Usable past.

MEMORIAL DAY offers an occasion to get in touch with the mystic chords of American memory. An eloquent reminder of some key episodes is provided by acclaimed historian Neil Baldwin in The American Revelation: Ten Ideals That Shaped Our Country from the Puritans to the Cold War (St. Martin's, 253 pp., $24.95), which recounts episodes in which remarkable individuals put forward ideals that still have the power to motivate. Some of Baldwin's chapters cover well-known territory, such as Thomas Paine's Common Sense and George C. Marshall's Plan to rebuild Europe; others explore less familiar stories, like those of playwright Israel Zangwill (author of The Melting-Pot) and African-American historian Carter G. Woodson. In telling his tales, Baldwin shows the American genius for combining individualism and public spirit: We have been, and remain, the country of John Winthrop and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The author succeeds in creating what he calls a "cumulative portrait of America as a place to begin anew, [and] an arena in which each individual should ennoble and serve the whole."

* The End of Time (Encounter, 157 pp., $23.95) is a moving and memorable change of pace for intellectual provocateur David Horowitz. In this brief memoir of illness, the agnostic Horowitz confronts issues of mortality with candor and depth, recognizing what he calls "the false consciousness that had accompanied me my entire life":

   These tragedies happen to others. I am
   not one of them. Even as I entertained
   these thoughts, I recognized how self-denying
   and ultimately absurd they
   were. None of us are outsiders. We
   are all going to the same destination.
   Though my recent ordeal was over and
   I could walk back into the sunlight and
   resume my interrupted life, I was not
   really out of there. I had been lucky, but
   I had not been given a pardon, only a
   reprieve.

He looks to sources as diverse as Pascal and Saul Bellow, Shakespeare and Wallace Stevens, to make sense of human limitation, and concludes: "Consider what you have and be grateful for it, and remember to look while your eyes are still open."

* The latest addition to ISI's impressive Library of Modern Thinkers is Bertrand de Jouvenel: The Conservative Liberal and the Illusions of Modernity (225 pp., $15), by Daniel J. Mahoney of Assumption College. Mahoney makes a good case for this neglected figure who "steered a principled middle path between reactionary nostalgia and progressive illusions": "Jouvenel envisioned the diverse ways in which the permanent goods and truths of our nature could be sustained within an ever-changing and mobile social order.... There was no more penetrating critic of 'the myth of the solution,' of the pernicious illusion that the political problem could be permanently solved rather than prudently navigated or adjudicated." That's the conservative temperament, nicely summarized.

* Kudos to Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University for republishing Michael Novak's 1961 novel The Tiber Was Silver (304 pp., $18.95). Before he became one of our most valuable public intellectuals, Novak was a thoughtful and observant young seminarian in 1950s Rome; his experiences there inform this novel, which still captivates after (dare I say it?) almost half a century. The story concerns a seminarian struggling with his vocation, in the context of a conservative Catholicism in which liberal forces, percolating ever more loudly below the surface, were about to reach their historic boiling point. This is a fine work of narrative art, and also a poignant answer to the question, "Where did Vatican II--and the Sixties generally--come from?"

* For 60 years, Commentary magazine has been one of the most powerful weapons in the intellectual arsenal of American conservatives. The new anthology Commentary in American Life (Temple, 226 pp., $22.95), edited by Murray Friedman, collects nine essays about the magazine's achievement; it's a fitting tribute.

* One of the best bargains of the year comes from ISI Books, which has just released a massive anthology of the writings of John Lukacs. Remembered Past: John Lukacs on History, Historians, and Historical Knowledge: A Reader, edited by Mark G. Malvasi and Jeffrey O. Nelson, weighs in at 922 pages and costs just $18. Lukacs's mind is agile as well as scholarly, and the book shows him at his best, at play in the fields of Clio.

