A spring selection.

'THE Bushes consider self-focus and self-analysis to be dangerously close to self-centeredness," write the authors of an entertaining new collective biography of the current First Family. In The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty (Doubleday, 574 pp., $27.95), Peter and Rochelle Schweizer try to tell the story the clan itself is forbidden by modesty to recount. The book is full of charming anecdotes:

   [Prescott Bush's love of music] led to a
   nocturnal life he tried to keep secret from
   his family. Pres would slip out at night
   and trek up to the Cotton Club ... The
   family learned about it only by chance
   when Dottie was driving the kids around
   in the car one night. Pres Jr. was fiddling
   with the radio and Poppy and Nancy were
   in the backseat. Suddenly a voice on the
   radio declared, "Live from the Cotton
   Club on 125th Street in Harlem, New
   York, the Ink Spots!"

   After the quartet sang their first melody,
   a loud and enthusiastic "Attaway
   boys!" could be heard amidst the applause.

   "That sounds like dad," said Pressy....

   The next evening at the dinner table,
   Pressy said, "Dad, we were driving home
   and we heard the Ink Spots were at the
   Cotton Club. We heard someone say,
   'Attaway boys, way to go boys.' And it
   sounded like you. Was it?"

   Pres turned scarlet but never answered
   the question.

The "Pres" of this story would later become one of the first Republican senators to denounce Joseph McCarthy; the "Poppy" in the backseat would become the 41st president of the United States and father of the 43rd.

As a young man at Harvard Business School, George W. Bush "made a point of being different," write the Schweizers. One of the women he dated at the time describes how W. stood out: "While they were drinking Chivas Regal, he was drinking Wild Turkey. They were smoking Benson & Hedges and he's dipping Copenhagen [chewing tobacco], and while they were going to the opera he was listening to Johnny Rodriguez over and over and over and over." The WASP rebel as Ivy League redneck: It's a classic American tale, one of the many told ably in this delightful book.

* Critics of the Enlightenment: Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition (ISI, 367 pp., $18) is a valuable sourcebook for the thought of an often-neglected strand of conservatism. In his introduction, the book's editor and translator, Christopher Olaf Blum, writes that the 19th-century French conservatives "sought to vindicate the principles of the Old Regime not for their own sake, as if it were an antiquarian matter, but because they were convinced that these same principles could, if followed, again give birth to the kind of noble and truly human civilization that Europe had been at its best." While neo-monarchists and other nostalgists will find much to savor in this anthology, the writings also have much to teach those who favor a liberal, dynamic, and pluralistic society. Louis de Bonald, for example, warns that "religious controversies are an evil, but religious indifference is a still greater one. The hard and fierce fanaticism of the Wars of Religion caused infinite evils to France over two centuries ... [yet] the most attractive moral lassitude and disdain or forgetfulness of religion in a society whose only care is pleasure ... have brought us in less than fifty years to the most complete delirium, the most bloody revolution, the total upheaval of society, and the general disorganization of Europe."

Chateaubriand tells us that "liberty must not be accused of the faults committed in her name," but liberty can't survive unless the faults Bonald pointed to are addressed by the citizenry, in all its small Burkean platoons. Writing in 1864 about social problems--including illegitimacy--Frederic Le Play recognized that while under the Old Regime government action could be important in fostering moral change, "it is not the same with the moderns, for whom progress is more and more a question of the initiative of the citizens."

The less polite side of the French counter-revolutionary tradition is also represented in this volume. In an essay from 1798, Joseph de Maistre accuses Protestantism of being, in its essence, a socially corrosive force: "By establishing independence of judgment, free discussion of principles, and contempt for tradition, it undermines all national dogmas ... Mohammedism, even paganism, have done less political evil when they substituted their kind of dogmas and faith for Christianity, for they are religions. But Protestantism is not one at all." Not quite the sort of thing one would hand out at a suburban meeting of Evangelicals and Catholics Together; editor Blum observes, with dry understatement, that Maistre "was at times an intemperate writer." But the presentation of the anti-Enlightenment tradition in such a broadly inclusive manner bolsters the contribution made by this lively book. The reader will finish it with a sense of an intellectual tradition in its fullness.

