This year, the Claremont Review of Books is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a hefty double issue, which will be coming down subscribers‘ chimneys not too long from now. But first, a stocking stuffer: it’s our custom this time every year to gather friends, contributors, and editors for a roundup of reading recommendations. Just in time for the holidays, and with very warm greetings from our Claremont family to yours, we’re pleased to present this year’s bounty.
***
Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
The Washington Examiner
Last spring I decided to reread some classic boys’ books, each of which I had last read many years ago: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901). In each, a boy embarks on a perilous journey, interacts with adults both helpful and (mostly) pernicious, and ultimately reaches a successful conclusion. In other words, these are stories of how a boy becomes a man. At a time when boyhood seems in crisis and manhood is often seen as a pathology, these books are reminders that both can be good things.
It turns out that Twain (born 1835) actually met and became a mutual admirer of both Stevenson (born 1850) and Kipling (1865) while the younger men were traveling through the United States. Twain, two decades younger than Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray, became the kingpin of a transatlantic brotherhood of writers.
Reading Twain led me to James (2024), Percival Everett’s ingenious account of Huck’s voyage as seen by the runaway slave Jim. Everett makes a point to show how Jim and other slaves speak two languages, one to assuage white people, the other to communicate with one another. This sent me to Eugene Genovese’s classic Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974), which describes how slaves code-switched from one argot to another.
Having spent time in Northern Europe, where adults and teens routinely speak English as well as the national language, and reflecting on my ancestral Sicily, where I gather adults and schoolchildren are fluent in both standard Italian and the considerably more difficult Sicilian dialect, it strikes me that we Americans—gifted with command of the imperial language of English—mostly fail to develop the bilingualism of which human beings of almost all mental capacities are easily capable. I am told that my grandfather Charles Barone, born a year after his family left Sicily for Buffalo, had a command of English that got him through college and medical school, and understood enough Sicilian (but not Italian) to communicate with Sicilian-speaking patients.
I also dipped into Ron Chernow’s 2025 biography of Mark Twain, an experience which has convinced me to plunge in fully as soon as possible. Huckleberry Finn was Twain’s attempt to teach readers in the more orderly America of the 1880s, chastened as it was by war, what the disorderly pre-Civil War America was like. I have come to think of the antebellum era as that of “the headlong republic,” an America whose population was growing 30% or more each decade and hurtling toward a future whose actual character was utterly unclear.
Twain, who grew up in that republic, on the Mississippi River boundary between slave and free states, was trying to tell Americans some hard truths rather than glorious legends. Percival Everett has claims to doing the same. Jim, or James, is both authors’ Sancho Panza, in that he tries to disabuse Twain’s Don Quixotes—the adolescent Tom Sawyer, the even more self-deceiving adults, and the awakening Huck—of their unwise reliance on romantic books.
***
Mark Blitz
Fletcher Jones Professor of Political Philosophy
Claremont McKenna College
This year I will recommend five items, beginning with the speeches of Margaret Thatcher. You can find a good collection in The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcher, edited by Robin Harris (1997). Or you can make a sensible use of your computer and hear her deliver some of her most famous ones. These speeches remind us of the combination of sound principle, courage, and judgment that characterizes political excellence. They also remind us of what Great Britain once was and, one hopes, will be again. My second recommendation is the title essay in Leo Strauss’s What is Political Philosophy (1957). It offers reflections that are both deep and accessible on political philosophy and on “cosmology.” You can follow this with a study of Plato’s Statesman, his third great political dialogue, and of the other two dialogues, the Theaetetus and Sophist, in the trilogy that the Statesman completes.
***
Paul Cartledge
Emeritus A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture
Cambridge University
It’s been a bumper year for us historians of ancient Greece and Rome. I’ll confine myself to just two recommendations.
The History of the Peloponnesian War is actually a history, and a very personal one, of one stage in the protracted conflict between Sparta and its allies on the one side, and Athens and its on the other, during the latter part of the 5th century B.C. Its author is Thucydides, the brilliant Athenian historian. Or was he an historian? Was he rather, or also, a political theorist? And a great literary artist too? Seasoned classicist Robin Waterfield, working alongside Durham University Professor Polly Low, has produced a superb new translation that does ample justice to all three Thucydides-es.
Few cities have had or continue to have as global an impact as ancient Greece’s Sparta. Today Sparta is perceived as far from cuddly or laudable (it is associated, for example, with Greece’s late and unlamented neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn). But any seriously objective attempt to get behind the myth or mirage that Sparta’s many fans and enemies have projected over the centuries is laudable. Professor Andrew Bayliss’s Sparta: Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower is as successful as any and more so than most. Sparta was—happily—unique, and yet its combination of corporate heroism with damnable oppression contains much valuable instruction regarding how empires rise…and fall.
***
David DesRosiers
Publisher
RealClearPolitics
My favorite big book of the year is Jordan B. Peterson’s We Who Wrestle with God.
