What a country! No matter who’s elected this week, it’s heartening to know that America’s big enough to accommodate every shade of opinion — from Bill O’Reilly’s to Oliver Stone’s. The controversial, Oscar-winning filmmaker (“JFK,” “Platoon”) just came out with a 750-page book, “The Untold History of the United States,” that, written with American University history professor Peter Kuznick, has been hailed as a “compelling leftist primer.” Among its assertions: that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were neither strategically necessary nor morally defensible. Showtime’s doing a series based on it premiering Nov. 12; Stone and Kuznick will discuss the book Saturday at the 92nd Street Y. Here’s what’s in Stone’s library.
The Price of Vision
by Henry Wallace
Henry Wallace was an extraordinary man: secretary of Agriculture for eight years, vice president for four. This diary covers 1942-46,. when he struggled so valiantly to prevent the Cold War and stop the nuclear-arms race. I often wonder what the world might have been like if it had been Wallace instead of Truman.
The Fate of the Earth
by Jonathan Schell
It is as relevant now as it was in 1982, when it was published and helped spark an extraordinary anti-nuclear movement. Schell looks the horror of nuclear war straight in the face and doesn’t flinch. What right, he asks, do presidents and other policymakers have to threaten to end all life on our planet, and what are we as citizens going to do about it?
The Long Road to Baghdad
by Lloyd Gardner
Gardner is a great historian of US foreign policy. Here and in his other books, he chronicles the wrongheadedness of US policy dating back to the late 19th century. Iraq and Afghanistan may have been the latest blunders but they are not, as Gardner shows, aberrations.
American Dreamers
by Michael Kazin
[Kazin shows what] people forget: what a proud tradition the left has had in this country and why our future depends on its resurgence. The political center has shifted so far to the right that our country has become unrecognizable. Our civil liberties are under assault. The gap between rich and poor is obscene and growing. It’s time to move this country in a radically different direction.