth of Chiang's daily diaries and documents from the Soviet era, it torpedoes many of that catechism's cherished tenets. This is an important, controversial book.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels by Tristram Hunt
[The Sunday Times Of London]
Robert Service reviewing: 'He had always been an involuntary factory owner. Without agreeing to tend his German father’s business interests in Manchester he would have lacked the income for himself and Marx to live in the comfort they took as their right. The profligate Marx was constantly on the edge of penury. Engels counted his pennies (or rather his tens of thousands of pounds) more carefully but did not stint in his pleasures. He rode out regularly with the prestigious and costly Cheshire Hounds. He drank wine of quality and ­Pilsner beer in quantity. He treated himself to bevies of young women, including prostitutes. He dressed in fashion. Engels was not just a monetary provider for the Marxist cause. Letters ­written between Marx and Engels point to a dynamic partnership, and Hunt defends Engels against the modern charge that he distorted the essence of Marx’s doctrines. Marx always submitted drafts of books such as Das Kapital, which appeared with Marx as sole author, for improvement. When Engels tried to codify Marxism after Marx’s death in 1883, he was only making up for what his chronically indecisive partner sho­uld have done for himself.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

The Truth About Columbine
[National Review Online]
Robert VerBruggen: 'Ten years ago...Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold stormed their high school with bombs and guns. They killed 15 people, including themselves, and injured 23 others, some severely. The nation thought the shooters’ parents were mostly to blame. Adults cast a suspicious eye on high-school-age males who were bullied, played violent video games, listened to Marilyn Manson, took an interest in the macabre, enjoyed shooting guns, or dressed like “Goths.” Americans had to respond somehow, but at the time they could not respond to the facts: There was little information available, and much of what was available was false. The county police department suppressed and even destroyed key documents, the confusion of the situation spawned many myths, and people’s biases spawned many more. But now that the police documents have become public and some investigators have been willing to speak to the press, we have a basically complete account of the day’s events and the surrounding circumstances. Journalist Dave Cullen, who’s been on the story since the beginning, pulls that account together in Columbine.'

In Search of Auntie Em
[The Wall Street Journal]
Meghan Cox Gurdon: '[L. Frank] Baum recalled the experience of writing "Oz" as an epiphany.... In "Finding Oz," Evan I. Schwartz argues that Baum really wasn't equipped to explain his own imaginative processes. "Finding Oz" makes for an entertaining page-turner, but reading it is a little like discovering that you're trapped in a gallery with a knowledgeable but wild-eyed museum docent: The line between established fact and crackpot speculation is not always clear, and occasionally you may find yourself glancing toward the exits. Part of the charm of "Finding Oz" is the way that Mr. Schwartz seeks to draw profound mystical meaning from what can seem comically light evidence.'

The Emperor Left Town
[The Wall Street Journal]
Peter Stothard: 'Adrian Goldsworthy's "How Rome Fell" begins and ends with reflections on Edward Gibbon, whose classic work of the 1770s and 1780s, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," set a standard for all successors. Mr. Goldsworthy sees Gibbon as instinctively relating imperial Rome to imperial London and growing ever more pessimistic as the years swept by. When the first volume of "The Decline and Fall" appeared in 1776, the prospect of Britain keeping its American colonies seemed bright. By the time of the second and third volumes, in 1781, Britain's trans-Atlantic empire was trundling shakily toward Yorktown. In 1788, Americans were able to read the final three volumes in a new country. The tone of the great British historian, Mr. Goldsworthy says, took a noticeable change during this time. His own tone toward Britain -- Mr. Goldsworthy is himself British -- moves equally toward depression. Although Britain's decline is much on Mr. Goldsworthy's mind, the U.S. is the main focus of his practical historiography.'

Too Much Britney Is Bad for You
[Pajamas Media]
Christian Toto: 'Pinsky, the host of the long-running Loveline radio show as well as VH1's Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew, thinks the narcissism on regular display via tabloid-style media is hurting the country. He puts his thesis together in his latest book, The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism is Seducing America. Co-authored by Dr. Mark S. Young, the book highlights their findings regarding the narcissistic levels of today's celebrities. Pinsky isn’t a player in the culture wars, eschewing ideology and party labels, but his latest book could change that.'

J.G. Ballard was a man of the Right - not that the Right really wanted him
[The London Spectator]
Rod Liddle: 'There was a period between about 1978 and 1989 when the most unexpected cultural luminaries on both sides of the Atlantic swung sharply to the right, captured, one supposes, by the Reagan-Thatcher revolution. Indeed, the more strongly these luminaries had been previously associated with what was considered a leftist counter-culture, the more likely they were to begin espousing free-market economics and/or ‘traditional’ values. But Ballard, more than any of the others, was absolutely explicit. He announced, in the manner of a rightish Republican presidential candidate, that the best form of government was always the least form of government and expressed unconfined admiration for Margaret Thatcher, who, he said, exerted a ‘powerful sexual spell’ over all men.'

Tinkering With the Ideal
[The Wall Street Journal]
Terry Teachout: 'When is a work of art finished? Most artists, of course, are perfectly happy to leave well enough alone, secure in the knowledge that they got it right the first time (even if they didn't). On the other hand, revised versions of well-known works of art are quite a bit more common than you might suppose, and it turns out that more than a few great artists were near-compulsive tinkerers.'

Northern Discomfort
[National Review Online]
Mark Hemingway: 'It’s hard to describe Ezra Levant’s splendid new volume, Shakedown: How Our Government Is Undermining Democracy in the Name of Human Rights, as an enjoyable read — because the book is a chronicle of injustice, with outrage on every page. On opening this slim volume, I was transported to early last year, when I first heard that Levant — formerly the publisher of the Canadian conservative magazine The Western Standard — was being hauled before the Alberta Human Rights Commission for having the temerity to publish something a radical imam didn’t approve of. I hope the book’s understandable focus on Canada doesn’t discourage Americans from reading it. If you think it can’t happen in America, guess again. State human-rights commissions are fast gaining ground here.'

Clever, Enduring Odysseus
[Claremont Review Of Books]
Bruce S. Thornton: '"The Odyssey," wrote the great Homer scholar G.S. Kirk, "can be read without having to try too hard and without special preparation." Compared with the heroic grandeur of the Iliad, the adventures of the wily Odysseus can indeed seem a mere crowd-pleasing romance: travelers' tales, folklore monsters, exotic islands, femmes fatales both mortal and divine, and domestic drama complete with a happy ending—these are the stuff of boys' novels and other light diversions. Yet for all its entertaining accessibility, the Odyssey is conceptually very ambitious. Homer's theme in the Odyssey will become the central question of later Greek philosophy: what makes us human beings?'

J.G. Ballard, R.I.P.
[The London Daily Telegraph]
'Before the success of Empire of the Sun Ballard was known principally for darkly surreal novels such as The Crystal World (1966), which described a West African country undergoing an inexplicable process of petrifaction, and Crash (1973), in which he put forward the idea that modern society finds traffic accidents erotic. Despising the term science fiction, Ballard never used it, preferring to describe his work as “apocalyptic”. Despite his avuncular appearance and booming voice, Ballard’s air of bonhomie belied a much darker side. Acquaintances recalled that as a young man he was “obsessed” with topics such as assassination, car crash injuries and psychosis. Another long-term obsession, assassination, culminated in Ballard’s producing a screenplay, Atrocity Exhibition, which in 1969 became part of The Assassination Weapon. Friends, while remembering Ballard as “generous and jovial” also described him as “jolly peculiar” and on occasion as “straightforwardly mad”. Ballard admitted to spending too much of his adult life drinking . “It was a great sense of achievement,” he recalled, “when my first drink of the day was not at nine in the morning but at noon and then at eight. Life got much duller as a result.”'

Grandfather Abraham
[The American Spectator]
David Mark: 'Abraham Lincoln's last descendant died in 1985. But were Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith still alive, it's unlikely he would have enjoyed the elaborate commemoration the 200th anniversary of the Great Emancipator's birth. Beckwith was an ornery, reclusive, self-described "spoiled brat" who lived off a trust fund inherited from his tycoon grandfather, presidential son Robert Todd Lincoln, as author Charles Lachman describes in vivid and often morose detail in his new book, The Last Lincolns. The Lincolns Lachman portrays are nothing like our public-spirited, wise, forward-looking, strategically brilliant 16th president. It's unfair to judge an individual by the accomplishments of a forebear. Yet the Lincolns' behavior would be depressing under almost any circumstances. The Last Lincolns follows the path of Beckwith and the other two Lincoln great-grandchildren, each of whom lived pampered, largely wasted lives, a striking departure from the president's public service and martyrdom for his country.'

Austenmania
[Literary Review]
Mark Bostridge reviewing Claire Harman's Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World: 'What Jane Austen could never have foreseen - and might have had some trouble comprehending - was her transformation, in the 190 years following her death at the age of forty-one in 1817, into a writer of mass popularity, a global phenomenon, whose six completed novels are among the best-known, best-loved works in the English language. This transformation into a brand name, as Harman wryly notes, doesn't always have much to do with reading. After all, for many people around the world, 'Jane Austen' may simply evoke an image of Colin Firth in a wet shirt.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

An Ill-Fated Ship in an Era of Opulence at Sea
[The Wall Street Journal]
Martin Rubin: 'Of the many books about the Titanic the lavishly illustrated two-volume "Titanic: The Ship Magnificent" (The History Press) offers about as up-close and microcosmic a view of the vessel as you are likely to find. The books are clearly a labor-of-love project, headed by writer Bruce Beveridge, with co-authors Scott Andrews, Steve Hall, Daniel Klistorner and editor Art Braunschweiger. The first volume, "Design & Construction" ($65, 686 pages), is almost literally a nuts-and-bolts account. The second volume of "Titanic: The Ship Magnificent," called "Interior Design & Fitting Out" (510 pages, $65), captures the splendor of its first-class staterooms and public spaces as well as the solid comfort and decent facilities of its lesser regions.'

