WSJ Book Review: THE WEEKLY STANDARD: A READER, 1995-2005

Wall Street Journal ^ | September 2, 2005 | ERICH EICHMAN

[OESY]

...Then the Weekly Standard arrived in 1995, and Washington was suddenly a two-magazine town. William Kristol, Fred Barnes and John Podhoretz came up with the idea and Rupert Murdoch came up with the money....

Ever since, the Standard has proudly flown the banner of conservatism from Washington each week, sometimes conservatism of the "neo" sort....

"The Weekly Standard: A Reader" offers an impressive sampling from the magazine's first 10 years. Irving Kristol, William's father, defines neoconservatism, insofar as it can be defined -- he calls it a "persuasion," not a movement or ideology. Andrew Ferguson, tired of hearing Edward R. Murrow praised as a journalist-hero, deflates Murrow's reputation with pointed elegance. Tucker Carlson tracks the 2000 McCain presidential campaign, from boom to bust. Christopher Caldwell parses French society after the shocking first round of the 2002 election, when Jean-Marie Le Pen and his nativist National Front forced a runoff with Jacques Chirac, the conservative president. Joseph Bottum sums up the achievement of Pope John Paul II. On the cultural front, John Podhoretz explains how Stephen Sondheim ruined the Broadway musical; Gertrude Himmelfarb pays tribute to Lionel Trilling; Philip Terzian tries to read the New York Times Magazine's centennial tribute to itself; and Matt Labash goes to a Red Lobster with Tammy Faye Bakker and finds only the Mix & Match Shrimp Combo worth praising.

It becomes noticeable, paging through the book's six-dozen entries, that not a few of the magazine's bylines, once familiar only to right-of-center readers, are now widely recognizable....

The true pleasure of "The Weekly Standard: A Reader," though, is not in tracking byline reputations but in reading the prose itself -- the spirited tone, the vividness of detail, the wide range of subjects, the coherence of the arguments and the panache with which they are made....

[OESY]

THE WEEKLY STANDARD: A READER, 1995-2005 Edited by William Kristol (HarperCollins, 538 pages, $27.95)

[goldstategop]

Irving Kristol was right... neoconservatism began - first at Commentary and then broke new ground at The Weekly Standard. In the past decade its wielded a lot of influence.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[OESY]

I agree. It's the best read around.