Federal Judiciary

WILLIAM McGURN
In the McGurn house, most of our summer-reading questions revolve around which books we intend to inflict on our children, not infrequently occasioning great complaints about summers ruined and so forth. For friends, I?d recommend a few:

Empire of Lies by Andrew Klavan: I?m not normally a thriller type of guy, but this is different. Terrorists are planning an attack on New York; a man discovers a daughter he hadn?t known about; and -- in contrast to prevailing orthodoxy, the hero is#...#drumroll#...#a conservative. And the bad guys are really bad guys: Islamic terrorists, professors, Hollywood. One warning: a little more ribald than mom might be used to.

Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President by Allen Guelzo: I recommend this on any list. It?s not long, but it?s a great biography that also gives context to the rise of the GOP and its roots in evangelicalism and small business. Guelzo also discusses Lincoln?s faith, if that is the right word, without going too far in either direction -- resisting the temptation to claim him as either a Christian or an unbeliever. At some point in their lives, while they are still living under my roof, all my daughters will read this book.

Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Disaster, by Marc Thiessen: Marc is a colleague from the White House days, but I don?t think I?m being biased here. Though waterboarding may be a little bit heavy for a beach read, it?s a must for anyone who wants to know what really happened with the CIA interrogation program. It?s not a subject most people want to engage, lest they find themselves accused -- as Marc has been -- of being ?pro-torture.? Read the book and make up your own mind.

-- William McGurn, formerly the chief speechwriter for Pres. George W. Bush, is an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal.

ERIC METAXAS
Chance or the Dance: A Critique of Modern Secularism, by Thomas Howard: Simply put, a little-known classic. If you?ve read it, you understand. It?s a sparklingly written critique of the modern secular-humanist version of reality and an enchanting defense of the medieval Christian worldview, all offered in the inimitable style of the delightful Thomas Howard, a prose stylist among prose stylists. It will forever change the way you see the world, and it will do so with elan and then some.

Perelandra, by C. S. Lewis: If the academy hadn?t been taken over by left-wing ideologues, this and the other two books in C. S. Lewis?s ?Space Trilogy? (a misnomer) would be on every undergraduate reading list in the English-speaking world, rather than On the Road and Zora Neale Hurston. Perelandra is simply one of the best-written works of fiction of the 20th century and should be taught as a companion to Paradise Lost -- wherever people still study Milton.

-- Eric Metaxas is author, most recently, of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.

JOSEPH PEARCE
A recently published survey by the National Association of Scholars exposed the scandalous anti-Western and anti-Christian bias in the summer reading recommended by U.S. colleges. In response, I feel constrained to recommend the Ignatius Critical Editions, the very purpose of which is to counter the ethno-masochism of the liberal ascendancy in the academy. Like other critical editions of classic literature, these contain the full text of the work, an introduction, and a selection of contemporary critical essays. The difference is that the criticism in the ICEs is exclusively of a tradition-oriented perspective. There is no queer theory, no rampant feminism, no anti-Christianity, no moral relativism, no deconstructionism. It allows the classics to be read without one?s having to ingest the contaminants of the modern academy at the same time. If forced to select one of these editions in particular, for summer reading, I would choose the Ignatius Critical Edition of The Merchant of Venice. The accompanying essays are simply superb and allow this most misunderstood of Shakespeare?s plays to be understood in the way the Bard himself understood it.

As for other summer reading, I must recommend the wonderful pocket-sized books of Christian poetry produced by Kaufmann Publishing, and in particular A Sudden Certainty: Priest Poems, by Father Dwight Longenecker, and Animal Kingdom, by Pavel Chichikov. Kaufmann is to be commended for giving voice to some of the excellent Christian poets writing today, and the pocket-sized format makes the books vacation-friendly.

Finally, I?d like to recommend Roads to Rome by John Beaumont, forthcoming from St. Augustine?s Press. This is an astonishingly meticulous work of scholarship, cataloguing hundreds of prominent British converts to Catholicism, from the Reformation down to the present day. As summer reading, specifically as vacation reading, it has that enticing quality of being the sort of book that can be opened at random, revealing interesting nuggets on every page.

