Books, Arts & Manners: The Nation-State Foundation of Civilization

War, Peace, and the Presidency By Henry Paolucci

McGraw-Hill, $6.95 It’s not often that you come across a book that really makes a change, something not quantitative but qualitative. Most of the books you read are good books; you have a nose for the bad ones, and you avoid them; and so you almost always learn something from your own book of the day or the week. But Henry Paolucci’s book is something else. It did not merely provide me with this or that insight, or with one or another bit of information. It provided qualitative news—a perspective, a way of seeing the relations among seemingly disparate events, and of perceiving their larger meaning and tendency. The result, for me at least, was an increase in understanding.

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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War, Peace, and the Presidency By Henry Paolucci

McGraw-Hill, $6.95 It’s not often that you come across a book that really makes a change, something not quantitative but qualitative. Most of the books you read are good books; you have a nose for the bad ones, and you avoid them; and so you almost always learn something from your own book of the day or the week. But Henry Paolucci’s book is something else. It did not merely provide me with this or that insight, or with one or another bit of information. It provided qualitative news—a perspective, a way of seeing the relations among seemingly disparate events, and of perceiving their larger meaning and tendency. The result, for me at least, was an increase in understanding.