R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

July 7, 2025

Hello, I’m Albert Mohler.

Welcome to In the Library.

I’m going to talk about my 2025 summer reading list. And it’s not just for summer. These books would be read for profit at just about any time, but summer is an unusual season for reading for a lot of people. And I just share this from one reader to other readers in the hope that this might be helpful. And I’ll tell you right up front my summer reading list, the books that most interest me, they tend towards the world of history and biography. They tend towards some special interests that have just been a part of my reading life for most of my life. And it’s not so much fiction—I look forward to sharing some fiction lists—but this is mostly nonfiction, and history and biography in particular.

And that leads me to say the first books I’m going to talk about are books that are coming out in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of the United States in 2026. So we’ve got a big anniversary coming and just consider this: for the last few years of a good, many historians and writers have been anticipating this anniversary. It’s a great opportunity for reflection. It’s a good opportunity for revisiting a lot of the big history and also some of the smaller stories of the American Revolution. It’s a good time to put it into context, and it’s a good opportunity to focus attention. and so you’re going to be seeing a lot of books come out.

Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston 1777-1780: Volume 2 of The Revolution Trilogy (Crown, 2025)

I honestly think the most important publishing event in terms of the American Revolution and the anniversary, the 250th anniversary, is going to be The Revolution Trilogy by Rick Atkinson. And so you look at this particular book and you see that already we have two volumes out. The first volume has been out for a couple of years.

Now we have The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston 1777-1780. And thus you know that a third volume is coming. And you also know that this is someone who’s accomplished this kind of work in the past. So Rick Atkinson, skilled historian, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, his trilogy on D-Day and the end of the war, his Liberation Trilogy, absolutely brilliant.

And I’ll just share with you that when you look at the first volume and its size, and you know that there are going to be three volumes, you have to wonder if an author can pull this off. That’s an awful lot of work. Those are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages. Is the reading going to be worth it? When it came to The Liberation Trilogy, the answer is resoundingly yes. And I’m certain the same is going to be true for this trilogy.

It is already true of the first volume, the second volume Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston. Again, extremely interesting, a lot of historical detail, but incredibly well done. And I think in many ways it’ll be the authoritative work coming out of this anniversary period.

There are other various established American historians doing some excellent work. I was looking forward to this one:

John Ferling, Shots Heard Round the World: America, Britain and Europe in the Revolutionary War. (Bloosmbury, 2025)

The subtitle in this book kind of gives away its importance. It’s not just about the American Revolution, it is about America, Britain, and Europe in the Revolutionary War. So that leads me to a theme of some of my recommendations today for summer reading. I think it’s good that we be able to step back and put the events of the American Revolution in a larger context.

There are those who have argued that the Revolutionary War as we know it, which of course was tied to a long war between Great Britain and France, which was also tied to other military events, and tied to the fact that both of those European nations had extensive empires, particularly the British Empire and all of that was at stake. There are those who have argued that what we know as the Revolutionary War, the war for American independence was actually one very important manifestation of what was truly the first world war. And that is because the Old World and the New World were very much at war. Now of course, we’re looking at this from the perspective of knowing that the American Revolution ended with American independence, but there are other world shaking stories, a part of that ongoing war.

John Furling, a very, very fine historian and also a good writer, he has written previous books including Winning Independence. This one: Shots Heard Round the World is really important because of the context he gives very well written, drives us through the reading of the book, and you’ll put your understanding of the American War of Independence up a notch and you’ll also have a greater understanding for that context. It’s really helpful.

Now, when you put all this in an even larger context of Revolution, well that points to the importance of this book:

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It. (Basic Books, 2024)

Now this book and the author’s intention in the book is to demonstrate that the American Revolution was really a part of a larger age of revolution. Now, I think a lot of Americans miss that point, they miss the larger context and they make very few connections between the American Revolution and revolutions that took place elsewhere. I think most Americans know about the French Revolution that came of course pretty fast on the heels in historical terms, on the American Revolution. I think many Americans would be able to offer at least some contrast between the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The American Revolution was towards order, and the French Revolution was really, I think, towards disorder. But it’s really important to put all this into context and on several continents, and that is what Nathan Perl-Rosenthal does in this book, The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made it, it will introduce you to a lot of revolutionary history you really didn’t know, and the revolutions and places you may never have considered. Like every kind of work that’s of revisionist history, there’s some revisionism here. A part of this is kind of the representation of history from below. So it’s not only about George Washington and George III, it is about figures at just the human level, men and women whose names probably haven’t been in the history books before, but whose lives and whose perspectives on these issues do help us to understand the larger context.

A lot of these books make some judgments, even political judgments, even brought into the contemporary age. Just remember, you can read a book without agreeing with all the judgments. As a matter of fact, you often are a better reader and a better thinker for having to think about some of the judgments that are made. In any event, the age of revolution, the American Revolution, these are important books and I recommend all three. And I would say as you look at the Atkinson book and the trilogy, that’s a major commitment of time. But I’ll tell you those who read The Liberation Trilogy, now it’s time well spent.

Alright, also from the same era sort of and looking at American history in a very focused way, I’m going to recommend:

Russell Shorto, Taking Manhattan: The Extraordinary Events that Created New York and Shaped America. (W.W. Norton, 2025)

Now Shorto has written about New York before his previous book was The Island at the Center of the World. And if you just take one island, Manhattan, I think a lot of Americans don’t even think of it as an island, but it is. If you take Manhattan, and you take the importance of what we know as the island of Manhattan in the history of North America, it’s pretty massive. It may not be the city which is on an island at the center of the world, but it’s hard to argue against the importance of the city we know as New York. Russell Shorto takes us back in both of these books, but in particular in this book, he takes to the transition from Dutch Manhattan to English New York, a very interesting story. Once again, he does some really good investigative work and once again, he brings to voice some people and some stories we otherwise would not know. He makes some political judgements at the end of the book that I didn’t totally appreciate. But you know what I appreciate his very skillful telling of the story. And once again, his points and arguments really do make me think. And without question, the history of Manhattan and I think particularly in this period, should be of real interest to Americans and not only to New Yorkers. New York is a part of our lives whether we live there or not.

We also know that a good bit of history is about some of the biggest worldview issues, some of the most important battles of ideas. And in recent history there is no battle of ideas more important than understanding the reality, the threat, the history, the context of communism. And that’s why I want to recommend this book:

Sean McMeekin, To Overthrow the World, the Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. (Basic Books, 2024)

So again, I guess just as a reading hint, let me suggest you pay attention to subtitles because the title’s a way of getting your attention, and certainly the title should convey the meaning and significance of the book. But, the subtitle often tells you what the argument is going to be. So let’s look at that subtitle again, The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism. So it really is a very interesting book. It takes us back, of course, to the origins of Marxism and the development of communism. It takes us to Russia, but it also takes us to China and it takes us elsewhere. When you talk about the rise and fall and rise, well just think of contrasting stories here. Just think of the Soviet Union, but then think of China and the power of that communist regime and the Communist Party in China even now. It’s a really interesting story, huge worldview dimensions, and it will change the way you look at the world, not only the way you look at say, today’s China.

Joseph Torigan, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (Stanford University Press, 2025)

Speaking of China and communism, I’m going to recommend a book that’s heavy. And by the way, it’s heavy in more ways than one. It’s physically heavy. And that’s another little publishing thing. Sometimes it’s just about the weight of the paper on which the book is printed. So you can have a heavy book and content published on light paper. You can have a light book and content published on heavy paper. This is heavy and heavy.

But I’m recommending it because it is unprecedented and it will offer you an understanding of some of the biggest names in the contemporary world, particularly in China, particularly Xi Jinping, the head of the Communist Party and the head of the totalitarian government under the Communist Party in China, one of the most important figures of our age, I think that should just simply be recognized as a fact, one of the most important figures of our age.

This book is: The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping. So now you have the father, Western sources, Western intelligence, China Watchers, the old China hands have been very familiar with the story of Xi Zhongxun. And that is because he rose in so many ways into the highest ranks of the Communist party, only then to fall. And the story of the Father, in this case, Xi Zhongxun, helps us to understand the story of Son Xi Jinping. Now, I think most of us would agree that when you have a father and a son, it’s extremely helpful if you want to know the son to come to know the father. And in this case, there’s plenty of documentation about Xi Zhongxun and his rise and his fall, and then the unprecedented rise of his son. And by the way, all of this came in ways that reveal how communism works, how the Communist party works. It is at times a fairly horrifying story. I think it’s an incredibly important story. And I think as you think of the importance and the strategic nature of China right now, the worldview challenge of communism, right now, it’s not just the rise and fall and rise of communism, that is an important story. It’s the particular story, the biography of Xi Jinping. But behind that, this historical work concerning his father, and this is a biography, but it’s more than a biography. It really is an incredibly well-researched, and I think it will become an authoritative understanding of China in this period, which is, it’s really important for understanding China now. As I say, without apology, this isn’t really beach reading like a murder mystery. This is heavier work, but I’ll also tell you it’s compelling.

Dan Jones, Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King (Viking, 2024)

Speaking of history, sometimes history can come to us in a way that is written in such a way, it can be picked up and you can read a chapter now, you can read a chapter later, you can put it all together. One of the compelling figures of history, I’m recommending Dan Jones’s biography of Henry the V. He identifies Henry V as England’s greatest warrior king, and thus the subtitle, The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King.

Dan Jones has written a lot of popular history, particularly of Great Britain, particularly of monarchs. And this is an example of a kind of book, and this came up recently, on Henry V, a major figure, not only in British history, but I would say in the history of Western civilization. And it’s offered here with all the drama of monarchy. It’s offered here with frankly the violence of monarchy and of the age. You’ll understand the medieval age better and you’ll of course understand the story of Henry the V. You need at times not to apologize for being drawn to a book, which you’re not reading for academic purposes, and you’re not trying to read in terms of someone who comes at this arguing to the scholarly world. Some of the best history is history that is just written for everybody. And there’s a reason why this kind of history is so important.

Ron Chernow, Mark Twain (Penguin, 2025)

Magisterial biographies, when we use that term, we mean big biographies that are likely to be authoritative. Ron Chernow, who’s a major American biographer and of course won the Pulitzer Prize, he’s written several other biographies and I would say all of them I think are really important. I love his biography entitled Titan on John D. Rockefeller. But this is his new biography on Mark Twain. Again, it’s a big book. You’re not going to just carry this in your pocket. Are you interested in Mark Twain? Well, my guess is that whether or not you are really interested in Mark Twain, you certainly know of Mark Twain’s influence or think you know about his influence in terms of American history. I would suggest that when you look at this particular biography, which is kind of warts and all, it reminds us that we really understand and age through some of the lives that become representative of that age. And so I think in that light, this biography of Mark Twain, which is going to be I think the authoritative, definitive biography of Mark Twain, it helps us to understand America and for that matter of the world. But most importantly America, and American thought, and American life, and American culture, and American narratives—It helps us to understand these things in a very powerful way.

Chernow is I think a particularly skilled biographer. And so I will just say, I’ll just read anything he puts out, but that doesn’t mean I recommend everything he puts out in terms of the subject matter. And so in this case, it is kind of middle ground for me, Mark Twain’s, not someone with whom I have an enormous amount of fascination. But I do understand you can’t understand America, and the American mind, and even much of American history without understanding Mark Twain and his role in that history. So again, I recommend this just incredibly done, skillfully done. And in the end, authoritative.