A Time of War
[The Wall Street Journal]
Arthur Herman: 'America's most controversial war ended 34 years ago this month. There are two schools of thought about what happened in Vietnam. The version taught in colleges and textbooks is that it was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thanks to Cold War paranoia, the story goes, the U.S. wound up caught in the middle of a civil war that North Vietnam and its leader, Ho Chi Minh, were bound to win and that America and its ally, South Vietnam, were bound to lose. The second, more recent, version, involving a re- examination of the evidence on the battlefield and at the Pentagon -- and drawing on testimony from the North Vietnamese themselves -- concludes that the U.S. military succeeded far better in Vietnam than was once supposed. The revisionist view suggests that the conflict was not only winnable but largely won by January 1973, when the Paris Peace Accords were signed compelling North Vietnam to recognize South Vietnam and to honor the border between the two countries (an agreement the North immediately violated). By then, however, the U.S. Congress refused to support South Vietnam any further. So America stood on the sidelines while a tragedy ensued and perhaps as many as two million innocent people lost their lives -- and communism won an unearned Cold War victory. John Prados's "Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975" is, as its title suggests, an attempt to hold the barricades against the new version and resuscitate the old.'

The Secrets of Her Success
[The Wall Street Journal]
Jennifer Scanlon: '[Helen Gurley] Brown's relationship to the feminist movement has always been, at best, ambiguous. Yet "Bad Girls Go Everywhere," the first full-length biography of Ms. Brown, is inexplicably devoted to claiming her "rightful place as a feminist trailblazer." Well, good luck. Jennifer Scanlon, the author of this heavily footnoted opus, is a professor of gender and women's studies who extends "special thanks" to the students in her "Feminist Theory" class for their "important contribution" to her thinking for the book. The 86-year-old Ms. Brown, though, didn't contribute to the author's thinking, other than giving Ms. Scanlon permission to quote from her published and unpublished writing collected at Smith College. And the life led by Ms. Brown -- who is still in editorial harness at Hearst Corp. as the editor of Cosmopolitan's international publishing arm -- certainly doesn't make things easy for an author intent on feminist-trailblazer lionization.'

Hard Work at a Cutting Edge
[The Wall Street Journal]
Geoffrey Norman: 'In any gathering of men who take down trees for a living you will see a few battle wounds. Sliced digits. Crooked legs. Scarred faces. Chain saws are fast, powerful and unforgiving, and the ones that the professionals use resemble what the ordinary citizen buys from Home Depot about as much as a Chevy off the lot resembles the Impala SS Jimmie Johnson drove at the Daytona 500. Then there are those dead limbs -- "widow makers" -- that break off as a tree is coming down, whipping through the air and occasionally landing on a logger who considers himself "lucky" if he is merely injured. Hazard also comes from the heavy equipment for bundling logs and moving them out of the woods on greasy skidder trails and along narrow dirt roads. Those bundles can roll over and crush a man if he isn't careful, or even if he is. In "Brush Cat," Jack McEnany offers a vivid account of the "wood economy" of New Hampshire, never stinting on the danger in this line of work. "According to the U.S. Department of Labor," Mr. McEnany writes, logging is "the most dangerous job in America," handily beating out the number-two killer profession, commercial fishing.'

A Time of Terror
[The Wall Street Journal]
David Gress: 'Even during the 1970-77 heyday of the Red Army Faction -- West German terrorists also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang -- the group operated in a claustrophobic, paranoid atmosphere. "We were afraid of discussion; it seemed like treachery," Astrid Proll, who was a junior member of the gang, tells "Baader-Meinhof" author Stefan Aust. "And we tried fending off danger by involving ourselves in it more and more. Illegality became an end in itself, the means of holding the group together." The story has been told before: how a disparate group of bright but morally and intellectually confused young Germans met in the late 1960s and decided that society was so irredeemably corrupt and oppressive that violence was the only legitimate response. But there has never been an account as authoritative, or as gripping, as "Baader-Meinhof," which has the advantage of being related by a journalist who was once so close to the action that the gang targeted him for death.'

Vases, Tea Sets, Cigars, His Own Watercolours
[London Review Of Books]
Christopher Clark reviewing High Society In The Third Reich: 'From the very beginning, as Fabrice d’Almeida shows in his fascinating study, Hitler networked with considerable success among the great and the good. Throughout the 1920s, his access to elite society steadily increased. There was no need for Hitler to assimilate himself to the social norms of his hosts, for his attractiveness lay precisely in his louche, somewhat uncouth manners and the ‘aroma of adventure’ that surrounded him. There was an undeniable frisson in welcoming a guest who left his revolver and bodyguards at the door when he entered a salon. The very highest-born families, descendants of the ruling dynasties of the German principalities, were especially susceptible to the party’s appeal.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

Dissecting an Unheralded Alliance
[The Wall Street Journal]
Mark F. Teaford: '"Gray's Anatomy" is one of the most famous medical books of all time, but if a picture is worth a thousand words, then the man most responsible for the success of the book was its long-forgotten illustrator, Henry Vandyke Carter. In "The Making of Mr. Gray's Anatomy," Ruth Richardson shows how Carter and Henry Gray came together to produce a classic that originally bore neither of their names -- it was published as "Anatomy Descriptive and Surgical" -- but she also affords us a remarkable glimpse of science in the 19th century.'

Please, Stay On the Line
[The Wall Street Journal]
Barbara Phillips: 'It is one of the most maddening ordeals of modern life. You are having a problem with a product or service, and so (fool that you are) you call a customer-help number, only to be greeted by a cheerfully inept or robotically indifferent voice at the end of the line -- sometimes human, other times a simulacrum, and nearly always emanating from a source far from home. In "Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us," Emily Yellin strives to "seek out the humanity and reason behind the customer service experiences that many people find to be inhuman and nonsensical."'

The Snowball: Warren Buffett
[Commentary]
David Billet: 'Although Buffett’s public life and utterances have been studied as closely as Abraham Lincoln’s, Alice Schroeder’s The Snowball is presented as the first comprehensive biography of the privacy-minded subject, who took a liking to Schroeder when she tracked his holding company as an analyst for Morgan Stanley and gave her unprecedented access to his world. Published this past fall at the height of a financial crisis that toppled many other reputations but only seemed to elevate Buffett’s, The Snowball has enjoyed several months on the best-seller lists. Despite its overheated prose and nearly unbearable longeurs (the 960-page volume opens with great-grandfather Zebulon and takes you through every hamburger dinner), the book manages to provide a clear portrait of a man who has achieved far more than anyone would ever have thought possible—and somewhat less than his legendary reputation would suggest.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

Back to the Baroque
[The Weekly Standard]
Glenn Harlan Reynolds: '[Neal] Stephenson's most famous novel, the 1999 blockbuster Cryptonomicon, stayed true to this point, too, though geeky readers often missed that message amid episodes of hacking, code-breaking, and van Eck phreaking. Unlike some of his science-fictional predecessors (Robert Heinlein, for example), Stephenson is never preachy. And this subtlety has led some Stephenson fans to miss the point of the "Baroque Cycle," his...trilogy of Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. But although science and technology play an important role in these stories--something hard to avoid when the major characters include Leibniz, Hooke, and Newton--the story is again ultimately about people and society.'

Everybody Knows Everything
[The Wall Street Journal]
Jeremy Philips: 'Until just a couple of years ago, the largest reference work ever published was something called the Yongle Encyclopedia. A vast project consisting of thousands of volumes, it brought together the knowledge of some 2,000 scholars and was published, in China, in 1408. Roughly 600 years later, Wikipedia surpassed its size and scope with fewer than 25 employees and no official editor. In "The Wikipedia Revolution," Andrew Lih, a new-media academic and former Wikipedia insider, tells the story of how a free, Web-based encyclopedia -- edited by its user base and overseen by a small group of dedicated volunteers -- came to be so large and so popular, to the point of overshadowing the Encyclopedia Britannica and many other classic reference works. As Mr. Lih makes clear, it wasn't Wikipedia that finished off print encyclopedias; it was the proliferation of the personal computer itself.'

Strong Circulation
[The Wall Street Journal]
Geoffrey Norman: 'It would be hard to imagine a more thoroughly American success story than that of Bernarr Macfadden (1868-1955). The name would draw a blank in most conversations today, and it is to Mark Adams's great credit that, in "Mr. America," he has rescued from obscurity a man whose influence is still felt in this country more than a century after he muscled his way onto the national scene. Perhaps more than any other individual, Macfadden bears responsibility for pioneering what has become the American obsession with diet, health and fitness. With a stable of publications and ancillary enterprises, he built a movement and a market that that can be traced from the early 20th century through Charles Atlas and Jack Lalanne at mid-century to Arnold Schwarzenegger and countless exercise gurus of more recent vintage. Without Bernarr Macfadden, there would likely be no Gold's gyms, and no South Beach Diet, for that matter.'

Dickens vs America
[More Intelligent Life]
Matthew Pearl: 'Charles Dickens's coffin was lowered into Westminster Abbey in 1870. He was 58. As the world mourned one of its most beloved authors, there were some who blamed his fatal illness on his gruelling reading tour in America a year and a half earlier. In John Forster's influential biography of Dickens, written within years of the funeral, he argued that the American trip pushed Dickens over the edge. Others described the author's cross-country book-peddling as "tragic". It was perhaps unwise for Dickens to make the long trip. His strength had been fading well before his 1867 departure from Liverpool for Boston. At 55, he was plagued by a lame left foot and weak spells. Still, his peculiar and perhaps insidious relationship with the New World demands closer scrutiny.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

When Computers Rule the World
[The Wall Street Journal]
Jeffrey Trachtenberg: 'In Daniel Suarez's high-tech thriller novel, "Daemon," computer-game designer Matthew Sobol dies but continues to "live" online via a series of computer programs that he created prior to his death. These programs interact in increasingly brutal and effective ways with the physical world, eventually dominating it.As defined by webopedia.com, a "daemon" (pronounced dee-mon) is "a process that runs in the background and performs a specified operation at predefined times or in response to certain events." By contrast, the publication of "Daemon" has followed a somewhat unorthodox process. Mr. Suarez, a first-time novelist and computer programmer, initially self-published his book at the end of 2006. He sold 3,500 copies before attracting the attention of Dutton, an imprint owned by Pearson Plc.'s Penguin Group (USA), in May 2008.'

