Fall reading

Read if you want those beach thrillers in the last two remaining summer weekends. But be ready for more serious reading fodder in the weeks ahead. Here are four recommendations:

• Tony Blankley's The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations? You should already know Tony from his work as a columnist, panelist on The McLaughlin Group and editorial page editor of the Washington Times. Here he takes several steps back from his daily work and looks at how Europe, America, and Islamists have developed in different and dangerous ways, and he recommends specific steps to prosecute the war against those who seek to destroy our civilization. Publication date is September 12; with any luck it's in your bookstore now.
• Pedro Sanjuan's The U.N. Gang: A Memoir of Incompetence, Corruption, Espionage, Anti-Semitism and Islamic Extremism at the UN Secretariat. The title seems to pretty much say it all. This book by a former U.N. staffer comes with blurbs from Jeane Kirkpatrick, Abraham Foxman, and Lawrence Eagleburger, is slated for release September 13, just in time for the September session of the United Nations. Champions of the U.N.-as-it-is are already squawking about U.S. Ambassador John Bolton's moves to reform this ailing institution.
• Laurent Murawiec's Princes of Darkness: The Saudi Assault on the West. Murawiec is analyst at the Hudson Institute in Washington and the book was published in French in 2003 and ruffled a lot of Saudi feathers. The Saudis may argue that they've cleaned up their act since the book was written. Even if so, it's good to know what they've been doing for so many years.
• Thomas Barnett's Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating. This is the PowerPoint guru's follow-up to The Pentagon's New Map, in which Barnett presents his recommendations for "A Department for What Lies Between War and Peace." Barnett argues that the military wasn't ready for peacekeeping in Iraq and that it has made mistakes. But, he goes on, "no public institution responds to failure better and more quickly than the U.S. military. And it has." This book will be widely read in the Pentagon, and should be widely read beyond. It's pre-order right now, but see if you can get (as I did) a reviewer copy.

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