Books for Christmas

It’s time to again trot out the idea that books make the perfect Christmas gifts. So for those last-minute shoppers, some recommendations: William Manchester’s three-volume The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill (the last of which was ably finished by Paul Reid after Manchester’s death). Now packaged as a box set by Little, Brown and Company, Manchester provides (with all due respect to Martin Gilbert), the definitive biography of the 20th Century’s most interesting and indispensable leader, in part because he writes about Churchill the way Churchill used to write about history, with the emphasis on drama, personalities and eloquence over nitpicking detail.

The next time you hear some historian drone on about how “great men” don’t matter, just say the name “Churchill” and you win, hands down. Charles Moore’s Margaret Thatcher: From Grantham to the Falklands (Knopf) is the superb first volume of Lady Thatcher’s life, from early involvement in the Tory Party to Britain’s inspiring triumph over Argentine thugs in the Falklands War. Thatcher was, along with Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, one of the key architects of the West’s Cold War victory; whether her common-sense ideas and courage in the face of leftist rot truly reversed Britain’s long-term decline remains to be seen. For those wishing to hear from the Iron Lady herself, Harper Perennial has now also packaged between two covers both volumes of her autobiography, The Path to Power and The Downing Street Years.

Henry Kissinger’s three-volume memoirs, White House Years, Years of Upheaval and Years of Renewal (Little, Brown and Company). I was assigned the first of these in an undergraduate seminar on Kissinger and his ideas, and nothing I’ve read before or since has influenced my thinking as much. Over the course of nearly 4,000 pages we get the ultimate “realist” education on diplomacy, with its crucial underlying precept that in the real world most choices involve bad and worse.

If I had one set of books to save in the fire, these would probably be it. And if I were limited to recommending just one book (in this case, books) to anyone seeking to learn about American foreign policy and world politics more broadly, these would be them.

Whittaker Chambers’ Witness (Regnery Publishing). Chambers’ memoir ranks with the best of Orwell and Koestler in terms of Cold War literature and warnings on the dangers of totalitarianism. It is much more than simply Chambers’ side of the Alger Hiss case (and yes, his side was the one where truth was found); it is also an almost poetic account of an intelligent and decent man’s struggle to free himself from the lure of utopian communism.

Chambers has returned to the center of debate recently courtesy of liberal efforts to favorably compare his style of conservatism to that of Tea Party favorite Ayn Rand (based on his devastating 1957 review of Atlas Shrugged, which pretty much drummed Rand and “Objectivism” out of conservative intellectual circles, at least for a time). Can be wrapped together with Sam Tanenhaus’ authoritative Whitaker Chambers: A Biography (1998, Modern Library).

Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (Harper Perennial). If Churchill and Thatcher refute the simplistic idea that great men don’t matter, Barzun’s synthesis elegantly eviscerates the trendy notion that a person can be educated without understanding the Western legacy. Interestingly enough, the ghastly crowd that babbles on about neo-imperialism, racism and sexism is so ignorant, they don’t know that those ideas came out of the same Western tradition they disparage and which Barzun so majestically presents.

Max Hastings’ Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (Knopf) gives us an alternative to Barbara Tuchman’s thesis from The Guns of August (and recently reinforced by Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers) that the Great War was merely an accident flowing from misperception and railway timetables. Rather, according to Hastings, it was very much intentional, at least on the part of the leaders of Austria-Hungary (who wanted to crush Serbia) and imperial Germany (who were willing to go to war in 1914 because they feared doing so later, after the planned expansion of the Russian Army).

Sylvia Nasar’s Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius (Simon and Schuster) demonstrates that economics can be more than a “dismal science,” if one realizes it was never actually a “science” in the first place but instead an effort to understand human nature and to solve the fundamental human problem of “scarcity.” Nasar engagingly traces the history of economic thought from Adam Smith through Marx, Schumpeter, Hayek and Friedman, in the process confirming Keynes’ observation that we will always be “the slaves of some defunct economist.” Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (Viking). Pinker appears to have read just about everything from every relevant discipline in order to come up with a comprehensive analysis of violence, both domestic and international. His conclusion-that it has been on a marked decline for decades-is refreshing because it’s so at odds with our pessimistic conventional wisdom. As Pinker makes clear, we’ve come a long way since we ran around with bones in our noses and boiled our enemies in pots.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.