Fortune's Ticket
[The Wall Street Journal]
Daniel Akst: 'As Matthew Sweeney makes plain in "The Lottery Wars," objections to lotteries have been around for as long as lotteries themselves -- and that's a long time. Since the colonial period, lotteries have combined entertainment and the promise of gain for the sake of all sorts of causes. For much of this time Americans have oscillated between enthusiasm and revulsion. Today lotteries are operated by all but eight states, and in 2006 we spent roughly $500 per household on lottery tickets, or $57 billion in total. Only a modest fraction of this money made its way into state coffers -- most went to pay for prizes and other expenses -- with the result that most lottery states get no more than 2% of their budget from lottery ticket sales.'

Two Crooks for the Road
[The Wall Street Journal]
J. Lynn Lunsford: 'Among couples known almost universally by their first names, few have captured the imagination like Bonnie and Clyde, the young lovers from Texas who escaped the poverty of West Dallas in the 1930s and went on a meteoric crime spree on America's back roads. In "Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde," Jeff Guinn cuts through the sex and gunsmoke surrounding the gangster love story of Bonnie and Clyde, and he reveals a couple of kids from the wrong side of the river who were anything but the sharpest gangsters to roam the countryside. His gritty chronicle is a welcome corrective to the affectionate portrait of the couple played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in Arthur Penn's 1967 movie, "Bonnie and Clyde," which told us much more about the rise of the Hollywood antihero than it did about the real-life criminals.'

A Year of Living Dangerously
[The Wall Street Journal]
William Anthony Hay: 'Since 9/11, we like to think of ourselves living at a hinge moment in history, and the past year's economic meltdown only adds to our sense of momentousness. But the consequences of events only become clear over time. Not every hinge turns as expected. The revolutions of 1848 provide a case in point. Many older accounts of 1848 depict the year's events as a flowering of liberal nationalism crushed by the forces of order. A.J.P. Taylor described abortive revolution in Germany as a turning point that failed to turn, thereby directing Germany on a separate path -- toward authoritarianism rather than liberal democracy. In "1848," Mike Rapport sympathizes with European liberals but nonetheless offers a fully nuanced portrait of a tumultuous year. Ethnic conflict and deep social tensions, he notes, complicated the task of constructing liberal, constitutional regimes. Different interests had their own agenda, and Otto von Bismarck, the German statesman, grasped an essential point when he argued that liberalism appealed only to the urban middle classes. That fact gave the revolution a narrower foundation than its architects had expected.'

Stars in Alignment
[The Wall Street Journal]
Moira Hodgson: 'As [Michael] Holroyd demonstrated with his books on Lytton Strachey and (in four volumes) George Bernard Shaw, he is that rare biographer who has a masterly sense of both serious scholarship and spicy detail. In "A Strange Eventful History," he conveys a staggering amount of information with seemingly effortless prose, observing the tangled lives of his protagonists with the clear-eyed detachment of an amused bystander. The actress with the dramatic offstage life, Ellen Terry, is the sun around whom the other characters revolve in Mr. Holroyd's magnificent "A Strange Eventful History." All were famous (or infamous) in their time. Together, Terry and her frequent co-star Henry Irving -- a world-famous actor-manager and the other major figure in Mr. Holroyd's account -- changed the face of Victorian theater.'

The Hunting of the Denby
[Commentary]
Mark Steyn reviewing David Denby's latest book: 'So I confess to some misgivings about the mode of public discourse in 21st-century America. I am, therefore, amenable to the premise of Snark, a 144-page treatise by the film critic of The New Yorker (no, not Anthony Lane; the other one). Where I part company with David Denby is with David Denby. With the best will in the world, he doesn’t seem the obvious go-to guy for a “polemic in seven fits.” ...David Denby cocks a snook at snark and sounds merely snippy.'

The Endless Allure of El Dorado
[The Wall Street Journal]
Simon Winchester: 'Percy Harrison Fawcett, the affection-starved son of an independently wealthy Devon cricketer, joined the British army, got "slightly gassed" during World War I, surveyed Bolivia, went quietly mad, devoted his middle years to searching for the Lost Cities of the Brazilian rainforest and, while doing so in 1925, vanished. Numberless books and articles have over the past 80 years retold a story that is known to British audiences to the point of tedium but less familiar here in America. Now in the hands of David Grann, an amusingly self-deprecating Brooklyn nerd on the staff of the New Yorker, it is brought vividly alive once more in "The Lost City of Z."'
A 'Real-Life Indiana Jones'
[The Wall Street Journal]
Jeffrey Trachtenberg: 'Although Mr. Fawcett's name has largely been forgotten, in the 1920s he was as much a celebrity to the man in the street as mountaineer Edmund Hillary would be to later generations. Mr. Fawcett's fame helped inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel "The Lost World," which was set in South America. "He's often referred to as the real-life Indiana Jones," says Mr. Grann.'

What should we think of Henry VIII?
[The Times Of London]
Steven Gunn reviewing Henry: Virtuous Prince and Henry VIII: 'His reign attracted some of the most powerful English historical minds of the twentieth century, from A. F. Pollard to G. R. Elton via W. G. Hoskins, the doyen of English landscape historians, who characterized Henry’s generation as an “Age of Plunder” and the King himself as “the Stalin of Tudor England”. Yet full-scale biographies of the King are strangely rare. In part it is the magisterial quality of J. J. Scarisbrick’s work of 1968 that has enabled it to hold the field for so long. But there seems also to be a sense that Henry is so large a character, the evidence so bulky, the controversies so fierce, that the task daunts those who consider it. We should therefore be grateful to David Starkey and Lucy Wooding for giving us new Lives, which will doubtless be much read in the coming year. Their books are very different.'

Special Thanks to Spot
[The American Spectator]
Jonathan Black: 'You may think scanning the Acknowledgments page first is like reading the weddings in the New York Times Sunday Styles section before hitting the news. I beg to differ. The Acknowledgments page cannot make a bad book better, but it can ruin a good one. Did I say "page"? Section is more like it. Names upon names. Artists' colonies. Intrepid editors. Copy editors. Mentors. Foundations. Librarians. The upstairs neighbor. Research assistants. Personal assistants. People who read drafts. The mom who sparked the great endeavor. The dad who would have been proud. The agent, brilliant and prescient, as well as the best friend any writer could have. Speaking of friends…who are all these people? How many drafts did the author circulate? Isn't writing supposed to be a grim and lonely pursuit?'

Gifted Seller, Kilted Eccentric
[The Wall Street Journal]
Paul B. Carroll: 'David Ogilvy (1911-99) had a grand life. He also had a boundless personality and a lot of fresh ideas, not to mention the luck of a booming postwar economy and the genius to take advantage of it. He helped transform the world of advertising -- and generally in a good way, even for those of us who usually find advertising an annoying distraction from important things, like sports. As described in "The King of Madison Avenue," Kenneth Roman's engaging biography, David Mackenzie Ogilvy's life was writ large from birth.'

Handwriting Is on the Wall
[The Wall Street Journal]
Cullen Murphy: 'So the problem of bad handwriting is not new. But as Kitty Burns Florey argues in "Script and Scribble," a witty and readable (and fetchingly illustrated and glossed) excursion through the history of handwriting, we have today reached a point of crisis. Typing and texting have caused cursive skills to atrophy, and schools regard standards of style and legibility the same way they regard standards of dress. There may even come a day when longhand writing can no longer be deciphered by ordinary people -- you'll have to bring those old letters in the attic to some fussy museum curator. In 2006 only 15% of students taking the SAT wrote out their essays in cursive script; all the rest -- no doubt to the relief of the examiners -- used block letters.'

The Wizard of Tuskegee
[The Wall Street Journal]
Jason L. Riley reviewing Robert Norrell's Up From History: 'A century ago, the most consequential black person in America was a biracial man who had been abandoned by his father and raised by his mother, and who favored a nonconfrontational style of politics. Sound familiar? Yet to the extent that Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) is remembered at all today, he is usually misremembered, which is a travesty. In 1881, Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, a normal school in Alabama dedicated to educating recently freed slaves. He gained national prominence in 1895, after a famous speech in Atlanta where he called for racial conciliation and urged blacks to focus on economic self-advancement. The address would make him the central figure in American race relations for the next two decades.'

Covenant? What Covenant?
[The American Spectator]
Peter Hannaford: 'An air attack on Iran would never work, said numerous pundits. Israeli aircraft wouldn't be able to refuel for the mission; one attack would not be enough; Iran's nuclear facilities were too dispersed; and, finally, the U.S. would be blamed for the attack and if we, ourselves, launched it, we would be drawn into a ground war. The pundits' bottom line: if tried it would fail; it would not halt the inevitability of Iran's nuclear weapons program. Only (surprise) diplomacy would do. Those pundits should get a copy of Iran Covenant by Chet Nagle, a former Naval officer with extensive experience in the Middle East and, for many years, one involved in international intelligence. His 306-page book is a recipe for successfully damaging Iran's nuclear program and setting back its hegemonic impulse. This "recipe book" takes the form of a novel, a gripping novel that is the kind of stay-up-late-until-its-finished book that doesn't come along often.'

Shakespeare and deep England
[The Times Of London]
John Guy reviewing Soul Of The Age: The Life, Mind, And World Of William Shakespeare: 'At last we have a new kind of biography of Shakespeare. Starting from Ben Jonson’s description of Shakespeare as “Soul of the Age”, and shunning “the deadening march of chronological sequence that is biography’s besetting vice”, Jonathan Bate selects only the material that, he believes, will help to reveal Shakespeare’s cultural DNA. Structuring this loosely around the theme of the Seven Ages of Man from Jaques’s speech in As You Like It, Bate sweeps majestically backwards and forwards in time, moving between history and criticism, appropriating whatever best brings together Shakespeare’s life, work and world.'

Revels and Reverberations
[The Wall Street Journal]
Martin Rubin: 'If the flappers of the 1920s epitomized the Jazz Age on this side of the Atlantic, in England it was the Bright Young People. The British milieu of society scions flinging themselves into the nonstop pursuit of fun in the aftermath of World War I was immortalized -- and hilariously flayed -- by Evelyn Waugh in 1930 with his novel "Vile Bodies," but the real-life major players who made up this set are long gone. Thanks are due, then, to English critic D.J. Taylor, who brings them back to life in "Bright Young People." Some were distinguished, others once famous only for being famous and now pretty much forgotten -- but they were almost invariably fascinating.'

