I highly recommend Malcolm Muggeridge's Chronicles of Wasted Time, a richly realized memoir and a stern reminder of just how long the progressive left has been defending the totalitarian enemies of the West and lying about both present and past in order to do so. Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a powerful and elegantly written memoir focusing on the Islamist oppression of women. Gregory Davis's book Religion of Peace is intelligent and useful guide to the political religion of Islam; Nonie Darwish's Now They Call Me Infidel is the eye-opening memoir of the daughter of the leader of the fedayeen, the first Muslim terrorists against Israel. Doestoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor" is the greatest and most profound 10 pages ever written about the scourge of progressive totalitarianism.

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Norman Podhoretz, Editor-at-large of Commentary and the author of ten books, the most recent of which is The Norman Podhoretz Reader, a selection of his writings from the 1950’s through the 1990’s. In June 2004, Mr. Podhoretz was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. His new book (his eleventh), World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism, will be published by Doubleday on 9/11.

Two weeks ago, after being put off for years by its enormous length, I finally got around to begin reading Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate, which is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. Now, having reached page 200, with about 650 closely printed ones yet to go, I can already see why. But so far I am not prepared to say, as many do, that it ranks in stature with War and Peace (not that any other novel does either--except, of course, for Anna Karenina).

Speaking of very great writers, there is a new biography of John Donne by John Stubbs, and I recommend it to anyone who loves Donne's poetry (and his sermons too) but knows very little about his amazing life. 

And speaking of long books, I am halfway through the first volume of William J. Bennett's exhilarating history of America, and before the summer is over, I expect to have finished the recently published second one as well.

For the rest, and as always, there is Trollope. Having recently reread all six of the Palliser novels, I look forward to gorging on the delicious Barchester series as well in the months ahead.

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James Woolsey, director of the CIA from 1993-95 and a former Navy undersecretary and arms-control negotiator.

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali: one of the great autobiographies of our time

Florence of Arabia by Christopher Buckley: strap yourself down in the chair or you'll fall out laughing

Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright: essential for anyone who wants to understand what happened/is happening.

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Robert Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., the founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator, a contributing editor to the New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. He is the author of the new book The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President's Life After the White House.

Having just published my own book, I know how important it is to a writer to be recognized for the work and wit the author has put into it, and I would like to suggest a dozen or so recent books. But the editors have suggested summer reading that I shall be undertaking and so I shall stick with four books.

The first is Andrew Roberts' A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900. Picking up on Churchill's magisterial history which he concluded in at 1900, Roberts brings Great Britain and its former colonies (the USA gets major billing) up to the present. In doing so he gives us all credit for the civilizing influence we have had on the world. It is revisionist history at its most elegant.

Next let me suggest Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man: a New History of the Depression. Friends of the New Deal will not like this particular revisionist history, for it makes clear that FDR had no greater clue to solving the Depression than Herbert Hoover, and Roosevelt was a greater threat to freedom.

Another book that will make great reading is Andrew Ferguson's Land of Lincoln. He is a superb writer and it is his wish to return reverence to the 16th President. From what I am told he does it with style.

Finally let me suggest another Lincoln book, though this is about a dastardly plot to steal the martyred president's body from its grave in Springfield Illinois in 1876. Thomas Craughwell's Stealing Lincoln's Body abounds with information about the amazingly goof-ball plot and about such things as the transformation of the Secret Service into being the presidential body guard. As my great great grandfather, P.D. Tyrrell, played a commanding role, you will understand my anticipation in reading it.

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Angela McGlowan, the president and chief executive officer of Political Strategies & Insights. She is a Republican political consultant and Fox News Channel contributor. She is the author of the new book book, Bamboozled: How Americans are being Exploited by the Lies of the Liberal Agenda.

For this summer, I am going back to a “classic.” A book by one of the most brilliant political strategists who worked for  three presidents and is presently chairman of Fox News, Roger Ailes. His 1995 book, You Are the Message: Secrets of the Master Communicators, is a necessity for anyone who wants to learn how to: communicate successfully, read others, and to create their own message. This book goes in depth on the techniques Ailes used during his years as a communications guru. I cannot wait to get some time to sit down and read this book over again this summer.

David Horowitz’s new book, which educates the reader on the Liberal takeover of college campuses, Indoctrination U: The Left's War Against Academic Freedom, is an eye opening work. Horowitz describes his Academic Bill of Rights which will rescue America’s Colleges from the grip of Liberals.  Indoctrination U is also an expansion of his 2006 work, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, where he criticized individual professors’ misconduct in the classroom. Horowitz has fought the war against the liberal agenda. He is now continuing to fight the fight to promote intellectual and social diversity in America’s Universities. He enforces the need for this moral campaign to succeed.