This master class of exegetical jujitsu comes in at a lean 576 pages. In defense of its length, We Who Wrestle with God is half the page count of the Old Testament, which sets the parameters of Peterson’s weighty reflections on the nature of being and the intended relationship of a created being—born in the likeness of God—to its Creator.
True to the title of a previous book, Peterson offers the perplexed a map pointing onward and upward, after the biblical model of Jacob’s ladder. He is an unparalleled cartographer of the human condition. To my fellow Straussians, I say: Peterson is the real exegetical deal. His public and popular success is earned, and We Who Wrestle with God is indisputably a critical success. It’s a Yeshiva-worthy book that ought to guide future Judeo-Christian generations. I even think and pray that it could go some way toward opening up the minds and hearts of the Sam Harrises of the world.
I do hope that this Old Testament study is followed by one on the Good News of the Cross and God’s New Deal with humanity, as summed up in the joyous Easter declaration: “He is risen.” Until then, Peterson has a course on the New Testament—the Sermon of the Mount—over at Peterson Academy, which presently has 66 courses in its growing catalogue of liberating offerings from our nation’s best thinkers.
Allan Bloom may have determined that that the American Mind was “Closing,” and Arthur Schlesinger may have declared the country’s propensity to “Disunite” a feature, not a bug. But Peterson is not satisfied merely with diagnosing the present crisis. He is a prescriptive prophet of a better way.
***
John J. DiIulio, Jr.
Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society
University of Pennsylvania
If Charles Murray did not exist, then the God in whom he has recently come to believe would surely wish to create him.
In Taking Religion Seriously (2025), the latest of Murray’s couple of dozen books, the long-time “overeducated agnostic” recounts his “meandering pilgrimage to belief.” Religion, he writes, is “something that…can be taken seriously in the same way that Chinese history or plate tectonics can be taken seriously—by reading a lot, thinking about what you’ve read, and bouncing your reactions off people who know more than you do.”
Murray would rather teach than preach. “I don’t proselytize,” he writes. And wisely so. Murray knows that belief in a Big Banger behind the Big Bang, in a God-gifted reality that runs from quarks and anti-quarks, radiation, and gravity-clumped matter right down to extinct reptiles and your favorite bartender, can be cultivated in more ways than one.
Of course, most people’s roads to religion are not paved by “reading a lot.” But there are those who need to know that faith can be nurtured, not negated, by the heavy-duty exercise of reason. Murray, like the many world-class physicists, paleontologists, and other hard scientists I know who are also professing Catholics, is a role model in this regard.
I have long been proud to call Murray a friend. Friendship was the theme of Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (2012), in which he skillfully diagnosed the loss of social capital and cohesion in one Philadelphia community. That book sits on my “Murray Classics” shelf alongside, among others, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (1984); What It Means to be a Libertarian (1997); In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State (2006); and Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America (2021).
Read or re-read those books along with his latest one, and you’ll discover or re-discover that Murray is first and foremost a teacher, the kind who is excited to lay bare his reasoning and share the fruits of his forthright intellectual labors—with one and all, but most especially with those who might be inclined to doubt, deny, or disparage his own conclusions.
During the controversy surrounding The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (co-authored with Richard J. Hernstein in 1996), I shared with certain of its critics (not all of whom had actually read it) an extraordinary essay on statistics. Written beautifully in non-technical terms, the essay explained regression analysis and highlighted the importance of mining not just inter-group differences but also intra-group variance in characteristics and outcomes. My interlocutors loved it, or did until I admitted stretching fair-use copyright laws and revealed that it was from Murray’s Afterword to the book.
In recent years, I’ve heard it uttered that Murray has been “rehabilitated” into ever-wider respectability. Okay, great; but, read his books carefully, and you’ll see that he needed no rehabilitating. Besides, as he found in his second book, Beyond Probation (1979), “rehabilitation” rarely works.
To read Murray, agree or disagree with his analyses and conclusions, is to read an epically thoughtful and capacious thinker on some of the most important questions of our time and now, with Taking Religion Seriously, of all time. So, a very Merry Christmas to Charles, and prayers for all whom God loves and believes in even when they don’t love and believe in Him.
***
Christopher Flannery
Contributing Editor
Claremont Review of Books
“We began the Dance.”
With help from a motley crew of ink-stained wretches—framers of political documents, speech makers, songwriters, poets, letter writers, journalists, book writers, and now digital scribblers—American phrases gather and accumulate in the course of American events. “Live free or die”; “We hold these truths”; “We the people”; “One if by land, two if by sea”; “The shot heard round the world”; “A new birth of freedom”; “Purple Mountain Majesties.” I hadn’t heard this one—“We began the Dance”—until I read James Ceaser’s good book, Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (1997).
It is from a letter John Adams wrote in 1815:
I had been plunged head and Ears in the American Revolution from 1761 to 1798 (for it had been all revolution during the whole Period)….
The last 25 Years of the last Century and the first 15 Years of this, may be called the Age of Revolutions and Constitutions. We began the Dance, and have produced Eighteen or Twenty Models of Constitutions, the Excellencies and defects of which you probably know better than I do. They are no doubt the best for Us that We could contrive and agree to adopt (emphasis added).
