The acid test.

LEGENDARY critic John Simon admits that he is "open to charges of political analphabetism": "I have always sympathized with the autobiographical hero of Anatole France's Le Lys rouge who declares, 'I am not so devoid of all talents as to occupy myself with politics.'" The remark is characteristic of Simon, an idiosyncratic polymath who revels in his resistance to trends (political correctness very much included). Applause Theatre & Cinema Books has just provided copious further documentation of these qualities, by releasing three volumes' worth of Simon's work as chronicler--and steely-eyed judge--of the arts: John Simon on Theater: Criticism 1974-2003 (837 pp., $32.95), John Simon on Film: Criticism 1982-2001 (662 pp., $29.95), and John Simon on Music: Criticism 1979-2005 (504 pp., $27.95).

It's well known that negative reviews are more fun to read than positive ones, and Simon's are an especially guilty pleasure. Here are examples, taken almost at random from the volumes: "There is a canard abroad, originated by [Edward] Albee himself, that an Albee play has linguistic distinction. It has, to be sure, a style more literary than that of a play by Murray Schisgal or Neil Simon, but so has a sophomore term paper about William Faulkner." "Merchant and Ivory should have been ivory merchants, a field in which fakery thrives." "There's nothing redeeming about Joe Papp's Julius Caesar, the second item in a six-year complete Shakespeare cycle that promises to be as artistic as a seven-day bicycle race."

He is also a master of the brittle cultural summation: "American movies today are aimed at three kinds of audiences: kids, cokeheads, and those seeking any kind of loud and vulgar stimulation with which to fill up a gaping inner emptiness for a couple of hours." And, prompted by Leonard Bernstein's podium caperings: "To a majority of laymen who cannot follow the music in any other way, it is such gyrations, such facial expressions of rapt transfiguration that spell out the meaning of the music. They are to the tone-deaf what Braille is to the blind."

One need not concede the justice of all--or indeed any--of these Simonisms to enjoy them immensely. And then come the refreshing declarations of love: of the beautiful 1995 Iranian film The White Balloon, the 1997 noir classic L.A. Confidential, Erick Zonca's touching 1998 The Dreamlife of Angels, Beth Henley's play Crimes of the Heart ... in short, enough of them to demonstrate that beauty remains alive in the contemporary arts. To read these three books is to explore a mind brilliantly--and passionately--engaged in the struggle to advance that beauty.

* That Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon has provided a blurb for Alan Dershowitz's new book, The Case for Peace: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Can Be Resolved (Wiley, 246 pp., $22.95), will come as a surprise only to those who believe in the Left's caricature of the Mideast conflict. In actuality, Israel is precisely the sort of liberal state--founded on democracy and respect for human rights--that liberals like Dershowitz ought to champion; that so many self-described American liberals view Israel's fight for survival with thinly disguised contempt is an enduring disgrace.

Like Sharon, Dershowitz is a believer in "a real peace with security." He harbors no illusions about Palestinian terrorists, and refutes the ubiquitous chatter about a "cycle of violence"--the myth that Israel's counterterrorism measures are themselves somehow to blame for suicide bombings and other atrocities. "The time has come," he writes, "to address the real root cause of suicide bombing: elitist incitement by certain religious and political leaders who are creating a culture of death and exploiting the ambiguous teachings of an important religion." Furthermore, he recognizes that Israel's continuing ability to defend itself is central to any workable two-state peace settlement: "The only guarantee of peace in the region is a qualitatively superior Israeli military deterrent. Whenever an Arab nation, or a combination of Arab nations ... believed itself capable of destroying Israel militarily, there [was] war. Whenever Israel's military superiority has been clear, there has been no war."

The core principles of Western civilization are at stake in the defense of Israel--but important sectors of the West are showing an inadequate level of understanding of, and commitment to, those principles. Dershowitz quotes a telling observation from Israeli novelist Amos Oz: "The graffiti in Europe have also changed ... When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in Europe said, 'Jews go home to Palestine.' Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a visit, the walls all screamed, 'Jews get out of Palestine.'" Alan Dershowitz is issuing a timely call to the West to reject bigotries of the past and present, and stand up for its better self: a self that will help build a Mideast peace that is founded on justice.

* The mullahs' regime in Iran is a major supporter of terrorism, and one of the greatest threats to world peace. In Tehran Rising: Iran's Challenge to the United States (Rowman & Littlefield, 218 pp., $24.95), Ilan Berman--vice president for policy of the American Foreign Policy Council and adjunct professor of international law and global security at the National Defense University--outlines the threat persuasively and in detail. Iran is making a "massive" push to develop nuclear weapons, "encompassing close to two dozen strategic sites scattered throughout the country." Already "the preeminent military power in the Persian Gulf, and the region's dominant political and strategic force," the theocracy is headed toward superpower status. Berman makes a strong case for a U.S. policy of regime change; his book deserves serious attention.