-- Joseph Pearce is the author of Through Shakespeare?s Eyes: Seeing the Catholic Presence in the Plays.

JOHN J. PITNEY
This summer, the contours of the 2010 election will become clearer as economic reports come in, the primary season winds down, and public opinion firms up. Two excellent books will help us understand what is going on, and what is likely to come next.

We are hearing a great deal about the role of the Constitution and the significance of congressional parties. In James Madison Rules America: The Constitutional Origins of Congressional Partisanship, William F. Connelly Jr. explains their connection. Drawing on his vast knowledge of contemporary politics and the Founding era, Connelly shows how Madison?s handiwork shapes congressional behavior. Under the separation of powers, he argues persuasively, neither party is ever simply the ?government? or the ?opposition.? Even when the same party controls the White House and Congress, differing interests and duties will create tension between presidents and their co-partisans. Also, the minority can sometimes side with a president of the opposite party when members of his own party oppose him. In 1993, for instance, Republicans helped Bill Clinton pass NAFTA when congressional Democrats were mostly against it. In 2010, Afghanistan policy may shape up the same way.

This lucidly written and thoroughly documented analysis also offers us a preview of what might happen if the Republicans win majorities this fall. A Speaker Boehner and a Majority Leader McConnell would still be leading the opposition to President Obama, but they would also have to help him govern -- a tricky business for all concerned. And I am certain that Nancy Pelosi and (if he is still around) Harry Reid would not relish the unhappy task of sustaining unpopular presidential vetoes. They should all read this fine work to see what is in store for them.

One book that already has a readership on Capitol Hill is Naftali Bendavid?s The Thumpin?: How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution. (One quibble about that title: Congressional Democrats never needed lessons in ruthlessness.) When he chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2006 election cycle, Emanuel gave Bendavid backstage access. The product is not only a lively story but a virtual manual on how the party out of power can take advantage of political events to win a majority.

One passage is especially relevant now. As the Hurricane Katrina disaster was unfolding, Emanuel was quick to pounce:

"I think Katrina just did us a really big favor, to be crass about it," Emanuel said. He called Bill Burton, his communications director at DCCC, and ordered him to find out which Republican congressmen from the Gulf region had voted to cut the budget for the Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps was responsible for New Orleans levees, and given the levees' fate, such a vote would now look reckless. "Hey, look, if the AP doesn't do it, let's see if either the [New OrleansTimes] Picayune would do it or we can go to a blog," Emanuel said. "No fingerprints," he added curtly, meaning the news item should not be traceable to the DCCC.

Something to remember as we live through the oil spill in the Gulf.

-- John J. Pitney Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College.

FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER
I blithely assume that National Review readers would find in my latest little effusion, Cloud of Witnesses, a book for beach reading: Each essay is brief enough to fit the rhythms of the ocean?s undulations, although its niche market probably sunburns quickly.

I propose three books for making summer days tolerable.

Fanny Kemble: A Passionate Victorian, by Margaret Armstrong: Published in 1938, its only difficulty is a degree of literacy out of the reach of those who did not have the sense to avoid school and instead just read great books. Fanny was an actress of a venerable family of stage figures: Her father was George Kemble and her aunt was Sarah Siddons. Her cosmopolitan childhood in the Regency period -- which she spent shuffling back and forth between post-Napoleonic France and Jane Austen?s Bath -- produced a benign eccentric of a highly eccentric age, a woman who could have made a Dickens character seem colorless. Visiting America, she saw the first locomotive in New England and married the grandson of Founding Father Pierce Butler. Her abolitionist sentiments led her to a scandalous divorce from a husband who did not want to part with the nearly 500 slaves he owned. One of her daughters was the mother of Owen Wister. Rare is an author with panache sufficient to end almost 400 pages with such a valediction: ?So it will be fairest to leave Fanny Kemble in the Alps, where she would like best to have been left, remembering her as the Swiss guides remembered her.?