Ceaser tells how early in our Republic, the most sophisticated European intellectuals held it as scientific truth that “all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America—that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed awhile in our atmosphere,” as Hamilton put it. Reconstructing America includes a chapter on the most influential philosopher of the 20th century, who held that America was the greatest catastrophe that had occurred in history so far. America was night descending on the world. The literary critics and other woke intellectuals who consider themselves authorities in our world today are descendants of this long tradition, in which the smug and the desk-bound claim to grasp reality as it is.
Caesar shows that these authorities were and are “far gone in Utopian speculations,” and that the American Founders had a much sounder grasp of reality than any of their critics among the scientists, philosophers, or literary critics. Specifically, the founders grasped the reality of politics. They did not try to explain politics by reference to some force beyond politics—evolution or history or anything else. They took seriously their own “reflection and choice,” duly seasoned with “accident and force.” And doing so, they provided us with an excellent example of how, in Ceaser’s words, we too might “reclaim for political phenomena an autonomous place in our understanding of the world.” The American revolutionaries and founders were dancing with destiny. They set out to “vindicate the honor of the human race.” The dance goes on, and we are invited.
Something like this, in a more broadly philosophic way, is the point of Stanley Rosen’s The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy (2002). As an old friend likes to say, the real crisis of our time is the crisis of what Leo Strauss called the cave beneath the cave. It is a crisis that keeps us from living in the natural cave where human life, with all its imperfections, flourishes. That natural cave is akin to what Stanley Rosen calls the “ordinary.” Science, philosophy, and “reason” all originate in the “ordinary,” or what could be called the cave or “common sense.” And science and “reason” and philosophy cannot help having to give an account of the ordinary. But it eludes them, necessarily.
I think Strauss was more or less making this point in this enigmatic sentence from Thoughts on Machiavelli (1958): “The problem inherent in the surface of things, and only in the surface of things, is the heart of things.” This also seems to have been the point of a conversation I overheard in a parking lot in Claremont Village, California, circa 1983:
Graduate Student: “I find Saul Bellow’s novels interesting, but not profound.”
Harry Jaffa: “I find them profound, but not interesting.”
In every other Louis L’Amour book, a good guy with a few bullets in him may find himself far out in the high desert hiding from a gang of bad guys trying to finish him off. At moments like this, you want to know that when you make a bowl out of tree bark to boil some water over your dry kindling fire to cleanse your wounds, the bark won’t burn beneath the waterline. The water will cool it. Reality matters. Louis L’Amour tells the story of his own attempts to come to grips with reality as a young land and sea hobo on the make in the 1920s and ’30s: Education of a Wandering Man: A Memoir (1990).
Reality, among its other mysteries, brings joy to the world.
Merry Christmas!
***
John B. Kienker
Managing Editor
The Claremont Review of Books
In anticipation of next year’s Semiquincentennial, here are a few suggestions on the way to celebrating a glorious Fourth:
There are likely to be several titles on the Declaration coming out in time for the approaching anniversary, but I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advance copy of Matthew Spalding’s The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence. This new book invites Americans to fall in love with their country by rediscovering the goodness and greatness of its first principles. It is a solid introduction to our founding document, touching on the historical events surrounding it, the effort that went into drafting it, and the heated debate over ratifying it. Spalding enriches his account by turning often to the founders themselves to explain the Declaration’s words.
For a slimmer introduction, try The Founder’s Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What We Risk by Losing It (2020), by Larry P. Arnn. This meditation on the founders’ political thinking emphasizes the way the Declaration and the Constitution spring from the same comprehensive and unified philosophical point of view, whose basic structure Arnn elegantly sets out.
If you want a deeper dive, there’s Thomas G. West’s The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom (2017). Though not strictly speaking a book on the Declaration (alone), it is the single best presentation in print of the founders’ political thought as a coherent system (it is itself something of a scholarly expansion on West’s earlier (1997) Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America). The book’s first 150 pages or so give generous attention to the Declaration, supplemented by public statements at the national, state, and local level, to explain what it means that government’s rightful purpose is the protection of natural rights. Correcting common misunderstandings along the way, West then turns to policies the founders promoted that follow from these first principles.
The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (1922), by Carl L. Becker, is a classic for a reason. This more-than-a-century-old book remains surprisingly spritely and readable, running nicely through the Declaration’s words, style, argument, and editorial process. But skip the last chapter on philosophical influences and read Tom West’s book instead.
If you pick up Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (2014), jump ahead to page 107 and start at chapter 14, where the book turns to the reading of the Declaration promised in its subtitle. It is a close, careful reading—a slow reading, as Allen says—offering observant, accessible reflections on the document’s word choice, structure, edits, meaning, and implications throughout. Allen is especially impressive for her insight into the lawyerly list of grievances against the king.
