When he's right ...

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS is the kind of writer who makes you miss your bus stop when you're engrossed in him, who makes you want to grab friends by the arm and read them passages that have made you shiver between the shoulder blades (this last was Vladimir Nabokov's test for good writing). He is such an excellent writer, indeed, that on the notorious occasions on which he is colossally, flagrantly wrong you suspect he must be kidding. (Mustn't he?)

The new anthology Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (Nation, 475 pp., $16.95) is Hitchens's widest-ranging book since the events of 9/11 catalyzed his transformation from an occasional gadfly against leftist platitudes into a full-throated denouncer of the Left's ideological abdication from the defense of Western liberty. The United States, he writes, "has been very kind and hospitable to this immigrant, and I would calmly affirm that . . . my adopted country has found a defender in me. This necessarily broad and vague allegiance came to a tungsten-sharp point in the fall of 2001," when terrorist atrocities by "barbaric nihilists" demonstrated "the fatuity of letting only one side be ruthless and organized, let alone self-confident. It is civilization and pluralism and secularism that need pitiless and unapologetic fighters."

Civilization, pluralism, secularism: This is the trinity to which Hitchens devotes his knightly efforts. His trouncing of one of the age's most egregious snake-oil peddlers ("Unfairenheit 9/11: The Lies of Michael Moore") is reprinted in the book, and stands as a bold reassertion of the true purposes of the current war: "If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD." This passage--like many others in the book--rises to level of art in its remorseless candor; it demonstrates quite starkly who is on the side of civilization and pluralism, and who isn't.

But what of Hitchens's third guiding light, secularism? In a sense, of course, secularism is a condition almost all Americans cherish; I sometimes attend a very conservative Baptist church, in which on one recent occasion the minister--in the course of arguing for traditional moral values in public life--noted that it would be a very harmful thing for the Church to run the State. But Hitchens proclaims his devotion to secularism in significantly less nuanced terms. "Religion" he condemns as "that most toxic of foes . . . the most base and contemptible of the forms assumed by human egotism and stupidity. Cold, steady hatred for this, especially in its loathsome jihad shape, has been as sustaining to me as any love." Religion is "the elevation and collectivization of credulity and solipsism"; Hitchens singles out for obloquy religion's "parasitic relationship" to "disease and ignorance and misery."

Leave aside the reference "especially" to jihad, and its implication that murder in the name of religion is merely a more extreme form of something pernicious in itself, different from other religion only in degree rather than in kind. Focus instead on the inaccurate utilitarian calculus underlying Hitchens's analysis: He is suggesting that throughout history more people have been reduced to misery by religion than have had their misery alleviated by it; that religion has encouraged egotism more than it has encouraged altruism. In Hitchens's understanding, then, Tartuffe is the rule, not the exception; but if this were the case in reality, why do the religious and irreligious alike find Tartuffe a figure of fun? Hitchens is an astute observer of society, and must therefore be aware that the acts of social benevolence inspired by religion are more numerous than the acts of religious bigotry, violence, and oppression; why then this level of rejectionist fury? In my experience, the only other people who cherish similar hatred for the sins of religious thugs, bigots, and hypocrites are . . . religious believers themselves. Do we have in Hitchens a self-suppressed Puritan, a Jeremiah who will not console erring believers with nominal professions of faith as he chastises them?

To read Hitchens, then, can be a thought-provoking joy, but sometimes a joy tout court. He is a lover of language, which is evident not just in his own perfectly turned phrases, but in his unearthing of gems from others. It was from Hitchens, for example, that I learned the great definition of "the upper crust" as "a load of crumbs held together by dough"--Bolshevist, to be sure, but lovely. And from this book, an anecdote in which an Irishman is seeking work at an English construction site. A surly English supervisor rebukes him: "You don't look to me as if you know the difference between a girder and a joist." To which the Irishman indignantly responds: "I do, too. The first of them wrote Faust and the second one wrote Ulysses."

Hitchens is a defender of civilization: of Faust and Ulysses, and of the lightheartedness of free men and women.

* The spectacular failures of American higher education in our time--in particular, the spurning of high culture for leftwing and other trendinesses--have been described in countless necessary but dispiriting works. How refreshing, then, to read Naomi Schaefer Riley's splendidly detailed new book, God on the Quad: How Religious Colleges and the Missionary Generation Are Changing America (St. Martin's, 274 pp., $24.95), which describes how the classical tradition in education--the idea that students should be taught the best things that have been thought and spoken--survives in many of America's religion-based colleges and universities. "Devotion to the idea that 'the glory of God is intelligence' is ubiquitous among religious colleges," writes Riley. "The schools disproportionately require students to complete a rigorous traditional core curriculum, at the same time that the curricula of their secular rivals have often been watered down." Nature abhors a vacuum, and if you rob education of its substance students will soon end up carrying placards protesting against "slavery," by which they mean low wages at Starbucks. "The big controversy here is the Plato versus Aristotle controversy," says a freshman at Thomas Aquinas College, a Catholic liberal-arts school in California; this is just one among many positive signs recounted by Riley in her deeply heartening book.