* Journalist Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer, provides a sweeping guide to national defense and foreign-policy strategy in New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy (Sentinel, 292 pp., $24.95). Peters is a Washington veteran, and impatient with some of its characteristic behavior that ends up subverting the public good: "The most insincere phrase in circulation in Washington, D.C., is 'think outside the box.' In Washington, when a superior tells you to think outside the box he or she wants you to come back with fresh reasons why the in-house position was right all along." Real thinking-outside-the-box comes naturally to Peters, whose iconoclastic cast of mind is evident in the following passage: "One of the most valuable early lessons I received in the cruelty of intellectuals came when I read Thomas More's Utopia in my early teens--after purchasing a copy under the influence of one of the twentieth century's disinformation successes, the film of Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons. I was mortified by what I read. I realized immediately that More's disciplined world--a harshly limiting place--was not one for the human beings I knew. And it certainly wasn't for me. I began to view Henry VIII more sympathetically."

Not quite fair to More, but Peters's strictures against intellectual utopianism in general are well taken. Peters is an astute and historically informed observer of the world's cultures and politics, so the vision he offers in New Glory manages to be not just inspiring but also highly realistic. A world in which America solidifies its leadership role will be a better place for mankind; to achieve such a world will require the work of people who, like Peters, are capable of unconventional thought.

* The Senate's consideration of the John Roberts Supreme Court nomination provides us a healthy opportunity to focus on some crucial constitutional issues. Robert H. Bork has edited a new collection of essays, "A Country I Do Not Recognize": The Legal Assault on American Values (Hoover, 196 pp., $15), in which eminent scholars diagnose the current legal pathologies. Some of the most trenchant writing is in Bork's introduction: "'Outside the mainstream' ... is the standard liberal epithet for any judge who adheres to the original understanding in applying the Constitution's principles to current controversies. What the cultural Left calls the 'mainstream' is a polluted current that has long since overflowed its banks and is wreaking devastation on America's moral and aesthetic landscape." Among the contributors to the volume are Terry Eastland, Gary L. McDowell, and Lee A. Casey and David B. Rivkin Jr. (with an essay on the dangers posed to U.S. sovereignty by fashionable theories of international law).

* The Weekly Standard celebrates its tenth anniversary with an impressive anthology, The Weekly Standard: A Reader: 1995-2005 (HarperCollins, 538 pp., $27.95). Editor William Kristol has made some great choices in the longer articles he has included in the book--for example, a 2002 Christopher Caldwell essay on French anti-Semitism. But one is especially grateful for the inclusion of David Tell's 1999 "I Disonesti," a faux-opera synopsis of the Clinton impeachment that was one of the funniest pieces of the 1990s.

* Full disclosure: I have met Raymond Arroyo, the news anchor of Catholic cable-TV network EWTN, and I can testify that he is one of the nicest people on earth. So when I heard that he was writing a full-length biography of his own boss--who is, as if that weren't enough, a nun to boot--I naturally feared the worst: a hagiography of the most cloyingly saccharine kind. Well, not to worry. The book--Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles (Doubleday, 384 pp., $23.95)--is a solidly researched, professionally told account of one of the most improbable successes of recent years. The EWTN network founded by Mother Angelica--nee Rita Antoinette Rizzo in Canton, Ohio--faced down the ferocious opposition of Catholic authorities and has not just survived but prospered. Much of its programming is of devotional value not just to Catholics, but to members of other churches as well--and also serves as a valuable demonstration of how intellectually challenging religious content can be successfully communicated on TV.

* If the bestseller list is anything to go by, the cause of tax reform is alive and well: America's number-one nonfiction volume these days is The FairTax Book: Saying Goodbye to the Income Tax and the IRS (Regan, 188 pp., $24.95), by Neal Boortz and Congressman John Linder, which proposes replacing the current system of income taxes and federal withholding with a 23 percent flat retail-sales tax. Another worthy entrant in the tax-cut stakes--and equally willing to think big--is Steve Forbes, with Flat Tax Revolution: Using a Postcard to Abolish the IRS (Regnery, 216 pp., $24.95). Forbes was a pioneer of the flat-tax movement and remains one of its most persuasive advocates; he calls for a 17 percent flat rate for income and corporate taxes.

* The death of film director Alan Pakula in a 1998 car accident robbed the cinema prematurely of one of its greatest artists; but justice is done to his life's work in Jared Brown's marvelous new biography Alan J. Pakula: His Films and His Life (Back Stage, 416 pp., $29.95), which includes fascinating details about the making of such masterpieces as Klute, All the President's Men, and The Parallax View.

* Epiphanies in daily life are the subject of the new anthology In Real Life: Powerful Lessons from Everyday Living (New Beginnings, 237 pp., $17.95), edited by Karl Zinsmeister with Karina Rollins. Zinsmeister and Rollins are based at The American Enterprise magazine, in which the vignettes initially appeared; the volume is refreshing.

* Zinsmeister, once an embedded journalist in Iraq, has also done a fine job with his new graphic novel, Combat Zone: True Tales of GIs in Iraq (Marvel, 120 pp., $19.99).