From The American Spectator’s December
2007-January 2008 issue: Part II of our annual list of holiday gift
suggestions from distinguished readers and writers. To subscribe to
our monthly print edition, click here.
Kevin Lynch
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is famous for minding his own business, both
during the years he was creating literary bombshells inside the
Soviet Union as well as during his 18 years of exile in the United
States. Since his return to Russia in 1994, the man whose pen
proved mightier than the Soviet Union has done what he has always
done, concentrated on his work and fended off intruders. Legions of
would-be interviewers, especially those from the West, failed to
gain access, no matter how impeccable their credentials. But a few
years after his return home, the Nobel prizewinner opened his doors
to Joseph Pearce, an Englishman whose previous works included
biographies of G.K. Chesterton and J.R.R. Tolkien. The result of
the interviews, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile, shows
the Russian icon chose his man wisely. Pearce’s passion is
Solzhenitsyn’s passion, what the Russian has described as the
“universal and eternal questions.” In addition to the insights he
provides into Solzhenitsyn’s work, Pearce, an agnostic turned
Catholic, asks questions that secular interviewers are more
comfortable avoiding (if they occur to them at all) and
Solzhenitsyn answers.
Having whetted the appetite with Pearce’s book, the thoughtful
giver would naturally want to include a book by the master himself.
But there are so many. What is a busy Christmas shopper to do?
Answer: The recently published The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential
Writings, 1947-2005. In one splendid volume, Edward E.
Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney have collected selections from
Solzhenitsyn’s poems, short stories, memoirs (The Oak and the
Calf), novels (The First Circle and Cancer
Ward), and other works, such as the earthshaking Gulag
Archipelago. Also included are many of his essays and
speeches, some famous (including his Nobel acceptance speech) and
others little known, such as one he gave in Liechtenstein in 1993
in which he paid tribute to the tiny country’s World War II leader,
Prince Franz Joseph II, for providing what Solzhenitsyn called a
“lesson in courage.” At the end of the war British and American
officials agreed with Stalin to repatriate hundreds of thousands of
anti-Communist Russians, Ukrainians, and other Soviet-bloc refugees
who wrongly believed they had found safety in the West. But Franz
Joseph refused to comply, thereby saving the detachment of Russian
anti-Communists in his country from what awaited hundreds of
thousands of others on their forced return to the Soviet Union:
outright execution or slow death in a concentration camp. At the
time of Solzhenitsyn’s speech close to 50 years had elapsed since
the repatriations. But he remembered and paid homage. That this
towering figure, 89 this month, is still among us is another reason
for joy this Christmas.
And what will the children do while the adults are immersed in
Solzhenitsyn? The ones Santa really likes will be savoring The Saga of Erik the Viking, the
spellbinding story of a brave Viking who sets off with his brave
crew to find where the sun goes at night. They find it, but what
heart-stopping adventures they have on the way, facing the evilly
seductive Old Man of the Sea, the terrifying Dogfighters, and the
wicked Enchantress of the Fjord, to name just a few. Author Terry
Jones is probably best known as a member of Monty Python, but in a
better world he would be more renowned for his children’s stories,
especially The Saga of Erik the Viking. The book is best
in hardcover because that version does more justice to the
spectacular illustrations of Michael Foreman. Warning: Several
years after Erik was published, Jones wrote and directed a
dreadful movie called Erik the Viking that was aimed at an
older audience. It failed miserably, while the book is an utter
triumph.
Kevin Lynch, former articles editor of National
Review, lives in Arlington, Virginia.
Heather Mac Donald
If you live for classical music, you must not die before reading
Hector Berlioz’s Memoirs. (The Memoirs of Hector
Berlioz, translated and edited by David Cairns; Everyman’s
Library, 2002.) They are a thrilling expression of artistic passion
and a fascinating chronicle of 19th-century European musical life.
Not wild about Berlioz’s music? It doesn’t matter. Berlioz’s gifts
as a prose stylist are so endearing as to make one’s opinion of his
musical voice irrelevant. Had he never written a note, this book
would have earned him a place among Europe’s great Romantic
spirits.
Rarely has the experience of great art been more eloquently
conveyed. On first hearing Shakespeare, for example: “The lightning
flash of that sublime discovery opened before me at a stroke the
whole heaven of art, illuminating it to its remotest depths. I saw,
I understood, I felt… that I was alive and that I must arise and
walk.”
Such joyous enthusiasms — for Beethoven, Christoph Willibald
Gluck, and others — make the Memoirs a delight to read.
But their most unexpected effect is to reveal that we are living
today in the golden age of performance — despite the death of
classical-music composition — thanks to reforms championed by
Berlioz himself. Berlioz fought relentlessly against the shameless
mauling of scores by publishers, conductors, and performers. His
lacerating description of the “fixes” imposed on The Magic
Flute is hilarious — but also terrifying. We, too, might
never have heard Mozart’s genius uncorrupted had publishers and
performers continued the desecrations that Berlioz so decried.
Equally revelatory are his witty accounts of his conducting
tours through Europe. While Berlioz met musicians of the highest
artistry (especially in Germany), he also found mediocrity and
unprofessionalism that today would be unthinkable in even
provincial orchestras. He advises conductors to learn to read
scores, and composers and conductors to learn the range of each
instrument — skills that are now routine, thanks, again, in part
to Berlioz’s influence.
