3 titles on our nightstand: On Diedrich Bonhoeffer, David Horowitz and the Muslim Brotherhood

In the WSJ, Alex Kazam writes of a new biography titled “No Ordinary Men” on Dietrich Bonhoeffer and brother-in-law Hans von Dohnayi’s efforts to resist the Nazis during World War II.

Among the books and films this story has inspired, Ms. Sifton and Mr. Stern's narrative stands out for its elegance, brevity and measured tone: exciting but not sensational, moving but not sentimental, erudite but not academic. It is also enriched by the authors' connections to some of its central figures and events. Ms. Sifton is the daughter of Reinhold Niebuhr, and Mr. Stern fled Nazi Germany as a child in the 1930s.

Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi are sometimes celebrated as "martyrs." But in Ms. Sifton and Mr. Stern's telling, the two men never allowed themselves to speak of their sacrifices that way. In Dohnanyi's more modest formulation, they had simply taken "the path a decent person inevitably takes." And yet, as the authors soberingly conclude, "so few traveled that path—anywhere."

Over at Frontpage, author Theodore Dalrymple gave a comprehensive analysis of David Horowitz’s new book "The Black Book of the American Left." Dalyrmple writes:

“Horowitz’s essays collected here, written over twenty-five years, are dedicated to demonstrating that this leftism was not an ‘infantile disorder,’ to quote Lenin, or a mild and mostly harmless childhood illness like mumps, but more usually like a chronic condition with lingering after-effects and flare-ups. Those who suffered it only very rarely got over it fully, the late Christopher Hitchens being a good example of one who did not. He, Hitchens, could never bring himself to admit that he had for all his life admired and extolled a man who was at least as bad as Stalin, namely Trotsky; and his failure to renounce his choice of maître à penser became in time not just a youthful peccadillo of a clever adolescent who wanted to shock the adults but a symptom of a deep character flaw, a fundamental indifference to important truth. With the exception of Hitchens, for whom he has a soft spot and to whom in my opinion he is over-indulgent, Horowitz does not want any of the leftists to get away with it by rewriting not only history but their own biographies.”

Last but not least, over at National Review Andrew McCarthy sung the praises of John Guandolo’s new book "Raising a Jihadi Generation: Understanding the Muslim Brotherhood Movement in America," stating:

"The handbook lays out the Brothers’ history, its principles and goals, its interpretation of sharia, and its infrastructure in the United States – the key organizations and players. It provides insight into how radicals think, what motivates them, and how they recruit young people to the cause. It explains how the Brotherhood conducts influence operations under the guise of 'outreach,' targeting major Western institutions, very much including law enforcement, pressuring them to accept sharia standards and the Brotherhood’s blame-America-first worldview.

While Raising a Jihadi Generation is geared toward government agents, it will prove useful to any American who wants to learn about the threat. An agent who spent an hour reading it would learn more pertinent information than can be gleaned in a hundred of Washington’s preferred sensitivity-training courses."