I found it impossible to narrow the books I would recommend to one or two; so here are just a few of the ones that have impacted me, in alphabetical order:
1. Arthur C. Brooks, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservativism (Basic Books, 2006), and Arthur C. Brooks, Gross National Happiness (Basic Books, 2008). Brooks, a professor of public administration at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, discovered through exhaustive research that approximately equal percentages of liberals and conservatives give to private charitable causes. However, conservatives gave about 30 percent more money per year to private charitable causes, even though his study found liberal families earned an average of 6 percent more per year in income than did conservative families. This greater generosity among conservative families proved to be true in Brooks’ research for every income group “from poor to middle class to rich.”
This “giving gap” also extended beyond money to time donated to charitable causes, as well. Brooks also discovered that in 2002, conservative Americans were much more likely to donate blood each year than liberals and to do so more often within a year. Brooks found “if liberals and moderates gave blood at the same rate as conservatives, the blood supply in the United States would jump by about 45 percent.”
In Gross National Happiness, Dr. Brooks further finds that his research shows that conservatives are “happier” than “liberals” and significantly more optimistic about the future, both in general and in terms of the country. I found Arthur Brooks’ slaying of pop culture myths to be stimulating and informative.
2. Connally Gilliam, Revelations of a Single Woman: Loving the Life I Didn’t Expect (Tyndale House, 2006). A heart-breaking, yet life-affirming biography of a Christian woman who is a victim of the sexual revolution in that our culture has so distorted sex for her generation that it is almost impossible for her to find the Christian marital relationship her heart so desires. This book will break your heart, but give you much greater understanding of the emotional pain and difficulty younger Christians often experience in this neo-pagan culture. I know it sensitized me in new and profound ways.
3. Derek Leebaert, The Fifty-Year Wound: How America’s Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World (Little, Brown, 2002). A riveting history of the Cold War written by a prize-winning scholar who was one of the first to have access to the formerly secret Soviet archives. It’s the kind of book that while you’re reading, you’re constantly checking the footnotes, because you’re saying to yourself, “Where did he find that?” It will give any reader a new and much more textured understanding of a complex and dangerous time through which many of us lived.
4. Peter Robinson, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life (Harper Collins, 2003). Robinson went to work at the White House as a 23-year old speech writer and famously penned the “Mr. Gorbachov, tear down this wall” speech for the former president. Robinson relates how being associated with Reagan, the man, made Robinson a better husband, father, son, citizen, and employee. He probably does the best job of getting at the essence of that unique, sunny, complex person that was Ronald Reagan. I think reading it made me a better man, too.
5. Gregory J. Wallance, Two Men Before the Storm: Arba Crane's Recollection of Dred Scott And the Supreme Court Case That Started the Civil War (Greenleaf Book Group, 2005). A wonderful historical novel which relates the true story of the lawyer who took up the cause of Dred Scott and argued it all the way to the infamous Supreme Court decision. Few novels have more accurately brought that troubled era in our nation’s history to life and few books, fiction or otherwise, so dramatically explain the horror and degradation that was human bondage. I certainly came away from reading this book even more aware that the scourge of slavery poisoned everything it touched and even more grateful that our nation eradicated this evil in its midst.
Please e-mail On Faith if you'd like to receive an email notification when On Faith sends out a new question.
Email Me | Del.icio.us | Digg | Facebook
