Back to the Future

Having seen Michael J. Fox on a PBS program on Parkinson's disease, I immediately decided to see this film again. It holds up fairly well, though some of the jokes are less hysterical now than I remember them being then. Still, it really works well.

The topic of time travel, which has been treated numerous times by varied writers (a Wikipedia article puts it back to the 19th century), is treated with humor. And it works. At one point Doc Brown asks Marty McFly who the president is in 1985; when Marty replies Ronald Reagan, Doc is incredulous, and quips and I suppose Jerry Lewis is VicePresident. The DeLorean is still a nice touch.

New Reagan book

The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War.Mann, James (author).
Mar. 2009. 379p. Viking, hardcover, $27.95

Review: Lucky or resolute? Mann has reset the terms for the debate between Reagan’s liberal detractors and his conservative admirers. In this surprising history of how Reagan helped unravel the Soviet Empire, Mann adduces convincing evidence that the fortieth president deserves far more credit for ending the Cold War than his liberal critics have given him. However, that same evidence—drawn from probing interviews and newly available archives—smashes the standard conservative account of Reagan’s triumph. As it turns out, the great conservative icon of the 1980s toppled Soviet communism by ignoring bellicose rhetoric of the sort he himself had used to galvanize opposition to the Evil Empire. Defying his ideological advisors—including Nixon, Kissinger, and Buckley—Reagan reshaped the world by boldly reaching out to Mikhail Gorbachev in face-to-face negotiations on arms control. Mann persuasively shows that even when Reagan overruled moderates (such as Baker and Powell) who objected to his speech demanding that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall, he was engaging his Kremlin counterpart in a dance of rapprochement. A sharp challenge to theories that discount the decisive role of personalities in global affairs, Mann’s insightful portrait of Reagan reveals an adept statesman who concealed a calculating shrewdness behind a deceptively folksy demeanor.

— Bryce Christensen