Of course, out of filial piety, I should mention, too, that much of the best interpretive writing on the Declaration of Independence traces back to the groundwork laid by Harry V. Jaffa in several of his polemical essays. Many of these essays refute traditionalist, libertarian, liberal, and Straussian misconstructions of the founders’ views (echoes of which can still be heard today). The major pieces can be found primarily in How to Think About the American Revolution: A Bicentennial Cerebration (1978) and American Conservatism and the American Founding (1984) (sadly, both out of print, though you might check this invaluable resource), as well as in the posthumously edited The Rediscovery of America: Essays by Harry V. Jaffa on the New Birth of Politics (2019).
Happy 250th!
***
Andrew Klavan
Novelist
Host, The Andrew Klavan Show
Two books I read this year left indelible marks.
British psychiatrist, philosopher, neuroscientist, and all-around polymath Iain McGilchrist must have poured much of what he knows into The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (2021), his 1,500-page, two-volume magnum opus. But though it’s a long read, it’s wise and wonderful company beginning to end. The thesis: we have given mastery to the wrong side of our brains and so become all but blind to the holy carnival of consciousness that is creation. McGilchrist harnesses science, literature, and philosophy in his attempt to give us back our sight.
At a crisis moment at the end of my youth, I was desperately seeking a way to meld a burgeoning vision of the world with my little skill for writing fast-paced genre fiction. After reading ten pages of Wilkie Collins’s masterful Victorian thriller The Woman in White (1859), I sat up in bed and whispered: “There it is!” What a pleasure, these many decades later, to return to this riveting plot with its unforgettable characters and see that, yes, it really is that good. Some credit Collins’s friend Charles Dickens with a heavy—ahem—edit. But while Collins never topped it—no one has ever topped it—it’s clearly his very own dark and fabulous masterpiece.
***
Spencer A. Klavan
Associate Editor
The Claremont Review of Books
You should always read the book before watching the movie, but in this case it’s a matter of urgency: if you’ve got even the slightest interest in science fiction then run, don’t walk to the nearest place where books are sold and read Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary (2021) before the movie comes out next March. Don’t even watch the trailer if you can help it. The plot twists in this novel are what make it breathtaking—with each one, the bottom drops out of the story and our hero is suddenly plunged into a far vaster and grander narrative than he seemed to be in. Two of the best moments are spoiled in the trailer, for reasons that make good commercial sense but will ruin the dizzy exhilaration that only reading the story chapter by chapter can create. Even sci-fi skeptics may find themselves charmed by the narrator, a dorky schoolteacher who wakes up on page one to find himself the unlikely captain of a deep space mission to save the world. Weir, known chiefly for his previous bestseller The Martian (2011), is much livelier and fleeter of foot than many other writers in the genre—his characters more realistically pockmarked, his plots more deftly controlled. A book I wish I could read again for the first time.
Far less readable but equally moving in its own way is Why Only Us (2016), by linguists Noam Chomsky and Robert C. Berwick. Chomsky is not someone readers of the CRB are likely to admire for his interventions into contemporary politics. But in his field, which is the study of the human capacity for language, he is unmatched. Chomsky’s work, which revolutionized the field, represents in many ways a triumphant rehabilitation of Aristotle’s insight that “mankind alone among the animals possesses language.” Language, that is, not merely in the superficial sense of spoken words but in the deeper sense of logos, that mystical and deep-set order in things which none of our fellow creatures—for all their other noble graces—can absorb into their souls as deeply as humans do. It’s difficult to overstate how critical this fact is now, when artificial intelligence is producing such mesmerizing, but ultimately superficial, imitations of human speech. If Chomsky’s arcane terms of art and Berwick’s brain scans give you headaches, read Stephen M. Barr’s admirably eloquent summation in First Things. Chomsky wouldn’t agree with me about this, but his research is awash with the reflected gleam of that luminous Christmas truth: “In the beginning was the Word…and the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”
***
Heather Mac Donald
Thomas W. Smith fellow
Manhattan Institute
I listened to Gone with the Wind on Audible this year, not having read the book since I was young and not remembering much of anything about it. From the movie I had remembered only the famous “Frankly, my dear…” line. Please don’t think that if you have watched Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable duke it out that you have come at all close to experiencing one of the world’s great novels—perhaps the greatest of all anti-war novels. Anyone fantasizing desultorily about some version of a hot civil war to cut through the irreconcilable disputes between conservatives and progressives should read or reread Gone with the Wind. It is a reminder of how cataclysmic a war on one’s own soil is and how destructive of everything that had once seemed secure.
The novel allows a reader to see the Civil War and Reconstruction from the loser’s perspective and even for a moment to empathize with that perspective. This reversal of viewpoints feels like an act of radical taboo breaking. Despite the contemporary Left’s deconstruction of “truth” and its stated desire to topple dominant narratives, it would not tolerate for an instant such a challenge to the winner’s history of the Civil War if Gone With the Wind were published for the first time today. Even as it is, the movie was summarily dropped from HBO’s streaming service amid the fervor of 2020 and restored only with a sniveling “disclaimer.” Tellingly, there is only one version of it on Audible. It is fine in its own right, but ordinarily a book of this stature would have brought forth multiple readings. We can be grateful that Mitchell’s masterpiece preceded our era of censorious dogmatism, since it memorializes, with gripping detail and psychological acuity, a now-buried reality that was an integral part of the American experience for at least a century and a half.
