It’s summertime, and one can only hope that means catching up on reading. Some NRO regulars and friends share their summer-reading lists.

Jonathan Adler

An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths by Glenn Reynolds “Instapundit” Reynolds. I admit I’m already half-way through this book, and it’s great — an exhilarating and provocative exploration of how technological change is empowering individuals and spurring the creation of a new, dispersed entrepreneurial class. Given Glenn’s own pioneering efforts as a blogger extraordinaire, the insights of this book should be no surprise.

A Scanner Darkly by Phillip K. Dick. This novel by the ground-breaking, proto-cyberpunk sci-fi author will soon find its way to the silver screen. Given I’m a big fan of Dick’s work (including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book upon which Blade Runner was based), and that Hollywood is quite good at making a hash of his stories (see, e.g., Paycheck), I want to read the book before seeing the movie.

In Defense of Freedom: And Related Essays by Frank S. Meyer. This collection by former NRODT senior editor Frank Meyer is a must read — and worth re-reading (as I plan to do this summer). It sets forth the uniquely American brand of conservatism, labeled “fusionism,” that helped define the modern American conservative movement and makes a powerful case for informing conservative politics with a more libertarian view of government.

— NRO Contributing Editor Jonathan H. Adler is associate professor and associate director of the Center for Business Law and Regulation at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law.


“The Anchoress”

My summer reading begins with My Life with the Saints by James Martin S.J., whose personal experiences with various saints are chronicled with a great deal of charm and whose inspirations sneak up on you. You think you’re just enjoying some essays. You’re doing much more.

		Steyn: The Superbower Blase: A Medicaid Buy-Off Sanders: Blanche Lincoln’s Balancing Act Costa: Saturday Night Fever Miller: The Man Who Would Kill Lincoln Hibbs: Just Bite Her Already Goldberg: We Need Your Help Spruiell: Welcome to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy Editors: End It, Don’t Amend It Goldberg: Palinophobes Hate First, Ask Questions Later Murdock: Medicare: A Glimpse of the Future? Krauthammer: Travesty in New York Charen: Holder’s True Motive Lowry: Barack Obama’s Chump Diplomacy Spakovsky: Criminalizing Health-Care Freedom Anderson: Roadmap to Victory

Then, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor edited by Sally Fitzgerald. Faith, wisdom and snark all rolled into one and you cannot read O’ Connor without becoming a better writer.

If there is any time left, I am going to re-read Diana Gabaldon’s wild time-travel romance, Outlander, because it has everything — history, herbal remedies, scourgings, torture, witchcraft, Eucharistic Adoration, two husbands and torrid (but married) romance. Summer reading to gasp by.

— The Anchoress, a Catholic blogger, writes here.


Colleen Carroll Campbell

This summer, I hope to read and re-read the works of philosopher and Catholic saint Edith Stein. Her essays on women and civic life in Essential Writings are strikingly relevant to our cultural debates about marriage, motherhood, and feminism today, as are her philosophical and spiritual reflections on faith, suffering, and the contemplative life in The Collected Works of Edith Stein. In the same vein, I have read good things about Alasdair MacIntyre’s Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913-1922, which offers valuable insights into Stein’s spiritual journey and her development as a philosopher.

A few other interesting books have crossed my desk recently. I am enjoying Jennifer Roback Morse’s Smart Sex: Finding Life-Long Love in a Hook-Up World, which is a good antidote to a lot of bad ideas about marriage. I am intrigued by Al Hsu’s The Suburban Christian: Finding Spiritual Vitality in the Land of Plenty, which challenges the politically correct notion that suburbanites necessarily live shallow, sheltered, materialistic lives that are morally inferior to the lives of city dwellers and those in small towns. And I hope to finally dig into David Scott’s The Catholic Passion, which takes a narrative approach to explaining Catholic beliefs, inviting readers to experience the faith through the stories of men and women who have lived it heroically down through the ages.

— Colleen Carroll Campbell, an NRO contributor, is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a former speechwriter to President George W. Bush, and author of The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy.


