Our Critic’s Tip Sheet On Current Reading: Week of January 14th, 2008

Need another excuse for ditching Hillary? She goose-steps through a long chapter of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism (Doubleday, $27.95). Mr.

Need another excuse for ditching Hillary? She goose-steps through a long chapter of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism (Doubleday, $27.95). Mr. Goldberg concedes that “Hillary is no führer, and her notion of the ‘common good’ doesn’t involve racial purity or concentration camps”—but he can’t help concluding that she’s bent on “tyranny.” Sieg Heil!

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I CAN NEVER hear the name of the man who built the V-2 rocket without reciting the lyrics of the great Tom Lehrer song: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/ That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.” In his review of a new von Braun biography in The New York Review of Books (Jan. 17, $5.50), British-born physicist Freeman Dyson takes a more serious attitude: “The author of this book condemns von Braun for his collaboration with the SS, and condemns the United States government for covering up the evidence of his collaboration. Here I beg to differ with the author. War is an inherently immoral activity. Even the best of wars involves crimes and atrocities, and every citizen who takes part in war is to some extent collaborating with criminals. I should here declare my own interest in this debate. In my work for the R.A.F. Bomber Command, I was collaborating with people who planned the destruction of Dresden in February 1945, a notorious calamity in which many thousands of innocent civilians were burned to death. If we had lost the war, those responsible might have been condemned as war criminals, and I might have been found guilty of collaborating with them.” A rare and admirable instance of the kettle claiming kinship with the pot.

 

A DASH OF wit and a dollop of innuendo help Simply Irresistible (Running Press, $12.95) transcend its how-to mission. Who knows whether it will help you to “unleash your inner siren and mesmerize men”—it will at least amuse and possibly instruct. Ellen T. White has organized 30-odd sirens, most of them plucked from the history books, into five categories, and chosen for each a representative figure. There’s the goddess (Evita Perón); the companion (Lady Randolph Churchill); the sex kitten (Marilyn Monroe); the competitor (Beryl Markham); and the mother (Wallis, Duchess of Windsor). Other sirens are deployed to teach specific lessons about how to have and hold the man of your choice: Cleopatra (a competitor) shows how to “make an indelible first impression”; Pamela Harriman (a mother/companion) suggests that you “make him the center of the universe”; Mae West (a competitor/goddess) offers tips on how to “talk dirty”; and Jackie Onassis (a goddess/companion) advises that you “strive to be chic.” The biographical sketches are sharply focused and well researched, and the illustrations are copious and eye-catching—but most of them are defaced by jokey speech bubbles. As the author herself counsels, “Don’t add raisins to your martini, or you’ll ruin the taste.”

Our Critic’s Tip Sheet On Current Reading: Week of January 14th, 2008