Star Power
[The Corner]
Tony Woodlief: 'Sunday's inauguration concert was designed to evoke strong emotion. It was certainly held in a dramatic setting, cast at the feet of Lincoln, in the place where Reverend King gave his nation-changing speech. The danger of standing where giants have tread, of course, is that doing so invites comparison. There was certainly little to be compared, this day, between the transformative words of these great men and the canned lines of the very small playactors selected to give speeches between the concert's musical acts. It's a gentler kind of reflection we seek these days, not an inward look at what is good and evil within this country, within each of us, but instead a reflection that is all glitter and shine, delivered by beautiful people who have distinguished themselves by an ability to show us what we want to see.'

The Not So Greatest Generation
[The American Spectator]
Davis N. Bass: 'With his soft voice and unassuming manner, Mark Bauerlein seems an unlikely prospect for penning an ostentatious book like The Dumbest Generation. The title immediately brings to mind the Greatest Generation, the idol of 20th century American history that weathered the Great Depression, beat the Nazis at Normandy, and brought us swing music. But the generation that Bauerlein writes of is very different. Ignorant of politics and government, art and music, prose and poetry, the Dumbest Generation is content to turn up its iPods and tune out the realities of the adult world. It is brash, pampered, young, and dumb -- and content to stay that way.'

There's more to humans than biological burps
[Spiked]
Stuart Derbyshire reviewing The Kingdom Of Infinite Space: Through vivid explorations of tears, snot, earwax and blushing, Ray Tallis' brilliant new book shows us that ‘being human' is not a simple stimulus-response thing - it is shaped by history, thought, time and space.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

Sir John Mortimer, R.I.P.
[The London Daily Telegraph]
'His experiences at the Bar afforded the material for the creation of Horace Rumpole, the shambling but stylish barrister whose quirky devotion to apparently hopeless causes made him one of the most compelling characters on British television. It sometimes seemed that Mortimer regarded not merely the Bar but his whole existence as a form of play-acting. The causes he adopted, though maintained with intellectual resource, often seemed to conflict with his instincts. Mortimer cheerfully admitted being a champagne socialist; genial and unruffled as ever, he held that he wanted everyone to have champagne. Naturally he was a founder member of the 20th of June Group which first gathered in Harold and Lady Antonia Pinter's Campden Hill Square drawing room on that date in 1988 to plot the downfall of Thatcherism.'

Poe at 200 -- Eerie After All These Years
[The Wall Street Journal]
John Miller: 'On a snowy night toward the end of his life, Edgar Allan Poe delivered a lecture on the origins of the universe. It was an unusual topic -- Poe was always more interested in death than birth -- and the reviews were mixed. Frustrated by the response, Poe announced that 2,000 years would pass before his work was properly admired. It remains to be seen whether anyone will read Poe in the distant future. As we approach the bicentennial of his birth on Jan. 19, however, it's obvious that Poe is far from "nameless here for evermore."'

Playing to Type
[The Atlantic]
Virginia Postrel: 'Nowadays, even nonprofessionals take an abundance of typefaces for granted. My computer includes about 100 English-language fonts, many of them families encompassing multiple weights—Baskerville in bold, bold italic, italic, regular, semibold, and semibold italic, for instance—and all available instantly. Basic cultural literacy now demands at least a passing familiarity with typefaces: witness a November episode of Jeopardy that featured the category “Knowledge of Fonts,” with correct responses including “What is Helvetica?” and “What is Bodoni?” A thoroughly entertaining (really) documentary called Helvetica, tracing the rise and fall and rise of the 20th century’s most ubiquitous typeface, played to sold-out crowds on the film-festival circuit last year.'

Two Happy Warriors Were We
[The American Spectator]
Hunter Baker: 'When William F. Buckley died in February 2008, it was widely known that he had been working on a book about Ronald Reagan. He died before completing the task. The unfinished nature of the work is something that should be understood at the onset. It is quite clear that The Reagan I Knew runs short of a great deal of personal reflection by Buckley on the former president. There is simply no question about it. The good news for readers is that the editorial team made skillful use of Buckley-Reagan correspondence and a series of footnotes to create a highly engrossing reading experience. Indeed, the book may have begun as the narrative story of a relationship with substantial personal reflection, but of necessity it became a successful collection of letters with a solid array of commentary by an author who pre-deceased his project's completion.'

Napoleon's Europe
[City Journal]
William Anthony Hay reviewing Napoleon's Wars: An International History, 1803-1815: 'For all his renown, Napoleon Bonaparte remains an elusive figure with a contested legacy. Admirers view him as a latter-day Julius Caesar who enacted reforms only imagined during the Enlightenment. Critics denounce him as the Corsican ogre whose ambitions made war a seemingly permanent state. At the center of the debate stand the prolonged wars from 1803 to 1815 that, according to historian John Holland Rose, made Napoleon’s story the history of mankind. In his new book, Charles Esdaile avoids so sweeping a conclusion; through the prism of Napoleon’s wars he nevertheless seeks to dispel competing myths and understand both the man and his impact on Europe.'

Who Checks the Spell-Checkers?
[Slate]
Chris Wilson: 'There's no reason why spell-check dictionaries need to be so behind the times. All the technology to build a relevant, timely spelling database already exists in search engines like Google and Microsoft's own Live Search, which have a vast vocabulary of words and names and update their dictionaries in near real time. Microsoft Word may not have heard of Marky Mark, but a Live Search or a Google query for Mark Walberg includes results for the actor, who has an "h" in his last name.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

The reality of government-controlled medical treatment
[National Review Online]
Thomas Sowell reviews: 'This is an emergency book review. Before you do anything else, make a note to read The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care by Sally C. Pipes. It might literally save your life, by checking the political stampede toward a government-controlled medical profession — usually presented politically as “universal health care.”'

Desperate Romantics
[The Times Of London]
Francis Wilson reviews Franny Moyle's latest book: 'Imagine the biographical equivalent of a venn diagram and you have Desperate Romantics. Franny Moyle describes the chaotic private lives of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as though they were a number of overlapping circles. In the outer rings, accompanied by the various women they shared between them like opium pipes, are Ford Madox Brown, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and the patron, or father figure, of the group, John Ruskin. At the intersection, touching on them all, is the brilliant, insatiable Dante Gabriel Rossetti. For the models - Lizzie Siddall, Annie Miller, Jane Morris and Fanny Cornforth, slum girls picked up from the streets who blend into one icon of bohemian beauty - belonging to the Brotherhood was less like being part of a neat design than living in Dante (Alighieri's) second circle of hell. The cost of being a muse was high: Lizzie killed herself after marrying Rossetti (he painted her from memory as Dante's Beatrice); Annie (painted by Rossetti as Helen of Troy) resorted to blackmailing her former lover, Hunt; Jane Morris (Rossetti's Proserpine) was shared between her husband, William, and Rossetti; Fanny Cornforth (Rossetti's Lady Lilith) was traded between Rossetti and his friend George Boyce.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

Power politics over a chess board
[The Washington Times]
Doug Bandow reviewing Daniel Johnson's White King And Red Queen: 'Thought to have originated in India in the sixth century A.D., the beautiful game of chess finally has returned home. The current world champion is Viswanathan Anand of India. He is only the third non-Soviet (or Russian post-Soviet break-up) since 1948 to hold a world chess title. Journalist Daniel Johnson explains, "it is impossible to write the history of chess during the Cold War period without contrasting the rival political, economic, and social systems. Only a book that got to the heart of the matter, to what made the evil empire evil, could give the Cold War chess grandmasters their context."'

Twenty years on: internalising the fatwa
[Spiked]
Kenan Malik: 'The anti-Rushdie protest did not, therefore, come out of the blue. It was an expression of the changing social and political landscape within Western societies in the 1980s. It also helped transform that landscape. It was able to do so because liberals to a large extent abandoned their own principles. Twenty years ago, most liberals defended Rushdie’s right to publish The Satanic Verses despite the offence it caused many Muslims. Today, many argue that whatever may appear to be right in principle, in practice one must appease religious and cultural sensibilities because such sensibilities are so deeply felt. The avoidance of ‘cultural pain’ is seen as more important than what is regarded as an abstract right to freedom of expression. The lesson of the Rushdie Affair that has never been learnt is that liberals have made their own monsters.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

The Right Gifts
[City Journal]
Daniel Flynn reviewing the new book by Nicole Hoplin and Rin Robinson: 'Conservative intellectuals chronicling their movement’s past tend to concentrate on other conservative intellectuals, not funding. The definitive work on the conservative movement is George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, while another, John East’s The American Conservative Movement, boasts chapters on professors Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendell, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Ludwig von Mises. This historiography is enough to make an uninformed reader believe that academia was the center of American conservatism. Where are the men of action? And where are the moneymen? Funding Fathers gives credit to those who provided credit—and cash and checks. Through biographical sketches of the patrons of such iconic conservative institutions as the Heritage Foundation, Hillsdale College, National Review, and Britain’s Institute for Economic Affairs, Hoplin and Robinson present the overlooked stories of the money behind the men and the men behind that money.'

Ruminations on the end of an iconic camera
[Culture11]
Sophie Gilbert: 'This month marks the end of an era: the last month of the last production year of instant Polaroid film. Imperfections or no, there's a certain quality about Polaroid pictures that you can't capture with any other camera, a quiet dreaminess that's as much an artistic feature as it's a product of the camera's old-fashioned technology. Polaroid pictures always look like they were taken in a bygone era (which may be because most of the good ones were). The format is small, so flaws are minimised. Landscapes develop a beautiful and hazy glow.'

A man of imagination
[The New Criterion]
Joseph Tartakovsky reviewing Adam Kirsch's Benjamin Disraeli: 'Disraeli was an English Jew at a time when being English and Jewish was inconceivable; he was flamboyant in an age of formality; illiberal in an age of liberalism; an advocate of spiritualism during the ascent of utilitarianism, socialism, and materialism; a self-declared Tory Radical; the champion of a conservative party founded in birth and property, of which he had neither. And this was just the first half of his career.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

Why Do Artists Hate The Suburbs?
[The Wall Street Journal]
Lee Siegel: '"Revolutionary Road," based on Richard Yates's 1961 novel of the same name, is the latest entry in a long stream of art that portrays the American suburbs as the physical correlative to spiritual and mental death. Yet the Wheelers live in a safe and protected middle-class town with intact, well-to-do families; efficient services; and happy children gamboling in sprinklers and running among the trees. How did such an environment come to acquire qualities previously associated with Dante's "Inferno," Dickens's Victorian workhouses and Solzhenitsyn's gulags?'