George Schuyler (1895–1977) was a black libertarian journalist who travelled the world reporting on race relations and the lethal failures of Communism and Pan-Africanism. Mary Grabar’s synopsis of his life in Chronicles (she is writing Schuyler’s biography) introduced me to this unfairly forgotten author for the first time. Schuyler’s refusal to divvy up racial blame and victimhood according to our current Manichean schemata has undoubtedly contributed, along with his eventually ultra-right politics, to his current obscurity.
I listened on Audible to Black No More (1931), a tour-de-force comic novel. Schuyler spins the novel’s sci-fi solution to America’s race problem out to its audacious logical conclusion which this reader, at least, did not see coming but which, once arrived, was breathtaking in its comic inevitability. Schuyler is equally scathing toward white racists and black grifters, while conveying the dilemmas of being black in a white man’s world with a lighter touch than that of Ralph Ellison. No wonder he drew the admiration of H.L. Mencken. The Audible reader is excellent and captures the central character’s sunny charm despite the odds against him.
I then picked up Schuyler’s autobiography, Black and Conservative (1966). The most compelling sections of that work recount Schuyler’s childhood in Syracuse, NY, and his Army service in the lead-up to World War I. Schuyler was raised in an upwardly aspiring household; his family obeyed all the bourgeois norms, but were not too proud to grow their own food. Their propriety is a heartbreaking reminder of how much the oppositional culture of the 1960s destroyed America’s best hope for racial reconciliation.
***
Daniel J. Mahoney
Senior Fellow
The Claremont Institute
Let me begin by heartily recommending what is undoubtedly the book of the year. The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, published by the indispensable Encounter Books, is the masterful two-volume work by two impressively erudite and talented historians, Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins. The first volume, for which Hankins had responsibility, deals with “The Ancient World and Christendom” through the Renaissance and the Machiavellian revolution in politics and ethics which helped inaugurate modernity. Hankins combines judicious (and compellingly readable) narrative history; ample color paintings and artwork; carefully selected and sketched biographies of statesmen, heroes, villains, warriors, saints, and philosophers; and remarkably helpful chronologies, maps, and “threads” or recurring themes.
The ample primary sources, from Homer’s Iliad through the “St. Crispin’s Day” speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V, are cited faithfully, concisely, and judiciously. This is history, “warts and all,” that nonetheless elevates and inspires. It is completely free from the spirit of negation and repudiation that dominates so much of academic scholarship today. Volume 1 is out at a mere $100 (it is a steal for what one gets in return), and volume II will appear at the beginning of the new year. The second volume, of comparable length and written primarily by Guelzo, picks up the story in the 16th century and takes it into the 21st. It is of the same high quality and treats the familiar (and less familiar) with insight and gusto. The perfect book to give for Christmas, one that can help rejuvenate a thoughtful and vibrant appreciation of the Western tradition in all its amplitude.
On November 1, 2025 Pope Leo XIV wisely named St. John Henry Newman, better known to many as “Cardinal Newman,” as a Doctor of the Catholic Church. But, alas, much nonsense is written about the great Newman, that 19th-century convert to Catholicism in a still deeply anti-papist England. His robust, non-relativistic conception of conscience is confused with the very “self-will” and subjectivism he meant to oppose. He is lauded for a free-floating (and largely mythical) contribution to “ecumenism,” and his notion of the “development of doctrine” (let’s say, how the doctrine of the Trinity was codified and formalized over time) is confused with relativism and historicism. The theologian Reinhold Hütter has written the perfect riposte to these distortions and fictions in John Henry Newman on Truth and Its Counterfeits, published in 2020 and available in paperback from Catholic university of America Press.
In 2025, I was privileged to write forewords to two stellar books by outstanding French political philosophers, Pierre Manent and Chantal Delsol. The first book, Pierre Manent’s Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition, makes Blaise Pascal’s paradoxical Christian rationalism come alive for contemporary readers. Manent rescues Pascal from false accusations of fideism and irrationalism (the “heart” Pascal appeals to is a cognitive faculty), reveals his sober anti-utopian political sensibility, and challenges the widespread view that the French scientist and Christian apologist promoted a “sad religion.” Manent’s book restores luster to a “Christian proposition” more and more unknown, forgotten, and even despised by Europeans who have succumbed to indifference as much as atheism.
Chantal Delsol’s Prosperity and Torment in France: The Paradox of the Democratic Age is an impassioned reflection by a conservative-minded thinker about how her beloved country, still comparatively free and prosperous, has succumbed to an indiscriminate “passion for equality” (as Tocqueville called it) that leads to a permanent political malaise and deep-seated civic and psychological discontents. Both volumes are published by the University of Notre Dame Press, which has established itself as one of the most open and serious academic publishers in the country (publishing, for example, most of Solzhenitsyn’s works in English).
