Charles Krauthammer's 6 favorite books

The Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated political columnist recommends works by Jorge Luis Borges and Isaiah Berlin

Krauthammer

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (Grove, $14). I first encountered the great Argentine fabulist on my 22nd birthday, a day I remember because I was so profoundly influenced and moved by his deeply philosophical imagination — abstract, almost mathematical, and yet powerfully human. I've been haunted ever since by this collection's masterpiece, "The Library of Babel."

The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn (Oxford, $25). A kind of historical companion to Borges's fiction because both provide relentless, yet deeply sympathetic, chronicles of human folly. This fascinating history of the various apocalyptic sects that arose in the Middle Ages reveals the inexhaustible human longing for certainty — and the terror it invariably unleashes.

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