Chronicle of a Council
[The Wall Street Journal]
Edward Oakes, S.J., reviewing Father John O'Malley's What Happened At Vatican II: 'Of course, no major event in history can escape the law of unintended consequences; and Vatican II is no exception. The assembled bishops hardly intended to empty rectories and convents, but that is what happened. Which forces the question: How much of this disruption was predictable and how much was due to the unexpected winds of history, such as the student rebellions of 1968 and the rise of the so-called counterculture? And if predictable, should Vatican II, at least to some extent, be faulted -- for the sin of imprudence if not of untruth?'

Noisy, smelly, excavated Pompeii
[The Times Of London]
W.V. Harris: 'Being Mary Beard is a difficult balancing act. On the one side is the unrepentant scholar, trained in Latin epigraphy in the rigorous school of Joyce Reynolds, passionately determined to get things exactly right, ready to weigh probabilities judiciously, and thoroughly informed about the contents of the latest Dutch festschrift. On the other is the ardent blogger, and the writer (and TLS Classics editor) determined to communicate with audiences larger than a Roman historian or archaeologist can normally reach. Pompeii: The life of a Roman town combines these two personae, often triumphantly, sometimes a little uneasily.'

Aunts Aren't Gentlemen
[The Times Of London]
Max Hastings reviewing the reissue of P.G. Wodehouses' book: 'Just as the author consoled a huge readership through the last slump, the new editions appear just in time to see us through the next one. Even after 80-odd years, it is amazing how handy his words can be. The other day, I was struggling to find adequate phrases to describe Peter Mandelson on his return to the cabinet. I was saved by one from the master, who would surely have agreed that Lord M is “one of the lowest things ever to crawl out of the slime”.'

Monsters: History's Most Evil Men And Women
[The Times Of London]
Barry Forshaw reviews Simon Sebag Montefiore's latest book: 'Monsters' strap-line augurs a chilling read: “warnings from history no one should forget” - but, in fact, the final effect of the book is a rather comfortable one: as this parade of the most unspeakable excesses of human behaviour creeps before us (in colourfully illustrated form), we do not shudder at the depths to which men and women throughout history have sunk, but experience a piquant relish.'

No Need for Despair
[The Wall Street Journal]
Amy Dockser Marcus reviewing Alice Wexler's The Woman Who Walked Into The Sea: 'Ms. Wexler discovered that, ironically, an increased understanding of Huntington's disease actually discouraged doctors, early on, from pursuing a cure. Many thought that, because it was hereditary, nothing could be done. It was families like the Wexlers who felt otherwise and essentially transformed the way such research was pursued. They pushed forward the project to find the gene. They raised private money to fund research that mattered to them and required investigators to share their data and collaborate on projects with one another. They set up a company to drive the testing of drugs to see if any were effective against the disease. In doing so, they created a paradigm not only for understanding Huntington's disease but for targeting other diseases as well.'

The Perfect 'Perfect Christmas' Book
[SteynOnline]
Mark Steyn: 'I'm one of those guys who tend to leave the old Yuletide preparations until around 2 p.m. on Christmas Eve only to discover that half the stores closed early at 1 p.m. and those still open have got nothing left except for massive storewide clearances on Hanukkah wrapping paper. Yet for a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-Santa-suit-pants kind of guy I seem to have acquired over the years an enormous number of books on how to have the perfect Christmas.'

Decline, fall and then some
[National Post]
Patrick Kennedy reviewing Theodore Dalrymple's Not With A Bang But A Whimper: The Politics And Culture Of Decline: 'It is a literary curiosity that so many physicians write so well. From Anton Chekhov to Somerset Maugham to Williams Carlos Williams, to more contemporary examples such as Lewis Thomas, the late Michael Crichton or last year's Giller Prize winner, Vincent Lam, there is no shortage of doctors who excel at the literary arts. And none writes more elegantly and eloquently than the British essayist Theodore Dalrymple, the nom de plume of Anthony Daniels, a retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He believes that man is a fallen creature and so is dismissive of the idea of perfection or utopian thinking of any kind. He is unmoved by Marxism, or indeed any other ideological system that posits causation by abstract social forces. For Dalrymple, the locus of moral concern falls on personal behaviour rather than on social structure, and he is caustic about any notion that negates the idea of personal responsibility, or that suggests that we are simply passive victims of our environment. And unlike so many of the intelligentsia, he is ever mindful that, in this world at least, we do not get something for nothing: Improvement usually comes at a cost. Ideas that arise from the very best of intentions often result in disastrous social consequences.'
[tip of the fedora to Arts & Letters Daily]

Death of Reading, Part MCMLXVI
[AmSpecBlog]
Robert Stacy McCain: 'The newspaper industry has been circling the toilet bowl for years. Conservatives love to claim that liberal bias explains the decline of newspaper circulation and ad revenue. Technophiles say that dead-tree Old Media is losing circulation because readers are going to the Web. Whatever the merits of these explanations, they are not sufficient to account fully for the loss of readership. I have often argued, in response, that what we are actually seeing is a decline of reading, period.'

A Clumsy Mix of Art and Politics
[The Wall Street Journal]
Roger Kimball: 'The 2000 film "Billy Elliot" was a surprise hit. It's an absorbing drama about personal transformation and the power of art to ennoble the human spirit. "Billy Elliot: The Musical" -- the noise is supplied by Sir Elton John -- is a depressing spectacle about partisan politics and the ephemeral power of schlock.'

Such Good Friends
[The Wall Street Journal]
Martin Rubin reviewing two new books about the relationship between America and Britain: '"The Eagle and the Crown" is a remarkably concise but nonetheless probing study of the dynamic relationship between English royalty and American democracy. David Fromkin's "The King and the Cowboy" focuses on the geopolitical "partnership" of Theodore Roosevelt and Edward VII.'

The Day of Restlessness
[The Wall Street Journal]
Stephen Miller: 'Who, raised in or around the Christian tradition, has not experienced the ambivalent dolors of a Sunday? That is only one question -- but a central and recurrent one -- raised by "The Peculiar Life of Sundays," Stephen Miller's lively history of a day that has exercised a peculiar hold on countless human beings for the past 2,000 years.'

Nightmare before 'Christmas'
[New York Post]
Jonathan Yardley reviewing Les Standiford's The Man Who Invented Christmas - How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits: 'No, Dickens did not "invent" Christmas. But he "played a major role in transforming a celebration dating back to pre-Christian times, revitalizing forgotten customs and introducing new ones that now define the holiday," including the turkey as the centerpiece of the day's feast.'

The Sixties Revisited
[New English Review]
Norman Berdichevsky reviewing Arthur Marwick's The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958- 1974: '"The Sixties" is a brilliantly incisive and penetrating analysis that transcends pure nostalgia and analyses the causes and consequences of events and trends that formed a watershed in the social history of the United States, Britain, France and Italy and subsequently spread throughout the world. The genius of 'The Sixties' and its charm for both older and younger readers lies to a considerable degree in its jarring use of historical memory to put in perspective the life styles, perceptions, fads and social relations that are so taken for granted today.'

Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World
[The Times Of London]
James Robertson reviewing the book: '...Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, Marcy Norton's excellent new book, is proof that, in the right hands, even a seemingly narrow study can provide significant insight. Her history of tobacco and chocolate tells us much about those commodities and the broader intersection of culture, consumption and statecraft.'

Showroom Showdown
[The Wall Street Journal]
John Stoll: 'Since about 1908, when the supply of automobiles first began outpacing demand, car dealerships -- particularly those peddling used vehicles -- have developed a reputation for employing more scoundrels than is strictly necessary. In "Horse Trading in the Age of Cars," Steven M. Gelber offers vivid portraits of several automotive flim-flam artists, and he captures the antics of dealers like Earl "Madman" Muntz, who revolutionized auto sales in the 1940s and early '50s by creating a sales-crazed character for his advertising. The more typical car salesman, though, is a workaday guy who lacks a college education but has a way with people and numbers and can talk himself around the latest models coming off dealer lots.'

Laughs last Down East
[The Boston Globe]
Jerry Harkavy: 'Some of the classic lines that define Maine humor emerged 50 years ago on a record made by two Yale University students in a dormitory room. Uttered in exaggerated Down East accents, the exchanges between Marshall Dodge and Robert Bryan on the "Bert and I" album inspired generations of storytellers both in-state and beyond, including the likes of Garrison Keillor of Lake Wobegon fame.'

Only One Thing on Their Minds
[Standpoint]
Kate Maltby reviewing Giulia Sissa's Sex And Sensuality In The Ancient World: 'Sissa, an expert in the technique of comparative literature, has a sharp eye for debunking politically motivated revisionism in studies of classical culture. In this case, Sissa's target is the modern obsession with Greek homosexuality. Male-male eroticism, she argues, has been greatly exaggerated by classicists, and she surveys a mind-bogglingly broad range of classical and Christian literature to demonstrate the centrality of heterosexual concerns to ancient, male, writers.'

A Rhetorical Question
[First Things]
John McWhorter: 'In our times, we are not surprised that in policy statements slogans will be valued over explanations and parsimony of words valued over complete accounts. For a defense of the war in Iraq, for example, we expect applause lines such as “When the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down.” For more serious policy engagement, we look to wonky policy journals, not to the president. Most of us have come to accept this state of affairs, but not Elvin Lim. His recent book The Anti-Intellectual Presidency is not one more rant about the limited cognitive abilities of George W. Bush but a brisk, methodical deconstruction of “the relentless simplification of presidential rhetoric in the last two centuries and the increasing substitution of arguments with applause-rendering platitudes, partisan punch lines and emotional and human interest appeals.”'

Destructive Delusions
[The Wall Street Journal]
Theodore Dalrymple: 'In "Try to Remember," Paul McHugh, the former director of the psychiatry department at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, recounts the history of the movement to recover "repressed" memories of abuse. He also analyzes the movement's origins in a false view of the workings of the human mind, a view traceable to the theories and influence of Sigmund Freud as well as to the primitive system of classification that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association represents. In 300 years' time, our descendants -- who will, of course, pride themselves on their superior rationality -- will read of the recovered-memory-driven prosecutions of parents (usually fathers) as we now read of the Salem witch trials. And some future Arthur Miller will set his "Crucible" in a late-20th-century psychiatric hospital in which the disorder was supposedly treated but was actually manufactured.'