Finally, let me recommend another vitally important book recently published by that same press: Alexander Podrabinek’s Between Prison and Freedom: Memoirs of a Soviet Dissident. Expertly translated by Marian Schwartz, Podrabinek’s dignified book tells the story of an honest man who committed himself “to live not by lies” and paid the price for it by eventual incarceration in prison and labor camps. This book stands alongside Punitive Medicine, Podrabinek’s account of the Soviet “psychiatric hospitals” in which dissidents and political prisoners were deemed mentally ill, as a signal contribution to the anti-totalitarian wisdom of our time.
***
Ken Masugi
Senior Fellow
The Claremont Institute
I must begin my recommendations with the latest from my esteemed colleague Edward Erler, who fulfills Harry Jaffa’s commission in Prophetic Statesmanship: Harry Jaffa, Abraham Lincoln, and the Gettysburg Address (2025). At Jaffa’s insistence and on his behalf, Erler carries to completion the Civil War book series that began with Crisis of the House Divided (1959) and continued with A New Birth of Freedom (2000)—a book which, despite its title, did not cover the Gettysburg Address. How to deal with Jaffa’s apparent correction or repudiation of his classic earlier book? Erler takes up this difficult question. Well done, faithful servant.
In a previous book recommendation I celebrated the first volumes of former University of Dallas and Claremont Graduate School student Tim Seibel’s Freedom Voyages series (2023)—ironic, road atlas-type portrayals of landscapes, courthouses, restaurants, and sights in small town America. Following his photos of Midwest and California counties, he has published Volume III, on the towns in Illinois that hosted the Lincoln-Douglas debate, and Volume IV, subtitled “Christmastime in Texas” (2024). So we are invited to experience how small-town Texans celebrate Christmas. Having just moved to Tennessee from his earlier base of Colorado Springs, Seibel can tempt us with celebrations of freedom and local patriotism in the South, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeast. Mention of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in turn requires a nod to Brenda Hafera’s award-winning Heritage Foundation database of national parks, complete with assessments of enlightened patriotism and wokeness in their official presentations.
Catholic University philosophy professor Michael Pakaluk adds to his extraordinary commentaries on the Gospels of Mark and John with Be Good Bankers: The Economic Interpretation of Matthew’s Gospel, with a Fresh Translation (2025). The invocation comes from a passage on friendship by St. Francis de Sales, who cited other sources, which Pakaluk tracked down while completing his Harvard philosophy dissertation on friendship in Aristotle.
Angelo Codevilla’s many paeans to friendship and patriotism in both scholarly and popular form are reflected in the wonderful volume of eulogies gathered by Ryan Williams, Fighting Enemies Foreign and Domestic (2025). As contributor Steven Hayward put it, Angelo was our “compleat political thinker.”
Finally, I commend my old grad school classmate Joe Sachs’ translations of Homer and late graduate scholar professor Seth Benardete’s commentary, The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey (2008).
***
Sally C. Pipes
CEO
Pacific Research Institute
Congratulations to the CRB on its 25th anniversary. My recommendation for the Christmas reading list this year is My Fight For Canadian Health Care: A 30-Year Battle To Put Patients First (2025), which I reviewed in “Where Health Care Went to Die” (Summer 2025). The author is noted Canadian orthopedic surgeon Dr. Brian Day, who has lost his agonizing battle to bring some much-needed competition to Canada’s disastrous single-payer health care system. His famous and successful private Cambie Clinic based in Vancouver, B.C., was used not only by patients who were facing very long waiting lists but by politicians of all political stripes.
Canada’s health care system was completely taken over by the federal government in 1984. Private health care was outlawed for anything considered “Medically Necessary.” Amid shockingly long waits at public clinics and doctors’ offices (30 weeks today from seeing a primary care doctor to treatment by a specialist), Dr. Day’s surgery center took the pressure off the government-run system and gave patients access to timely care.
But a private alternative was unacceptable in the eyes of the provincial and federal governments or the courts. Ultimately, after many years of fighting British Columbia’s government and very high costs, Dr. Day lost his battle in the Canadian Supreme Court. It was a setback for patients and for needed health care reform in my native country.
In America today, there is a strong push to move to a single-payer, “Medicare for All” system as touted for many years by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the “Pied Piper of Single Payer”. While a complete takeover of our health care system by the federal government is not possible today under the current makeup of Congress, the process is taking place through incremental measures. They started with President Obama’s “Obamacare”—a steppingstone to single payer which became law in March 2010.
The slow march toward single-payer continued with the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which introduced price controls on drugs covered under Medicare; Trump’s “Most Favored Nation” Executive Order, which tied U.S. drug prices to those in other developed countries; tariffs on pharmaceuticals imported from other countries, which will destroy the vast majority of innovation that takes place in the U.S.; and the expansion of Obamacare through the proposed continuation of the enhanced premium subsidies introduced under the American Rescue Plan of March 2021 when the COVID pandemic was in effect (not achieved, in the event, by the recent government shutdown, but still up for a vote in days to come).