* The Pius XII debate is surely one of the least edifying controversies of recent years. Here was the spectacle of a southern European clergyman, dead almost 50 years, being exhumed and interrogated on the question, not Did you commit war crimes? but Did you express--in terms explicit enough to be considered adequate by me, a comfortable suburban op-ed writer of the early 21st century--your disapproval of the offenses of the Nazi regime? On this crucial question depended not just Pius's own reputation but important issues of contemporary self-definition. If you defended Pius--heck, if you merely failed to join in the attack on Pius--Pius-bashers would suspect you of anti-Semitism; some of Pius's defenders were similarly intemperate. The new book The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII (Lexington, 282 pp., $29.95), edited by Weekly Standard literary editor Joseph Bottum and Rabbi David G. Dalin, a professor of history at Ave Maria University, is one of the best volumes to emerge from the controversy so far. It's an anthology of some of the most compelling defenses of Pius, including essays by the editors themselves, Michael Novak, and Ronald J. Rychlak. Two-thirds of the book--amounting to some 80,000 words--is devoted to a comprehensively annotated bibliography of the controversy by William Doino Jr.; this is a tour de force of scholarship, and highly readable to boot.

* One of the central insights of conservatism is that reforms, no matter how well intentioned, can have very bad unintended consequences--and that pointing this out, far from being evidence of hardheartedness, is a compassionate act of the highest order. The indispensable Mona Charen devotes her new book, Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us) (Sentinel, 269 pp., $25.95), to depicting the severe price that America has paid for past acts of ill-considered liberal beneficence. The array of facts Charen assembles, from crime to welfare to education, is daunting and definitive: The left-liberal project, in many crucial ways, backfired. To read this excellent book is to receive a keen insight into why America has moved so far in the conservative direction in recent years.

* In Africa Unchained: The Blueprint for Africa's Future (Palgrave Macmillan, 483 pp., $35), Ghanaian-born economist George B. N. Ayittey demonstrates yet again that he is himself one of that continent's most valuable resources. He documents in his searing pages the depredations of Africa's kleptocracies and socialist "vampire states," but offers a hopeful prognosis based on the idea of a return to indigenous market structures. "Markets were not invented by Europeans and transplanted into Africa," he writes. "There were free village markets in Africa before the Europeans stepped foot on the continent. . . . Timbucktu, Salaga, Kano, and Mombasa were all great market towns of yesteryear. It is rather bizarre and an act of unpardonable cultural sabotage for African governments to pursue strident anti-market policies." Ayittey contends that when the virulent strains of Marxism-Leninism--imported from the West in the 20th century--have been removed, Africa will have a chance to prosper. This is a fine book, and an interesting example of how cultural conservatism can coexist harmoniously with liberal (market) economics.

* The rise of the Internet as an alternative source of information has been a boon to lovers of truth. In Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World (Nelson, 225 pp., $19.99), Hugh Hewitt provides the perfect way to understand just how important this development really is: He compares the blogosphere's overturning of the old-media monopoly to the Protestant Reformation's challenge against entrenched ecclesiastical abuses. In both cases, he writes, "a revolution in communication technology" fueled a major social transformation away from an information hierarchy, and toward greater liberty. Dan Rather as Pope Leo X: a suggestive, and cheering, image for our times.

* Last summer, Ronald Reagan received the thanks of a nation that warmly reciprocated his love for it. The outpouring of affection toward the late president was more than matched by the tide of books on various aspects of his life and career. Now comes distinguished conservative historian Lee Edwards, with a volume that meets the important need for a very brief one-volume introduction to Reagan's character and achievements. The Essential Ronald Reagan: A Profile in Courage, Justice, and Wisdom (Rowman & Littlefield, 187 pp., $19.95) is a masterpiece of compression; strongly recommended as a first book to read on Reagan.

* The Founders on God and Government (Rowman & Littlefield, 314 pp., $29.95), edited by Daniel L. Dreisbach, Mark D. Hall, and Jeffry H. Morrison, is a valuable anthology of essays about the thought of individual Founders on religion and religious liberty. In his essay on George Washington, AEI fellow Vincent Phillip Munoz quotes Washington's famous letter to the Hebrew congregation of Newport: "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support." Munoz points out the "revolutionary character" of the new regime Washington was describing--one in which rights do not depend on religious affiliation, but do imply corresponding patriotic duties. Also among the book's many highlights is University of Virginia political scientist Garrett Ward Sheldon's contrarian essay persuasively outlining the "all-pervading Christian perspective" in the thought of James Madison.

* David Dubal is one of the great educators in the classical-music world; his Essential Canon of Classical Music (2001) is one of the best guides to the repertory. Kudos, then, to Amadeus Press for reissuing a couple of Dubal's important earlier works about his specialty, the piano. In a revised and expanded edition of The Art of the Piano: Its Performers, Literature, and Recordings (693 pp., $34.95), Dubal offers an encyclopedia of biographies of performers and composers, with discussions of hundreds of individual works (including each of the 48 Preludes and Fugues in Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, and all 32 Beethoven sonatas); also contained in the book is a CD of rare performances, most from before 1940. Also being reissued is Evenings with Horowitz: A Personal Portrait (327 pp., $24.95), Dubal's account of his conversations with the singular Russian-American pianist Vladimir Horowitz; it's a highly entertaining anecdotal work on one of the last great Romantics. "The piano is the easiest instrument to play in the beginning," Horowitz tells Dubal, "and the hardest to master in the end." This volume includes a CD of some of the Dubal-Horowitz conversations.

* Since its publication in 1978, the New International Version (NIV) has established itself as the most popular English translation of the Bible: an impressive combination of (not overly literal) accuracy and readability. But a revised version of the NIV--Today's NIV (TNIV)--has sacrificed one particular kind of accuracy in the name of political correctness. In The TNIV and The Gender-Neutral Bible Controversy (Broadman & Holman, 494 pp., $24.99), Bible scholars Vern S. Poythress and Wayne A. Grudem make a solid argument that the systematic omission of male-specific references compromises the Bible's meaning, and its concreteness, without providing any commensurate benefit.