The Search for a Hero
[The Wall Street Journal]
Robert Messenger reviews The Question Of MacArthur's Reputation by Robert Ferrell which investigates whether he deserved his WWI Distinguished Service Cross.

Enough With the Sweet Talk
[The New York Times]
Joe Queenan: 'This brings us to the least-discussed subject in the world of belles-lettres: book reviews that any author worth his salt knows are unjustifiably enthusiastic. Authors are always complaining that reviewers missed the whole point of “Few Mourn the Caballero,” or took the quote about the merry leper ballerinas out of context, or overlooked the allusions to Octave Mirbeau, or didn’t mention that the author once jilted the critic after he kept begging her to go out on a double date dressed as one of the Boleyn sisters. What makes this bellyaching so unseemly is that the vast majority of book reviews are favorable, even though the vast majority of books deserve little praise. Authors know that even if one reviewer hates a book, the next 10 will roll over like pooches and insist it’s not only incandescent but luminous, too.' [tip of the fedora to Mark Hemingway]

Ben Wattenberg's American Life
[The American Spectator]
Hunter Baker reviewing Fighting Words: A Tale Of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism: 'The book is both an autobiography of Wattenberg and a light history of neoconservatism. The two go together. Wattenberg, who grew up in a community disproportionately sympathetic to socialism in New York, is one of many Jewish intellectuals who found themselves first trying to move the Democratic Party to the center and then, in many cases, settling among Republicans. Wattenberg never went all the way to the GOP. He worked for LBJ, Hubert Humphrey, and Scoop Jackson before becoming a fixture in the think tank world. Unlike his fellow neocon Daniel Patrick Moynihan (who became a reliable left vote in the Senate), though, he could not reliably support the Democrats, either. It turns out Wattenberg is a rarity in Washington. He is a swing voter.'

Slouching Toward Fanaticism
[City Journal]
Theodore Dalrymple reviewing Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, And The Serach For A Cure: 'The combined measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine is the latest to act as a lightning conductor for parental discontent. Paul Offit’s new book, as readable as a good detective novel, tells the story of how autism, a disorder of psychological development, came falsely to be blamed first on the MMR vaccine and then on thimerosal, a preservative found in several vaccines. It is a tale about bad science, worse journalism, unscrupulous political populism, and profiteering litigation lawyers.'

The Rise Of The West
[Forbes.com]
Michael Auslin: 'As conservatives ponder a long exile in the political wilderness, many voices are calling for a period of contemplation, a returning to roots, so to speak. They could do worse than return to William H. McNeill's 1963 magnum opus, The Rise of the West, which celebrates its 45th anniversary this year. The lessons of that 900-page survey of human history have as much urgency today as they did at the height of the Cold War, and they make a sweeping case for economic and political freedom.'

The Name's Fleming. Ian Fleming.
[SteynOnline]
Mark Steyn's take on the Bond books: 'Unlike most other thriller writers, the father of James Bond can be read over and over.'

The Showman Who Started It All
[The Wall Street Journal]
Steve Barnes: 'In "Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business," Ethan Mordden offers a wealth of detail to illustrate how Ziegfeld left his stamp on every aspect of his productions -- from supervising costumes and lighting to picking songwriters and comics and, crucially, choosing those rare examples of feminine beauty that had what it took to become a Ziegfeld Girl. He knew how to spot talent, especially female talent, and how to feature it winningly. More important, he knew how to mix the vitality of popular culture in the early 20th century -- a product of America's lower classes and newly arrived immigrants -- with the high-toned gloss expected of a top-flight theatrical production.'

Will the Real James Bond Please Stand Up?
[The Wall Street Journal]
Allen Barra: 'Decades of big-budget movies, most of them overstuffed with ridiculous gadgets and increasingly absurd save-the-world plots, have taken us away from the real Bond, the Cold War-era warrior admired by such high-class fans from the literary world as Kingsley Amis (who wrote a book, "The James Bond Dossier," in tribute), Raymond Chandler, W.H. Auden, Cyril Connolly and Anthony Burgess.'

Learning for Everyone
[The Wall Street Journal]
Robert Landers: 'Alex Beam, a columnist for the Boston Globe, set out to write a book that wasn't great -- and, mirabile dictu, he has succeeded. He wanted his informal history of the Great Books movement in America, "A Great Idea at the Time," to be "brief, engaging, and undidactic . . . as different from the ponderous and forbidding Great Books as it could possibly be" -- and so it is.'

Married to the Muse
[The Wilson Quarterly]
Kate Christensen reviewing Ruth Butler's Hidden In The Shadow Of The Master: 'The library of art history is rife with biographies of The ­Artist—­whomever he might ­be—­as a young, ­middle-­aged, old, and immortal man. But rarely does a book deal primarily with the woman he painted over and over, the ordin­ary ­model-­wife whose face an artist immortalized in paint or bronze. Rarer still is the book that focuses on three such women and reveals them as biographical subjects in their own ­right.'

Revolution Is No Tea Party
[The Wall Street Journal]
Jonathan Karl reviewing Samuel Adams: A Life: 'These days Samuel Adams is more likely to be known as a brand of beer than a revolutionary leader. While it is true that he ran his father's Boston malt house for a time, he was perhaps the most forceful single figure behind the American Revolution. He was also America's first great political operative, mastering the arts of spin and strategy in ways that future generations of David Axelrods and Lee Atwaters could profitably emulate. Ira Stoll, in his pithy and well-researched biography, sets out to rescue Adams from historical obscurity.'

Extra, Extra! Lunar Man-Bats
[The Wall Street Journal]
Seth Lipsky: 'When Ira Stoll and I were preparing to re-launch The New York Sun in 2001, the Atlantic Monthly sent around a reporter to find out, among other things, why we had picked the name. I was just getting warmed up when the reporter, David Carr, caught me off-guard by inquiring about the New York Sun's notorious moon hoax. Now this story has been told in full by Matthew Goodman in "The Sun and the Moon." Mr. Goodman has managed not only to give us a ripping good newspaper yarn but also to illuminate life in the nation's largest city in the early part of the 19th century. He also provides something of a treatise on the birth of modern mass-market newspapering.'

Michael Crichton's Legacy
[The Weekly Standard]
S.T. Karnick: 'Bestselling author and TV producer Michael Crichton, who died of cancer Tuesday at the age of 66, had an ambivalent view of science but an unfailingly benevolent attitude toward humanity. His writings are particularly important for having brought an intelligent, nuanced view on science to a popular culture much more inclined toward ignorance and political shibboleths in its treatment of scientific issues.'

Enter, Stage Right?
[The Wall Street Journal]
Terry Teachout on why we don't get conservative plays.

The Great Duke and others
[The London Spectator]
James Delingpole reviewing Wellington by Jane Wellesley: 'There can never be too many biographies of the Duke of Wellington because, like Churchill’s and Nelson’s, his career path is so extraordinary, uplifting, chequered and involving that it reads more like (slightly overwrought) fiction than fact. ...But her broader aim, as the Duke’s great-great-great-granddaughter, is to show how the Wellington legend and tradition has gone on to affect his descendants.'

What a Tax Lawyer Dug Up on 'Dracula'
[The Wall Street Journal]
John J. Miller: 'This is a challenge for a lot of classic books: The stories are so familiar that their twists and turns fail to shock or awe. Yet the publisher W.W. Norton & Co. seems to have found a commercially viable way out of this fix, with a series of annotated volumes that perform the marketing miracle of making the old seem new again. The latest, "The New Annotated Dracula," is out just in time for Halloween.'

Bath and Body Works
[The Wilson Quarterly]
Winifred Gallagher reviewing the books Clean and The Dirt On Clean: 'Both histories of cleanliness necessarily offer much of the same information, but their presentations may determine where each is shelved. Clean is the more complete and academic, replete with the subheadings favored by university presses, 80 pages of notes, and Smith’s politically correct disclaimer—“I am unashamedly looking for universal trends, but do not claim to be anything other than a local European (in fact a British) historian.” Ashenburg’s style is livelier, and her text is riddled with gossipy anecdotes about the rich and famous. Whatever you think of Napoleon’s politics, it’s fun to know that he bathed daily for two ­hours.'

Seaching For Schindler: A Memoir
[The Times Of London]
Elaine Feinstein reviewing Thomas Keneally's latest book: 'Searching for Schindler is Keneally's own story of accident, literary good fortune and a daunting global pursuit. The book opens in 1980, with Keneally entering a Californian leather-goods shop owned by Leopold Page (once Pfefferberg) to buy a briefcase. Poldek, as he is nicknamed, is one of the Polish Jews rescued by Oskar Schindler and he has a single mission: to have Schindler's courageous exploit more widely known.'

The Woman Who Never Stopped Talking
[Slate]
Stacy Schiff on Madame Germaine de Stael: 'She woke with her mouth open, discoursed "as she was being coiffed, manicured, and laced into corsets," fell silent only when asleep. It was a virtuoso performance, at least at those addresses that thrilled to such things. Her aperçus were lost, for example, in Geneva, for whose people she had little patience: "Their love of equality is but a desire to drag everybody down; their liberty is insolence, and their morality is boredom."'

Our Founding Partisans
[The American Spectator]
Robert Novak reviewing Edward Larson's A Magnificent Catastrophe: 'Imagine that in the 2004 U.S. presidential election, President George W. Bush was directing the government to arrest, convict, and imprison his critics. Imagine that John Kerry was paying a scandalmonger to dig up dirt on Tom DeLay. Imagine further that John McCain was working secretly against Bush's re-election, that DeLay was plotting to replace Bush with Dick Cheney as president, and that John Edwards was conspiring to be elected president instead of Kerry. Unimaginable, surely. But 204 years earlier in the presidential election of 1800, that's roughly what took place.'

A Journey Across The Dial
[The Wall Street Journal]
Randall Bloomquist: 'It is easy to forget, given today's consolidated and corporatized radio industry, that the medium was given life in this country by a remarkable band of hobbyists, hustlers, preachers, quacks, con men and the stray unstable genius. Hard to recall, too, that radio in its early days barely avoided the sort of heavy government control that probably would have deprived us of every colorful persona on the radio, from Jack Benny and Fibber McGee to Casey Kasem and Rush Limbaugh. The story of radio's rise sprawls across dozens of themes, hundreds of cites and towns, and countless memorable characters. Anthony Rudel's "Hello, Everybody!" tries to get it all between the covers of a single book -- an unenviable and perhaps impossible task, given that so many aspects of radio's pioneering era might warrant books of their own.'

