Christmas Reading

The Claremont Review of Books has just put out their annual Christmas reading list, which is made up from a fine group of noted scholars and conservative thinkers.  Please review the list and make it a point to read at least a couple of the books in the new year.

In the sprit of the CRB's list, here is my own:

I Am the Change:  Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism by Charles Kesler

Kesler, taking his bearings from Leo Strauss, argues that in order to understand Barack Obama, we have to understand him as he sees himself.  The best way to do this, of course, is to read and take seriously his speeches and two published books.  Kesler finds Obama to be nothing new in the political world.  Instead, Obama is continuing the progressive project that began with his intellectual and political heir, Woodrow Wilson.  All is not roses, however, as modern liberalism's destructive core is threatening to tear down the entire project.  This book is by far the best book ever written on Obama and is one of the finest books ever written on liberalism in its modern form.

A New Birth of Freedom:  Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War by Harry Jaffa

Jaffa builds on and goes beyond the arguments he laid out in his first work on Lincoln, Crisis of the House Divided:  An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and argues that, contrary to his teaching in Crisis, Lincoln's statesmanship was built on the recovery of the Founders' natural law and natural right principles. Both books are two of the greatest books written on Lincoln and the principles of America.  A New Birth is essentially nothing less than a full defense of the American republic.

Natural Rights and Right to Choose by Hadley Arkes

Arkes, one of the main supporters behind the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban (it was signed into law by President Bush in 2003), argues that we have been slowly talking ourselves out of the grounding of our natural rights.  We still talk about "rights" but the substance that used to be there is now stripped away.  With the idea of universal truths being cast aside, we are now unanchored, drifting along under false impressions that we are constantly being granted new liberties and freedoms through the decisions of the Supreme Court.  This story is told through the critical examination of the new freedom the Supreme Court found in 1973, the right to choose.  Arkes find that this new right rests on the same principle on which chattel slavery rested:  the denial of the principle consent and its coeval principle, the natural equality of man.

That'a all for now, but I may expand this list later.  Happy reading.