We do not need to pursue an experiment in universal, government-run health care in this country. We would find ourselves, like in Canada and the U.K., facing long waits for care, a shortage of doctors, and a lack of access to the latest medical treatments and procedures. Brian Day has given us a strong warning of what not to do in America.
***
R.R. Reno
Editor
First Things Magazine
Books often inform; they sometimes delight. Others provoke, although more often than not we read to deepen our beliefs—especially if, like me, you are in the business of convincing others that your ideas are correct and should be adopted. It was for this reason that I took up a collection of essays from 2007-2017 by Renaud Camus, Enemy of the Disaster, translated last year by Louis Betty and published by Vauban Books.
Camus is known best for a phrase he coined: le grand remplacement, or “the great replacement.” It describes more than the influx of Muslims into France. Camus sees the larger phenomenon of globalization as an economic and technocratic project in which human beings are made into interchangeable objects to be used, manipulated, and managed. The goal is to produce not the New Soviet Man but rather an even more momentous creation, the New Global Man. Creating this person—the true global citizen—requires stripping him of all beliefs and loyalties, a process Camus dubs “the great deculturation.” Camus is a writer, not a theorist. His essays burst with rhetorical fireworks. In their glow a reader who, like me, has catalogued the grim effects of globalization and mass migration, understands more deeply the West’s loyalty to what Hegel called “bad infinity.”
I’ve also been reading for guidance about how to maintain my equilibrium. The Bible is indispensable, of course. The Word of God endures forever, providing us with stable ground when everything else is moving. But I also recently reread On the Marble Cliffs, the 1939 literary meditation by Ernst Jünger that was retranslated and reissued last year by New York Review Books. This short book is best understood as a guide to spiritual survival in a time of disintegration and dissolution. Jünger depicts two brothers who wish to cultivate a personal “End of History.” But events intrude, as they do in our own time.
Some books provoke contemplation, which is what Balcony in the Forest did for me. This 1958 novel by Julien Gracq (also reissued by New York Review Books) draws the reader into a liminal realm in which death and destruction are held in abeyance, allowing for the main character to enjoy something of the ordinary but precious gifts of life. I found myself wondering: Why is this so difficult to achieve? To answer this question intellectually is easy; to answer it spiritually is a lifelong challenge.
***
Andrew Roberts
Biographer
Historian
Gary L. Stiles’ A Prelude to Immortality: Churchill’s My Early Life (2025) offers excellent insight into Winston Churchill’s 1930 autobiography My Early Life, which was published in the United States as A Roving Commission. Out of office for the first time in years, and about to enter his Wilderness Years, Churchill had time to think about his extraordinary childhood and early adulthood. This was his only exercise in autobiography, and it makes one wish he had written a full one after leaving the premiership in 1955.
Ronald Roberts’s excellent new edition of The Memoirs of Victor Dupuy reminds us what a fine Napoleonic cavalryman Dupuy was, but also what an impressive diarist. He fought many battles, was wounded twice, won the Légion d’honneur, took part in the Retreat from Moscow and the battle of Waterloo. Roberts’s own career as a U.S. Army major makes his military estimations of Dupuy’s career all the more perceptive.
The second volume of Ronald Hutton’s trilogy, Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief (2024) is as absorbing as the first, The Making of Oliver Cromwell (2021).This book takes us from Cromwell’s victory in the English Civil War, through the negotiations that ended with King Charles I’s execution, the controversial Irish campaign, and the seizure of absolute power in a military coup. A model piece of biography-writing from an historian at the top of his game.
***
Matthew Schmitz
Editor
Compact Magazine
Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World (2025) describes a rational and orderly future in which everyone is conceived by IVF. The novel’s heroine, Amane, is an awkward exception to this rule. Her parents produced her in a moment of passion. Worse yet, they taught her romantic notions from old picture books. These ideas are outdated, for the rationalization of reproduction has led to the death of love. Romance is too complicated, sex too messy to fit into the tidy world enabled by technology. Cleanliness and convenience trump ecstasy and self-sacrifice. “I put a curse on you at birth so you would spend your life haunted by something that is disappearing,” Amane’s mother tells her. With chilling detachment, Murata describes Amane’s effort to overcome that curse.
J.P. Mallory’s The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered (2025) and Laura Spinney’s Proto (2025) summarize a remarkable scientific development. Beginning in 2015, studies of ancient DNA began to show that the spread of Indo-European languages (the etymological family comprising over 40% of the world’s languages today) was effected not through cultural diffusion, as many believed, but through migration. The Indo-European peoples swept across Europe from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, often leaving little trace of the prior inhabitants. Mallory, an archaeologist, notes that this genetic data accords with the “Japhetic” account of European origins, drawn from Genesis 10 by figures such as Josephus and Isidore of Seville. Spinney, a science writer, is more concerned with the story’s contemporary relevance. She understands that it has the potential to unsettle optimistic assumptions about the way migration works.