Jonathan Horn, The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines. (Scribner, 2025)

As I’m sharing this list with you, I’ll also tell you I don’t apologize for certain preoccupations, subjects that have interested me deeply and in many cases since I was a boy. And that’s certainly true of World War II and I think World War II is so compelling to us. And just consider this: every month, several titles are published on World War ii, and that has been true ever since World War II. So ever since World War ii, there have not just been a couple, there have been several, sometimes many books published on World War II every month since the war itself ended. That tells you something about its significance. It’s significant in my life. I wasn’t alive during World War II. My parents were, my grandparents were. I had an uncle who was a mustang fighter pilot there in the war to liberate Europe. And I had so many other relatives who were part of the war. The war greatly impacted every American life. And when I grew up, I grew up around a lot of men who were veterans of World War II. Every one of them seemed to have an incredible story to tell.

I will tell you that my life experienced just a remarkable moment when my Sunday school teacher, when I was a seventh grade boy, took an object to our class and teaching seventh grade boys is by any measure, not the easiest thing to do in the world. But he certainly had our attention when he told us the story of what it meant to be a Nazi prisoner of war during World War II, I was surrounded by those stories. I always wanted to know more. I wanted to know how to connect the dots. And so you do that sometimes by reading big, authoritative, big tapestry histories of World War II. You do that knowing that it was the largest world war in terms of its reach of human history. And you understand there are two theaters: the European Theater, which has received most of the attention, the allied effort against Nazi Germany has received most of the attention, the allied effort against Imperial Japan, less attention, but also some giant figures.

One of those figures was Douglas MacArthur. And from the very beginning, there were people who loved Douglas MacArthur and people who hated him, and they’re historians who like him and historians who don’t like him, but an incredible amount of attention is but given to Douglas MacArthur. And you can understand why he lived one of those giant lives on the cloth of world history, and especially the history of the 20th century and especially World War II, but frankly also before and also after. But that means sometimes other lives are eclipsed. And that’s why I appreciate this book, Jonathan Horn’s book: The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines. The battle to liberate the Philippines was a massive, massive story of World War II. It’s a bigger story I think, than most Americans who know something about World War II understand.

Just about everyone who’s understood in World War II and understands that context, you know that it was Douglas MacArthur who famously said, “I shall return,” meaning to the Philippines.  He had left it to General Jonathan Wainwright, to hold the Philippines. It was not only a daunting task, it was an impossible task. And so it fell to Wainwright to basically surrender to the Japanese and one of the highest ranking American general officers ever to be a prisoner of war. A horrifying story. By the time the war was over, by the time the Philippines were liberated, Wainwright was an emaciated man. He looked like a skeleton with skin, and he had to deal with the fact that Douglas MacArthur really poured out his wrath on Jonathan Wainwright and frankly his condescension. And so it was MacArthur who in one sense lived on free to fight another day. It was Wainwright who had to take the experience of being a POW to the forces of Imperial Japan, horrifyingly enough.

When the Philippines were liberated, when Wainwright was liberated, MacArthur was kind in what he said.  But it continued to be a very difficult dynamic. In this book, you’re going to see these two different men, and I want to tell you, I think you’re going to like Jonathan Wainwright. Those who really, really admire Douglas MacArthur, you’re going to have that admiration tested in this book. On the other hand, Jonathan Horn recognizes the greatness of MacArthur. It raises all kinds of interesting questions about men who make a difference, individuals who make a difference in world history, and every one of them is complicated. And that complication, those complications, are also part of the story.

Another way of trying to understand something as big as World War II is to look at a work that takes one unit, one front, one battle, one dimension of the war, and takes us into the story of those who are involved with it. That’s exactly what this book is:

Shannon Monaghan, A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men: The Forgotten British Special Operations Soldiers of World War II. (Viking, 2024)

I think it’s really interesting, we think of special forces and they have existed ever since modern warfare has existed, but they become more and more important in the history of warfare. And World War II was one of the testing grounds for the development of so many of the techniques and strategies and uses of groups of special operations. And you know what makes special operations special? It is the fact that it is outside the boundaries of just the normal command armed forces. There are special forces that have a special designation, they’re useful and in fact vital for a special missions. And so even the cover of the story showing paratroopers landing, that tells you it’s going to be an interesting story.

And you look at this and you think this kind of history could be written about just about any unit in World War II, but there are particular units that have historical significance. And when it comes to British Special Operations, there’s one of them.

When you’re thinking about World War II, it’s just impossible to ignore the fact they’re just Titanic personalities in terms of the political leaders and the military strategists. And so I just want to put you in at least the knowledge of two of these books I read just about every one of them I can get my hands on. And as a student of leadership and a teacher in the area of leadership, an author in the area of leadership, military leadership is just one of those crucibles that’s absolutely vital and the varied personalities of World War II, particularly the leaders of the nations on both sides. So you think of: Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, you think of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill and Great Britain, Franklin Roosevelt in the United States of America, just to invoke those names is to mention some of the biggest names on the canvas of world history. And so every one of them was a personality. Every one of them was a worldview. Every one of them was an individual that comes out in two books. This one is:

Tim Bouveri, Allies at War: How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World (Crown, 2025)

So there you have Churchill and Roosevelt and Stalin, there on the cover. Well, that just tells you all you need to do is see the picture of Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin to know you’re dealing with Titanic personalities. And sometimes they were at odds with each other. And of course, how natural could that be? When you think of the Soviet Communist, Joseph Stalin, the American president, Franklin Roosevelt, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, there were epic struggles behind the Allied victory and the allied effort, a very good telling of the story.

Similarly, you have this book:

Phillips Payson O’Brien, The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler:How War Made Them and How They Made War. (Dutton, 2024)

By the way, a great subtitle. This book looks at these five figures and Churchill style and Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler. And so you have certainly something of a biography of all five. You have the historical context for all five, and you have World War II told through the strategists, these five. And once again, a very interesting way of getting at history.This is not unprecedented, these two books they follow in a sequence of other books that I’ve recommended in the past.

And you say, well, why would you read more than one of these? Or why would you read more than two or three of these? Because I learn a lot because every one of the authors, the historians, the writers, finds different aspects of these Titanic personalities and the events they made and the events that made them in a different way. So maybe it says something about me, but I’ll tell you, I am fascinated by all of these. I found both of these books to be compelling reading.

Alright, while we’re talking about strange preoccupations, I’ll just tell you that I like to know about espionage and spycraft. It’s been a fascination ever since I was a kid, ever since the James Bond movies, and ever since I first came to know anything about spycraft and espionage and that entire world, I’ll admit, I’ve just been really interested. And also crime and the criminal underworld. When I was a teenager, the Godfather movies came out, or at least I was a teenager when the first came out. They reshaped the way Americans even thought about organized crime. And that’s not an accident. It is because an awful lot of documentation of the story, the reality of organized crime came out just in the 1950s, but particularly in the 1960s. So that’s why a lot of these epic stories emerged and there’s a fascination with them.

But before turning to espionage by craft and organized crime, I want to mention another book I found very interesting:

Cita Stelzer, Churchill’s American Network, Winston Churchill and The Forging of the Special Relationship. (Pegasus Books, 2024)

Cita Stelzer is a pretty well established scholar of Winston Churchill in his times. And this particular book looks at the network of American friends that Churchill had been putting together ever since he was a very, very young man and made his very first visit to the United States. But there’s more to it than that because Winston Churchill was of course the son, the first son of Lord Randolph. And then Lady Churchill, who was Jenny Jerome, an American before she married Randolph Churchill and the daughter of an American financier. And so on both sides of the Atlantic. Winston Churchill’s mother had an extensive social network. And here’s the thing, she played that network for her son. She was one of the best placed women in terms of the social context of Britain having been the wife of Randolph Churchill and therefore the wife of the second son of the Duke of Marlborough. And it’s just a very different life than most would live. Jenny Churchill, fascinating figure in her own right, as Randolph Churchill, a fascinating figure in his own right, she really invested a lot in opening doors for Winston Churchill, and some of those were American doors, they were relationships with Americans. And then Churchill skillfully developed his own relationships and they became so crucial, particularly during the war, but also thereafter. So this is really, really interesting. It’s the American network that Churchill put together, Churchill’s American Network, Cita Stelzer, I think it’s really interesting. I have such an interest in Winston Churchill. Honestly, I’ll find almost anything about Winston Churchill interesting.

Next I want to talk about a book that connects Churchill with espionage:

Thomas Maier, The Invisible Spy: Churchill’s Rockefeller Center Spy Ring and America’s First Secret Agent of World War II. (Hanover Square Press, 2025)

This is about Ernest Cuneo, who was a very interesting figure and just looking at the title of the book, you would think this was Churchill Spy, and in some ways he was, but he really was working as an American and largely with the knowledge of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the American president. So in one sense, you could say he operated in the intelligence world on behalf of both Britain and the United States. But the crucial thing is that he really was instrumental in getting the right information to Winston Churchill when Britain was at war with Nazi Germany. And most importantly during this crucial period, the United States was not at war. And so in one way, you can just see Ernest Cuneo as someone who really was a necessary bridge between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt through their officers and military personnel, through the intelligence networks that began to develop. And already at this time, it’s life or death for Great Britain. And I think FDR very clearly understands it soon going to be life or death for the United States.

This is one of those historical works where someone goes back and really unearth a big story. And the story of Ernest Cuneo is a big story. He’s identified as America’s first secret agent of World War II, and that’s basically what he was. And there are people who are going to debate the story of Cuneo for decades to come. But this is a major work that really tells you a great deal about the story. And it reminds you also that had the war gone differently, we’d be talking very differently about many of these figures, not to mention our own lives.

Shaun Walker, The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West. (Knopf, 2025)

When it comes to espionage and spycraft, I think a lot of Americans watch The Americans that television multi-series on embedded illegal Soviet agents in the United States. And the strangest part of the story is it was basically true. And I’m not saying all the events in that special series turned out to be true, but the fact that there were such agents, and frankly even the stories of how they came about in the Stalinist era and beyond.

So here you have: The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West. The use of these illegals, well, it’s a real spy thriller to tell you the truth. And by the way, it doesn’t always turn out that for every spy there was anything thrilling. One of the things you learn from reading a work like this is how much a spycraft ends up being basically worth nothing. But there are huge issues at stake. And sometimes the kind of information, the kind of espionage that comes through spycraft, it can make a determinative difference. So this is really a book that focuses on the illegals.

The most interesting thing about this from Shaun Walker is that it’s not just about, say the 1970s and the eighties even into the nineties, it’s about Putin’s Russia as well, and the ongoing threat that is represented, the use of these illegals comes down to headline news that broke just in the last couple of years on both sides of the Atlantic. So this is history, yes, it’s history, but it is also, I hesitate to say, it’s also something that could burst into headline news tomorrow.

Louis Ferrante, Borgata Trilogy. Volume 1 & 2. – Borgata: Rise of Empire: A History of the American Mafia. (Pegasus, 2024); Borgata: Clash of Titans: A History of the American Mafia. (Pegasus, 2025)

This is two volumes of three volume work. The two volumes are out. And let me just say they’re about the mafia. You would think that a definitive history of the mafia in the United States would exist and there’s some very important works, but once again, this is something that’s been shrouded in mystery for a long time. The title is Borgata: Clash of Titans: A History of the American Mafia by Louis Ferrante. And it is a three volume work and two volumes are out now. And honestly, I think with the second volume, things get even more interesting because we’re a lot closer to contemporary history. But it was really interesting to read that first volume and just see how now what was basically a Sicilian mob model, began to take root in New York City and some other major American cities.

And by the time of course you reach the midpoint of the 20th century, it’s a huge, huge story. And there are debates right now as to how invigorated the same criminal organization is, but there’s no doubt that it played a major role in American history, certainly in many of America’s big cities and biggest crime stories in the 20th century. So I recommend it because I found it really interesting and I’m waiting for that third volume.

Alright, well that’s a lot of books, more than I would usually put into a summer reading article, but I just thought it is likely that some of you’re going to find some of these books to be particularly interesting. Some are going to be interested in espionage and Churchill. Some are going to be interested in organized crime, some are going to be interested in the American Revolution and the entire historical context. Some are going to be interested in Mark Twain and Henry V.

