Read Any Good Books Lately?

As you can see from the title, this article will be all about gardening....and whales. Sure, why not. Whales. And maybe record players too.

As is natural with my line of work, I voraciously snap up books on history and politics. Being a conservative, I go more specifically for ones that challenge the conventional wisdom concerning liberal awesomeness and progress and all that nonsense. But they should also be well-written and serious works, not Limbaugh's "Rush Revere And The Whatever It Was Because I Took One Look In The Bookstore And My Eyeballs Rolled Into The Back Of My Head."

So, here are three fairly recent books the Commentarama community might enjoy.

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. By Anne Applebaum. I want to stress something: No credible college professor, not even an Ivy Leaguer, will today deny that the Soviet bloc was not a fun place to live in; the evidence of oppression and economic failure is simply too great. But many of them will pooh-pooh the idea of the USSR as "totalitarian" and claim that Stalin and Co. were just reacting to American aggression, blah blah blah.

Applebaum, who won a Pulitzer for a previous book on the Russian gulags, relies on a lot of newly available archival evidence to show that in the Eastern European countries which fell under their control, the Soviets were not "reacting," but very definitely intended, from the beginning, to stamp out democracy and civic society, and to create something very close to the totalitarian ideal. Their ultimate goal was nothing less than the creation of a new sort of man, a Homo Sovieticus, if you will. It's a sad story, and pretty dark; but Applebaum also shows that traditional Western values persisted, despite the official persecution, and played a significant part in the fall of the Iron Curtain decades later. Definitely worth checking out.

Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World. By Daniel Hannan. Hannan is one of the few prominent Europeans to be a conservative in more than name. Which he is in name as well: He represents Britain's Tories in the European Parliament, and some of his speeches are awesome to watch, if you have the time and access to YouTube. (Which presumably you do, if you're reading this.) Anyway, his latest book can best be considered an ode to the Anglophone world--Britain and all its former colonies, including America. Basically, he argues that all the rights and institutions we take for granted today (private property, the rule of law, etc.) can be traced back to the ancient traditions of the first Anglo-Saxons, who preserved "English liberty" and handed it down to the present day.

Some of his characterizations are a bit sappy, if you want my honest opinion, and I don't agree with every single one of his interpretations, but he makes some compelling arguments for why the Britons went in such a different (and far more stable) political direction than, say, continental Europe. And I can think of precious few academics--certainly none in the "Colonial Studies" section--who would let you know there were instances when, yes, British subjects beyond the island did love the Empire and all it stood for. Bottom line: Don't be afraid to go rah-rah for your country and your culture once in a while.

The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. By Niall Ferguson. Ferguson being, of course, another of those rare truly conservative Europeans--so much so that I've heard more than one liberal express a wish that he would just drop dead already, so you know you can trust him. Not quite as optimistic an author, I'm afraid, but then Ferguson does concern himself with the long-term rise and fall of civilizations. Short and to the point, he identifies some common characteristics of prosperous Western societies--democracy, capitalism, the rule of law, and civil society--and argues that all are threatened today by the ever-expanding state. It's already become such a behemoth, in America and Europe alike, that you can't relate to it except in a purely technical sense: noted in his comparison between "The Rule of Law" and "The Rule of Lawyers." (Sorry, Andrew.)

If you've read some of Ferguson's other work, you know he can get a little grim when contemplating the future. Still, he draws on his personal experiences to argue that none of these trends are irreversible; action from below, in the form of ordinary people taking an active interest in their government, or even their own neighborhood, can mitigate a lot of these problems.


So there you have it--three of the latest books to catch my eye at the bookstore. All worth a read, I think. But I'll turn it over to you guys. What have you read lately that's good, and does any of it have a strongly conservative message? Because books are important, yo.