Some book reviews from the Movie Snob:

I was sick with some nasty head cold over most of the Christmas holiday, so I had a lot of time to sit around under the blankets and catch up on some light reading. First on the list was a book I got last Christmas called The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays from a Witness to the Twentieth Century, a collection of works by French sociologist and intellectual Raymond Aron. They are interesting works, largely from just before and just after World War II, and Aron wrote with clarity and foresight about the totalitarian nature of the Nazi and Soviet regimes and the inevitable crumbling of European control of their overseas colonies.

Then I read the new book Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum. This book has gotten a lot of good reviews in the magazines I read, and it is indeed a good overview of the entire history of the Soviet concentration-camp system. Although Applebaum does not write from an insider’s perspective, like Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, she does leaven her account with lots of quotations from her personal interviews with camp survivors. If you’re going to read one book about the gulag, this is probably the one to read. But I have to say, if you’ve read The Gulag Archipelago or the book from a few years ago called The Black Book of Communism, this book will feel like a little bit of a repeat.

Finally, I can happily recommend My Love Affair with America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative, by Norman Podhoretz. Part autobiography and part warning against Buchananite anti-Americanism on the political Right, this is a very enjoyable little defense of the many virtues of the United States.