But I’m going to end you with a hint of things to come, because I think the most important biography published in this year, and frankly for many years around it is likely to be this one. It is the biography of William F. Buckley Jr.:

Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America. (Penguin Random House, 2025)

Let me just tell you, it’s not light reading and it’s about 900 pages long, just short of that. Tanenhaus has been working on this for decades. And as a matter of fact, many people thought they might never see the book. Well, the book is out, and I can just guarantee you it is going to cause controversy. William F. Buckley Jr. had a big impact on me and on so many others, one of the biggest lives of the 20th century in the United States, and frankly with impact far beyond a fascinating person.

And all I’m going to tell you is that there are people who are going to love this book. There are people who are going to hate this book, and I think I understand both responses. And I just want to say you can stay tuned. We’re going to have a very lengthy consideration of this new biography of William F. Buckley Jr. That’s going to have to wait for another day. But you know, this summer you might want to start reading. It is 850 pages long, so it may take more than an afternoon in the hammock. It’s worthwhile.

Okay, I hope this has been helpful to you. I love books and I enjoy talking about books. And as one book lover to another, I just want to share this with you in hopes that maybe some of you will find some of these books really, really interesting. And I hope you’ll let me know if you do. And if you get a chance, let me know what you’re reading. I might want to read that too.

Thank you for joining me for In the Library.

Until next time, I’m Albert Mohler. And you know what I got to say here, and that is just keep reading and read for enjoyment, read to honor the Lord, read to see things and know things and to understand stories you otherwise would not know and read to infect others with the joy of reading as well. God bless you.

This transcript has been mildly updated to improve readability.

The post Summer Reading List 2025 appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.

I spend much of my time and attention on reading, and necessarily so. I also enjoy reading, but even as I enjoy the reading I do for research and preparation, there is still a qualitative difference between the enjoyment of reading and reading for enjoyment. Those of you who get the difference understand what I mean. The books I suggest below were read for enjoyment and I recommend them to you. As usual, they are nonfiction and tilted toward history, biography, and the like.

1. Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945, (Viking, 2021).

How many massive books about World War II occupy your bookshelves? No matter the answer, this volume deserves prime space. Overy is among the most respected historians of World War II, and he combines academic credibility with clear writing. Why another big book about the most famous war in Western history? The answer comes in two dimensions. First, the sheer magnitude of the war staggers the imagination. Thousands of books have been written, and thousands more are needed. Second, new questions underline the need for new investigations. Overy’s big history was written with the question of empire in the foreground. The book’s great achievement is to captivate the reader while reconsidering the war as the battle of empires and imperial ideas. His argument is particularly helpful in coming to a clearer understanding of Imperial Japan’s context and war aims. No reader will agree with Overy’s arguments at every turn (I did not), but his work demands attention, will keep readers turning pages, offers abundant material for consideration, and deserves first place on my list for this summer. It is one of the best single-volume histories of World War II.

2. Jane Ridley, George V: Never A Dull Moment (Harper, 2021).

Like his son, George VI, King George V spent his early years as the princely “spare” rather than the “heir.” Furthermore, he is often dismissed as stuck in an older age and utterly uninteresting. His father (Edward VII) and his son (Edward VIII) were playboys and Edward VIII would, as the next book makes clear, threaten to bring down the entire monarchy through his disastrous debauchery and treason (just wait until the next book on the list).

Once king, George V devoted his life to serving his country, the British Empire, and the institution of the monarchy. Ridley, also a respected historian, basically argues that George V was anything but dull, and that he actually cultivated his public image in order to rebrand the British monarchy as the central institution of British identity and dignity. In Ridley’s eyes, George V saved the British crown, but is remembered also for the great moral fault of abandoning his hapless first cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, and his family to the murderous Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, George had to deal with another cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, and the horrors of World War I. Ridley pulls the reader along, weaving the events of the times with the personalities of its famous figures. Her book helps us to understand, not only the reign of George V, but the moral seriousness and sense of history borne by his son, King George VI, and his granddaughter (whom he adored), Queen Elizabeth II.

3. Andrew Lownie, Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke & Duchess of Windsor (Pegasus Books, 2022).

Britain’s king was a traitor? The evidence of this dark truth is now overwhelming. Every century has its scandalous figures, but the twentieth century brought the opportunity to be scandalous on a global scale. The century also included some of the darkest moments of human history. The British figure at the intersection of the scandal and the darkness was King Edward VIII, whose short reign and profligate life mixed a deeply unserious man with the horribly serious crime of treason.

Andrew Lownie is hardly the first to reveal the treachery and lechery of King Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor, but his book “seals the deal,” as it were. This is not a book on the scale of Overy’s Blood and Ruin or Ridley’s biography of George V (who, by the way, predicted that his oldest son would ruin himself and possibly the British Empire within a year of taking the throne), but it is written on the right scale and with the right tone. If the book reads at times like a tabloid report, it is because the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as they became known, lived tabloid lives. They must be seen together as pathetic, ruthless, stupid, completely self-absorbed blots upon the House of Windsor and the human race. But, as Lownie makes clear (and the evidence reveals), Britain’s King Edward VIII, was actually a traitor before, during, and after his wretched reign. The book underlines one of the great and ominous questions of twentieth century history: What would have happened if King Edward VIII had remained on the throne?

4. Robert L. O’Connell, Team America: Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, Eisenhower, and the World They Forged (New York: Harper, 2022).

Staying within the same historical period, take a look at four great American generals who led great armies into battle and commanded the world stage in order to win World War II. Team America puts the focus on four American generals who led the Allied War effort. Together, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur, George C. Marshall, and George S. Patton would change the course of history and the art of warfare. O’Connell argues that they forged a world, and in some sense they certainly did. The great trial of America’s task in World War II called out for leadership, but these leaders are mere men. They also led the world’s greatest military effort to victory and changed history.

As O’Connell argues, “They were far from perfect human beings, but they did basically represent the values of their countrymen in some very tough circumstances. All four exhibited remarkable adaptability, which was exactly what tumultuous times demanded, but they never lost their basic respect for human life in an environment devoted to slaughter. They played in a very rough league, yet they never truly disgraced themselves, or us–not even George Patton.” This book is not about hero-worship or celebrity. Chapter after chapter, O’Connell’s book takes the reader behind what John Keegan called “the mask of command.”

5. Candice Millard, River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile (Doubleday, 2022). 

Candice Millard is among the best writers of nonfiction working in the field today. She knows a good story when she sees one, and she tells the story well. Her books Destiny of the Republic, The River of Doubt, and Hero of the Empire, were all best-sellers, and deservedly so. In this most recent book Millard turns to the story of the race to find the source of the Nile.

To modern readers, able to use their smart phone to pull up a fairly current satellite image of virtually any spot on earth, it might seem inconceivable that nineteenth century Europeans had no real knowledge of the source of the Nile, but that was indeed the case. The Nile nourished civilizations for centuries, but it was the age of empire that provided the impetus for the race to find its source.

The story of the British expeditions to find the source of the Nile is fascinating and Millard puts the story within its context in world politics and the swirl of Victorian imperial ambitions. But it is the characters that make the story. Most importantly, it is the lives of Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke that provide the central moral dynamic and conflict. The character of Sidi Mubarak Bombay, “sold for cloth in Zanzibar” as a young boy, is a big part of the story, and rightly so. Returning from India to Africa, he became part of the great search for the headwaters of the Nile.

6.  Anthony Tucker-Jones, Churchill, Master and Commander: Winston Churchill at War 1895-1945 (Osprey, 2021). 

The world knows no shortage of books on Winston Churchill, but his life was so large that the books will keep coming. Frankly, this is good news. In this new book, Anthony Tucker-Jones considers Churchill as military leader and man at war. By dating the book back to 1895, Tucker-Jones is able to trace Churchill’s rise to lead Britain in World War II through looking at dimensions many other biographers miss. As Andrew Roberts, author of the best single-volume biography of Churchill noted, Churchill drew upon his long decades of experience both with and in the British armed services in order to lead Britain “during the greatest existential crisis in British history.”

Tucker-Jones clearly admires Churchill, and his book offers a broad and insightful view of Churchill’s life and times seen through his military training at Sandhurst, his experience as a soldier in war, and his role in national leadership over more than six decades of public life. At the same time, Tucker-Jones acknowledges Churchill’s mistakes and misjudgments. And yet, the big story is the sheer indispensability and magnitude of Churchill’s leadership in World War II. He was the soldier-statesman who understood Hitler, understood warfare, and understood what to do.

7. Keith Thomson, Born to Be Hanged: The Epic Story of the Gentlemen Pirates Who Raided the South Seas, Rescued a Princess, and Stole a Fortune (Little, Brown, 2022). 

Who exactly were the pirates and what was the “Golden Age of Piracy?” In truth, piracy of one sort or another is about as old as humanity, but in our culture the term most commonly refers to the bands of upstart criminals who raided naval shipping and coastal communities during the Age of Empire. In this work, Keith Thomson tells the tale of pirates who risked their lives to cross Panama on foot and then raid the Spanish Main with remarkable skill. At the same time, Thomson cuts through any romantic notions of piracy and reveals the mix of opportunism, risk-taking, and treachery that had to be combined with courage and intelligence in order for “buccaneers” to survive, much less to gain riches.

Thomson focuses on a two-year period in which these pirates greatly vexed the Spanish through their raids up and down the Pacific’s South American coast. There is no Disney-like cartooning here, but the characters are no less compelling. Thomson has done good investigative work here, and his purpose is not to write social history, but to tell a very good historical tale. Given the ambition of monarchs, it was quite possible in the age of piracy for buccaneers to be threatened with the hangman’s noose in one season, only to be given a royal commission in the next. Thomson tells us that the tales of the pirates captivated readers in the seventeenth century. They still do.

8. Henry Kissinger, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy (Penguin, 2022). 

He is 99 years old and he is still writing and thinking. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize and earned the hatred of the American Left, served President Richard Nixon as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, and was one of the very few figures who dominated the twentieth century still with us today — and still talking and writing. It is safe to say that no thinker alive today can match Henry Kissinger for the length of his struggle with the question of leadership and the intimacy of his personal knowledge of leaders who shaped human destinies in the twentieth century.

“Any society, whatever its political system, is perpetually in transit between a past that forms it memory and a vision of the future that inspires its evolution,” Kissinger writes, adding, that “along this route, leadership is indispensable.” He should know.

Kissinger’s new book, impressive in both size and scale, includes serious considerations of the art and science of leadership — offered with good argument and spiced with historical observations — and direct considerations of significant figures on the world scene who are taken as examples. Many readers will hasten to the chapters on individual leaders who Kissinger knew. That would be a mistake. His observations about leadership are, taken alone, worth reading. But the chapters on individual leaders constitute the heart of the book.

In the central chapters, Kissinger considers Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kwan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher. In each chapter, Kissinger makes the kind of observations that he alone can make, and did make, up close. A commanding pillar of realism in American foreign policy, Kissinger often infuriated the Left and the Right, but especially the Left. Only Henry Kissinger could write this kind of book late in the tenth decade of his life, and I am glad he did.

9. David Gergen, Hearts Touched by Fire: How Great Leaders Are Made (Simon and Schuster, 2022). 

If Henry Kissinger was a political colossus, David Gergen was a political enabler. As the cover for this book indicates, Gergen was “White House advisor to four presidents.” Indeed, he was. More Americans probably know him as a commentator on CNN. Unpredictably enough, Gergen served both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton as political advisor. As a matter of fact, he advised four presidents — Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. That list would indicate that Gergen as a certain kind of political and ideological flexibility, to say the least. At the same time, that resume underlines the unique vantage point Gergen occupied over decades — and from which to make observations about leadership.

