Books for Christmas
Topic: Must Read
If you have on your Christmas gift list someone with an interest in military history, go out immediately and buy J.E. Lendon's Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity. For that matter, buy two copies and read it yourself. Professor Lendon's fascinating, provocative study of Greek and Roman warfare provides that rarest of literary pleasures, a genuine intellectual challenge.

A Campus Scandal Exposed
Topic: Must Read

So you think that when you send your son or daughter off to college, a kindly campus community will support and protect them?

Think again.

That's the message of Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student by Anonymous, MD—anonymous because of the author's well-founded fear of retaliation for her heretical opinions.

 I read it over the weekend and all I can say is that if you have a son your daughter bound for college, you must read this book.

Quotations of Chairman Tom
Topic: Must Read
No religion is louder in its demand for respect than Islam, and no religion deserves it less.

How the Nightmare Ended
Topic: Must Read
I just finished reading Armageddon, by the British journalist and popular historian Max Hastings. This is his account of the last nine months of the Second World War in Europe, roughly from September 1944 to May 1945. Mr. Hastings aimed to put a human face on this European catastrophe by punctuating his narrative of great events with the stories of ordinary soldiers and civilians. The result is a bit choppy and uneven, but Armageddon is a bracing antidote to the goo and treacle currently being pumped out by the Greatest Generation industry.

The moral absolutists of today's antiwar movement might profit by contemplating one aspect of the Second World War that Mr. Hastings discusses at some length: the Western Allies' alliance with the Stalinist Soviet Union. It's sobering indeed to be reminded that the United States and Great Britain tamely acquiesced in Stalin's conquest of Eastern Europe, which replaced Nazi tyranny with something just as bad if not worse. Poland, for whose sake Britain went to war in 1939, was cruelly abandoned to her fate by FDR, despite Churchill's protests.

Hastings also makes clear what students of the campaign in northwest Europe have known for a long time: that the Allied armies did not perform all that well against the Germans. Poor strategic direction, slack leadership, administrative mismanagement, inferior equipment and inadequate training bedeviled the Allies from start to finish. Hastings is particularly critical of the performance of the US, British and Canadian infantry who, he claims, were no match for the Germans.

Armageddon is provocative in other ways as well. At a time when the members of our Greatest Generation are passing from the scene, it does them no dishonor to look back on a key campaign of their war with a clear eye. I'm not sure I agree with everything that Mr. Hastings asserts in his book, but I'm glad he wrote it.

Alive and Kicking
Topic: Must Read
Sorry for the recent lack of posts--but I'm baaaaaack. . .

The More Things Change. . .
Topic: Must Read
Looking over the collection of freaks and geeks that populates the contemporary Left, you can't help wondering what the hell has gone wrong with the modern world. It's something of a comfort, therefore, to pick up Dostoevsky's masterpiece, Demons, from which you will learn that it has all happened before.

The first time I read this remarkable novel, it failed to make much impression on me. That was because I was largely ignorant then of Russian history. Rereading it recently, with some understanding of the difference between Westernizers and Slavophiles & etc., I was riveted. Demons is a political tract, a spiritual treatise, a thriller, a comedy, a tragedy, a "poem unlimited" (the term that Harold Bloom applied to Hamlet).

Probably no writer has given us a better portrait of the intellectual and moral debasement that accompanies the replacement of God by some "great idea." Reading this novel today, one is inescapably reminded of Mother Sheehan, Michael Moore, George Galloway, Barbra Streisand, etc., etc. In the Everyman's Library edition (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky), Demons is a must read.

The Essential Orwell
Topic: Must Read
In 2002, Everyman's Library published a fat one-volume collection of George Orwell's essays and journalism. It cost me about $30 to add it to my personal library. This is a small price to pay for the pleasure of owning a book that you can open at random to find passages like this:

I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during "God Save the King." This is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so "enlightened" that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions. ("My Country Right or Left," 1940)

This splendid volume contains the best of Orwell's essays on literature, popular culture and politics, the whole of "The Lion and the Unicorn," plus a generous selection of shorter pieces, including many of the famous "As I Please" columns he wrote for Tribune.

Not only recommended but mandatory.