Freedom and its enemies

Daniel Silva’s The English Spy is his 15th in a fiction series featuring Gabriel Allon, a legendary Israeli spy and assassin. Allon is also a masterful restorer of Renaissance paintings and prefers to live at peace amid art, but he is so good at his violent tasks that not only Israel’s Mossad but British and American intelligence agencies can’t live without his special talents. Silva’s writing is far above that of typical thriller authors, his intricate plots work brilliantly, and his evil characters—terrorists and Russians who employ them—deserve what they get. Warning: violence and occasional bad guy verbiage and adultery.

Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Broadway Books, 2014) is a well-written account of the British counterintelligence chief whose work for the Soviet Union led to the murder of hundreds of agents. Michael Rubin’s Dancing with the Devil (Encounter, 2015), takes us through U.S. attempts to find common ground with rogue regimes: North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and more. He concludes that the diplomats’ axiom, “it never hurts to talk to enemies,” is a lie.

Jay Cost’s A Republic No More (Encounter, 2015) shows how we moved from checks and balances to expanding the checkbook balances of special interest groups: James Madison called that factionalism, and maybe “corrupt special-interest democracy” is the better term for today. A 2014 edition of James Burnham’s 1964 Suicide of the West (Encounter) shows how liberalism was (and is) unable to stand up to dedicated and persistent opponents.

Honest, hard-hitting essays on the Middle East comprise Daniel Pipes’ Nothing Abides (Transaction, 2015). Fighting the Ideological War, edited by Katharine Gorka and Patrick Sookhdeo (Westminster Institute, 2012), has essays showing lessons from the Cold War against Communism worth applying to the lukewarm war against Islamism. Kirsten Powers’ The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech (Regnery, 2015) points out the internal demoralization that often accompanies external aggression.

In Universal Man, a biography of John Maynard Keynes (Basic, 2015), Richard Davenport-Hines praises Keynesian economics and Keynesian homosexuality: Many upper-class Brits indulged in both, but at 40 or so many of them married women and had children.

Other Short Stops

Burton and Anita Folsom’s Death on Hold (Nelson, 2015) narrates well how their friendship with a death row inmate changed his life and theirs. Agenda Setting: A Wise Giver’s Guide to Influencing Public Policy by John Miller and Karl Zinsmeister (Philanthropy Roundtable, 2015) offers some rousing and some depressing stories of how behind-the-scenes funders have changed American history.

Rodney Stark and Xiuhua Wang’s A Star in the East: The Rise of Christianity in China (Templeton, 2015) succinctly tells of what may be the world’s best hope of avoiding a future war between the United States and China. Guy Sorman’s The Empire of Lies: The Truth About China in the Twenty-First Century (Encounter, first published in 2008) looks at the lives of the 1 billion poor Chinese we tend to overlook as the lives of 200 million upwardly-mobiles dazzle us.

What Adam Smith Knew, edited by James Otteson (Encounter, 2014) includes essays praising or damning capitalism by John Locke, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, and others. David Brooks’ The Road to Character (Random House, 2015) is promising in parts but deeply confused: Brooks writes about the importance of humility and understands the need for grace, but it’s grace without the cross.

Tom Cooper’s The Marauders (Crown, 2015) is an entertaining crime novel set in Louisiana swamps. David Downing’s One Man’s Flag and Jack of Spies (Soho) are World War I novels (warning: sexual situations and language) by the author of the excellent John Russell series of novels set in Hitler’s Germany. Thomas Mallon’s novel Finale (Pantheon, 2015) portrays Washington in the 1980s and offers glimpses of Richard Nixon. Benjamin Percy’s novel The Dead Lands (Grand Central, 2015) is a well-crafted dystopia following some American apocalypse. —M.O.