Now, the same ideological “flexibility” that marked Gergen’s resume and political commentary is fully on display in this book. This is not the same quality of deep and serious consideration of leadership that we find in Henry Kissinger’s new book. There is little ideological or political consistency on display. Gergen just offers anecdotes and illustrations and advice, offered in something of a self-help guide. And yet, he was there, making observations, as leaders on the world stage passed by (and occupied the office down the White House hallway). His new book is a light read, but some of the practical advice and many of his anecdotes and illustrations are worth consideration. So eat the meat and throw out the bones.

10. Tom Sancton, The Last Baron: The Paris Kidnapping that Brought Down an Empire (Dutton, 2022). 

Baron Edouard-Jean Empain, Third Baron Empain, captain of industry, multimillionaire, and man of stature, power, celebrity, and industry, was kidnapped in Paris on January 23, 1978. Held for ransom, he would remain in captivity for 63 days, and in that period Empain would lose both a finger and his empire.

Classify this work as a combination of narrative history and true crime. The 1970s were a period of increased terrorist activity and headline kidnappings. But the kidnapping of Baron Empain (known to family and friends as Wado) set loose a series of events that the kidnappers did not intend. The entire Empain empire (associated with the Schneider group, of which Wado was the director) began to crack when it became apparent that the family was not really in a position to pay the ransom. Wado was a gambler and he played for big stakes. He lost a lot of bets. Empain did not expect to survive the abduction, but he did. Eventually, French authorities ended the kidnapping.  After the sensational events were over (a truly interesting crime story), Empain’s empire was in shreds. He was soon divorced, devoid of empire, and out of the headlines. The family’s mansion in Paris would be owned by a Russian official with Gazprom. Few remember the story today, but sometimes that makes the story more interesting.

The best thing about summer reading is that it is no crime to read the books when the weather turns chillier. So enjoy.

The post As Summer Ends — (Late) Summer Reading List 2022 appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.

1. Robert Kurson, Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man’s First Journey to the Moon (Random House).

2018 is the year of so many 50th anniversaries, most of them tragic. One of those anniversaries is heroic. Fifty years ago, fresh from tragedy with Apollo 1, NASA made the seemingly mad decision to send Apollo 8 to the moon and back. The move was daring, and perhaps irresponsible. The Soviets were threatening to reach the moon first, and the Americans were determined to beat them. But the Saturn V rocket — still the most powerful machine human beings have ever developed — had never carried human beings into space. The mission could have ended in a tragedy over Christmas in 1968, with the astronauts slowly dying in an unrecoverable trajectory in space. Instead, it became one of the greatest moments in the human exploration of space, and an incredible story. The mission provided the residents of Earth the first unforgettable sight of an “Earthrise,” which inevitably raised deeper theological questions.

In this excerpt, Robert Kurson tells of the three American astronauts, Frank Borman (commander), James Lovell, and Bill Anders, deciding to read from Genesis 1-10 on Christmas Day 1968, during the live television broadcast from lunar orbit. Each astronaut read part of the passage:

“We are now approaching lunar sunrise,” Anders said, “and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.” No one at Mission Control, or anyone else, had any idea what the men were about to say. The astronauts’ wives and children leaned forward. While the Moon continued to move across television screens, Anders began: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” [Anders read, then Lovell, and finally Borman] “Borman continued, “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the Heaven be gathered together in one place. And let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. And God called the dry land Earth. And the gathering of the waters He called seas. And God saw that it was good.” Borman paused: “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you–all of you on the good Earth.” A moment later, television screens around the world went dark. Inside Misson Control, no one moved. Then, one after another, those scientists and engineers in Houston began to cry.

2. Jim DeFelice, West Like Lightning: The Brief, Legendary Ride of the Pony Express (William Morrow).

Most Americans know something about the Pony Express. Most of what they know is probably wrong. The riders of the Pony Express are part of American history and national lore, but the lore tends to come at the expense of history. The Pony Express was, for a brief time, a vital communications link across the vast expanse of the American West. It’s most important moment was the news of the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States in 1860. Within months, the Pony Express was gone. The rise of the telegraph and the train (the transcontinental railroad) were part of the story, but so were business competition and the Civil War. But for a brief time, the Pony Express was one of the most powerful representations of America, with a network of very young men hired to ride like lightning across virtually half the nation. DeFelice tells the story well, separating fact from fiction over a century and a half after the last rider finished his ride.

Excerpt:

The raw ingredients of the Pony story–young men, horses, hardships, and danger–are potent bits for any narrative, whether in a rodeo ring or the big screen. But there’s more to the Pony Express’s staying power than galloping horses and reckless young men. As important as Bill Cody and his shows were in keeping the memory of the service alive, I think it’s likely we’d remember it even without the great showman. The Pony is the perfect transport vehicle for the things we still value in America, and for the realities we as a nation continue to face: speed, courage, individualism . . . distance, time, and, yes, money. If the Pony riders were the brave archetypes of the American spirit racing across the American heartland, Russell and his partners were surely nineteenth-century venture capitalists. The fact that they failed so spectacularly is itself thoroughly American. If you’re going to fail, fail big.

3. Lewis E. Lehrman, Lincoln & Churchill: Statesmen at War (Stackpole Books).

Just a year after the release of his Churchill, Roosevelt & Company: Studies in Character and Statecraft, Lewis Lehrman is back with Lincoln & Churchill: Statesmen at War. An accomplished historian and biographer, Lehrman has written a book that looks at Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill through a new lens, considering these two towering historical figures as leaders at war. The book reveals both men in a new light, considering how each understood the world, conceived of statesmanship, and lead massive war efforts. The two men faced very different historical moments, but both were fueled by a clear understanding of their goals and obsessions. Both demonstrated leadership beyond all expectation, and both learned to lead by the force of both words and example. One was born into poverty on the American frontier while the other was born in the splendor of a duke’s palace. Both made their way into the annals of history, and the words and deeds of both men continue to shape the world today. My favorite part of the book is Lehrman’s consideration of the particular approach each man took to the English language, with both often using single-syllable Anglo-Saxon words in their speeches. Considering Lincoln and Churchill together was a stroke of genius.

Excerpt:

The president and the prime minister would embrace their duty to educate, to persuade, to rally the public, by demonstrating steadfastness in crisis. President Lincoln concluded his special address to Congress of July 4, 1861: “And having thus chosen our course, without guile and with clear purpose, let us renew our trust in God, and go forward without fear, and with manly hearts.” Lincoln’s answers to questions were often simple and unselfconscious. A Union army officer reported the story of a “gentleman [who] was conversing with the President at a time during the war when things looked very dark. On taking leave, he asked the President what he should say to their friends in [slaveholding] Kentucky.” The officer recalled: “Tell my friends,” said Mr. Lincoln, drawing himself up to his full height, “there is a man in here!” In World War II, there lived a man without fear at 10 Downing Street. . . . The prime minister’s courage–proven as a young calvary subaltern in three imperial battles of the late 1890s–intensified as crises threatened. “Danger, the evocation of battle, invariably acted as a tonic and stimulant to Winston Churchill,” noted Major-General Edward Spears, who served as the prime minister’s personal representative in France as that nation collapsed before the German invasion. Of Prime Minister Churchill, Joseph Stalin said it best at the Yalta Conference: “There have bene few cases in history where the courage of one man has been so important to the history of the world.”

4. Donald Rumsfeld, When the Center Held: Gerald Ford and the Rescue of the American Presidency (Free Press).

The American political crisis of 1972-1974 is virtually unparalleled in the nation’s history–and for that we must be thankful. For most citizens today, the Watergate crisis and the fall of the Nixon presidency are distant memories, if remembered at all. One of the most neglected figures, unexpectedly central to this story, was Gerald Ford, the 38th President of the United States. Ford became Vice President of the United States in 1973 and President in 1974, without being elected to either office. Then, against all odds, he came close to being elected president in his own right in 1976. Rumsfeld, who was himself central to the story, gives us a front-row seat at one of the turning points in American history. More than anything else, Rumsfeld wants us to understand that Gerald Ford, who never wanted to be president until he unexpectedly was president, rescued the American presidency by his personal decency and calm. As a teenage political volunteer I worked for Ronald Reagan and against President Ford in the 1976 campaign for the Republican nomination. After Ford secured the nomination, I joined his campaign as a volunteer, mostly manning a phone bank. After the campaign of Reagan, fueled by ideas, the campaign of Gerald Ford was a let-down for me. But Donald Rumsfeld’s book reminds all of us of why we should be thankful that, when he had to choose the man who would shortly succeed him, Richard Nixon called Gerald Ford.

Excerpt:

He understood from the beginning that he had taken the reins during an emergency, a constitutional crisis unlike anything our country had faced before. He was President, but he did not have a mandate from voters who had endorsed him in an election. But he understood the American people and their desire and indeed need for stable, competent leadership,and that was to be Ford’s priority–not scoring partisan points. ‘I am acutely aware,” Ford told the American people after sworn in by Chief Justice Berger in the East Room of the White House, “that you have not elected me as your President by your ballots, and so I ask you to confirm me as your President with your prayers. . . .  I have not campaigned for either the presidency or the vice presidency,” Ford reminded the nation. “I have not subscribed to any partisan platform.” From the onset, Ford looked at his presidency not as a time to further a political agenda but a mission to bring trust and confidence back to the American government at a time when much of the public was convinced Washington had given up on both.

5. Kate Andersen Brower, First in Line: Presidents, Vice Presidents, and the Pursuit of Power (Harper).

The framers of the Constitution were not sure what to do with the vice presidency, so they did very little. Until the adoption of the 25th amendment in 1967, there was not even clear constitutional language about the succession of the vice president in the case of the death or removal of a president, nor any provision for the replacement of a vice president. The vice president was given almost no duties, other than serving as President of the Senate, and vice presidents have generally been bored and forgotten. Harry Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s last vice president, said: “The vice president simply presides over the Senate and sits around hoping for a funeral.” George H. W. Bush, vice president to Ronald Reagan, attended so many state funerals (including funerals for three Soviet leaders) that he simply quipped, “You die, I fly.” But the story of the modern vice presidency is more interesting than most Americans imagine, and Kate Brower focuses on the relationships between modern presidents, beginning with John F. Kennedy, and their vice presidents. Political junkies will find the book impossible to set down. The only warning: Be aware that the Vice Presidents are allowed to speak through their own words, and some of those vice presidents liked 4-letter words.

Excerpt:

Fourteen vice presidents have become president, eight of them ascending to the highest office because of the death of the sitting president. The eight vice presidents who succeeded presidents who died in office are John Tyler (upon William Henry Harrison’s death in 1841), Millard Fillmore (upon Zachary Taylor’s death in 1850), Andrew Johnson (upon Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865), Chester A. Arthur (upon James Garfield’s assassination in 1881), Theodore Roosevelt (upon William McKinley’s assassination in 1901), Calvin Coolidge (upon Warren Harding’s death in 1923), Harry Truman (upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945), and Lyndon Johnson (upon John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963). In the post-World War II era, the vice presidency has become more and more consequential. “Vice presidents are generally an uninteresting lot,” Cheney admitted. “There are fascinating relationships now. I think the really consequential vice presidents are the ones who get to be president”–an ironic statement coming from the most powerful vice president in modern history. Beginning with Harry Truman in 1945 and up until George H. W. Bush, five out of nine presidents were former vice presidents: Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Bush–two by election, two by death, and one because of resignation.

6. Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic, Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man (Simon and Schuster).

It tells us a great deal about the power of popular culture that most Americans probably learned of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis from Bartholomew Marion Quint, the hardened shark hunter of the movie “Jaws.” In the midst of their own epic shark hunt, Quint told the crew from Amity about the sinking, when 900 men went into the waters, and only 316 survived. In his telling, most of the men in the water were eaten by sharks.

