The Best Books
of 2001
By Steven Martinovich
web
posted January 14, 2001
Two-thousand and one shaped up to be a pretty good year for books, at
least judging by many of the reviews that Enter Stage Right published
over the past year. In no particular order, here are the books that impressed
ESR's book editor:
Before
the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
by Rick Perlstein
Hill & Wang, 671 pgs.
Left-leaning writer Rick Perlstein manages a mostly evenhanded account
of Barry Goldwater's horrifically inept 1964 campaign against Lyndon Baines
Johnson. As Perlstein points out, Goldwater may have lost that election
but he also provided the spark that would one day see a resurgence of
conservatism that culminated in Ronald Reagan's 1980 win. He may have
lost the big battle, but he ultimately won the bigger war.
Read our full review here
In
Harm's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary
Story of Its Survivors by Doug Stanton
Henry Holt & Company, Inc., 320 pgs.
The story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the 112 hours that
several hundred survivors spent in shark infested waters has been an oft-told
one, but rarely was it done with the personality that Doug Stanton managed
to infuse. Reportedly optioned by Hollywood with Mel Gibson tapped to
play Captain Charles McVay, Stanton's tour de force manages, as our original
review states, to put the reader in the water with the ship's men, dying
one by one until a chance encounter with a U.S. Navy patrol plane.
Read our full review here
Toward
Rational Exuberance: The Evolution of the Modern Stock Market by B. Mark
Smith
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 342 pgs
Written with some panache, Smith's effort "isn't a mundane guide
to picking stocks but rather it is a study of the modern stock market
beginning in 1901, a time that Smith says major trends began to manifest
themselves that would define what today's market has become." If
you lost money in the dot.com debacle, you'll be happy to know that it
isn't the first time that the markets have punished irrationality.
Read our full review here
At
Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election by Bill Sammon
Regnery Publishing Inc., 294 pgs.
Bill Sammon's account of the November 2000 election and the resulting
debacle may not add much in the way of new information but At Any Cost:
How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election is still an enjoyable look at
the 46 days which alternately repelled, embarrassed and enthralled the
American people. Sammon, who makes it fairly clear that he wasn't behind
the Gore-Lieberman ticket, attempts to build the case that Gore out and
out tried to steal the election from George W. Bush.
Read our full review here
Night
of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia by Catherine Merridale
Viking 402 pgs.
That Russia and Russians have known enormous suffering is a fact that
should never be taken for granted. Since the fall of Communism and the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, many have wondered how tens of millions
of people could simply disappear and how Russians today were coping with
what must be tremendous grief over the past. Catherine Merridale's Night
of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia doesn't completely
answer the question but it does offer tremendous insight into a part of
the Russian soul usually closed off to the west.
Read our full review here
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