Robert F. Darden and Stephen M. Newby’s Soon and Very Soon: The Transformative Music and Ministry of Andraé Crouch (2025) is the best book on one of the greatest gospel musicians. Crouch cared above all about what he called “a person’s one-to-one relations with God.” This concern allowed him to cross color lines. It also scandalized those who prioritized social problems and racial solidarity (as when Crouch chose to perform in apartheid South Africa). Initially embraced by the largely white Jesus movement, Crouch got a cooler reception from black listeners. That changed with his triumphant Live at Carnegie Hall in 1973. Today, songs he wrote are staples in white and black churches, known word-for-word by people who have never heard his name.
***
Brian A. Smith
Senior Program Officer
Liberty Fund
However joyous the season, for some believers, Christmas is an annual reminder that not all of those we love share in the faith. This year, Charles Murray published a surprising little book that might open some hearts and minds to Christianity. Taking Religion Seriously is probably not what anyone familiar with Murray would expect. At first glance, a man whose scholarship and policy advocacy has so regularly skewered pieties from a distinctly materialist and sociological perspective doesn’t seem likely to pen an account of his own personal efforts to understand spiritual questions. Murray’s book offers a refreshingly honest account of how he came to doubt the “secular catechism” and leads readers from one puzzle to another, beginning with his own doubts concerning strict materialism and ending with a fascinating argument about why we ought to take the Bible as an authority in our own lives. Murray himself still claims not to have much in the way of certainty, but the book recognizes the truth that faith is a gift we should all seek.
Speaking of secularism, readers of the CRB will not need persuading that too many scholars have labored to conceal or excuse the excesses that have followed in its ideological wake. Thomas Albert Howard’s Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History (2025) offers a whistle-stop education in the violence that secular movements and regimes have done to religious believers around the world. The book makes no claims to completeness—indeed, it would be hard to canvas the whole of anti-religious violence in a standard-length academic book. In questioning the typical modern approach to secularism as a benign or passive force that simply enlightens backward peoples, Howard does a great service. A secular reader might even wonder what made faith so dangerous to projects that promised a “better future.”
For most of his career, the artist and writer Makoto Fujimura has helped lead the effort to make a way for Christian artists to thrive. In his latest book, Art Is: A Journey into the Light (2025), Fujimura strives to help readers see the ways that true art—which means works of beauty that avoid being pressed into service by ideology—is a pathway to truth and goodness. Convinced that the world distracts us from being able to truly see and appreciate reality, Fujimura calls us to make and observe art from a place of stillness; he believes that this shift in perspective is the key to renewing our hearts. This seems like wisdom particularly appropriate to Christmas.
***
Tevi Troy
Senior Fellow
Ronald Reagan Institute
Philip K. Howard has long had a knack for diagnosing America’s problems and recommending real solutions. In his latest book, Saving Can Do (2025), he offers up three essays on situations badly in need of improvement: insufficient incentives for taking initiative, subpar schools, and a suffocating government decision-making process. Fixing these problems could go a long way toward giving America its mojo back, and reading this book will encourage like-minded Americans in making New Year’s resolutions to join Howard in his efforts.
***
Carl Trueman
Busch Family Visiting Research Fellow, Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Government
University of Notre Dame
This year, the two books that had most impact upon me were both books I was rereading. I often turn to Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1940), the story of a Catholic priest on the run from the authorities in Mexico at a time when members of the priesthood face death for their calling. He is far from a good man, let alone a good pastor. He is an alcoholic with an illegitimate daughter. Of all Greene’s novels, this is the most theological. It wrestles with the age-old question, first mooted in the Donatist controversy that vexed the ancient African church, of whether the moral caliber of a priest affects the power of his sacramental ministry. Greene also invites the reader to think about other issues: What does Christian fidelity look like? Are martyrs superhuman, or made of the same crooked timber as the rest of us? Every time I read it, I find some new challenge.
The second book was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924). I first read it nearly 40 years ago and it left me cold. This time I found it totally compelling. Published in a Europe torn apart by one war and hurtling toward another, the novel is set in a sanatorium high in the Alps where the main character, Hans Castorp, encounters various fellow patients. They represent the various philosophies competing for the imagination of cultural elites at that time, from humanistic liberalism to sexual hedonism and Hegelian Marxism. At the same time, Mann interweaves other themes, including the standard modernist preoccupations with time, illness, death, geographical space, and music. At the end, Castorp leaves the sanatorium to fight, and presumably die, in the trenches. The book thus closes without the typical resolution of a Bildungsroman but, like life in the modern world, in a kind of flat pointlessness. A work of real greatness to which I shall turn again.
Finally, there is Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2019), a book that others repeatedly recommended to me before I finally turned to read it. I am incompetent to judge the truth of his argument about the brain’s role in shaping our culture, but his account of that culture—of how we have ceased to understand the connection between ourselves as individuals and the whole around us, and of how instrumental reason has come to dominate our moral and cultural imagination as a society, shaping everything from art and music to our sense of personal worth—strikes me as absolutely on target.