The Knox Brothers, by Penelope Fitzgerald: This is simply the most beautiful book I have read all year. The author?s father was Edward, editor of Punch. Her three uncles were Ronald, who converted to Catholicism and, as chaplain at Oxford, became the greatest preacher and apologist of his century, idolized by Evelyn Waugh (who detested anyone who idolized anyone); Wilfrid, an Anglo-Catholic ascetic and social reformer; and Dillwyn, a  mathematician and classics scholar who served king and country as a cryptologist during World War II, helping to break the Enigma code.

Dillwyn and Edward were agnostics, but they could discuss the New Testament with their clerical brothers in the Greek they had all learned in their Victorian childhoods and perfected under the Edwardian sun. Dillwyn?s Greek professor was the great Headlam of Cambridge, who exclaimed, flying through the air as he thought he was dying in a carriage accident, ?Now I shall never edit Herodas.? The Knoxes were sons of a kindly, paternal Anglican bishop whose own father had been a missionary bishop in Arabia, where he died. That ancestor was so saintly in his love for the heathen that ?agents of the Sultan, who deeply respected the strange old fakir, were deputed to keep watch over him, but they could do nothing when they found him insensible, still with a book in his hand.? Mrs. Fitzgerald, having inherited the Knox literary genes, records the family of genius with affection and humor, and a steady eye for the truth. A book like this shows how far our civilization has declined: I cannot think of one person in the higher reaches of government today who could begin the weakest semblance of a witty conversation with any of the Knox brothers.

Le choix de Dieu: Entretiens avec Jean-Louis Missika, by Jean-Marie Lustiger: Published in 1987, these are long interviews between a political scientist and journalist and one of the great souls of the century. Cardinal Lustiger, archbishop of Paris, died 20 years later, but here he already gives a sort of summa of his life, which also turns out to be a variation on the theme of the agony and ecstasy of France in his century.

He was born to non-practicing Ashkenazi Jews who moved from Poland to Paris and later to Orléans, where, as a young teenager, Jean-Marie became a Christian. The family moved to unoccupied southern France but his mother returned to Paris to run the family business; she was sent in 1942 to Auschwitz, where she died the following year. As a bishop, Lustiger would go to a synagogue to recite the Kaddish prayers for her.

He was the man John Paul II hoped would bring back to the minds of the French what had made France. He was made a member of the Académie Française; the Académie?s founder was in many ways Lustiger inside out, but I suspect Lustiger and Richelieu would have had the most animated conversations. When he died, President Sarkozy returned from a trip to the United States for the funeral, at which a Jewish cousin of the cardinal-archbishop of Paris chanted the Jewish prayers for the dead outside the west portal of Notre Dame cathedral.

Having been chaplain at the Sorbonne, Lustiger knew many of the celebrity existentialists who were gods in their own vain pantheon, as forgotten now as they were idolized two generations ago. And in his student days at the Sorbonne, he had studied social science next to Pol Pot, with different results.

-- Fr. George W. Rutler is a Catholic priest in New York.

NICK SCHULZ
Capitalism and the Jews, by Jerry Z. Muller: This new book grew out of Muller?s monumentally important earlier work The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought. If you want to understand why Jews have done phenomenally well in capitalist societies and at the same time have been some of capitalism?s harshest critics, this history will help you understand. (Those of you familiar with the Teaching Company should check out Muller?s course ?Thinking about Capitalism.?)

The Axe and the Oath: Ordinary Life in the Middle Ages, by Robert Fossier: Well, there?s this: ?Man is the only mammal, if not the only animated being, who destroys and kills out of hatred or for pleasure, without being pushed to it by fear, hunger or some sexual impulse. He is the most dreaded and pitiless of predators.? Can you say beach reading? This remarkable book, forthcoming from Princeton University Press, belongs with William Manchester?s A World Lit Only by Fire as a window into a world so far removed from us and yet still very much present today.

Sonic Boom: Capitalism at Mach Speed, by Gregg Easterbrook: With a sluggish economy, looming entitlement disasters, and high unemployment, it?s hard to be optimistic about the future. Gregg Easterbrook?s new book is an antidote to doom and gloom. There?s a lot to be bullish about, if you look in the right places. Gregg is your guide.

-- Nick Schulz is editor in chief of American.com.