There is truth in that account, but the real story of  the Indianapolis and its fate is a bigger story that “Jaws” could tell. The Portland-class heavy cruiser, once flag ship for Admiral Raymond Spruance and ship of state for President Franklin Roosevelt, was one of the most beautiful large ships in the Navy. She had suffered a devastating kamikaze attack and had just been repaired when she was sent on a secret mission to deliver the first atomic bomb to Tinian Island. Returning to port, the Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine attack. Of the almost 1,200 sailors on the ship, about 300 went down with the vessel. The 900 others went into the Pacific. They were in the middle of the vast ocean and no one would miss them for days. Miraculously spotted by a Navy plane after days at sea, only 316 men survived. The sinking of the Indianapolis remains the greatest sea disaster ever experienced by the U.S. Navy. The sharks did attack and the story is like a horror movie, but the rescue of the 316 did not end the story. The ship’s commander, Captain Charles B. McVay, was convicted in a Navy court-martial of dereliction of duty, but the court-martial proceeding was controversial from the start, and even Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Ocean Areas, did not believe Captain McVay should be blamed. The burden for the convicted officer was too much to bear, and he committed suicide years later, with a toy sailor in his hand.

And yet, amazingly enough, the story does not end even there. Fast forward to 1999 and the school project undertaken by a determined 13-year-old boy named Hunter Scott. The boy in Florida had heard about the Indianapolis when he watched “Jaws” with his father. As a sixth-grader he started a school project on the Indianapolis and would write to the survivors of the sinking. Eventually he came to believe that Captain McVay had been wrongly blamed. He got finally got the attention of political leaders in Washington. Then, as an eighth-grader, he, along with others, would testify before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. Captain McVay would eventually be exonerated.

This new book by Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic, released only on July 10, is a good example of how a story can be set straight. In this case, and in this book, we confront a big story that badly needed setting straight.

This excerpt is from the book’s account of the 2005 reunion of Indianapolis survivors and their families. In an amazing sign of healing, among the guests at the event was Atsuko Iida, granddaughter of Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto, who had commanded the Japanese submarine that sank the Indianapolis by torpedo attack. Hashimoto had written in defense of Captain McVay–an act probably without precedent in the annals of war. The reunion came after McVay’s exoneration by Congress:

At the banquet that night, a procession of speakers paid homage to the Indianapolis survivors, the families of the lost at sea, and also the rescuers, many of whom had come. To close out the evening, per long tradition, Glenn Morgan climbed onto the stage as he did each year to lead the crowd in singing a final song, “God Bless America.” Morgan stepped up to the microphone. “Now, we haven’t done this before,” he said, “but what I’d like to do is to have all the children come up here.” The banquet hall burst into applause as the children and grandchildren of survivors and lost-at-sea families began streaming toward the stage. School-age children weaved their way through banquet tables, while parents led their preschoolers by the had. ‘That’s right, come on ya’ll,” Morgan said from the stage, beckoning. From a table near the front where she sat with her husband and sons, Atsuko Iida watched the children wending their way forward. She glanced at her own two boys, unsure. Suddenly, the Indy families seated around her began motioning her toward the stage, encouraging her with smiles: “Yes, Atsuko! You, too! Go up there . . . go!” Nervously, Atsuko stood. Taking her sons by the hands, she began making her way toward Morgan and the large group of gathering children. In this hall, there was no more room for hatred.

7. Taylor Downing, 1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink (Da Capo).

More than once, the world has stood on the precipice of nuclear war. In the most famous of these incidents, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the world’s leaders were aware of the danger and the drama was lived out before a global population holding its breath. Not so in 1983, when the world stood yet again on the brink of nuclear war. In the crisis moments of 1983, over twenty years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the leaders of both the United States and the Soviet Union failed to understand how close nuclear annihilation had come. Arguably, it was as closer than any other moment in the Cold War. In the United States, President Ronald Reagan was rebuilding U.S. armed forces and, as Taylor Downing explains, Reagan really did see the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire,” and he refused to recognize the Soviet regime as a permanent fact. The Cold War was, to Reagan, a battle of ideas and ideologies that he intended the U.S. to win. In the Soviet Union, Yuri Andropov, the former KGB chief, had become General Secretary in 1982, upon the death of Leonid Brezhnev. Andropov was terminally ill and paranoid, as was his regime. Meanwhile, events escalated in 1983 as the Soviets shot down a wayward 747, Korean Airlines flight 007, and the U.S. and its allies began a massive nuclear war game known as Able Archer 83. The Soviet spy system was certain Able Archer was the start of a real nuclear war. As we now know, it was almost true . . . by accident.

Excerpt:

The situation had reached its most dangerous point. If the Soviets, straining at the leash that November day in 1983, had launched their nuclear weapons, Armageddon would have followed. Tens of millions would have been killed directly by the impact of the missiles across western Europe and the United States, from Verona to Vermont, from Newcastle to New York. This would have triggered the firing of the massive arsenal of U.S. nuclear missiles in retaliation, from the huge silos in the Midwest and from submarines situated across the oceans of the world. U.S. commanders had long talked of blasting the Soviet Union back into the Stone Age. Tens of millions of Soviet men, woman, and children would have perished. Hundreds of millions mare around the world would have lost their lives as a consequence of the nuclear radiation that would be scattered across continents, carried by winds and rain, and countless millions more as a result of the starvation and chaos that would follow in what was called the ‘nuclear winter.’ It would not only have been the end of human civilization but probably the end of most forms of life on Earth. Some people believed that only the cockroach and the scorpion would have survived.

8. Arthur Herman, 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder (Harper).

We can count only twenty centuries from the time of Christ until our own time. The cataclysmic Twentieth Century looms in our immediate memory, and the events that shook the world in 1917 continue to shake the world now. Arthur Herman takes us back to 1917 and to the story of how the United States entered and exited World War 1 and the story of how the Bolshevik Revolution transformed Russia into the Soviet Union. Those stories cannot be told without the characters of Vladimir Lenin and Woodrow Wilson–one a communist revolutionary and the other a stern moralist who was determined to remake the world in his own image, according to his own internationalist vision for the League of Nations. Herman is no relativist, and he presents Lenin and communism in candor and horrifying honesty. At the same time, he clearly (and rightly, in my view) understands Woodrow Wilson as a dangerous man, driven by his own personal moral vision and staking his presidency on his failed vision of the League of Nations. Both men, Herman argues, contributed to the birth of what he calls the “New World Disorder.” The book is timely and important.

Excerpt:

They [Lenin and Wilson] were also in their own ways both secular millennialists. They saw the world and mankind around them as fallen, but they believed there was a final, destined age of redemption coming–not through a Second Coming of Christ, as conventional Christian millennialists have believed, but through a Final Coming of History, a great convergence of global fire into a single, coherent whole. Their total commitment to these beliefs made them both self-righteous, usually infuriatingly so. Yet there were also important differences. Lenin’s background and experience made him a more brutal man than Wilson; he was capable of overseeing acts of violence that Wilson would have been horrified to contemplate, let alone commit. Lenin’s correspondence is full of references to machine guns, bombs, and shooting and killing opponents; Wilson’s is not. At the same time, both men dismissed those who opposed them as nor just wrong-headed or misguided but evil. They could be unbelievably vindictive toward those who they thought were thwarting or betraying them or blocking the path to their chosen paradise on earth. And both could be cunning and unscrupulous when they believed the ends justified the means, as when Lenin happily cooperated with the German government to get himself installed in Russia, and when Wilson was willing to compromise one after another of his Fourteen Points in order to get his League of Nations. Finally, both were revolutionaries, men who dedicated themselves to overthrowing an existing world system. in order to build a new, and in their minds, more perfect system. By and large, they succeeded in overthrowing those old systems, although what they created instead in their lifetimes turned out to be unqualified disasters.

9. Helen Rappaport, The Race to Save the Romanovs: The Truth Behind the Secret Plans to Rescue the Russian Imperial Family (St. Martin’s Press).

Of all the tragic events of the 2oth century, the transformation of Russia into the Soviet Union is one of the most unspeakably tragic. The Bolshevik Revolution led to the deaths of tens of millions in Russia and within its communist orbit. But there was not just one Russian revolution in 1916-1918. Russia was descending into madness, and that madness was symbolized, most tragically, in the Romanov dynasty. That dynasty, infamously ruling for over 300 years, would come to a horrifying end, with the entire imperial family, the deposed Tsar, Nicholas II,  and his Tsaritsa, Alexandra Feodorovna, their four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and the Tsarevich (and only son) Alexey Nikolaevich, only aged 14, shot to death in a basement in Yekaterinburg. Nicholas was inept and seemingly unable to respond to unfolding events, and his abdication only made the crisis worse. With Red and White armies at civil war within Russia, the Bolsheviks quickly came to the conclusion that they could not afford to allow the imperial family to live. But why were they not rescued by their powerful relatives — some of Europe’s most powerful monarchs? Helen Rappaport is the right person to tell that story, and the story remains important, even a century after the gruesome events that haunt Russia even now.

Excerpt:

George’s [Britain’s King George V, first cousin to the deposed Tsar Nicholas II] scrupulous attention to the position of the constitutional monarch — or, moe accurately, parliamentary monarch — meant that he was obligated to respect the Coronation Oath that he had sworn in 1910 to put national interests first at all times. His government had been voted into power by the will of the people, and the will of the British people in 1917-18 was seemingly that the Romanovs were not welcome. And while it might be easy retrospectively to say that the threat to his throne was exaggerated and that a republican-style uprising on the streets of London was in fact highly unlikely, one has to view the King’s reaction in the context of 1917 and not that of 100 years later. In all his decision-making, King George V’s forceful and uncompromising wife Queen Mary supported him quietly but firmly behind the scenes. She, if anything, was even more determined to preserve the continuity and stability of the British throne, in much the same way that Tsaritsa Alexandra had vigorously defended it in Russia. Would Nicholas ever had capitulated and signed the abdication if Alexandra had been in the room at the time? No. Never.

10. Casey Sherman and Michael J. Tougias, Above and Beyond: John F. Kennedy and America’s Most Dangerous Cold War Mission (Public Affairs).

The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 remains one of the most dangerous and important events of the 20th century, and the accounts of the crisis available since the 1990s and the fall of the Soviet Union are spellbinding — if terrifying. In this new book, Casey Sherman and Michael J. Tougias go back and combine two important stories into one great narrative. They combine the story of the U-2 aerial spy program and the Cuban Missile Crisis into a story better than anything a fiction writer could imagine. The truth is far more interesting–and important–than fiction. President John F. Kennedy is at the center of the account, and understandably so. But the authors tell the stories of others as well, from U-2 pilots to Soviet leaders. The Cuban Missile Crisis happened within my own lifetime, as did most of the Cold War. I was a toddler in Florida when the crisis unfolded in 1962. Had events gone otherwise–and they almost did–I might not be alive to tell of this book.

Excerpt:

It is chilling to think that just two men, Kennedy and Khrushchev, could decide the fates of so many. And even today, the fact that the nuclear ‘football’–a set of codes ensuring that the military knows an order to fire a nuclear missile is coming from the president rather than a maverick or an imposter–travels everywhere the president goes serves as a reminder of how much power rests in one person’s hands and how important it is that this individual retain composure no matter what pressure and advice he or she is receiving. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy found safeguards of this kind woefully lacking and insisted on a more foolproof way for the military to know it was dealing with the president. The safeguards he desired are in the mechanics of today’s nuclear football, but the ultimate authority over the decision still rests with one person, the commander in chief. . . . Kennedy and Khrushchev instinctively knew that the longer the crisis went on, the shorter the odds that someone at a lower level would act without consulting them. Still, neither leader was going to walk away from his duty to safeguard his country and give the other side the upper hand militarily or in terms of world dominance and influence. They had to strike a deal in which both sides seemed to win.

