Those of us who love books also love to give books as gifts because we like to think we have friends and family who read books, too. Even if they don't, give the right book and they might start.
So for those cutting it perilously close with the Christmas shopping, some suggestions from politics, history, etc.:
• Max Hastings' Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy: 1945-1975 might be the best overview of the French and American failures in southeast Asia to yet appear, incorporating as it does some of the more recent revisionist research that balances out earlier, more ideologically tendentious interpretations drawn from the anti-war movement and the 1960s "New Left" (which still linger, most recently in the tone of the latest Ken Burns project, The Vietnam War).
Hastings identifies the key turning points in the American chapter of the debacle as the Kennedy administration sanctioned overthrow of South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem (just a couple of weeks before Kennedy's own assassination) and the American public's reaction to the shock of the Tet Offensive (ironic given that Tet was actually the biggest American military victory of the war but instead presented by an increasingly anti-war media as a shattering defeat--an actual case of "fake news" from 50 years ago).
Diem's overthrow signaled the "Americanization" of the conflict, Tet the point when getting out became more important for America than winning, thereby guaranteeing eventual defeat.
For Hastings, there are no "good guys" in the story: American policy was driven by persistent dishonesty and cynicism (particularly in how the war was justified to the public), Hanoi's by almost unbelievable cruelty in the service of totalitarian ideology.
• Hampton Sides' On Desperate Ground covers the most dramatic battle in the precursor to Vietnam, the Chosin Reservoir campaign in Korea.
There have been plenty of accounts of what happened at "frozen Chosin," and of the Marines' heroism therein (by circumstance, I had just finished Martin Russ' classic Breakout when Sides' book was published), but Sides does the best job thus far of explaining how American troops got trapped by Chinese forces in the frozen mountains of North Korea in the first place and the sheer hell of what followed.
Due to faulty intelligence and Douglas MacArthur's arrogance (in ordering the First Marine Division to march toward the Yalu despite Beijing's warnings of intervention), the Marines were ambushed, surrounded, and outnumbered roughly 10-1, raising the possibility their entire division would be wiped out. Instead, despite 30-below-zero temperatures and inadequate winter clothing, they fought their way out of the trap while devastating the Chinese Ninth Army in the process.
Overall, the Marines killed an estimated 30,000 of Mao's minions during the Chosin battle, 10,000 during one night alone, when they made foxholes by stacking the frozen bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lost 750 of their own and were able to take the vast majority of their wounded and the bodies of their fallen comrades with them in time-honored Marine fashion.
Perhaps no "retreat" in military history was a more glorious victory.
• Jonah Goldberg's Suicide of the West borrows its title from James Burnham's 1964 classic and undertakes the crucial task of reminding us, in a manner similar to Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now, of how precious and rare the achievement of liberal democracy and capitalist prosperity has been in the human experience.
The problem for Goldberg is that so few of those who now benefit from what he calls "the miracle" grasp this accomplishment and thus jeopardize it through their ignorance or forgetting.
Those ignoramuses on the left who, under the misleading moniker of "multiculturalism," denounce Western civilization as uniquely sexist, racist and imperialistic know little of actual sexism, racism, or imperialism or, for that matter, where their own ideas on those matters come from (hint: Western civilization).
• Sir Roger Scruton's Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition is a witty and concise overview of conservative political theory, much needed at a time when those ideas have been bludgeoned into brutal caricature by Donald Trump and his enemies.
For Scruton, probably our most important living political theorist, conservatism inherently involves a balance between rights and obligations, community and individuality, and respect for tradition and the need for reform; it preserves that which is tried and true and best from the past, and then applies it to the problems of the present in pursuit of the preservation of liberty.
Given the relative paucity of ser-ious conservative thought in our mass media and political culture (as opposed to the distorted version entrenched in poorly educated leftist minds and in bastardized Trump form), Scruton would be an especially useful first step for intellectually curious young people, perhaps followed by the more expansive treatment in Russell Kirk's classic The Conservative Mind and, finally, by reading the original thinkers themselves, from John Locke and Edmund Burke up through Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott.
One gets a sense of what can be called the Scruton temperament in a recent interview--when asked whether he could "briefly" explain the differences between British and American conservatism in "origins and trajectory," he pithily replied, "No."
Has there ever been a better answer to a question?
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 12/24/2018