Daniel Casse

Reading? I’m supposed to be reading this summer? I was planning on spending the next few months downloading iTunes videos and listening to sports talk radio. So let me make this easy. Here are the books that I have absolutely no intention of reading, this summer or ever:

The Parliament of Man by Paul Kennedy. How is it that one of the biggest academic windbags, famous for his colossally wrong predictions, (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) feels that anyone wants to read nearly 400 pages of sympathetic, supportive history about the United Nations? And could you have come up with a more portentous title for the Turtle Bay tyrants club?

The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror by George Soros. Makes me want to give one less cheer for capitalism. Is there anything more noxious than rich people who think they have their own philosophy? Wonder how many copies he’ll be purchasing himself.

My Senator and Me: A Dog’s Eye View of Washington, D.C., by Senator Ted Kennedy. I’m not reading it, but I am reading the delightfully vicious reviews on Amazon. Here is a sample: “It’s pretty bad when one of the most immoral people ever to disgrace the Senate is now propagandizing children.” Or this: “There is so much about this book that is appalling...but the one thing that really stands out is the blatant and STUNNING lack of respect for the young woman that he left to drown at Chappaquiddick!”

— Daniel Casse is a senior director of the White House Writers Group.


Bill Crawford

Faith at War by Yaroslav Trofimov. Trofimov covers Islam for the Wall Street Journal, speaks Arabic, and is well positioned to comment on events surrounding the war against militant Islam. His book provides firsthand reports from the Islamic world from countries such as Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Iraq; not the theorizing of talking heads we often get on the news, which is so often mistaken.

Godless: The Church of Liberalism by Ann Coulter. What better reason to read a book than the fact that lLiberals don’t want you to? Ann’s books are always entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny, and are the perfect sort of “light reading” for a summer vacation.

The First Crusade: A New History by Thomas Asbridge. Our enemies constantly accuse us of embarking on a “new crusade,” and so the history of the Crusades are still relevant today, and still shape the world in which we live. Dispelling many of the myths surrounding the First Crusade, Asbridge highlights the more important actors, and provides incredible details of the battles and the living condition of the first Crusaders.

— Bill Crawford lives in San Antonio, Texas. He blogs at “All Things Conservative.”


Dawn Eden

The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton: The Illustrated London News, 1908-1910, by G. K. Chesterton. The episodic nature of Chesterton’s weekly Illustrated London News columns makes them ideal summer reading; one can easily read this book straight through, or open it at any point and be sucked in. That the great British writer was a prophet is clear in his writings about the fads of his day; he finds aspects of them so timeless that his comments remain incisive. He not only saw the information age coming; he saw right through it: “Everything in journalism smells of the obituary notice. People talk about the haste and headlong precipitancy of journalism, but I have always been struck by the systematic slowness by which journalism contrives to keep behind the times.”

— Dawn Eden blogs at “The Dawn Patrol” and is author of the forthcoming book, The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On.


Patrick Gavin

America: The Last Best Hope by Bill Bennett. I usually disagree with Bennett but, after reading Why We Fight, I think that every one worried about recent American foreign policy should at least consider his interesting and thoughtful take on things before making an opinion.

Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild. I’ve heard nothing but praise for Hochschild’s account of the successful movement to end slavery in the British colonies.

Baseball Between the Numbers: Why Everything You Know About the Game is Wrong by the experts at Baseball Prospectus; edited by Jonah Keri. The reason is simple: Summers are nothing without arguments about baseball. This book is sure to start a few.

— Patrick W. Gavin is the associate editorial-page editor for the Washington Examiner and a contributing editor for Fishbowl DC.


Bridget Johnson

The first book I’ll be hitting this summer is Mastering Arabic by Jane Wightwick and Mahmoud Gaafar. Not only am I actually trying to master Arabic, but it’s great fun to read in public and watch the creeping looks of horror on the faces of passers-by, or to take through a TSA screening point at an airport. Another enjoyable summer pastime is reading The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern War at your nearest soy-swilling, peacenik-chic coffeehouse, nodding and murmuring approvingly as you sip a non-organic corporate beverage. But since summer reading should be educational as well as entertaining, now is a good time to pick up South Park Conservatives by Brian C. Anderson. Weigh his analysis in consideration with the most recent — and amazingly pertinent — Season 10 “South Park” episodes, like the Pious-driving hybrid hippies in “Smug Alert!” or the Muhammad episode that showed the rank hypocrisy of a network. Take your copy of South Park Conservatives to a screening of An Inconvenient Truth, and watch Al Gore groupies get violent as you invoke the ex-vice president from the South Park “ManBearPig” episode: “I did it. I killed ManBearPig. I’ve saved the earth from certain destruction. Everyone is super-stoked on me, even if they don’t know it.”

