Reagan's Place The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War. By James Mann; Viking; 396 pages; $27.95 In the annals of bad predictions, the one registered by German Democratic Republic honcho Erich Honecker in the final year of the Cold War surely ranks near the top. Honecker, archetype of the drab apparatchik,...
Tough Love Bronwen Maddox makes the case against Anti-Americanism. In Defense of America By Bronwen Maddox; Little, Brown; 216 pages; $16.99. “Only one opinion or ideology in the world today has a truly global reach,” observed political scientist James Caeser in 2004. “It is anti-Americanism.” Even after the death of Communism as a worldwide revolutionary doctrine, hatred...
Bad Samaritans Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution by Ian Kershaw; Yale University Press; 400 pages; $35 A recent news item in The New York Times highlighted the matter of collective indifference. Time-lapse pictures from a security camera showed a woman collapse onto the floor of a Brooklyn hospital waiting room. Though there were a number of people...
History’s Comeback According to Robert Kagan, the world is back to normal. The Return of History and the End of Dreams by Robert Kagan; Knopof; 105 pages; $19.95. Robert Kagan’s latest effort to explain the state of the world opens with a sentence that most book editors would abhor: “The world has become normal again.” So pedestrian....
Open the Gate Let Them In: The Case for Open Borders. Gotham Books. 228 pages. $22.50 No issue more divides conservatives today than immigration. Every night on his highly rated cnn show, Lou Dobbs inveighs against the “army of invaders” scurrying across our country’s “Broken borders.” Angry calls urging immediate construction of a 2,000-mile-long wall along the Mexican border light up lines on...
Communist Loser Eric Hobsbawm, revisionist On Empire: America, War and Global Supremacy,; By Eric Hobsbawm; Pantheon Books; 128 pp.; $19.95 Yes, Eric Hobsbawm is still at it. The University of London professor, it should be remembered and endlessly repeated, was an early member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and perhaps the most prominent scholarly defender...
Choosing the Whip Heidi Holland explores the complex psychology of Robert Mugabe. Dinner with Mugabe: The Untold Story of a Freedom Fighter Who Became a Tyrant by Heidi Holland; Penguin Global; 280 pp.; $30. When Heidi Holland welcomed Robert Mugabe to her home over 30 years ago, she “had never had a black man to dinner before.” Such...
The Passivist Matthew Yglesias proves that doves, too, bury their heads in the sand. Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats, by Matthew Yglesias; John Wiley & Sons; 272 pp.; $25. 95 A retrospective obsession, married to an indifference to Iraq’s prospects, characterizes Heads in the Sand:...