Reading a book is a good book’s first pleasure, but telling other readers about a good book is also a privilege. Read some of these good books before summer’s lease runs out.

The post Before the Lease Runs Out: Summer Reading List for 2018 appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.

These ten books are by no means assigned. These are books that I found sufficiently interesting and compelling to merit my recommendation. Frustratingly, this list could easily be many times as long. I hope to recommend other good books along the way through the season, including some recent works in biography and fiction. My recommendations for summer reading are, as usual, drawn more from the stacks of nonfiction and history. That is my own idiosyncrasy. Given an unfettered opportunity to read an “unassigned” book, I most often turn to history. What am I looking for? I look eagerly for books that make me rethink something I think I know, learn about something I do not know, or surprise me by revealing just how much there is yet to know about an era, an issue, an event — a happening.

So, no assignments here — only recommendations.

1. Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and their Forgotten World War (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2013).

Not a single American veteran of World War I remains alive. But, a decade ago, this was not yet true. Richard Rubin had the brilliant idea to try to track down some of the last of the Doughboys, as the American troops in World War I were affectionately known. By the time Rubin was able to interview them, these veterans were, on average, 107 years old. The Last of the Doughboys is a true gift, drawn from Rubin’s conversations with some of the most interesting people you will ever meet on the printed page. And, with the last of these veterans now dead, this is the only place you will find their stories.

The first World War is receding in our national memory. And yet, the national consequences of this war were monumental and lasting. This war, more than any other, marks the divide between the modern world and the world it left behind. When the war started, most of the peoples of the earth were ruled by hereditary monarchs in the Age of Empire. When the war ended, the world was utterly changed. The veterans through whose lives Rubin tells the story of the war live through this vast transformation, and even into the twenty-first century. The first man Rubin interviewed, Anthony Pierro, had been born in Forenza, Italy in February of 1896. As Rubin notes, in 1896 Grover Cleveland was President of the United States and the tallest building in the world was 18 stories tall. The Last of the Doughboys is a wonderful combination of biography and history. The story of the American involvement in World War I is told by those who had lived it, and who lived to tell the tale.

Excerpt:

“Before the New age and the New Frontier and the New Deal, before Roy Rogers and John Wayne and Tom Mix, before Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat, before the TVA and the TV and radio and Radio Flyer, before The Grapes of Wrath and Gone with the Wind and The Jazz Singer, before the CIA and the FBI and the WPA, before airlines and airmail and air conditioning, before JBJ and JFK and FDR, before the Space Shuttle and Sputnik and the Hindenburg and the Spirit of St. Louis, before the Greed Decade and the Me Decade and the Summer of Love and the Great Depression, … before Tupperware and the refrigerator and the automatic transmission and the aerosol can and the Band-Aid and nylon and the ballpoint pen and sliced bread, before the Iraq War and the Gulf War and the Cold War and the Vietnam War and the Korean War and the Second World War, there was the First World War, World War I, the great War, the War to End All Wars.”

2. Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, a Revolution (Viking, 2013).

Americans tend to think in rather romantic terms of the revolution that gave birth to the nation. As Nathaniel Philbrick makes clear, there were no historical inevitabilities in play as the American colonists and the British Empire approached open war. Philbrick, a seasoned writer who knows how to tell a story, brings the Boston of 1775 to life in this book. He reveals a city at the center of some of the most momentous events of the modern world, but he gives careful attention to the cast of unforgettable characters that made Boston ripe for revolution. School children, at least those fortunate enough to be taught American history, often think of the Revolutionary War beginning at Lexington and Concord. But, as Philbrick shows, it was the full-scale Battle of Bunker Hill that made the revolution a war. Philbrick gives good attention to the debates and controversies that animated, infuriated, and eventually transformed loyal subjects of King George III into revolutionaries. The book begins with a seven-year-old John Quincy Adams standing next to his mother as he watched the Battle of Bunker Hill from a distance. You will not want to put the book down until you understand what that little boy saw on that day, and what it meant for the birth of the nation.

Excerpt:

“The Revolution had begun as a profoundly conservative movement. The patriots had not wanted to create something new; they had wanted to preserve the status quo — the essentially autonomous community they had inherited from their ancestors — in the face of British attempts to forge a modern empire. Enlightenment rhetoric from England had provided them with new ideological grist, but what they had really been about, particularly when it came to the yeoman farmers of the country towns, was defending the way of life their forefathers had secured after more than a century of struggle with the French and the Indians. But something has shifted with the arrival of the new general from Virginia. As Washington made clear in his orders of November 5, 1775, his army was already moving in directions that would have been unthinkable to the  New Englanders of old.”

3. Lee Sandlin, Storm Kings: The Untold Story of America’s First Tornado Chasers (Pantheon, 2013).

We now take the technological revolution in meteorology for granted. We expect to receive a timely warning from qualified authorities when severe weather approaches. We are thoroughly accustomed to watching hurricanes form far away in the eastern Atlantic and then gain in strength as they head towards North America. We assume that such knowledge has always been with us. But, as Lee Sandlin makes abundantly clear, when it comes to tornadoes, the inhabitants of North America have more often been victimized than previously understood. Storm Kings traces the story of America’s experience with tornadoes, starting with colonial times when such whirlwind storms caught the attention of no less than Increase Mather, father of Cotton Mather. Sandlin then tells the remarkable tale of how Ben Franklin became the world’s leading expert in electricity (for which he saw no predictable use) and how this eventually led him to try to understand the nature of storms, including thunder and lightning and the vast devastation that came from the events known to early settlers as the “Storm King”. In telling the story, Sandlin traces the history of the American experience with tornadoes, painting in vivid detail the vast destruction, sheer terror, and unpredictability of these storms. He explains why North America, and the Great Plains and central portion of the United States in particular, experiences the vast majority of tornadoes known to humankind. Though tornadoes of some sort have appeared in other places of the world, only in the United States do they regularly appear in such strength, number, and intensity. In any given year, the United States will be visited by some 1,000 tornadoes. Most of these do little damage and are soon forgotten. A few, however, cause vast destruction and hundreds of deaths.

InStorm Kings, Sandlin traces the modern effort to predict tornadoes. As he explains, many, including weather authorities in Federal Government, doubted that these storms were predictable in any sense. Furthermore, when the military started developing an actual ability to predict the storms, the information was considered classified and withheld from the public. At one point, the weather service threatened to arrest a civilian meteorologist who tried to warn his community of an oncoming storm. In many ways the hero of Sandlin’s story is Robert C. Miller, an air force meteorologist who happened to be stationed at Tinker Air Force Base outside of Oklahoma City in March of 1948. On March 20, a significant tornado hit Tinker Air Force Base, destroying millions of dollars of military material and planes. The next day, Miller along with a colleague, attempted to draw criteria that seemed to be associated with the onset of a tornado. As the day progressed, the list of criteria grew more precise. At some point during the day, Miller noted with concern that the very set of criteria he had drawn together matched the developing weather in Oklahoma. Later, Miller’s hunch led to the issuance of the very first tornado warning in American history. He was demonstrated to be a prophet when a tornado hit Tinker Air Force Base, just as he had predicted. As Sandlin makes clear, today’s storm chasers are the heirs of many who came before them, trying to understand these dangerous storms from the sky.

Excerpt:

“In fact, as Fujita’s followers and successors began to think of it, there was something fundamentally misleading about conceiving of tornadoes as distinct phenomena. They are only as aspect of the fantastically complex and violent evolving dynamics of a supercell thunderstorm. They are rarely singular. They form in clusters and waves; they breed and die off within the larger movement of a storm front like bubbles in the froth. The number of tornadoes that form of half form, the blur and merge and separate within any given storm cell, defies any exact count. The sheer chaos of a severe storm renders precision impossible.”

4. Bob Thompson, Born on a Mountaintop: On the Road with Davy Crockett and the Ghosts of the Wild Frontier (Crown Trade Group).

My knowledge of Davy Crockett came, first of all, from Walt Disney. The song written for Disney’s brief television series on Crockett still reverberates in my head. As Bob Thompson explains, this is true for most living Americans, for whom Davy Crockett is a frontier superhero of sorts. That “Disneyfied” Davy Crockett bears little resemblance to the Congressman David Crockett, member of the U.S, House of Representatives, who was a major political irritant to President Andrew Jackson. Davy Crockett preferred to be called David, and, though the frontier heroism of Crockett is an established fact of history, this was not what his contemporaries imagined would be his legacy. Thompson combines history, biography, and a travelogue in one volume in Born on a Mountaintop. He retraces Crockett’s life as he retraces his travels, all the way to Crockett’s martyrdom at the Alamo — a fate he did not anticipate as he made his way to Texas.. He sets the record straight (where there is sufficient record) and separates myth from reality. In the end, readers will be even more fascinated with the real David Crockett than with his mythological image.

Excerpt:

“History drives a hard and devious bargain. If you aren’t the famous one in the center of the picture, your life will likely be forgotten, no matter how interesting it is. And if you are the famous one, as Crockett was in just about everyone’s picture of the Alamo, you will never be seen clearly again.”

5. Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945. Volume Three of The Liberation Trilogy (Henry Holt).

The Allied invasion of Europe that represents the closing chapter of the war against Nazi Germany is one of the great military accounts of all time, and the closing months of the war in Europe represent one of the most dramatic periods of history in any recent century. Historian Rick Atkinson tells this story just about as thoroughly as it should be told, and no one with an interest in World War II should be without this volume. On the other hand, no one who really cares about World War II is likely to lack the first two volumes of Atkinson’s work, The Liberation Trilogy. The Guns at Last Light brings the war to a climactic, but exhausted, close. Readers will find Atkinson on rather sure ground in terms of the military and historical consensus, but he does not hold back from making his own judgments. He fuses biography and chronology in this work, offering memorable insights and historical insights along the way. This summer marks the 69th anniversary of D-Day. Read this book in preparation for the 70th anniversary next year.

Excerpt:

“Churchill gave a brief valedictory, grasping his coat lapels in both hands. ‘Let us not expect all to go according to plan. Flexibility of mind will be one of the decisive factors,’ he said. ‘Risks must be taken.’ He bade them all Godspeed. “I am hardening on this enterprise. I repeat, I am now hardening toward this enterprise.’ Never would they be more unified, never more resolved. They came to their feet, shoulders squared, tramping down the hall to the limousines waiting on Hammersmith Road to carry them to command posts all across England. Ahead lay the most prodigious undertaking in the history of warfare.”

6. Terry Mort, The Wrath of Cochise: The Bascom Affair and the Origins of the Apache Wars (Pegasus Books).

The quarter century of warfare between the Chiricahuas and the United States is one of the saddest and most unnecessary chapters of American history. The war would be deadly on all sides, with many noncombatants among the victims, including women and children on all sides. In The Wrath of Cochise, Terry Mort reminds readers that, until the incompetence of a U.S. Army officer, Lt. George Bascom. entered the picture, the main conflict had been between the Chiricahuas and the Mexicans. All that changed when Bascom accused Cochise, a famous Apache warrior, of kidnapping a twelve-year-old boy. Mort helps the reader to understand the clash of civilizations that occurred in the Southwest and the deadly effect of each side misunderstanding the other. Furthermore, he offers the honest moral assessment that there were no innocent parties in this bloody conflict. Cochise emerges as a deadly warrior who, regrettably, showed himself to be just as ruthless and murderous as expected at times, and, at other times, utterly unpredictable. With Cochise’s death, an entire Native American civilization came to an end.

Excerpt:

“In the case of the Chiricahuas, the sharp distinction between themselves and everyone else seems to have strengthened both sets of coexistent instincts and values — the savage warrior when out on a raid or on the warpath, the cooperative member of an affectionate extended family when at home. The Chiricuhuas were living a double life, but their adversaries saw only one side. For most of them, that was more than enough. But humans are more than capable of holding multiple, conflicting sets of emotions and values, walling one set off from the other…. Clearly, this ability to maintain two radically different sets of values simultaneously has been the source of more than a little human misery — and misunderstanding.”

7. Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (Knopf).

The Civil War, historian Allen Guelzo reminds us, was a war. Yes, it was a great turning point in American history and a transformative event that reshaped the nation. But, it was a war, after all, and wars are determined by battles. The battle of Gettysburg is not only the most famous of those battles, but perhaps the most determinative. In this magisterial new account of Gettysburg, Guelzo brings his vast knowledge of the Civil War to the story of this singular battle. The background to this crucial battle was both military and political. Had Robert E. Lee succeeded, an invasion of the North would have been difficult to stop and demands for a political settlement of the war would have gained massive momentum. Lincoln knew that  his political prospects and his conviction that the Union must be preserved were on the line.

In telling the story of Gettysburg, Guelzo considers the raft of controversies that remain even today. More importantly, he puts Gettysburg within the context of the larger war — a story he told so well in Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Readers will find Gettysburg: The Last Invasion to be a definitive account of the battle and its legacy. Guelzo, Henry  R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and Director of Civil War Studies at Gettysburg College, is uniquely qualified to write this ambitious and worthy volume. Guelzo ends the book with an elegant and moving chapter on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Excerpt:

“And then came Gettysburg. It was not merely that Gettysburg finally delivered a victory, or that it administered a bloody reverse to Southern fortunes at the point and in the place where they might otherwise have scored their greatest triumph, or that it had come at such a stupendous cost in lives. It was that the monumental scale of the bloodletting was its own refutation to the old lie, that a democracy enervates the virtue of its people to then point where they are unwilling to do more than blinkingly look to their own personal self-interest.”

8. Dean King, The Feud: The Hatfields & McCoys, The True Story (Little, Brown).

Last summer, I recommended Blood Feud by Lisa Alther, a very interesting account of the famous feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. Now, just a year later, I am recommending a second book on the same historical event. Why? Because the real story of the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys deserves a second account — this one even more detailed and expansive than the last. Like Davy Crockett, the Hatfield-McCoy feud exists as a cartoon of sorts in the American mind. In reality, it was nothing of the sort. The feud was a representation of the feudal culture that existed on the border between Scotland and England, now transferred to the border between Kentucky and West Virginia. As Dean King notes, the bloody conflict has spawned a feud of arguments ever since.

King is an experienced writer. His previous works, Skeletons on the Zahara and Unbound were adventure tales, and The Feud is told in a similar style, but with a depth of research and detail that sets it apart from previous accounts of the feud. King’s research for the book involved extensive interviews with surviving members of both families. He traces the context of the Civil War, deep Appalachian poverty, and an honor culture that sounds more like something out of Afghanistan today. The Feud is filled with an unforgettable cast of historical characters, even as the story of their lives unfolds in such great tragedy.

Excerpt:

“The men who lived in these mountains had learned to fight from the Indians and had honed their craft of wilderness warfare — defending, tracking, ambushing, killing — and used it against them, until they had secured the place for themselves. They had a shoot-first, ask-questions-later mentality. They wrestled and fought for fun. Now they turned their sights on each other, and they excelled at the bloodletting.”

9. Adam Makos, A Higher Call (Berkley Calibre).

This is such a good story that I checked it out to make sure it is true — and it is. Adam Makos tells the story of what happened in the skies over Nazi-dominated Europe five days before Christmas in 1943. An American B-17 bomber was almost blown out of the sky, its young pilots barely able to keep it flying and half of its crew dead or dying. It was the crew’s first flying mission over Europe, and it looked to be their final mission in life. Then, into their view comes a German Messerschmitt fighter, flown by a certified ace. Two second lieutenants faced each other that fateful day. Second Lieutenant Charlie Brown was captain of the B-17 and Second Lieutenant Franz Stigler was the pilot of the Messerschmitt. The story that unfolded that day over Europe is one of the most moving and unlikely of any day in that global cataclysm.

Makos tells the stories of the two pilots, giving readers an understanding of how those two pilots ended up sharing the same frozen airspace on that memorable day. Readers will sense the terror of airborne conflict and gain insights into the unique morality of modern warfare in the skies and the shared moral code of pilots. More than anything else, readers will be captivated by the account of what took place in then sky on that harrowing day, and then what took place when the two pilots were reunited on the ground long after the war. Makos is editor of the military magazine Valor. A Higher Call is a story of valor. You won’t regret reading it.

Excerpt:

“From his perch on the bomber’s wing, Franz saw the two pilots staring at him. He saw shock and fear in their eyes. They knew they were hopeless. With his left hand, Frank pointed down to the ground, motioning for the pilots to land in Germany. He knew it was preferable to be a P.O.W. than to have one’s life snuffed out in a flak burst. But the American pilots shook their heads. Franz cursed in frustration. He knew he could be shot for letting the bomber go. That alone was treason. But Franz also knew that leaving the bomber now would be no different than shooting it down.”

10. Robert M. Utley, Geronimo (Yale University Press).

Authoritative books on famous individuals are often, oddly enough, hard to find. Until now, there was no truly authoritative biography of the most famous Native American Indian of American history and our national imagination — Geronimo. Robert M. Utley was for many years the chief historian of the National Park Service. Geronimo is a life project, and Utley reveals the true Geronimo, a fierce warrior whose personal reputation has often eclipsed his real identity. As Utley explains, Geronimo was not even a chief. He was, on the other hand, a fierce warrior with the ability to command others to follow him. He did not even come to the attention of Americans until he was fifty-three years of age. But when he did, he did in a big way. He never commanded more than about thirty warriors, but he threw an entire territory into havoc and terror. As Utley notes, Geronimo “accumulated a record of brutality that matched that of any of his comrades.”

Readers will find a wealth of information in this book, including lengthy accounts of how the Apache raised boys and taught them to be ruthless fighters. Utley explains the logic of using raids and terror as instruments of war, and how warriors like Geronimo extended their leadership by the development of a charismatic persona — even the impression of supernatural power. But, more than anything else, Geronimo is a biography, and the man who emerges from this account is one of tragedy, brutality, resignation, and mystery. In Utley’s words, “complex and contradictory.” Geronimo is a compelling and thought-provoking tale.

Excerpt:

“On September 4, 1886, at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona Territory, four centuries of Indian warfare in American came to a close. The Ghost Dance troubles four years later were a religious movement, not a war. The character of the Apache conflict differed profoundly from all other Indian wars. Other tribes often engaged in combat, which was rare in Apache hostilities. Few Apache conflicts merit the term ‘battle’ or even ‘skirmish.’ In most encounters the Apaches fled without loss of life. Even so, Skeleton Canyon achieves significance as the end of four centuries of Indian hostilities in North America. As the last holdout, Geronimo acquired the most recent position in the American memory, one reason his legacy has so firmly endured. Legend or reality, Geronimo remains the dominant Indian name in the American memory.”

________________________________

I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.

The post Books for a Summer Season — Some Recommended Reading appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.

Mercer University Press has released a new edition of Mullins’ most famous work, The Axioms of Religion, first published in 1908. Edited by C. Douglas Weaver of Baylor University, the new edition offers a new generation of Baptists an opportunity to enter the debate.

Weaver helpfully adds both notes to the text and an introduction to the work as a whole. Both are welcome additions. Weaver’s introduction offers a very good summary of the debates concerning Mullins, even as it also reveals his great respect and affection for both the man and his most famous book. Weaver argues that Mullins wrote the book as an apologist for the Baptist vision of the New Testament Church.

In recent years, Mullins has been criticized by conservatives for his excessive individualism and stress on religious experience. Weaver cites my own published criticism in this regard, and he does so fairly. He also acknowledges the criticisms offered by some on the Baptist left, who also decry Mullins for his individualism. The framers of “The Baptist Manifesto” (1997) argue that Mullins elevated the individual above the Christian community. Interestingly, Weaver argues: “Manifesto theologians seem to be evolving into Baptist-Catholics who increasingly affirm catholic community, the collective authority of the church, and the historic creeds (e.g., Nicene) in opposition to any substantive role for soul competency in decision making.”

Weaver seeks to rescue Mullins from these criticisms, but he does not evade the big questions. He wonders aloud if Mullins grew more conservative as he grew older, and he also admits that Mullins was often unclear in his positions — a posture Weaver attributes to denominational pressures. What, exactly, did Mullins believe about creation and evolution? The reader is left frustrated.

I will not expand upon my own criticisms of E. Y. Mullins here. Interested readers can look to my own introductory chapter on Mullins, available online. Suffice it to say that E. Y. Mullins cannot be ignored, and this new edition, helpfully edited by Professor Weaver and happily made available by Mercer University Press, will aid a new generation of Baptists in coming to terms with this seminal figure.

I now hold the office E. Y. Mullins once held, and I serve the institution he so devotedly led. Even as I offer my own criticisms of Mullins and his theological method, I am grateful for the orchard he tended with such care.

_____________________________

E. Y. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion, ed. C. Douglas Weaver (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2010 [1908]).

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In my personal library I have two entire sections devoted to Churchill’s own works and books about him. The most massive biography of Churchill is the multi-volume official biography written by Randolph Churchill and Martin Gilbert. In recent years, significant single-volume biographies have been written by both Martin Gilbert and Roy Jenkins. Shorter works have been written by historians such as John Keegan. Those who love Churchill cherish the two volumes written by William Manchester, and lament that the third volume will never be written. Biographical studies on Churchill have been offered by figures ranging from Lord Moran, his personal physician, to the philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Yet, until now, no shorter biography has done Sir Winston justice. Until now, that is, for the publication of Churchill by Paul Johnson fills that lamentable gap in the literature.

Johnson is a well-known British historian and a man of ideas. His books have their own honored place in my library, ranging from Modern Times and Intellectuals, to his History of the American People. With Churchill, he succeeds where others have failed. He captures Winston Churchill in under 200 pages of elegant and clear prose. The reasons for Johnson’s success are these — he knows how to write, he knows the history of the era, and he knows Winston Churchill. Johnson never gets over his admiration for the great man, but he sees him in honest and very human terms.

Johnson is a master of the English language, as was Churchill. Noting Churchill’s famous oratory — one of his major weapons of warfare — Johnson remarks that “he switched it on to its full power just as Hitler switched his off.”

Johnson traces Churchill’s life from his rather tragic childhood to the glory of his funeral service, an occasion of Britain’s most severe mourning. He deals honestly with his shortcomings, character flaws, and setbacks. But he never loses sight of the man’s greatness, nor the importance of his place in history. Paul Johnson’s Churchill is now the first book I would recommend to anyone who would ask why Winston Churchill still matters. Lest anyone miss the lessons of the biography, Johnson offers five important lessons from Churchill’s life in an epilogue. Churchill will please those who know little about Winston Churchill, as well as those who know a great deal.

An excerpt:

In his ninety years, Churchill had spent fifty-five years as a member of Parliament, thirty-one years as a minister, and nearly nine years as prime minister. He had been present at or fought in fifteen battles, and had been awarded fourteen campaign medals, some with multiple clasps. He had been a prominent figure in the First World War, and a dominant one in the Second. He had published nearly 10 million words, more than most professional writers in their lifetime, and painted over five hundred canvases, more than most professional painters. He had reconstructed a stately home and created a splendid garden with its three lakes, which he had caused to be dug himself. He had built a cottage and a garden wall. He was a fellow of the Royal Society, an Elder Brother of Trinity House, a Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, a Royal Academician, a university chancellor, a Nobel Prizeman, a Knight of the Garter, a Companion of Honour, and a member of the Order of Merit. Scores of towns made him an honorary citizen, dozens of universities awarded him honorary degrees, and thirteen countries gave him medals. He hunted big game and won a score of races. How many bottles of champagne he consumed is not recorded, but it may be close to twenty thousand. He had a large and much-loved family, and countless friends.