— Bridget Johnson is a columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News. She blogs at GOP Vixen.


Scott W. Johnson

My criteria for summer reading are that the book be long enough to get lost in, bright enough to entertain, and intelligent enough to instruct. These three new books fulfill my criteria:

Bill Bennett, America: The Last Best Hope. Bill Bennett is obviously not a historian; he is a man of politics and public affairs. Yet he is an avid reader, a gifted teacher, and an advocate of America’s cause. All these qualities are on display in his overview of American history from Columbus to the eve of World War I. Bennett bases his narrative on the best secondary sources and spins them into a compelling story. He writes in the spirit of a “loving critic.” This is a book by a voracious reader who loves our country and wants all of us to know why we should too. He is also a persuasive fellow.

Mark Bowden, Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam. Bowden is the indefatigable researcher who made his name with Black Hawk Down. His new book tells the story of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis — “the first battle in America’s war with militant Islam,” as Bowden’s subtitle has it. If you lived through the hostage crisis, Bowden’s reportage will make your blood boil all over again. Whether or not you lived through the events recounted by Bowden, you will wonder why you have never heard of the many Americans who distinguished themselves for their bravery in captivity under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, Michael Metrinko foremost among them.

The book is preeminently the story of the American hostages. Bowden also meticulously reconstructs the failed rescue mission that resulted in the death of eight Americans. Could the rescue mission have succeeded? Bowden says of the mission: “It was inelegant as a Rube Goldberg contraption.” He quotes Captain Wade Ishimoto on the mission in its planning stages: “The only difference between this and the Alamo is that Davy Crockett didn’t have to fight his way in.” Bowden makes painfully clear how the mission turned into a debacle before it achieved contact with the enemy.

The book could not be timelier. Bowden establishes that one of the ringleaders of the group that seized the American embassy is Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The man should be better known for what he is — a kidnapper in chief, with whom the United States has a long overdue debt of honor to settle.

Derek Leebaert, To Dare and To Conquer. Leebaert is the author of The Fifty-Year Wound, “a classic of Cold War historiography” in the estimation of historian and Reagan biographer Steve Hayward. Leebaert teaches government at Georgetown University and is a member of the Army Historical Foundation. He is the rare academic who writes as a friend of the United States and an admirer of America’s military.

Leebaert’s new book is a history of special operations “from Achilles to Al Qaeda.” It seems to have grown out of his work consulting for the Pentagon on new roles for special operations forces following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The book opens with American special operations in Afghanistan and closes with a blistering critique of the CIA. In between, Leebaert brilliantly recounts how small commando forces have affected “the destiny of nations.” Leebaert’s writes with a narrative skill that is striking; he turns adeptly to imaginative literature illustrating his themes. His literary interests seem to have served more than utilitarian purposes.

Leebaert’s book has virtually nothing in common with Bowden’s, but they overlap and complement each other on the hostage rescue mission. At the Desert One staging area, Leebaert tersely writes, “The tragic mated with the absurd.”

Leebaert’s closing critique of the CIA turns into a novel criticism of the Bush administration. According to Leebaert, among other things, the administration is blameworthy for relying on the judgment of the CIA when it should have known of the CIA’s sheer incompetence and ineptitude. Leebaert confides in a footnote, for example: “My own skepticism about invading Iraq was based on minimal faith in CIA estimates, especially CIA conclusions about WMD, as conveyed in my discussion with former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Kathleen Troia on January 30, 2003.” In his conclusion Leebaert also carries on a tendentious argument with administration officials on the subject of Bush administration foreign policy. All in all, it seems to me a cranky and inapposite conclusion sitting uncomfortably on a thoughtful history that seeks to prepare citizens for the challenges that lie before us.

— Scott Johnson is a Minneapolis attorney and contributor to the blog Power Line.