* The Da Vinci Code phenomenon continues to amaze. Its central allegations percolated for years in the pages of quack-history books, attracting little attention. Along came author Dan Brown, who slapped the label "fiction" on them and--presto!--millions of readers started asking, "Wow, is this true?" The short answer is, of course not. In her excellent new book De-coding Da Vinci: The Facts Behind the Fiction of The Da Vinci Code (Our Sunday Visitor, 124 pp., $9.95), Amy Welborn gives a sprightly, detailed, and highly satisfying account of the truth behind the pseudo-history.

Welborn is a renowned Catholic blogger with a knack for explaining complex issues clearly. The reader of this book will come away with a lucid account of Christian origins, and a strong sense that, even after 2,000 years, the New Testament remains the most accurate and reliable source for the thought and work of Christianity's founder. Other, later writings from heretical sects--and fanciful conspiracy theories about how they were "suppressed"--make for the stuff of entertaining thrillers; but if you want "the Real Story," writes Welborn, it's "as close as a book on your shelf.... Pick up that Bible."

* In his new anthology From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (Oxford, 438 pp., $28), Bernard Lewis collects 51 of his historical essays from the past half-century. Lewis has long been considered the West's leading interpreter of Mideast culture and history, and this collection only solidifies his reputation. His writing is erudite but not dry; he venerates the facts of history while remaining fully alive to their echoes and implications in the present. For example, he writes that the tactics of the medieval sect of Assassins--"probably the earliest example of what one can legitimately call state terrorism"--were not, as many in the West believed and continue to believe, directed chiefly against the Crusaders; their targets, rather, were fellow Muslims, and their goal was supremacy within Islam itself. Lewis then asks: "Are we as mistaken as the Crusaders were in thinking that the main objective of Islamic terrorism is Israel? ... The answer may well be the same as in the Middle Ages. The literature of the fundamentalists shows that they are much more preoccupied with their Islamic enemies, with the Islamic governments that they denounce as not truly Islamic, as tyrants and usurpers." There is deep wisdom here for would-be appeasers: Even the outright destruction of the State of Israel would not solve the problem of Islamist terrorism, because Israel's existence is not the cause of that terrorism in the first place. Lewis also notes the Assassins' "total and final failure": a cheering parallel.

* In Battling Corruption in America's Public Schools (Northeastern, 257 pp., $32.50), City University of New York law professor Lydia G. Segal writes that some major American urban school systems suffer greatly from fraud and abuse. But "school inspector general reports in [America's three largest school districts] show a relatively low incidence of theft, embezzlement, [and other corruption] among principals and assistant principals"; so one of the most important things we can do to stop the financial bleeding is to "give principals a significant degree of budgetary autonomy and broad freedom from central mandates."

* That religious elementary and secondary schools do a better job than the public schools on a range of objective criteria is by now very well known. In Between Memory and Vision: The Case for Faith-Based Schooling (Eerdmans, 181 pp., $22), Calvin College education professor Steven C. Vryhof outlines some of the reasons the religious approach has succeeded so well in a pluralistic society. Academic excellence is required, he writes, but it is not an end in itself; the religious school has "a more expansive view of the purposes of schooling," a higher calling to cultivate in students a sense of "meaning and purpose" grounded in the traditional vision of their faith. The goal of faith-based education, at its best, is to foster a young generation of "rooted cosmopolitans": children who build a social openness on the bedrock of unchanging values.

* In The Compleat Gentleman: The Modern Man's Guide to Chivalry (Spence, 256 pp., $27.95), former NR literary editor Brad Miner examines a code of conduct that still imparts vital lessons in the face of all social change. Miner does not romanticize gentlemanliness, but views it as--in its proper form--"a brotherhood of virtue." The gentleman is a "man of the world," though not "'worldly' in any base sense"; a secular Trappist who lives honorably, and with the combination of nonchalance and self-control the Italians call sprezzatura.

* John Donne is acknowledged as one of the best religious poets in the English language. His theological vision is well represented in One Equall Light: An Anthology of the Writings of John Donne (Eerdmans, 352 pp., $28), edited by John Moses. This compilation--most of it drawn from Donne's sermons and other prose works--is arranged according to topic, and makes for very uplifting browsing. "Be not apt to think heaven is an Ermitage, or a Monastery, or the way to heaven a sullen melancholy; Heaven, and the way to it, is a Communion of Saints, in a holy cheerfulnesse."