Wynton Hall, a professor and visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, has written another great political work, The Right Words, a collection of 17 speeches from GOP leaders. This book is more than just famous speeches; it is a behind the scenes analysis of each speech, its context, and what made these speeches powerful and historic. This book displays the valor and dedication of these leaders to public service, and whether or not you agree with their politics, you will admire their words.  From a country torn apart by war during Lincoln’s Gettysburg address to George W. Bush’s speech following the September 11 attacks, this book gives inspirational insight to some of the greatest speeches ever uttered.  I loved this book because the passion of politics is so strong through the words of great men who made great sacrifices for the benefit of America.

Newt Gingrich, former House Speaker and architect of the “Contract with America,” has teamed up with Nancy Desmond, CEO of the Center for Health Transformation and of the Gingrich Group, to write The Art of Transformation. These two brilliant leaders have produced a masterpiece that explains institutionalism and the importance of institutional transformation. This book is very thought provoking and I loved the read. It is clear these authors have used their experience with leadership and conflicts to inspire people everywhere to make the necessary changes for our country to thrive.

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Roger Kimball, co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author of many books, including The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art. He is the co-editor (with Hilton Kramer) of Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts, a collection that contains a generous sampling of the very best writing from The New Criterion.

Something old and something new. Let me start with something new: The Dangerous Book for Boys, accurately billed as "the perfect book for every boy from eight to eighty." Written by two brother, Conn and Hal Iggulden (no, I don;t know how to pronounce it) The Dangerous Book for Boys was published last fall in England. It was a runaway success, and an American version has just been published here. The book itself is a treat and its reception is suggests that things are not quite as bad as we'd thought. For here is a book that bucks the whole feminized, politically correct miasma that has crept into our society and says, in effect, "let boys be boys. They like digging in dirt, climbing trees, listening to stories of derring-do and adventure."  You'll learn how to make catapults, build a treehouse, start a fire with a magnifying class, and how to play poker. You'll learn about the explorer Scott and the battle of Waterloo and why the sky is blue. You'll even learn a bit about girls, in the invaluable chapter devoted to that esoteric topic.

Now for the old timer: Santayana's Character and Opinion in the United States. It's the second best book (after Tocqueville's Democracy in America) on our great country. It's beautifully written. And it is full of wisdom. Two nuggets: 1. "In a hearty and sound democracy all questions at issue must be minor matters; fundamental must have been silently agreed upon and taken for granted when the democracy arose." 2. "Free government works well in proportion as government is superfluous." How happy the republic that keeps both those observations in mind!

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Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, former acting chief of Communist Romania’s espionage service, is the highest ranking official ever to have defected from the Soviet bloc. He is author of Red Horizons, republished in 27 countries. In 1989, Ceausescu and his wife were executed at the end of a trial where most of the accusations had come word-for-word out of Pacepa's book. He is the author of the new book Programmed to Kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination.

The Death of a Dissident: the Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB (by Alex Goldfarb with Marina Litvinenko) is a must for anyone interested in foreign relations. This is not light reading for the beach. This is a frightening book about a frightening government that can waste $2 million worth of Plutonium 210 to silence a critic without batting an eye, although it rules over a country that inherited a gross national product smaller than that of Portugal—the poorest country in Western Europe.

In the United States today it seems to be regarded as bad manners to point out any KGB/FSB source of terrorism. The Death of a Dissident might change this, for it irrefutably documents that the over 6,000 former KGB officers who are running today’s Russia are spending a good part of her wealth on developing domestic and foreign terrorism. Russia is enjoying greater freedom today than ever before in the long history of that autocratic empire, but her fragile democracy may not be able to withstand a new wave of KGB terror. The Death of a Dissident is helping us to help Russia--whose borders still extend from the North Pole to the 35th parallel.

I also recommend Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolutions. It offers the gripping testimony of two American correspondents assigned to Moscow (Peter Baker and Susan Glasser) detailing Putin’s rise to unchecked power and the Soviet-style society he is trying to rebuild.

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Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He prosecuted the Blind Sheik and his organization for seditious conspiracy in 1995.