Melinda Ledden Sidak

For those of you who, like me, cannot get enough of Royal Family biopics and clandestine reading of Hello! Magazine, this is a must-read trilogy:

Snobs, by Julian Fellowes. Fellowes is the Academy-award-winning author of the movie Gosford Park. You won’t be able to put down this hilarious satire of the British aristocracy and the social climbers who try to break into it.

Annabel: An Unconventional Life, by Lady Annabel Goldsmith. A great companion piece for Snobs, this autobiography demonstrates Fellowes’ absolute accuracy in his portrayal of British upper class life. Lady Annabel, inspiration for the eponymous Annabel’s night club in London, wife and mistress to two flamboyant men, has led a life unimaginable to American middle class women. Read it to find out what a prude you really are.

Camilla: Her True Story, by Caroline Graham. Ditto. Camilla is the patron saint and inspiration for all dumpy middle-aged women like me. Diana might have been gorgeous, buff and a fashion icon, but Camilla turns out to be the real sexy woman. And as with Annabel, you find out why the British upper class still describes a married couple with multiple infidelities between them as “rock solid.”

— Melinda Ledden Sidak is a writer living in Washington D.C.


Seth Leibsohn

Well, there’s probably no beach this summer, the closest thing to it would be the shores of the “river” in the Grand Ol’ Opry Hotel in Nashville, if I can get the wife to agree to that sojourn I’ve long wanted to make (They have indoor Delta Flatboats, abutting a 44-foot waterfall! Plus the country music and bar-b-cue. How much better does life get than that!?).

So, three books are on the list for that journey south:

It’s time to reread the greatest novel ever written, The Great Gatsby. When I first studied it in high school, we memorized the opening sentences — good advice in this life, worth remembering: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’” It’s been too long since I read The Great Gatsby, and I fear it’s not read as much as it once was, but it’s a great novel if memory serves, or so I’m hoping to find out, again.

I just saw The Last Picture Show, starring Cybill Shepherd, Jeff Bridges, Cloris Leachmen, and so many other greats, directed by Peter Bogdonovich. A helluva story about a slice of lives in fictional Anarene, Texas. For years, my boss, Bill Bennett, had been quoting to me a speech from the movie about “trashy behavior,” and I finally saw it. It is a great speech. The movie raised a lot of questions about an interesting set of stories from small-town Texas in the 1950s. It’s based on the book, The Last Picture Show, by Larry McMurtry and his town growing up, Archer, Texas. It’s hard to explain why the movie was so interesting, but “think Friday Night Lights meets The Graduate” is about the best I can do. Hopefully, the questions I have from the movie will be answered in this 1968 novel.

My other boss, Brian Kennedy at the Claremont Institute, sent me a copy of The Suit: A Machiavellian Approach to Men’s Style, just written by a friend of his, Nicholas Antongiavanni. I’m guessing (hoping?) Brian doesn’t think I need to bush up on my Machiavelli, but when your boss gives you a book on clothing and how to dress (and he’s seen me in the studio when producing a daily morning radio show at 6 A.M.), I’m thinking the better part of prudence is to take the hint and read the book — or 195-page memo. It looks like a lot of fun, actually, so maybe there will be a new fight that can come of it, like the West-Coast Straussian v. East-Coast Straussian view of Machiavelli and sartorial ethics. Let’s hope.

— Seth Leibsohn is a fellow at the Claremont Institute and the producer of Bill Bennett’s Morning in America.


Rob Long

The great thing about this summer is that for me it started on April 12th, when I left for a three-week trip to London and Rome, and then continued for the past four weeks as I drove across the country, from LA to Connecticut to Florida to New Orleans and then back. What this means is that my Summer 2006 goal of actually reading War and Peace is about 300 pages short of completion, thanks to my early start.

It also means that my July reading list is wide open. I know I’ll be reading the new Alan Furst novel, The Foreign Correspondent — his novels really are spectacular works of intrigue, heroism, loss, and suspense, all set against the backdrop of World War II (remember that one?). And I’ll also finish up my Tom Sharpe collection with a used copy of Vintage Stuff, which I know won’t be as hilarious and stinging as his first couple of novels, Indecent Exposure and Riotous Assembly but which I’m sure will still do the trick. And then, because my magnificent, beloved, and most treasured companion, my wonderful dog Cohiba, died of cancer in late March — precipitating my moody, grief-stricken escape to Europe — I’m suddenly reading a lot about dogs, especially Jon Katz’s Katz on Dogs and pretty much all of his other books about dogs, too. He loves dogs the way I love them: with a practical, clear-eyed understanding of their nature, and a total, heartbreaking devotion to their friendship.

