1. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, by Louis Menand (Farrar Straus Giroux). This imaginatively conceived and elegantly executed intellectual history tells the story of how a quartet of diverse yet intuitively compatible talents — William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Pierce, and John Dewey — forged in the smithy of their souls a startlingly new way for America to think of itself. The result: the philosophy known as pragmatism. Menand posits that " ideas are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but are tools — like forks and knives and microchips — that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. "
2. Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, by James Carroll (Houghton Mifflin). Novelist Carroll, mixing his own experiences with vast scholarship, examines the uneasy and all-too-often poisonous relationship that Christianity — especially Roman Catholicism — enjoys with Judaism. This study of anti-Semitism shows how a noxious and misguided spiritual impulse has corrupted and compromised the institutional life of the world’s second oldest monotheistic enterprise.
3. Carry Me Home — Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, by Diane McWhorter (Simon & Schuster). Combining the precision of a skilled journalist with the empathic gifts of a top-notch novelist, McWhorter guides readers through a vividly uncomfortable but ultimately illuminating journey that explores the integrationist and segregationist communities of Birmingham, where, in 1963, four young black girls died when a Baptist church was bombed. This is a uniquely American story of the banality — and complexity — of good and evil.
4. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, by Rick Perlstein (Hill and Wang). Anyone who wants to understand how the United States morphed from the polity lead by Franklin Roosevelt into the banana-style republic governed by George Bush the younger should read this book. To understand the rise of the right wing and the genuine and bogus impulses that fueled it, you need to read Richard Hofstadter, Sam Tanenhaus’s biography of Whitaker Chambers, and Perlstein on Goldwater. This work will quietly and fundamentally change the way you think about the history of the past 50 to 60 years.
5. Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere, by Christopher Hitchens (Verso). Hitchens’s most publicly recognized talent is as a political controversialist. Witness his sound but inconvenient resurrection of the notion that lovable old Henry Kissinger is indeed a war criminal. But his true genius manifests itself in literary criticism. From considering the many facets of Oscar Wilde to synthesizing the totality of Anthony Powell, Hitchens proves to be the smartest — in all senses of the word — critical talent of his generation. Even the great and good Martin Amis appears to be, well, a polemist by comparison.
6. The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader (Talk Miramax Books). This brick of a volume is a monument to political incorrectness. Like so many superior novelists, Amis is as much a creature of his own invention as is any character in one of his books. His correspondence is distinguished and wide-ranging, encompassing those who enjoy the solitary delights of pornography (Philip Larkin), oppose the bestiality of totalitarianism (Robert Conquest), and calibrate the Proustian choreography of artistic social circles (Anthony Powell).
7. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, by David Cannadine (Oxford University Press). A deeply learned and serious historian, Cannadine has produced something of an intellectual raspberry, which gently but firmly challenges post-colonial notions of what made the British Empire tick. It was less, he argues with persuasive aplomb, about the desire to subjugate others (although that certainly was a factor), and more about the romantic impulse to extend and maintain a feudal vision of society. Simply put, he suggests that pomp and circumstance were ends in and of themselves.
8. The Changing Face of Jesus, by Geza Vermes (Viking). The Oxford don who has translated the complete Dead Sea Scrolls into English has condensed his highly regarded scholarly trilogy (Jesus the Jew, Jesus and the World of Judaism, and The Religion of Jesus the Jew) into a single volume of great power and insight. This book is an invaluable guide for those who wish to understand the spiritual underpinnings of secular Western tradition.
9. John Adams, by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster). This biography of the man who edited the Declaration of Independence, helped negotiate the peace that ended the American Revolution, wrote the Massachusetts state constitution (which served as a model for our national charter), served as the nation’s second president, sired our sixth president, and died on the Fourth of July along with his sometime friend and sometime foe Thomas Jefferson, comes alive in these vivid pages. McCullough accentuates the positive, heroic, and selfless aspects of Adams’s character at the expense of the man’s dark and brooding sides. And there is some justification for the view of those who charge that this is a Masterpiece Theatre view of history. But all in all, it is a meaningful reconsideration of a greatly misunderstood founding father.
10. Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, by Victor Davis Hanson (Doubleday). Military history is not the most fashionable of academic disciplines, but in the hands of masters such as John Keegan, Donald Kagan, and Hanson, it helps us to understand who has power and how in the starkest of terms it is exercised. In 11 thought-provoking and contrarian chapters, Hanson makes the case that " the only successful response to encountering a Western army seems to be to marshal another Western army. " Hanson is particularly shrewd when it comes to discerning the difference between political and military miscalculation.
