I still have Timmerman's Preachers of Hate: Islam and the War On America but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. I missed Berlinski's book (I didn't realize she is American) but read two others in the Death of the West genre: Steyn's America Alone and Tony Blankley's sober The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?, which ends on a more optimistic note than Steyn's book. A portion of his book is putting the War on Terrorism into the historical context of wars past, where in 1941 "FDR gave FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover emergency authority to censor all news and control all communications going into or out of the country. Initially, about 26 stories a day were censored." And for the anti-Patriot Act crowd he goes on to write that
By the end of 1942, the post office had banned 17 newspapers under the Espionage Act. The anti-Semitic father Charles Coughlin's newspaper, Social Justice, was censored. The newspaper of the Socialist workers party, The Militant, was banned. Even the annual shareholder's report of United States steel for 1941 was censored to show production as "00,000 thousand tons." By 1944, more than 500,000 pieces of private mail had been intercepted and held by the office of censorship, pursuant to the War Powers Aact; letters, cables, telephone calls, and films were inspected.
Two of my top books of the year are about terrorism and Islam: one is Bawer's excellent book you cite and the other is Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower, which I've mentioned several times. I know you are a topical reader, Lawrence, and probably done with reading on al Qaeda and the like but this one is worth your while if you are interested. Also good is Terry McDermott's well researched and original biographies of the Hamburg cell in Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It, where he parts the curtain on the al Qaeda terror network.
I'm currently reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's popular history of Lincoln's cabinet called Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln. It is a multi-biography of the men that Lincoln surrounded himself with, including his three Republican rivals for the 1860 nomination (Henry Seward, Salmon Chase, Edward Bates) and the remaining top posts that were offered to three former Democrats (Gideon Welles, Montgomery Blair, Edwin Stanton).
Your mention of a book about depression brings to mind some early passages where Goodwin contests other Lincoln biographers' diagnosis of depression. She, on the other hand, believes the evidence points to a melancholy nature that was attested to by many closest to Lincoln. His law partner in Springfield, William Herndon said "His melancholy dript from him as we walked" and his friend Henry Whitney wrote "No element of Mr. Lincoln's character was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy." And this demeanor was not dominant because Lincoln showed a great propensity for humorous storytelling.
Beyond that Goodwin shows that Lincoln was a man with great empathy that went beyond simple compassion. He put himself in the place of others to experience what they felt, and to understand their desires and motives, causing him great pain during the Civil War. And not for the first time you can see shades of Lincoln in President Bush with his empathy and anguish but also his resolve.
Brian Birmingham On Jan 2, 2007, at 11:33 AM, Lawrence Helm wrote:
I can’t meet the requirement of singling out one book. Nothing stands out in such a way, but I can describe some of the books I found most interesting.I read five books on Iran, two by Robin Wright a very insightful journalist (In the Name of God, the Khomeini Decade, and The Last Great Revolution, Turmoil and Transformation in Iran). Robin Wright is well worth reading. She provides valuable background on Iran. The remaining three books have to do with the Iranian threat. Islamic Fundamentalism, the New Global Threat was written by Mohammad Mohaddessin, a member of a group that fought against Khomeini, was declared illegal and hounded out of the nation. Ilan Berman (Tehran Rising, Iran’s Challenge to the United States) and Kenneth Timmerman (Countdown to Crisis, the Coming Nuclear Showdown) put Iran’s nuclear ambitions in a lurid light. If we assume Iranian intentions to be mad, malicious or evil, we should certainly do something about them before they are realized. None of the last three hold out hope for negotiating with Iran.I read eight books on Islamism. The two by Oriana Fallaci (The Rage and the Pride, and The Force of Reason) were very emotional and perhaps described a common European reaction against the Islamic and Islamist influx. Two American writers describe the threat of Islamic immigration in a relatable fashion: While Europe Slept, How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, by Bruce Bawer; and Menace in Europe, why the Continent’s crisis is America’s too by Claire Berlinski. One writer, Daniel Pipes, described a more direct threat against America in Militant Islam Reaches America.But perhaps the two best books on Islamism were The Losing Battle with Islam by David Selbourne and Globalized Islam, the Search for a new Ummah by Oliver Roy. Selbourne takes an encyclopedic approach to the matter. His conclusion isn’t quite as pessimistic as his title implies. Roy’s book is one of those invoked by Francis Fukuyama to get him to abandon the Neocons over Iraq. He provides some interesting arguments that might be said to counter the more alarmist contentions of Fallaci, Bawer and Berlinski.I read two books pertaining to France: Jonathan Fenby’s France on the Brink, A Great Civilization Faces the New Century, and J. F. Revel’s Anti-Americanism. The latter is an iconoclastic Frenchman who checked out the anti-American prejudices he was raised with and found them false.I was happy to discover the military historian Bevin Alexander. I read his The Future of Warfare in which he lists the lessons learned from Vietnam and elsewhere. A very insightful book. You should read it, Brian, if you haven’t already. I also read Alexander’s How America got it right, the U.S. March to Military and Political Supremacy – this also is very insightful and not as triumphalist as the title makes it sound. He also lists the occasions when America got it wrong.Perhaps a wee bit more in a triumphalist mode was Ralph Peters, New Glory, Expanding America’s Global Supremacy. Peters is one of those authorities who has a lot of inside information. His book was interesting.A very interesting book that relates to several of the themes mentioned above was Honor, a History. A lurker recommended it to me and I found it very valuable and insightful.I read a number of books on literary subjects. One that stands out is Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched with Fire, Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.