I'm in the middle of writing a book at the moment, so I'm way behind in my reading.  But when the dust finally settles, I'm anxious to get to the second volume of Bill Bennett's history of the United States.  Also on my list are David Pryce-Jones's study of France in Betrayal, John Agresto's Mugged By Reality about the U.S democracy project in Iraq, and The Professors, David Horowitz's latest on the sorry state of U.S. universities.  For fun, I'm also hoping to get to Roger Angell's Game Time, which a good friend tells me is a must for all baseball nuts.

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David Evanier, both a novelist and a journalist. He is the author of Red Love, The One-Star Jew, The Swinging Headhunter, Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin, and Making the Wiseguys Weep: The Jimmy Roselli Story. He is co-author with Joe Pantoliano of Who's Sorry Now. He is a former fiction editor of The Paris Review, assistant editor of The New Leader, assistant editor of Hadassah Magazine, writer for the civil rights and research division of the Anti-Defamation League, and a contributor to Commentary, The Weekly Standard, National Review, and The American Enterprise. He is the author of the new novel-in-stories, The Great Kisser.

I've read three plays of recent vintage about friendship that deeply impressed me. Kenneth Lonergan's "This Is Our Youth," despite its execrable title, has pinpoint dialogue and great depth, and is a very moving account of two boys scrounging toward manhood. Romulus Linney's "Klonsky and Schwartz" is about the relationship between the great and tortured poet Delmore Schwartz and his friend, poet Milton Klonsky. Quoting copiously from Schwartz's poetry, it still manages to be concretely grounded both in its dramatic conflict and in its place and time--New York bohemian life of the 1940s and `50s. "Red Light Winter" by Adam Rapp is an astoundingly moving account of two pals--one a cynical winner, the other a typical neurotic loser--who fall in love with the same prostitute in Amsterdam. Based on my reading of most of their work, I think Linney, who is of a much older generation, Rapp (despite some early lapses) and Lonergan are among our best contemporary playwrights.

Janet Hadda: "Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life." Hadda, a psychotherapist at UCLA, has written a succinct and insightful portrait of Singer, free of jargon and psychobabble. Singer was ensnarled by memories of his slaughtered brethren in the Holocaust and guilt about his talented writer brother, I.J. Singer, who saved his life, brought him to America and died very young. He emerges the quintessential writer-genius who lives a thoroughly miserable and haunted life.

John Simon: "On Film;" "On Theatre." Simon reminds us that cultural criticism can be an honorable calling, but in his singular genius also reminds us how rare it is, since these books confirm he is the only one of his rank.

Saul Bellow: "Something to Remember Me By." I am not a Bellow fanatic, and share Norman Podhoretz's belief that his characters are mainly mouthpieces for his ideas and are rather shrill and forced in their buoyancy. But I find that Bellow's shorter works are freer and looser and sometimes quite beautiful. That was always true of his novella, "Seize the Day," but David Horowitz in his brilliant memoir, "The End of Time," mentioned this novella and I read it with astonishment. An account of the young Bellow's adventure with a naked lady on a dentist's table (she steals his clothes, drops them out a window, and he has to slink home in a dress) on the day his mother is dying, is pitch-perfect fiction and somewhat reminiscent in subject matter of O'Neill's great play, "A Moon for the Misbegotten."

Arnold Rampersad: "Ralph Ellison." An excellent and judicious biography that proves its case that Ellison is one of the foremost writers of the 20^th century, a feat accomplished with one novel, "invisible Man" and his books of essays, primarily "Shadow and Act."

Budd Schulberg: "What Makes Sammy Run" and Jerome Weidman: "I Can Get It For You Wholesale." These corrosive Depression books about Jewish scoundrels are far more negative than the books Philip Roth wrote many years later and was so unfairly excoriated for. Who knew? They are both wonderful novels that rip off the page. Despite their use of the vernacular of the times, like any masterpieces they aren't dated in the least.

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As part of the research for the weekly Qur'an commentary, "Blogging the Qur'an," that I've begun at HotAir.com, I'm reading Illuminating Discourses on the Noble Qur'an by Mufti Muhammad Aashiq Elahi Muhajir Madani. The Islamist, Ed Husain's account of how he joined, and later broke with, the jihadist movement in Britain, is also on the summer list, along with Lionel Trilling's The Middle of the Journey, which is an enormously absorbing novelistic account of, in a vastly different context, just what Husain went through: the giving of oneself over to an ideology, and the subsequent disenchantment and disengagement. That will lead in turn to Osama bin Laden's Messages to the World, edited by Bruce Lawrence, as Osama tries to head off just that disengagement and to attract new recruits to the jihadist cause -- in the process crafting a multifaceted jihadist appeal that law enforcement officials and all anti-jihadists would do well to study and ponder how to counteract.