* The King James Version of the Bible has been treasured for centuries by religious believers and literary devotees alike; a new edition of the work, The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with the Apocrypha, King James Version (Cambridge, 1,868 pp., $109.99) by scholar David Norton, makes it easier for readers to appreciate the KJV as its translators envisioned it. Norton's is an especially conservative scholarly edition; he limits himself to modernizing and standardizing spelling and punctuation, and restoring original readings that were adopted by the KJV translators but have been altered over the succeeding centuries by a panoply of editors. Gone are the irritating spellings--e.g., "publick," "lunatick," and "cloke"--that have somehow survived into modern KJVs. Some of the restored original readings make the text clumsier: Galatians 3:13, rendered in most KJVs "cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree," reverts in Norton's edition to the 1611 translators' original "cursed is every one that hangeth on tree."

The Norton version's high price and its absence of study notes will make it an unsatisfying choice for most Bible buyers; they remain better advised to use one of the many study versions using the more common KJV text. But the book is an important contribution to scholarship, and beautifully produced and typeset. In a companion volume, A Textual History of the King James Bible (Cambridge, 387 pp., $95), Norton describes the travails of this remarkable book over almost 400 years; in a 1612 edition, for example, someone-probably a disgruntled employee at the printing shop--substituted "Printers" for "Princes" in Ps. 119:161: "Printers have persecuted me without a cause."

* In Exodus: Why Americans Are Fleeing Liberal Churches for Conservative Christianity (Sentinel, 224 pp., $23.95), journalist Dave Shiflett explores the most important religious development of our times: the abandonment of the politicized mainline churches in favor of Evangelicalism, Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy. Not so long ago, Bible-believing Christianity was commonly seen as "yesterday's religion"; now it's more accurately viewed as demography's religion of tomorrow. Shiflett has talked to many people at the forefront of the movement back to orthodoxy. One of them--Southern Baptist leader Richard Land--says of his liberal opponents: "I'd rather be playing our hand than theirs."

* Ed Meese is one of our MVPs, and he richly deserves the encomium he gets in the new biography To Preserve and Protect: The Life of Edwin Meese III (Heritage, 138 pp., $9.99), by Lee Edwards. Meese is a conservative's conservative--a true constitutionalist who has devoted his life to the principles of a just and ordered society-and was the chief aide to the most important figure of the latter half of the 20th century. Also worth reading is Meese's memoir, With Reagan (Regnery, 362 pp., $24.95).

* Respect for custom is a central facet of the conservative temperament; so is the desire to poke affectionate fun at the fallibilities of one's fellow mortals. In Being Dead Is No Excuse: The Official Southern Ladies Guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral (Miramax, 243 pp., $19.95), by Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays, both qualities are on display. A sample:

   Anne Dudley was hobbling around the
   kitchen, bravely dyeing Easter Eggs,
   despite her knees, which were bruised
   black and blue. "I just don't know,"
   Anne Dudley said. "Did I hurt
   my knees yesterday afternoon
   doing the Stations of the Cross?
   Or did I do it falling down drunk
   last night?" That, in a nutshell, is
   the spirit of Southern Episcopalianism.
   (To her credit, Anne
   Dudley remains a loyal daughter
   of St. James' [Episcopal Church],
   even though the bishop put his
   foot down and flatly refused to let her
   have her fourth wedding there. The fifth
   time, she was too proud to ask.)

This book does contain recipes and practical advice; but it is also--indeed chiefly--great fun.

* In Why Animals Sleep So Close to the Road (and Other Lies I Tell My Children) (St. Martin's, 206 pp., $22.95), National Review Online columnist Susan Konig explores the comedy of everyday life: homebuying, childbirth, and raising a family in the suburbs. This is a light-hearted, but knowing, lark of a book.

* From religious publisher New Leaf comes an attractive volume called Jesus: The Authorized Biography (350 pp., $24.99), in which author Gary C. Wharton has arranged the material of the Four Gospels into a single narrative: not a traditional scholarly harmony, but an engaging and readable story.