It is fascinating to see how much the musical canon has changed
— few today know the operas of Gaspare Spontini, whom Berlioz
ranked uncontroversially in a triumvirate of great modern masters,
along with Beethoven… and Weber! But what has not changed is the
ecstasy produced by great music. This book expresses that ecstasy
with unparalleled power.
Heather Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan
Institute and a contributing editor to City
Journal.
John McCaslin
None of the books consumed by this reader in 2007 was as powerful
or eye-opening as Dominika Dery’s childhood memoir, The Twelve Little Cakes. She provides a
first-hand account of growing up under a Communist regime that even
the sympathetic Ronald Reagan couldn’t come close to describe when
he set out to tear down the wall. One reviewer noted that the book
reads almost like a fairy tale, “replete with a menacing dragon of
sorts,” except in this case the dragon is the Communist fist that
controlled Prague during the 1970s and 1980s.
Making matters worse for Dominika and her struggling parents was
the fact that the child’s grandparents did not only support the
Communist regime, they were its top lieutenants and enforcers —
even when it meant confronting family. By far the most emotionally
gripping scene of many is when Dominika comes face-to-face with her
grandfather, a renowned Czech surgeon, which in itself would have
ripped apart the Iron Curtain had it somehow played out for all the
world to see three decades ago.
Amazingly, Dominika was born in Prague in 1975, the same year
Tiger Woods was born.
John McCaslin is the Washington Times’s
“Inside the Beltway” columnist and author of Inside the Beltway: Offbeat Stories, Scoops, and
Shenanigans From Around the Nation’s Capital.
Grover G. Norquist
Americans are blessed with short and shallow political memories —
unlike, say, the Serbs and the Albanians. But this has its
downsides, as a handful of self-appointed “historians” have been
allowed to create our memories. Arthur Schlesinger’s 1949 The Vital Center explained the
Depression and the New Deal. Later, his 1965 A Thousand Days congealed the myth of
Camelot.
The antidote to these two myths, central to the power of the
modern Democrat party, is only now at hand.
The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great
Depression by Amity Shlaes will forever change how America
understands the causes of the Depression and FDR’s policies that
prolonged it for a decade. The title alone is worth the price of
admission: FDR used the phrase to suggest the average American had
been forgotten by the government that should take control of his
life to “help” him. He stole the phrase from Yale philosopher
William Graham Sumner, who first used it to describe the person
forgotten when the government plays philanthropist or social
reformer — the taxpayer forced to pay the bill.
It was not until the 1980s that conservative book writers rallied
in time to accurately portray a decade, in this case the times and
presidency of Ronald Reagan.
Martin Anderson’s 1988 Revolution, Bruce Bartlett’s 1983
The Supply-Side Solution, and Kiron K.
Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson’s 2001 Reagan, In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald
Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America
put the nail in the coffin on the efforts of the left to claim
Reagan was “sleepwalking through history” as “an amiable dunce.”
Peter Schweizer’s definitive work, Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret
Strategy that Hastened the Collapse of Soviet Union,
outlined how Reagan deliberately set about destroying the Soviet
Empire.
Conservatives understandably focus on criticizing government for
doing poorly what it ought not to do at all: running health care or
playing philanthropist with other people’s money. But there are
some things a constitutional republic should do. A new book
highlighting the damage done by one spy, Jonathan Pollard, reminds
us that we would do well to focus as much on getting government to
do its limited legitimate functions well (the ones mentioned in the
Constitution) as we do trying to cull back the sprawling and
destructive, metastasized powers of the State.
Special Agent Ronald J. Olive was the counterintelligence
officer who broke the case and has now written the sadly true
story, Capturing Jonathan Pollard. (The book
had a chilling resonance for this writer as Pollard was a drinking
buddy.) Pollard should have been fired several times and was
instead awarded security clearances despite every warning that he
was not stable. It is truly frightening how this flawed character
got into a position in Naval Intelligence to sift through our
nation’s most sensitive secrets — in departments and agencies
across the government — and cart them out to be photocopied by
Israeli government agents. In 18 months, Pollard, aided by his
wife, carried out and gave Israel enough stolen material that would
stand six feet by six feet by ten feet solid — more than one
million pages of secrets. (While the Israelis got most of the
goodies, he gave or sold classified material to more than a dozen
foreign individuals or countries.)
Pollard was caught by a fluke when a concerned fellow worker saw
him walk out of the office with classified documents that were
never to leave the building and he reluctantly reported this to his
superiors. Once alerted, counter intelligence worked well and
quickly and Pollard is serving a well-deserved life sentence. But
where were they on the front end? If the government weren’t busy
running a national Endowment for the Arts, it might be able to
focus on keeping our nation’s secrets and capturing spies earlier
in their careers.
Grover G. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax
Reform and author of the forthcoming book Leave Us Alone
(HarperCollins).
*****
These Christmas Book recommendations appear in the December
2007-January 2008 issue of The American Spectator. Part
III of this year’s recommendations will appear tomorrow. To read
yesterday’s Part I, click
here.
To subscribe to our monthly print edition, click
here.
