Season of hope.

IS there hope for the Mideast, now that Arafat has passed from the scene? To read the marvelous new book The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror (PublicAffairs, 303 pp., $26.95), by Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer, is to be heartened about the opportunity for progress.

Sharansky, a survivor of the Gulag and a veteran human-rights crusader, argues that true peace cannot be built on what he calls a "fear society." Peace and freedom are finally inseparable, and until there is liberal reform within the Palestinian Authority there can be neither 1) a secure Israel nor 2) a viable Palestinian state.

And Sharansky demands both:

   The same human rights principles that
   once guided me in the Soviet Union
   remain the cornerstone of my approach
   to the peace process. I am willing to
   transfer territory [to the Palestinians] . . .
   because the principle of individual
   autonomy remains sacred to me--I do
   not want to rule another people. At the
   same time, I refuse to ignore the Palestinian
   Authority's violation of human
   rights because I remain convinced that a
   neighbor who tramples on the rights of
   its own people will eventually threaten
   the security of my people.

Sharansky makes a forceful case for the realism of the Bush administration's aggressive policy of promoting liberal societies in the Mideast. "The culture of death and violence that has engulfed Palestinian society can ... change quickly," he writes, but only if the leaders of the world's democracies preserve their moral clarity in foreign policy.

This would mean linking U.S. economic and diplomatic support for the Palestinian Authority to reform within the Palestinian body politic. Sharansky points out that on June 24, 2002, President Bush gave a speech that seemed to insist on this sort of linkage. That 2002 proposal, writes Sharansky, remains promising.

   The Palestinians are a relatively small,
   educated, and entrepreneurial population
   with decades of exposure to Israeli democracy.
   A peace process dedicated to
   strengthening them rather than their corrupt,
   unaccountable rulers would succeed
   much faster than people thought.
   After a few years in which a Palestinian
   administration--albeit one appointed by
   outsiders--worked to develop the Palestinians'
   civil society, economy, and
   democratic institutions, a fear society
   would gradually be replaced by a free
   society. The Palestinians would then be
   able to choose their leaders in free elections.
   By virtue of being dependent on
   the people they governed, those leaders
   would work to improve the lives of
   Palestinians, and as a result would have a
   vested interest in peace with Israel.

With such leaders, concludes Sharansky, "Israel could make peace."

To those inclined to be skeptical, one of Sharansky's prison anecdotes offers food for thought. One day, his Soviet jailers gave him a copy of Pravda. "Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an 'evil empire.' Tapping on walls and talking through toilets, word of Reagan's 'provocation' quickly spread through the prison. The dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth." At the time, speaking those words of truth did not appear--to many in the West--to be a promising or even prudent strategy. But events proved that the prisoners' desire for freedom was more powerful than the will of their captors to keep them in bondage. The Bush administration's aggressive effort to promote liberalization in the Arab world--with Iraq the test case--may be, even today, the subject of eager tappings on West Bank walls, by Palestinians who dream of a future offering more than the street gunfire of masked thugs.

And those hopeful Palestinians should find encouragement in the fact that both President Bush and his new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, have recently been reading Sharansky's book. In the hands of the makers of U.S. foreign policy, the book can be a blueprint for measurable, positive change not just in the Palestinian Authority but in the Arab world as a whole. We at NR are especially gratified that our own associate editor, Rachel Friedman, who served as the book's researcher, is singled out in the acknowledgments as "a rare find," who "strengthen[ed]" the authors' arguments and "point[ed] them in directions they had not even considered." Well done, all around.

* Berkeley professor Robert Alter is one of America's foremost literary scholars, and he has long displayed particular interest in works that have been canonical in the religious as well as the academic sense. His massive new work, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (Norton, 1,064 pp., $39.95), is the crowning achievement of his career so far: a rendition of the first five books of the Bible in a manner that combines a poet/critic's sensitivity to language with a rabbi's care for parsing out the text's religious meaning.