The Number-Crunchers
Soft Targets
[National Review Online]
[City Journal]
Two reviews of The Numerati by Stephen Baker.  From the first one by Robert VerBruggen: 'Over the last several years, most Americans have probably noticed that a lot of businesses, especially on the Internet, have been making careful use of statistical analysis. Netflix predicts what star rankings its customers will give certain movies, based on the rankings they’ve given others. Amazon recommends books that fit a customer’s preferences. Websites display different ads to different visitors depending on what other websites they’ve visited. All of these abilities come from the painstaking analysis of mountains of data, executed by what Business Week’s Stephen Baker calls The Numerati in his new book by that name.'  [The second review is by Laura Vanderkam]

The Sky Keeps Falling!
[The Wall Street Journal]
Tama Starr reviewing Max Page's latest book: 'This week's Wall Street disaster may still be unfolding, but it's not too soon for artists and writers to start imagining New York City in ruins. As Max Page notes in "The City's End," his engaging survey of apocalyptic visions of New York, the tradition began in the early 19th century, when New York was "about to become the preeminent American city."'

A Charm Brigade Raids Washington
[The Wall Street Journal]
Philip Terzian reviews Jennet Conant's latest book: 'Spies are not all romantic figures out of airport thrillers or James Bond movies. Julia Child was once employed by the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's forerunner. The eccentric ex-baseball player Moe Berg was another OSS veteran. But sometimes spies do live up to the stereotype, as Jennet Conant demonstrates in "The Irregulars." Ms. Conant tells the story of a handful of young, handsome, cosmopolitan British officers sent to Washington before Pearl Harbor -- at Prime Minister Winston Churchill's direction -- to ingratiate themselves on the social scene, subvert American isolationism and advance the British cause through good manners.'

That worthless piece of paper
[The London Spectator]
Graham Stewart reviewing David Faber's Munich: 'David Faber is the first British historian to write a major book specifically on the Munich crisis since the works of John Wheeler-Bennett and Keith Robbins in the 1960s. His achievement is such that we might wait another 40 years before feeling the need for someone else to give it a go. Faber has written a compelling work of narrative history. His personal judgments intrude only in the periodic choice of adjective. But his mastery of the evidence, clearly presented, is such that only the most independently minded reader will resist coming to sober conclusions about the course and consequences of events.'

Out of the frying pan...
[The London Spectator]
Judith Flanders reviewing Stranger in the House: Women's Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War, by Julie Summers: "The second world war is big business. Television, film, novels — whole industries have evolved to bring home to us the images of a ‘just’ war. Then there are the thousands of books, on politics, economics, Hitler and Churchill, Rommel and Monty. Too few of these, however, give us authentic voices, telling their own stories. Further, most end with VE or VJ Day, with happy crowds dancing down the Mall. But what came after? How did families reconnect after six years of separation, privation, horror and fear?"

Betrayal and the True Believer
[The Wall Street Journal]
Bret Stephens: 'Andrew Meier, a former Moscow correspondent for Time, addresses neither Mr. Sobell's nor the Rosenbergs' case in "The Lost Spy." But he does bring back to life the world of Communist intrigue into which they were drawn by telling the story of one of their most fascinating, if least known, brethren: Isaiah "Cy" Oggins, a Columbia University graduate who faithfully served his Soviet masters in the U.S., Europe and the Far East until his ultimate murder, at Joseph Stalin's direction, in 1947. The product of more than seven years of labor, the book is a brilliantly crafted account of true belief and its many terrible betrayals.'

Uncouth, Unheeded
[The Wall Street Journal]
Alan Pell Crawford: 'In "Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet," a short and engaging biography of Luther Martin (1748-1826), Bill Kauffman shows us a sot, a quarrelsome bore, a butcher of the English language, an outspoken abolitionist who himself owned slaves -- and a man who advanced opinions at the Constitutional Convention that desperately needed to be heard.'

The Woodward Way of War
[The Weekly Standard]
Peter Wehner on Bob Woodward's The War Within: 'The picture Woodward paints isn't pretty, and his judgment is harsh. Students of the Iraq war will find this book well worth reading, but for reasons Woodward probably didn't intend.'

Traffic: Why We Drive The Way We Do (And What Is Says About Us)
[City Journal]
Nicole Gelinas reviewing Tom Vanderbilt's book: 'Tom Vanderbilt’s data-heavy new book, Traffic, explains how each of these decisions or conditions (like whether you’re a man or a woman) dramatically changes the odds of getting yourself killed, or killing someone else, in a horrific crash. Note that these variables don’t change the statistical odds of whether you’ll live or die; your chances of living through the commute are always vastly better than those of dying (though there’s probably some exception out there). Over a lifetime of driving, the “average person” has about a 1 in 100 chance of dying in a car crash, which means that you’re likely to see yet another workweek. Still, driving is the most dangerous thing that most of us will ever do on a regular basis.'

A 'Little Book' Bursting With The Write Ideas
[The Washington Post]
Jonathan Yardley looking at The Elements Of Style by Strunk and White: 'In the half-century of its public life "the little book" has been a constant companion for millions of people, most of whom know it simply as "Strunk and White." It is scarcely so encyclopedic as H.W. Fowler's "A Dictionary of Modern English Usage" (1926, revised 1965 by Sir Ernest Gowers) but it is distinctly and distinctively American, and its brevity renders it both portable and accessible.'

Supreme Courtship
[The Wall Street Journal]
Brian Carney reviewing Christopher Buckley's latest novel: 'To replace a justice who has started appearing at oral arguments with tinfoil wrapped around his ears, President Donald P. Vanderdamp -- one of many amusing characters in "Supreme Courtship" -- puts forward one Pepper Cartwright, a TV judge best imagined as a cross between Judge Judy and Jessica Simpson. She tapes her television show with nothing but a "bra, pantyhose and high heels" under her robes -- an image, Mr. Buckley writes, "to induce infarction in the most hardened of male arteries."  In Mr. Buckley's capable hands, what starts as a simple send-up of our political mores develops into a rich tale of our media-centric culture.'

The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby
[The London Spectator]
Jane Ridley reviewing Angus Hawkins's book: "Who was the 14th Earl of Derby? He was three times Conservative prime minister, but few people have heard of him today. He became leader of the Tory rump after Peel smashed the Conservative party in 1846, and he remained leader until ill health forced him to resign some 22 years later. He was immensely rich, with estates in Lancashire yielding a princely income of £100,000. He was clever and a swashbuckling orator — the ‘Rupert of debate’, Bulwer-Lytton called him. He was also a gifted classical scholar. Confined to his bed by an attack of gout, he spent the time composing an acclaimed translation of Homer’s Iliad. In spite of all this, he has been forgotten."

Rekindling life in a dead frame
[The London Spectator]
Caroline Moore reviewing Peter Ackroyd's The Casebook Of Victor Frankenstein: 'Ackroyd’s novel is, like its famous predecessor, immensely readable. It crackles with that peculiar mixture of ebullience and self-loathing that galvanises Ackroyd’s resurrection of the past. His ear for Romantic language is almost pitch-perfect, without ever becoming slavish.... Yet Ackroyd’s fiction is destined or indeed designed never to achieve fully independent life. It is by its nature a hybrid, a patchwork, a parasite. For its effect, it depends upon the reader noticing the seams.'

Herbal Legends
[The Wall Street Journal]
Scott Gottlieb: '...hundreds of studies have examined the purported benefits of various alternative-medicine treatments. In "Trick or Treatment," Simon Singh and Dr. Edzard Ernst report on the results.  Together they conclude, after cataloging the evidence, that most of the popular forms of alternative medicine are "a throwback to the dark ages." Too many alternative practitioners, they say, are "uninterested in determining the safety and efficacy of their interventions."'

Bold English: Anglo-Saxon Poetry
[The New York Sun]
Jeremy Axelrod reviewing Michael Alexander's The First Poems In English: '...stress and enclosure defined the Anglo-Saxon experience: the enveloping gloom of the vast forests and long winters, the icy waters and limited geography, the pitiless enemies closing in, and the bloody shortness of life. Old English poetry was sharpened and compressed accordingly. Bare of rhetorical flourish, elaborative similes, and pleasing rhymes, its oral style is instead marked by abrupt, percussive phrasing, heavy alliteration, the heaving meter of German caesuras (or mid-line pauses), and dense metaphors or kennings, which fused layers of meaning within single epithets.'

The Cities of Our Dreams
[The Wall Street Journal]
Thomas Meaney reviewing Concrete Reveries by Mark Kingwell: 'Great architects are the enemies of history. They aspire to erase the visible past and to superimpose their own vision of the future.  Luckily for us, there is another species in the urban genus: the architectural critic, who stands up for the general public and typically takes the side of preservation.'

For the Thrill of It
[The Wall Street Journal]
Joseph Epstein reviewing Simon Battz's new book: 'But no crime has ever come close to stirring public interest in Chicago as did the 1924 murder of a 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks by two students at the University of Chicago. The killers were 18-year-old Richard Loeb and 19-year-old Nathan Leopold Jr. The cold-bloodedness of their crime riveted the city and the nation.  The crime may now be forgiven, but it is not forgotten, as Simon Baatz's excellent book demonstrates. Although the names Leopold and Loeb can no longer be used to frighten young children, the calculated viciousness of their crime, so compellingly captured by Mr. Baatz, remains a major event in the annals of human depravity.'

Stuff White People Like
[National Review]
Robert VerBruggen reviewing Christian Lander's book: 'By “white person” Lander actually means the young, urban, elite white person. I am the “wrong kind of white person” — the kind that listens to heavy metal, goes hunting, and occasionally finds Larry the Cable Guy amusing (git-r-done!).  The book’s subtitle, “The Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions,” takes a jab at the fact that legions of Ikea-shopping, thick-framed-glasses-wearing snobs all think they’re something special.'