HANS VON SPAKOVSKY
Flashman, by George MacDonald Fraser: This is the first book in the Flashman Papers, an absolutely wonderful ten-book series about Harry Flashman, history?s greatest adventurer, cad, and incorrigible scoundrel. The books follow Harry?s escapades as an English soldier, starting with his first foray to the Indian subcontinent in 1839, where, in Afghanistan, he survives one of the worst defeats of the English army in its history. In the other books, he goes to Europe, Africa, China, and even America, where he meets a congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln. Flashman has only three talents: an ear for languages, an eye for women, and the skill of an expert horseman. He constantly gets into death-defying scrapes and yet always manages to just get out of them. These novels are extremely funny as well as educational; the novels are all painstakingly footnoted.

Heart of Lies, by M. L. Malcolm: This great new book is actually written by an old friend of mine and was inspired by her family?s true stories. It follows the adventures and travails of a young Hungarian who flees Europe before the start of World War II when he gets into trouble with the law. Like so many other refugees during that time, he ends up in Shanghai, where he faces both the underworld and the Japanese invasion. It is a meticulously researched historical drama. I gave it as a gift to my wife, my sisters, and my mother; they all loved it.

Oliver Wiswell, by Kenneth Roberts: The best historical novels ever written about the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 are by Kenneth Roberts, a very popular author 70 years ago that most people today have never heard of. The quality and historical accuracy of his books make the John Jakes series look like pulp fiction. Oliver Wiswell is written from the viewpoint of a loyalist family, which makes it unique among books of this kind, as far as I know. His novel about the war from the American side is Rabble in Arms (1947), also excellent. His 1931 book The Lively Lady and its sequel, Captain Caution, tell the story of privateers (who were America?s substitute for a real navy during the War of 1812), including the brutal conditions imposed on American prisoners of war in England.

Captain Blood, by Rafael Sabatini: Kids today like Pirates of the Caribbean, but it does not compare to Captain Blood (1922). Peter Blood is wrongly charged with treason during the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England, and he?s sentenced to slavery in the West Indies, a virtual death sentence, given the harsh conditions. He escapes and becomes a pirate bent on revenge. The novel is terrific, and the 1935 movie starring Errol Flynn -- his first movie role -- is without doubt the best pirate movie ever made. (In law school, my wife?s legal-history professor once asked the class if they knew the name of the only movie ever made about the Bloody Assizes. She knew it was Captain Blood, because I?d made her watch it.) Whether you are on the beach or on a plane traveling, this book will take you to the Spanish Main and the days when buccaneering was the scourge of the Caribbean and beautiful women discovered that pirates with bloody reputations can sometimes turn out to be romantic gentlemen.

-- Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

JOHN YOO
The Richard Sharpe adventures, by Bernard Cornwell: Sometimes described as Patrick O?Brian novels, except on land, Cornwell?s 24 books describe the rise of Richard Sharpe: He starts as a private in Britain?s colonial army in India and becomes a lieutenant colonel by Waterloo. The focus of the books is on Wellington?s famous Peninsular Campaign, in which an outnumbered band of British troops, aided by vicious guerrillas (the first use of the word), pushed Napoleon?s armies out of Spain in hard, mountainous fighting.

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, by Winston Churchill: Leaders on both sides of the pond are doing their very best to ruin the ?special relationship?; this classic history explains why the ties that bind will survive any temporary failings in our leaders. Churchill writes history the way it was meant to be written, with flair, insight, and a focus on the great events and leaders of the day. I started reading Churchill while writing Crisis and Command -- I came away thinking that, of all of the great prime ministers who have led Great Britain, only Churchill stands with Washington, Lincoln, and FDR among the greats.

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant and The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman: In a day when civilian-military relations are at a low point, and in the midst of a tough war with rising casualties, it is important to remember how past generals in even worse wars handled both politicians and the enemy. Were it not for these men, Lincoln could not have saved the Union, and here we read how they did it, with an unsparing attention to casualties and setbacks as well as victories. Both books introduced modern American writing -- they are sparse and free of the overwrought, ornamental writing typical of the 19th century. They are more the Gettysburg Address, and less an Obama speech on health care.

-- John Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on July 02, 2010 (boomark / email).