In August, I’m going to North Korea. Seriously. I want to see it before it gets, you know, too touristy. So the first two weeks of August I’ll be reading up on the place — books like The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-Hwan and Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin.

And then, when I get back, I’ll probably be reading this book.

— Rob Long is a contributing editor for National Review. A Hollywood writer, Long writes “The Long View” for NR.


Kathryn Jean Lopez

Dear, dear Rob. I won’t be going to North Korea this summer but I’ve got exciting plans all the same.

I’ve been both jealous and feeling a bit embarrassed since sitting on a plane with Rich Lowry a few months ago as he broke open a new copy of The Brothers Karamazov. I think I was reading Vanity Fair at the time. And it’s been years and years since I read anything Dostoevsky. So I’m going to read The Brothers Karamozov again before Labor Day. Hopefully along with many a high-school student. My plan is to ride New Jersey Transit back and forth, leaving copies of Ramesh Ponnuru’s Party of Death each way behind, until I finish Brothers. If you see people lining the Jersey shore with P.O.D. on their beach blankets, you know why.

And don't you forget about Rick Brookhiser's What Would the Founders Do? It's the perfect conversation starter for endless summer nights.

Since it came out I’ve been wanting to read David Horowitz’s The End of Time.

And the summer will not pass without me reading Illario Pantano’s Warlord: No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy, because I owe it to him.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is the editor of National Review Online.


John J. Miller

The Ruins, by Scott Smith — A brand-new horror-thriller from the author of A Simple Plan, which was turned into a very good movie.

The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict, by Russell Kirk — I’m going to re-read this posthumous work, which was written the way Bob Dole talks, i.e., in the third person.

American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, edited by Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson — I started reading this big book when it came out a few months ago, and I’ll probably never stop.

— John J. Miller is national political reporter for National Review and the author, most recently, of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.


Geoffrey Norman

Summer is when you get out of Dodge, break jail, leave the city behind and head for the hills. This means, for me, reading the good old stuff that celebrates the America that lies beyond the limits of town and that part of the American soul that remains at least partially untamed. These three titles do that for me:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Literary men as diverse as Tolstoy and Orwell were confused by Mark Twain who got to the American soul and the big river that runs right through it.

The Short Stories of Earnest Hemmingway (the Nick Adams stories, especially). The Big Two Hearted River is a story that makes you rejoice in the natural world and its capacity to restore itself.

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. The desert and all of its austere beauty evoked by a man who loved it and hated everything that sought to spoil it out of sheer, spiritual laziness. Abbey is pure American cussedness.

— Geoffrey Norman writes for NRO and other publications.


Nick Schulz

Ogallala Blue: Water and Life on the High Plains by William Ashworth. There is an environmental crisis in the United States. But it’s not the one everybody talks about. Instead, it’s how we use and misuse water. This book tells the story of America’s great underwater ocean, the Ogallala Aquifer.

Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape, by Brian Hayes. Our human-built environment is insufficiently appreciated. We live within an extraordinary, life-sustaining industrial web that few of us comprehend. This book explains and explores the end product of mankind’s astonishing ingenuity.

— A former documentary and television producer, Nick Schulz is editor of TechCentralStation.com.


Dave Shiflett

Reading on the beach — among the vast and diversionary array of incredible carbohydrate sculptures (ahem) — is never an easy task, though as a fan of Soren Kierkegaard I’ll try to re-engage relevant chapters in The Denial of Death, in which author Ernest Becker (1924-74) discusses S. K.’s profound insights into what makes us fear, tremble, and perhaps pursue the Paraclete.

The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius (475-525) will also make the trip; written as he awaited execution, it goes a great deal deeper than contemporary works written “from the edge,” such as Anderson Cooper’s chart-busting work of emotive journalism. No trip is complete without the current issue of The Weekly World News, an ongoing work of comic genius.

— Dave Shiflett is the author of Exodus: Why Americans Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity. His latest CD — Karma Farmers: Songs for Aging Cynics — is available at CDBaby.com