Books in Brief
Catch a Fish, Throw a Ball, Fly a Kite: 21 Timeless Skills Every Child Should Know (and Any Parent Can Teach!) by Jeffrey Lee (Three Rivers, 275 pp., $12.95). A few years back, Seattle doctor Jeffrey Lee noticed the parents and children in his family practice were becoming increasingly disconnected. With everything from television shows to restaurants being divided into “children” and “adult” categories, families seemed to be spending less and less time together. The kite stayed in the garage, and the yo-yo stayed at Toys R Us. No one skipped stones.
So he made a list of twenty-one skills that he thought would have lasting value. “Stars will always be there,” he says, “and one day the kids might be looking up at the stars and remember, ‘Hey, I know that constellation. Dad told me a Greek myth about it.'”
The list turned into Catch a Fish, Throw a Ball, Fly a Kite, a compendium of pastimes such as juggling, gardening, and making apple pie. Each chapter opens with an anecdote, usually about Lee’s learning the skill himself or teaching it to his daughters, and closes with riddles and trivia related to the subject. In between, beginner-friendly advice covers when to start teaching the skill, what you need before doing so, detailed illustrations, and tips on technique, troubleshooting, and safety.
For those parents who already know how to do everything in the book, it’s still worth a read; I learned three new ways to teach bike riding, and the method for building sand castles is ingenious. Plus, each skill costs much less to learn than, say, Spider Man 2 for Xbox.
–Susie Currie
The Fourth Power: A Grand Strategy for the United States in the Twenty-First Century by Gary Hart (Oxford University Press, 187 pp., $22). Former senator Gary Hart has become a foreign-policy guru, writing thirteen books–including the latest, The Fourth Power, in which he seeks to formulate a post-Cold War national strategy for the United States. From 1946 to 1991, the United States had a strategy: containment of communism, as elaborated by diplomat George Kennan. Containment, Hart says, was “a kind of central organizing principle around which political and military policies could be shaped, resources mustered, and the public engaged.”
With the collapse of communism, however, the United States “found itself triumphant but strategically adrift”–hence the need for a new “grand strategy.” Hart is alarmed that the national strategy that seems to be emerging to replace containment is the war on terror and concomitant empire-building. Echoing Pat Buchanan, Hart says that an imperial project is incompatible with America’s true character as a republic.
For Hart, America’s grand strategy should entail the application of its power to realize certain national purposes. America has three traditional sources of power: political, economic, and military. It also has a “fourth power”: the appeal of its principles and ideals. This considerable power, Hart says, should be harnessed to achieve three “large purposes”: security, opportunity, and the promotion of liberal democracy throughout the globe. The bulk of Hart’s book explains how power is to be used to attain these ends. Hart’s book is, at times, turgid and tedious. Still, it is a worthy contribution to foreign policy debate and warrants attention.
–Graeme Voyer
Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk by Maureen Dowd (Putnam, 288 pp., $25.95). It wasn’t so very long ago that conservatives passed around Maureen Dowd’s columns like so many tiny samizdat, savoring the occasionally witty and sharp truths she dared to write in the party newspaper. But those Clinton days are gone, and with the publication of Dowd’s Bushworld, even the most smitten of conservative readers can see that the unhealthy dependency is finally over. Christopher Hitchens has become the lefty that righties hate to love, while Dowd has written her way into forgettableness.
In truth, this is where she always belonged–readers just didn’t notice because in the superficial Clinton era, frothy observations fit their target well. Now, Dowd’s dated pop-culture riffs about an evil Dick Cheney being Darth Vader, fictionalizations about a childish George W. Bush drinking from a Juicy Juice box, and cheesy alliterations about whack-Iraq co-conspirator Paul Wolfowitz seem to miss their mark. Never one for scratching below the surface, Dowd no longer seem cleverly catty but mewlingly repetitive: She’s not saying anything Democrat talking heads didn’t say on television the night before.
