Buffalo News - Editor's Choice Subscribe Today - 2 weeks FREE GO TO BUFFALO.COM Monday, September 5, 2005 Partly cloudy 77°F / 25°C more weather>> Local Business Name WNY Web Directory Keyword Buffalo News Articles National Business Search Local Events Yellow Page Categories: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z People Search Reverse Phone Lookup: Use our printed directory View or Download Entertainment Front Page > Entertainment > Books Email this story Print this story Get Headlines by Email Most viewed stories More by this author Editor's Choice By BOOKS 9/4/2005 The Weekly Standard, A Reader: 1995-2005, edited by William Kristol (HarperCollins, 538 pages, $27.95). When your father is neo-con icon Irving Kristol and your mother brilliant historian and essayist Gertrude Himmelfarb, it is, no doubt, highly recommended that you make something of yourself - preferably something intellectual that leaves a mark. And so Bill Kristol has. He's taught political philosophy at Harvard, acted as Dan Quayle's much-needed brain (it was he who helped launch the former veep as a TV critic in his ruminations on Murphy Brown and unwed motherhood) and been one of the most articulate talking heads in TV's endless carnival of political babble - all of which is very nice, but it doesn't quite have the weight of his last 10 years where he's been the co-editor of the conservative magazine he co-founded, the Weekly Standard. To celebrate its first decade, we have 500 bang-up, often brilliant pages of what Kristol the editor has done with Rupert Murdoch's money (in his foreward, Kristol chummily calls him just "Rupert"). The not-so-secret modus operandi of the best political journals in America is to value writing over politics, if push comes to shove (John Leonard and Jeff Greenfield, for instance, are two brilliant writers of the left whose very early champion was the National Review's William F. Buckley Jr.) A true conservative should want to conserve good writing; and a true liberal should be inclusive enough to reach out to excellence of an entirely different conformation. While some of this exhibits a political stridency that's only for believers, most of it bears the mark of a truly brilliant editor. It's true that Reuel Marc Gerecht was warning of Osama Bin Laden before Sept. 11, but this anthology is best, by far, when it's worlds away from politics and world affairs. See, for instance, neo-con scion John Podhoretz's surpisingly cogent writing about the revival of "Company," the "brilliant show that killed Broadway." And while you're at it, don't miss Christopher Hitchens' (whose politics now make him a refugee from the Nation) delightful evisceration of Christopher Ricks' book about Bob Dylan (where he reveals a game, invented by Salman Rushdie, to "retitle Shakespeare plays as if they had been written by Robert Ludlum," such as "The Elsinore Vacillation" and "The Dunsinane Reforestation.") Whatever you think of P.J. O'Rourke and Hillary Clinton, his decimation of "It Takes a Village" is a minor classic. In fact, there's a lot of delight and edification here. ••• The Trial, A History From Socrates to O.J. Simpson, by Sadakat Kadri (Random House, 459 pages, $29.95). With Robert Blake and Michael Jackson somewhat bafflingly acquitted and Phil Spector awaiting his day in court, the Trial as Titillation has set in as a staple of the media envelope that contains us all these days. With all of that there is, in the offing, a trial of potentially major historic significance coming up that may end up in future editions of this truly remarkable history: that of Saddam Hussein. This brilliant book - as up to date as Abu Ghraib - is by a practicing lawyer and mid-Atlantic legal scholar (he lives in London). None of his legal of academic qualifications (Cambridge, Harvard) necessarily presuppose the amount of wit and enlightened post-modern skepticism to be found in this encyclopedic book's surprisingly engaging pages, but they're abundant. (When every chapter begins with a quote from Kafka, you know the kind of mind you're dealing with.) - Jeff Simon • Stereo Advantage • Carpet Factory Outlet • The Tralf • Earth Travelers, Inc. FAQ | Help | Site Map | Privacy Policy | Buffalo News Services | Subscribe to the News Copyright 1999 - 2005 - The Buffalo News This material is copyrighted and is for your exclusive personal use only. Republication or other use of this material without the express written consent of The Buffalo News is prohibited. Copyright © 1999 - 2005 The Buffalo News™