In his introduction, Alter writes that "the unacknowledged heresy underlying most modern English versions of the Bible is the use of translation as a vehicle for explaining the Bible instead of representing it in another language, and in the most egregious instances this amounts to explaining away the Bible." Accordingly, Alter's translation strives to render the idiomatic voice of the original, with its rhythms and repetitions--and manages to do so in a readable English. The sense comes through with clarity; in this regard, Alter must also be commended for his detailed and scholarly--yet amazingly user-friendly--commentary at the bottom of each page. This is a beautifully produced book, a work by a great scholar that will be a valuable resource for lay readers as well.

* Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, is one of the MVPs of free-market economics. Indefatigably buoyant in his intellectual commitment to capitalism, he keeps his eye on the long term--and that's what makes his new book, Bullish on Bush: How George W. Bush's Ownership Society Will Make America Stronger (Madison, 119 pp., $9.95), so helpful. The 2003 Bush tax cuts have had a powerful stimulus effect, sparking a very welcome turnaround in the economy. But they have also set the stage for more ambitious reforms that, Moore argues, could turbo-charge the U.S. economy. Central among these is the reform of Social Security--not just to make the program solvent, but to transform it into a much more reliable wealth generator for America's retirees. The Bush proposal would "increase by tens of millions . . . the ranks of the ownership society in the United States. Rather than 52 percent of Americans owning stocks and bonds, the Bush plan would rocket that share up to 80 or perhaps even 90 percent." In the next four years, contends Moore, President Bush could set in motion socioeconomic changes more important than any since the New Deal.

* It's no secret that the implosion of the New York Times under the vainglorious leadership of Howell Raines brought joy to many conservatives; for too long, the paper had gotten away with rampant left-wing agenda-mongering by hiding behind the gray respectability of past accomplishments, and it was long past time for its public image to be brought in line with reality. In Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media (Random House, 330 pp., $25.95), former Newsweek media writer Seth Mnookin provides a gripping behind-the-scenes account of how the high-handed Raines--who is compared by a key Times insider to the title character in Dr. Strangelove--and his team were done in by the "too good to check" antics of rogue reporter Jayson Blair.

* Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger is not just the Catholic Church's enforcer of theological orthodoxy; he is also one of Christianity's most valuable contemporary thinkers. In his new book, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions (Ignatius, 284 pp., $15.95), he tackles the issue of the plurality of religions with intelligence and insight. "Today's man," he writes, is "inclined to recognize himself in the Buddhist parable of the blind men and the elephant": A king summoned all the blind men in his city to have them feel different parts of an elephant, and naturally the blind men disagreed about the nature of the creature they were touching--and eventually came to blows, as each contended that his own generalization from the part he was touching was the fundamental truth about the elephant. Is this not, modern man asserts, an apt metaphor for mankind in its religious quest?

No, says Ratzinger: "Someone who is born blind knows that he was not born to be blind ... Man's resignation to the verdict that, when it comes to what is essential, that on which his life ultimately depends, he was born blind is merely apparent.... Man cannot come to terms with being born blind, and remaining blind, where essential things are concerned. The farewell to truth can never be final." The thirst for truth is innate, whether that truth makes itself available through the natural reason, or through divine revelation, or through both. All people have dignity in the eyes of God, and should be treated with respect, but not all truth claims are equal. "For Christian faith," Ratzinger writes, "the history of religions is not a circle of what is endlessly the same, never touching the essential thing, which itself ever remains outside of history; rather, the Christian holds the history of religions to be a genuine history, to be a path whose direction we call progress and whose attitude we call hope." Ratzinger's book is both erudite and accessible, a very helpful engagement with the religious thought of East and West.

