Taki Theodoracopulos

Taki Theodoracopulos is the founder, co-editor, and a columnist of The American Conservative, a national biweekly. He has also been a columnist of the London Spectator for 25 years.

Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Simon & Schuster, $12). I read the haunting tale of how money is the enemy of promise when I was 14, in prep school, and decided right then and there that I would go to the Riviera and look for Dick Diver rather than go to work. I have looked for him ever since, and regret nothing.

The Iliad by Homer (Penguin, $16). The greatest war story ever told. It’s all about heroes and heroines, gods as men, and men closely resembling gods. Men are constantly tempted to go beyond mortal limits, and we feel the pleasure as they enlarge our conception of human powers. Says Apollo to Achilles: “Remember what you are. Gods and men can never be equal.”

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The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (Pantheon, $13). The author’s only work—based in 1850 Sicily during the unification of Italy—it is a beautifully evoked defense of conservatism, its central theme the decline of old virtues and graces and the triumph of coarser values.

Hell in a Very Small Place by Bernard Fall (De Capo Press, $21). It is the siege and battle of Dienbienphu, where the French Foreign Legion fought gallantly against great odds, surrendering only when out of ammo and medical supplies. De Castries, the commander, named all the outposts after his numerous mistresses, around eight of them. Real beau-geste stuff, the only one missing being Gary Cooper in a kepi. Dienbienphu fell in 1954, and with it the French presence in Indochina. The Americans should have read Fall’s book before committing.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway (Simon & Schuster, $12). Papa’s Paris in the ’20s, and the book that made me move to the City of Light as soon as I had finished it. Those were wonderful, graceful days in Paris, without le drugstore and le McDonald’s, but with La Closerie des Lillas and Les Deux Maggots.

The Red and the Black