For those of us in school, reading for pleasure is too often something saved for vacation. Well, it’s now vacation. If you find yourself with some free time, consider the following. These titles will likely take you off the beaten path. Whether you agree with them or not, they’re sure to get you thinking.

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order
by Samuel Huntington, Touchstone Books (February 1998)
The most talked about (and least read) book of the year. In The Clash of Civilizations, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington argues that the post-Cold War world will be marked by conflict along "civilizational borders" and, in particular, along the border separating an expansionist Islam from a decadent West. For Huntington, cultural difference drives this conflict and, if the West is not to slip into an irreversible decline, it must learn to defend its historical culture against its many enemies, external and internal alike. Widely criticized when first published in 1997, The Clash of Civilizations now seems prophetic. No discussion of the causes and consequences of the War on Terror can afford to ignore it.

Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America
by John McWhorter, Harperperennial Library (August 2001)
Without a doubt, one of the most important books of 2001. The Civil Rights Movement set out to ensure that black people enjoyed the same chances as whites in modern America. In the space of a generation, it achieved phenomenal ends. So why is it, McWhorter asks, that black students continue to post starkly lower grades and test scores than any other group? His answer, which has annoyed and frustrated liberals of all races, is that blacks are themselves responsible for their continued academic underperformance. Deeply invested in a "cult of victimology" that (mistakenly) identifies white racism as the root of all their problems, McWhorter, who is himself black, believes most black Americans simply don’t try to compete in school. In making his point, McWhorter — a Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley and so someone who has himself had plenty of experience teaching students of all races — draws in equal measure upon academic studies and personal anecdote. The result is a forceful and often hilariously iconoclastic look at the politics of race in contemporary American education and culture. Now in paperback, Losing the Race is necessary reading for anyone who has even the slightest interest in recent debates over diversity and affirmative action.

The Killing of History: How Literary Critics & Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past
by Keith Windshuttle, Encounter Books (February 7, 2000)
In recent years, professional stagnation, theoretical pretension and politically motivated revisionism have combined to transform how history is studied at our universities. In The Killing of History, Australian historian Keith Windshuttle takes on those among his colleagues who give greater heed to what’s going on in the OpEds of the New York Times — than to that part of the past which they claim to study. The end of objectivity in historical studies and a mutilated understanding of the past, Windshuttle argues, has been the price of their neglect.

The Road to Oxiana
by Robert Byron, Oxford Univ Press (August 1982)
Quite a few books have been published in recent months about the culture of the Middle East. Few, however, rival Robert Byron’s 1937 travelog, The Road to Oxiana. Starting in Venice, Byron (a distant relation to the poet Lord Byron) spent the better part of a year traveling across the Middle East and Central Asia, eventually winding up on Afghanistan’s northern frontier. Along the way, Byron visits ancient mosques, examines the ruins of long dead but once prolific civilizations, and takes a dip in the canals of Venice, of which he writes "The bathing, on a calm day, must be the worst in Europe: water like hot saliva, cigar-ends floating into one’s mouth, and shoals of jelly-fish." Beautifully written and very funny, The Road to Oxiana is available in paperback with an introduction by renowned literary historian Paul Fussell.

The Conquest of Cool
by Thomas Frank, University of Chicago Press (October 1998)
For almost a decade now, Tom Frank and his colleagues at the Chicago-based journal The Baffler have been churning out left-populist critiques of American consumer-culture and its many casualties. In the Conquest of Cool, Frank sets his sites on the world of advertising. Beginning in the late-60’s, Frank argues, American advertisers developed a new strategy for selling to the young and would-be hip: dress up your product in the icons of counter-cultural rebellion and sell it as an act of resistance. Advertising became politics, politics became consumption, and all of us lost something in the process. If you’ve ever recoiled in horror and shame when watching one of Sprite’s hip-hop commercials, you know what Frank is talking about.

Radical Chic
by Tom Wolfe, Bantam Doubleday Dell (October 5, 1999)
The strange journey which landed Taliban John Walker in the Afghan desert began in Leonard Bernstein’s drawing room. Or so you will realize after reading Tom Wolfe’s hilarious satire of elite radicalism. Radical Chic might be the best book ever written on the absurdities of the American Left and is a fine introduction to one of America’s greatest living satirists.

No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family
by Christopher Hitchens, Verso Books (July 2000)
A regular contributor to The Nation, Vanity Fair, and a host of other publications, Christopher Hitchens recently gained international attention for his very public opposition to the pathetic attempts on the part of Noam Chomsky and other figures on the hate-America Left to blame the US for the September 11 attacks. But Hitchens has long been worth reading. Two years ago, he published his No One Left to Lie To, a stinging indictment of the arrogance and lust for power of Bill Clinton’s White House. One of a very small number of left wing intellectuals to break rank in the Clinton nineties, Hitchens is also one of the wittiest and most talented journalists writing today.

Alien Nation
by Peter Brimelow, Harperperennial Library (May 1996)
In the next two decades, the most recent wave of non-European immigrants to arrive on American shores will profoundly and irreversibly transform the social, political, and cultural life of the nation. According to Peter Brimelow, these changes, which are already afoot, are almost certain to be for the worse. In Alien Nation, Peter Brimelow, an editor at Forbes magazine and a Hoover Institute Fellow, addresses both the likely consequences of present high-levels of immigration as well as the strange silence in which the issue continues to be shrouded. Even if it is rarely acknowledged, immigration is the single most important issue facing contemporary America. For those who wish to face the future soberly, Brimelow’s lucid and analytically impeccable book is as good a place to begin as any.

Why I Am Not A Muslim
by Ibn Warraq, Prometheus Books (August 1995)
Islam, we’ve been told time and again since September 11, is a religion of tolerance, not of violence. Ibn Warraq disagrees. In Why I Am Not A Muslim, Warraq (in fact, a pseudonym used to protect the book’s author from disagreeableness on the part of his co-ethnics) argues that the notion of the "infidel" and its correlary, intolerance, lie at the very heart of Islam. A rare look into the Islamic world by a critical insider, Warraq’s take on Islam is an Islam too dangerous to ignore.

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper
by Nicholson Baker, Random House (April 10, 2001)
Over the past generation, a disaster has befallen America’s libraries: in the interests of saving money and space, a cadre of librarians and government officials have converted large chunks of our most important collections to microfiche and microfilm. Not only do these techniques yield reproductions which are more difficult to read than the printed word, they are also far more prone to degenerate over time. A passionate and exhaustively researched plea for library preservation, Double Fold is must reading