* Terry Teachout is the critic's critic, a promoter of excellence whose eye is sharp and whose enthusiasms are infectious. His new book, All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine (Harcourt, 185 pp., $22), tells the story of the culture hero who transformed American ballet. Early in the book, Teachout describes his first encounter with Balanchine's choreography: "This was no dumb show, no mere pantomime, but sound made visible, written in the air like fireworks glittering in the night sky.... I asked myself, Why hasn't anybody ever told me about this? And what kind of man made it?" This book is excellent not just as an account of Balanchine's remarkable career--emigre establishes a high art form in his populist new homeland--but as an introduction to the world of ballet. "[Ballet does] what music does and words cannot. 'The thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love,' Felix Mendelssohn once remarked, 'are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.' So, too, with Balanchine, whose choreographic thoughts are extraordinary precisely because they cannot be translated into mere words." Teachout suggests that Balanchine may not have been the end of the line for classical ballet, but the originator of a new "lingua franca for ballet in the 21st century"--"the founding father who took the rudimentary steps of classical ballet and transformed them into a modern language capable of expressing feelings of the utmost subtlety and complexity."

* In America's First Frogman: The Draper Kauffman Story (Naval Institute, 221 pp., $28.95), Elizabeth Kauffman Bush movingly recounts the remarkable life of the World War II underwater-demolition expert who became the father of the Navy SEALs. The author is the sister of the book's hero--and also the sister-in-law of President George H. W. Bush and aunt of President George W. Bush. In the foreword, George H. W. Bush says that "in telling us about her brother's life of service and dedication," the author "defines sacrifice and heroism"; the narrative more than lives up to that promise, accompanying the legendary bomb-disposal specialist to the Battle of Britain and the war in the Pacific.

* There's something in the conservative spirit that disdains triumph, that refuses comfort in victories that might prove evanescent. In Lengthened Shadows: America and Its Institutions in the Twenty-First Century (Encounter, 266 pp., $17.95), edited by Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer, we have a marvelous anthology explaining what's still wrong with America. The pieces were all written before the thumping conservative victory in this year's elections, but speak to enduring conditions that deserve the attention of thoughtful people. Robert Bork has an essay denouncing today's judiciary as a coterie of arrogant Olympians; Mark Steyn wittily describes the monstrous PC shenanigans that blight our schools; Frederick W. Kagan contends that Donald Rumsfeld's "vision of military transformation ... is completely unbalanced [and] suffers from a wide variety of flaws"; Roger Kimball writes that "the corrosive imperatives of 'multiculturalism' and political correctness" are "institutionalizing our demise."

A welcome ray of optimism is emitted by NR managing editor Jay Nordlinger, who has an excellent and persuasive essay demonstrating that--despite frequent reports to the contrary--classical music is thriving in the U.S. Also impressive is David B. Hart's dissection of religion in today's America: With all its problems, it is nonetheless "alive and striving," which portends "something that might just survive the self-consuming culture of disenchantment."

* In A Year at the Supreme Court (Duke, 243 pp., $21.95), edited by Neal Devins and Davison M. Douglas, distinguished contributors from across the political spectrum analyze key decisions of the Court's 2002-03 term. NR's own Ramesh Ponnuru provides a key essay arguing that the Court is not committed to restoring the Founders' federalism: "The great federalist case of the 2002 term was . . . Lawrence v. Texas. State laws against sodomy were dying off, as they should have been. But the Court was not willing to wait. Instead, it issued an expansive ruling [striking down sodomy laws] . . . Once again, the Court has taken sides in the culture wars"--instead of leaving the resolution of those struggles to the appropriate branches of government. He also argues that the Court refuses to see that state governments can threaten federalism just as Washington can.

* Art Deco is one of the most distinctive styles America has ever made its own. In Art Deco New York (Watson Guptill, 214 pp., $40), cultural historian David Garrard Lowe offers a sumptuously illustrated tour of its highlights, from the Chrysler Building and Rockefeller Center to the New Yorker Hotel, at 34th Street and 8th Avenue, which "boasted that each of its 2,500 rooms had a radio." Lowe's text is fittingly evocative of a New York that, long past, leaves its mark on today's skyline.