The Butchery of Hitler and Stalin Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin By Timothy Snyder; Basic Books; 544 Pages; $29.95. There were moments reading this book when I was forced to shut it closed, an experience utterly alien to me. Like any reasonably historically-aware individual, I considered myself familiar with the carnage that overtook Europe in the earlier half of the 20th century: the...
The Center-Right Honorable Tony Blair A Journey: My Political Life By Tony Blair Knopf. 720 Pages. $35.00. Aside from George W. Bush, has any other Western political leader in modern times been so reviled and savaged by the intellectual elite, media, or his own people than Tony Blair? As the targets of novelists, satirists, and polemicists, democratically elected politicians have been...
Tolerating the Intolerable The Flight of the Intellectuals By Paul Berman; Melville House; 304 pages; $26.00. In 2003, the Swiss-born Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan debated Nicolas Sarkozy, then France’s interior minister, on a television program called “One Hundred Minutes to Convince.” At issue was the condition of women in immigrant Muslim communities in Europe. Sarkozy wanted to know if...
South Africa's Fading Promise South Africa’s Brave New World. By R.W. Johnson; Allen Lane; 646 pages; £25. “I miss the times that we chanted slogans in the street. It’s much easier than building a country.” — Jay Naidoo, former South African minister for reconstruction and development and African National Congress member of parliament In April of 2008,...
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,...
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...