Even though she made the bestseller list, Dowd’s decision to compile her columns allows readers to count up how often she repeats herself. Cheney-as-corporate-evildoer analogies, for instance, come up four times in seven months. Comparisons to the movie Star Wars come off the shelf as readily for members of the Bush team as they do for Saudi architecture. The one surprise in Bushworld is Dowd’s affection for George Bush Sr.
In the book’s opening paragraph, she compliments a satirical but intimate note he offered her in 2001. Interesting that ever since, she has peppered her columns with hopeful “father would disapprove” assumptions about the younger Bush’s foreign policy. Because of the revelation–one of several disclosures Dowd has dropped about notes from powerful older men–she comes off as an unhappy, wishful member of the Bush family, playing dutiful daughter to W’s prodigal son.
–Melana Zyla Vickers
All The President’s Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth by Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and Brendan Nyhan (Touchstone, 352 pp., $14). Most of the unremarkable anti-Bush screeds littering bookstore shelves don’t merit much attention, but this book is slightly different. Its authors run the popular political de-bunking website spinsanity.com, a site that garners praise even from some conservatives. So unsuspecting readers might confuse this tome for a serious piece of extended political journalism, a legitimate attempt to offer a point-by-point rebuttal to the president’s supposed “lies” on a host of issues.
It’s not. Some elements of the work are logically inconsistent. For example, the authors never quite explain how an administration the authors portray as more cynically PR-oriented than Bill Clinton’s could be so much worse than Clinton’s at communicating its message to the public. Or how a president as adept as they say George W. Bush is at manipulating the media and public opinion could still be so nearly tied with his rival in the 2004 election.
At other times one feels sorry for the authors. This book must have gone to print just before the Senate Intelligence Committee report appeared debunking many of the efforts to torpedo Bush’s case for the war in Iraq. Their reverence for Ambassador Joe Wilson seems quaint in light of what we now know about his relationship with the truth. The authors’ reliance on a Seymour Hersh article to flesh out their account of Wilson’s Niger adventure is icing on the yellowcake.
Whatever the virtues of their website (and it does seem to be relatively bipartisan), this trio has fumbled badly in their effort to craft a serious book. Perhaps they win points for at least including a few pages at the very end about John Kerry’s spin-machine (although they manage to blame Kerry’s deceptions on Bush).
But at the end of the day, don’t be fooled by the kind words from conservatives and libertarians on the inside cover: The website’s all right, but the book is merely another typical anti-Bush rant.
–Joseph C. Sternberg
Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales by Russell Kirk (Eerdmans, 424 pp., $25). It may come as a surprise, even to some conservatives, to learn, or recall, that Russell Kirk penned ghostly tales. But it shouldn’t. There may be no one more suited for the task than the author of The Conservative Mind.
Who better to serve as a guide to ancient manor houses, country backwaters, and forgotten side streets, and what might lurk in their darkened corners? Who better to cast aside dreary materialist dogmas and peer through the keyhole to eternity than a thinker who considered his a “Gothic mind” and who “did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization” but “sought . . . variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful”?
This collection returns nineteen of his stories to print, flanked by theologian Vigen Guroian’s introduction and Kirk’s own essay, “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale.”
Kirk believed there to be places where the distance between the seen and the unseen narrows to a sliver and something spectral, hellish, or heavenly might be glimpsed. And his uncanny stories, some said to be based remotely on true accounts, are set in such preternatural places. “The tales in this volume have retributive ghosts, malign magicians, blind angels, beneficent phantoms, conjuring witches, demonic possession, creatures of the twilight, divided selves,” Kirk wrote. “I present them to you unabashed. They may impart some arcane truths about good and evil; as Chesterton put it, all life is an allegory, and we can understand it only in parable.”
In the tradition of such masters of the ghost story as M.R. James and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Kirk’s tales are well-crafted, delightfully eerie, and creepy good fun. What more do you want from a book?
–R. Andrew Newman