Inquiring Minds Still Want to Know
[The Wall Street Journal]
Edward Kosner reviewing The Godfather Of Tabloid by Jack Vitek: 'Long after its fabled Elvis, O.J. and Monica splashes, the National Enquirer made news last week when Democratic pol John Edwards admitted that he'd cheated on his cancer-stricken wife with a blond campaign aide and lied about it, although he insisted he wasn't the father of what the Enquirer inevitably called her "love child."  Like people and anthrax spores, publications have their unique DNA. And, as it turns out, the Enquirer is still true in its fashion to the genetic heritage Generoso Pope Jr. endowed it with 55 years ago.'

Scared Senseless
[The Wall Street Journal]
Ronald Bailey: 'In "Hyping Health Risks," Geoffrey Kabat, an epidemiologist himself, shows how activists, regulators and scientists distort or magnify minuscule environmental risks. He duly notes the accomplishments of epidemiology, such as uncovering the risks of tobacco smoking and the dangers of exposure to vinyl chloride and asbestos. And he acknowledges that industry has attempted to manipulate science. But he is concerned about a less reported problem: "The highly charged climate surrounding environmental health risks can create powerful pressure for scientists to conform and to fall into line with a particular position."  Mr. Kabat looks at four claims -- those trying to link cancer to man-made chemicals, electromagnetic fields and radon and to link cancer and heart disease to passive smoking. In each, he finds more bias than biology -- until further research, years later, corrects exaggeration or error.'

Stamps of Wild Approval
[The Wall Street Journal]
Simon Garfield reviewing Blue Mauritius by Helen Morgan: 'What, beyond rarity, accounts for this lust for something so simple and small, of no inherent worth? As a stamp collector myself, and one who has spent many hours dreaming of rare stamps made valuable because they were printed in error, I can honestly say that I have no idea. The fever grips you at a tender age and never lets go. The desire to accrue has led at least one famous collector to the asylum.'

Psychological Crime Novels
[The Wall Street Journal]
Author Andrew Klavan picks the five best.

The Same Man
[The Wall Street Journal]
Michael Dirda review David Lebedoff's new book: 'George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh were both born in 1903 to middle-class families and both destined to become masters of English prose. Yet given that the authors of "1984" and "Brideshead Revisited" are among the most honored English writers of the mid-20th century, as well as the subjects of multiple biographies and critical studies, it is hard not to wonder, at first, whether David Lebedoff's "The Same Man" is really necessary.  And indeed, Mr. Lebedoff spends most of his book giving a succinct, if unremarkable, summary of Orwell's and Waugh's lives and careers. But then, in a startling last chapter, he makes it clear that "The Same Man" has not only a biographical purpose but also a polemical one. ...Mr. Lebedoff says, the leftist anti-Stalinist and the reactionary Catholic apologist both arrived at the same fundamental -- and, in Mr. Lebedoff's view, sound -- critique of the modern world and all its hedonistic, shallow falsity.'

The Future of Conservative Books
[City Journal]
Harry Stein: "In 2003, something unthinkable happened in the tradition-bound—and unapologetically liberal—world of book publishing: two of the largest and best-known conglomerates, Penguin and Random House, set up imprints, Sentinel and Crown Forum, dedicated to producing conservative books. Two years later, Simon and Schuster added its own right-leaning imprint, Threshold.  ...Yet over the past few years, some of the optimism on the right that greeted this publishing mini-revolution has faded. Outside the new imprints, the New York publishing world clearly remains a liberal stronghold, uncomprehending of, when not outright hostile to, conservative ideas—and authors. Mainstream media outlets that conventional publishers rely on to tout books have just as little enthusiasm for conservative titles."

With All His Might: Churchill Did Save The West
[City Journal]
Daniel Mahoney reviews Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: The Dire Warning: Churchill's First Speech as Prime Minister by John Lukacs: 'The Left tended to see in National Socialism a merely atavistic barbarism, a temporary detour from inevitable progress, or a manifestation of the “contradictions” of so-called “late capitalism.” These “progressivist,” quasi-Marxist categories illuminated nothing. In contrast, Churchill appreciated the genuinely revolutionary character of the Nazi regime, which meant that in opposing it the democracies were defending the broad “continuity” of Western civilization. As Lukacs brilliantly demonstrates, Churchill saw clearly because of, and not despite, his “conservatism.”'

The Forsaken
[The New York Sun]
Richard Pipes reviewing the book by Tim Tzouliadis: 'This is a very sad book, the story of thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, lured by sham Soviet propaganda and pro-Soviet falsehoods spread by the likes of George Bernard Shaw and the corrupt New York Times Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, migrated to the USSR in search of jobs and a role in the "building of socialism.''  Most of these expatriates, not intellectuals but simple working men, were quickly disenchanted and wanted to return home, only to find that Moscow considered them Soviet citizens and barred them from leaving. Ignored by the American government, many of them ended in the gulag.'

Power Behind The Throne
[Standpoint]
Jessie Childs reviews Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I by Stephen Alford who, she writes, 'is superb on the subtle relationship between Queen and minister. Elizabeth, with her delaying tactics, empty promises and "answers answerless", must have been a maddening mistress to serve. But Burghley could be just as sly, deciding as secretary what she did and did not need to know and occasionally threatening retirement if he felt ignored or under-appreciated. Frequently he was behind parliamentary initiatives that tried to force Elizabeth's hand.'  

Take Your Own Damn Order
[The Wall Street Journal]
Moira Hodgson reviews Waiter Rant by Steve Dublanica: 'Nothing raises the hackles of Steve Dublanica, the author of "Waiter Rant," more than tipping -- or, rather, bad or incompetent tipping. He can tell how much money he is going to make off customers, he says, within 10 seconds of meeting them. "It's like I can see the tip percentage floating over their heads."  ...But the main attraction here is his acerbic, biting and often hilarious accounts of life behind the scenes at the front of the house.'

Tupperware Unsealed
[The Wall Street Journal]
Mark Lasswell reviewing Bob Kealing's history of the famed product: "...vivid portrait of Tupperware's origins and of the little-remembered woman behind its remarkable selling strategy."

The Leaders We Deserved (And A Few We Didn't)
[The Wall Street Journal]
John Fund reviews Alvin Felzenberg's latest book: "Alvin Felzenberg is not an academic historian, although he holds a doctorate in politics from Princeton. ....He thinks presidential ratings should be demystified and opened up to laymen with an interest in American history. He wants to restart the conversation about what we want in a leader. It is a good time to ponder such things."

Where to Meet Others With Mayhem in Mind
[The Wall Street Journal]
Joanne Kaufman: 'The day was still young, but already "this is the fourth Iran nuke attack thing I've heard," said Bob Mayer, a novelist and writing coach who earlier this month was a panelist at the third annual ThrillerFest, a four-day extravaganza devised by the International Thriller Writers to further the cause of murder and mayhem, and to educate the best-selling authors of tomorrow in the art of the squeal.'

The Invention of Scotland
[The New York Sun]
Adam Kirsch reviewing Hugh Trevor-Roper's final book: '"The Invention of Scotland" was left unfinished when Trevor-Roper died in 2003, but it does not read like a collection of fragments. In fact, these eight chapters...fall neatly into three related sections, each dealing with an important episode in the "forging" of Scottish history. The first, titled "The Political Myth," explores the way Scottish scholars of the 16th century...advanced a grossly erroneous version of Scotland's history, the better to serve their contemporary political purposes. The second, "The Literary Myth," is a feat of documentary detective work, in which Trevor-Roper untangles one of the most famous frauds in literary history: the invention of the ancient bard Ossian by James Macpherson. Finally, and most playfully, Trevor-Roper turns to "The Sartorial Myth," offering the surprising truth about how and why the kilt and tartan became Scottish institutions.'

Rum, Roulette, and Revolution
[The Wall Street Journal]
'T.J. English's "Havana Nocturne," a keenly research history that uncovers the role of American mobsters during the rule of Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban leader overthrown by Castro in 1959. Meyer Lansky and his minions had created a paradise in Cuba and then watched el barbudo -- the bearded one -- trample over it.'

Interview With Robert Morse [of Mad Men]
[The Wall Street Journal]
'Youth served the actor well for some 20 years, in stage shows like "The Matchmaker," his Broadway debut; "Take Me Along"; "Say, Darling"; "How to Succeed [In Business Without Really Trying]"; and "Sugar," as well as in movies like "A Guide for the Married Man" and "Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?" Producers called, asking when Mr. Morse would be free from his commitments to star in their shows; Leonard Bernstein called him a genius. Guys in the ticket booth at Mr. Morse's favorite hangout, Madison Square Garden, just called him Bobby.  But after a certain point, looking young got pretty old.'

Nixon's The One
[Claremont Review Of Books]
"On March 3, Conrad Black reported to Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida. The Canadian-British newspaper magnate was starting a 78-month sentence following his conviction on charges of fraud and obstruction of justice. Before going to prison, Black finished a massive biography of Richard Nixon. Some reviewers have dismissed the book as one crook's effort to rehabilitate another.  That judgment is off base."

The Lunatic Fringe
[The American Spectator]
Emily Esfahani-Smith visits the Fringe Festival in D.C. which showcases plays that would never get performed anywhere else: 'It's no surprise then that [Festival Chairman] Fox described Fringe as a "dark, scary alley." A reference, in a play called "The Nature and Purpose of the Universe," to nasal sex comes to mind.'

A Long Way From Dullsville
[The Wall Street Journal]
Bill Kauffman reviews the republished book Names On The Land which looks at the origins of place names in the U.S.A.: 'The Spaniards were partial to the saints on whose day a discovery took place, thus the San Diegos and Santa Barbaras of the Pacific Coast. "California," however, was derived from a decidedly unsaintly fictive ruler -- the so-called Queen Califia -- whose women subjects lived without men "except when men were brought in to do what must be done if any land is to be peopled."'

Mametfest Destiny
[The American Spectator]
Shawn Macomber follows David Mamet's long road to the right, looking for signs along the way.  One observation: 'In the end liberalism became a kind of cousin to performance art to Mamet, who many years ago told New Theater Quarterly of the latter, "You have to ignore a hell of a lot to enjoy yourself at such a performance. You have to pretend you are something that you are not."'

It's Only A Joke. Or Is It?
[The Wall Street Journal]
Joseph Epstein reviews Jom Holt's Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History And Philosophy Of Jokes.

A Review of Ferdinand Mount's
COLD CREAM: My Early Life And Other Mistakes
[The London Times Online]
Fiona MacCarthy looks at the memoirs of a very interesting fellow.