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Americans tend to jump from the Revolution to the Civil War with little concern for the period Wood so thoroughly covers in this volume. And yet, America came of age during those years, developing political habits, establishing a national identity, and claiming more new territory than had been claimed during the entire colonial period.

During this period, America left behind its British identity and forged a new American ideal. It was the Age of Jackson and of the notion of the average American as “a new man.” It was also the age of the Second Great Awakening and the transformation of American Christianity. As Wood notes, many of the changes that occurred on the American religious landscape during this period continue to be determinative today.

Empire of Liberty is an important work that is both encyclopedic in scope and incisive in judgment. His treatment of religion during this period, though theologically thin, is genuinely interesting. Evangelical readers should supplement Wood’s volume with Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Religion and Iain Murray’s Revival and Revivalism.

An excerpt from Wood:

This Second Great Awakening was a radical expansion and extension of the earlier eighteenth-century revivals. It was not just a continuation of the first awakening of the mid-eighteenth century. It was more evangelical, more ecstatic, more personal, and more optimistic. It did not simply intensify the religious feelings of existing church members. More important, it mobilized unprecedented numbers of people who previously had been unchurched and made them members of religious groups. By popularizing religion as never before and by extending religion into the remotest areas of America, the Second Great Awakening marked the beginning of the republicanizing and nationalizing of American religion. It transformed the entire religious culture of America and laid the foundations for the development of an evangelical religious world of competing denominations unique to Christendom.

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I am a dedicated Kindle user, and have been for some time. The e-reader will not replace the printed and bound book (see my article on the Kindle), but it will become the technology of choice for reading many types of printed material and many books as well. My Kindle DX is loaded with good material and is always close at hand.

The Nook is a very handsome e-reader, very similar in appearance and functionality to the smaller Kindle models. It is actually very much like the Kindle in most respects, with the same screen and basically the same technology. It does have a color screen below the main reading screen — a very handsome addition that is both a navigation system and a catalog of your books on the Nook.

Before a long trip during the Christmas season, I loaded my Nook with several titles ranging from spy thrillers to serious theological works and literature. On a long flight, I read The English Assassin by novelist Dan Silva. As with the Kindle, I found that reading this kind of book on the e-reader is actually a delight. I soon forgot that I did not have a codex in my hand.

The Nook has access to the huge inventory of digital books at Barnes & Noble, including many free books that are in the public domain. You will not run out of reading material.

At the same time, I wish Barnes & Noble had more titles available. Another complaint is that the machine is rather slow compared to the Kindle. I did not find this a major frustration, but it is noticed. B&N promises to fix that issue with a software update — rather standard fare for a new technology.

Battery life seems less than my Kindle, but is very workable. With the unit turned to “airplane mode” you can read for days between charges.

I do like the Nook. It is good for Amazon to have competition for the Kindle. Do I think the Nook will displace the Kindle? No. Amazon has been at this longer and the Kindle is a really fine technology. Nevertheless, the Nook is really handsome and may over time reveal advantages not yet fully appreciated.

We are living in a remarkable era of human history, with the experience of reading changing (quite literally) before our eyes. You will know this for a fact when you read a favorite book on your Nook.

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There is something special about most books and the experience of reading them. The physical reality of the book, including its cover, paper, typeface, and design are part of its charm. Books are wonderful to behold, to sense, to hold, and ultimately to read. As a technology, books have survived the test of time. They do not need batteries, they hold up well with a minimum of maintenance, and, unlike a computer, they never crash. Books are almost perfect as a combination of design and purpose. Who could ask for more?

I do. The printed book is superior to almost every imaginable technology in any number of respects, but not in all. The digital revolution has reached the world of books, and things are forever changed. I was an early adopter of the Kindle, Amazon.com’s almost iconic electronic reader. My first Kindle was bought soon after the technology became available. I purchased a few books and intended the Kindle to operate as a supplement to my library of printed books. I did not expect to spend much time with it, but I saw the advantage of instantly-available books that could be carried in my briefcase by the hundreds.

Now, I travel with an unreasonable number of books inserted throughout my luggage, but I cannot stash more than a few. The Kindle allows me to carry hundreds, and eventually thousands. Even as Nicholas Negroponte of MIT predicted the shift of all information from atoms to bits, the Kindle allows this transformation for the book. Writing in The New Republic, Anthony T. Grafton predicts that “electronic reading will move from being one of the ways we access and consume texts to the dominant mode.”

I am not sure of that when it comes to books, but it is already true for any number of other published formats, ranging from newspapers to academic journals. I cannot imagine that the Kindle (or any similar technology) will replace the printed book in affection or aspiration, but it has already become a means of transcending the material barrier when it comes to books.

Put bluntly, I seldom leave home without my Kindle. It rides in my briefcase, holding more books than I could ever carry and ready for more.

I started with the original Kindle, then switched to the Kindle 2, and upgraded to the Kindle DX. I eagerly recommend the Kindle DX as the state-of-the-art Kindle. Amazon now also offers a Kindle that can be used to purchase books internationally.

Some thoughts:

1. Do not think of the Kindle as replacing the book. Bury that thought. Bury it deep. Then go and hold a favorite book in your hand. Enjoy. Then pile 50 of your favorite books and carry them with you all day, through airports, onto airplanes, checking into hotels, sitting in meetings, reading in bed at night. You get the point. You sit (gloriously) in a library. You take a Kindle in your briefcase.

2. Yes, you really can read books with this thing. The experience is not identical to reading a printed book, but it is very satisfactory for most books, magazines, and newspapers. The screen technology makes the Kindle look much like a printed book with type on a page. You will gain a feel for reading on the Kindle quite quickly.

3. The ability to purchase and receive books almost instantaneously is nothing short of amazing. I recently needed a couple of books for an article I was urgently writing in a New York City hotel room at 2:00 AM. No worries. I had both books on my Kindle within five minutes.

4. My Kindle holds dozens of theological classics, Bible translations, and seminal works of theology, history, and philosophy. It also holds a great deal of literature, including novels. I find reading fiction particularly profitable on the Kindle. I tend to forget the technology and just get lost in the book. I also have dozens of biographies, books on current events, and books by favorite authors on my Kindle.

5. I purchase and read some books on the Kindle, knowing full well that I probably do not want to maintain them in my permanent library collection. The Kindle is glad to hold them for me. You can often request a sample chapter to see if you want to purchase the book. I generally find myself hooked.

6. I really like the ability of the Kindle DX to receive and display PDF files and the ability of all Kindles to receive my own files as books. I can send a manuscript to my Kindle by email and it is there for the reading whenever I need it. That is extremely helpful.

Will the Kindle and its digital competitors replace the printed book? I think not. Indeed I hope not. I think most of us will reserve a special pride of place for printed books. Think not of replacement, but of supplement. Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bazos recently told The New York Times Magazine: “For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition.”

That stunning figure tells the story. Digital books are here to stay, and sales will only grow. You are probably reading these very words on a screen. That ought to tell you something.

_____________________________

I am always glad to hear from readers and listeners.  Write me at mail@albertmohler.com.  Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.

I will be trying out the Barnes & Noble e-reader, the “Nook,” in coming days. I’ll let you know what I think.

The post The Kindle Experience — A Personal Report appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.

On June 12, 1987, President Reagan delivered the 1,279th speech of his presidency. He stood at the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall and called for the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to take down the wall.

Well into his speech, the President said:

We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed. Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater freedom from state control.

Are these the beginnings of profound changes in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

“Tear down this wall.” Those four words, now so memorable, were words with effect. Just over two years later, the wall fell, torn down by a people tasting freedom.

In Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President, and the Speech that Ended the Cold War, author Romesh Ratnesar, deputy managing editor of TIME magazine, tells the story of that speech and its delivery.

That story is nothing short of amazing. Ratnesar’s book takes the reader into a feverish debate at the very top levels of the American government. He tells of diplomats and other figures who sought at great length to prevent the President from speaking those four words. The diplomatic establishment feared that the President’s ultimatum would “embarrass” Gorbachev.

Ratnesar takes the reader into the times, into the White House, and into the mind of President Reagan. The book is a fascinating historical account. Leaders will be especially interested in Tear Down this Wall for its lessons in the strategic importance of words, a message, and the power of the spoken word.

From the book:

Reagan loathed the Wall. On a trip to West Berlin in 1978, he was taken to an eighth-floor office overlooking it and told the story of Peter Fechter, the youth who had been gunned down by East German police in 1962 as he tried to crawl over. The authorities left Fechter unattended for nearly an hour, while he bled to death. “Reagan just gritted his teeth when he heard all of this,” says Peter Hannaford, a longtime aide who was with Reagan that day. “You could tell from the set of his jaw and his look and some of the things he said that . . . he was very, very determined that this was something that had to go.

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From a Christian worldview perspective, this is actually quite understandable. Our Creator gifted us with a moral sense and the capacity of conscience. At some very early age, sin becomes an active part of our consciousness. As we grow older, we grow more and more aware of our own capacity for wrongdoing. The spectacular evil represented by notorious criminals becomes a fascination hard to resist. This can be healthy if a closer look at crime and criminality brings greater moral discernment and deeper insight into the reality of human depravity. On the other hand, a preoccupation with criminality can reflect a fascination with evil that must never be granted.

Millions of Americans have gone to see the movie “Public Enemies,” starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger and Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis of the FBI. In the course of the movie, viewers are reminded of the gangster era of the 1930s and notorious characters including Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and a host of others. But, whereas the movie reduces the story of this era to only a handful of its most famous personalities, the book upon which the movie is based offers far more.

The movie is based on Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 by Bryan Burrough. I put the book in my stack for summer reading and, once I had begun reading the book I could hardly put it down.

Burrough drew his research directly from the records of the FBI. He takes his reader right to the scene of the crime, so to speak, tracing the rise of these infamous gangsters and placing the era within its own fascinating historical context. By the time the reader finishes the book, Public Enemies has offered a short course in America during the Great Depression, the rise of America’s most famous gangsters, and the emergence of the FBI as a respected law enforcement agency.

“When one looks back across a chasm of 70 years, through a prism of pulp fiction and bad gangster movies, there is a tendency to view the events of 1933-34 as mythic, as folkloric,” Burrough writes. An entire generation of Americans knew these gangsters as contemporaries, but the passage of time has obscured their history. As Burrough writes, “After decades spent in the washing machine of popular culture, their stories have been bled of all reality, to an extent that few Americans today know who these people actually were, much less that they all rose to national prominence at the same time.”

The cultural and historical context of the gangster era is truly interesting. Before the rise of these criminals, Americans associated organized crime with immigrants and cities. But the stereotypical gangster of the 1930s was raised on a farm with what most Americans had assumed to be typical American values. They had names like Barker, Floyd, Nelson, and Dillinger. They were home-grown criminals.

Burrough also points to the context of the Great Depression and the fact that so many Americans blamed the banks for their own economic distress. When the gangsters started robbing banks, many Americans saw them as modern versions of Robin Hood. But when the scene turned ugly, with bodies strewn from one crime scene to another, Americans demanded action.

At this point J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI enter the picture. Burrough traces the rise of the FBI during the “war on crime” declared by Hoover. As his careful telling of the story makes clear, the emergence of the FBI as a credible national law enforcement agency was anything but inevitable. The states did not want a national police agency and the structure of American law made the formation and functioning of a national law enforcement agency extremely difficult. When FBI agents first began investigating the gangsters, they were not even allowed to carry guns. As Burrough demonstrates, it was the gangsters who made the FBI what it is today. The FBI owes much of its current stature to these early years when its first agents transformed themselves from incompetent investigators into skilled crimefighters.

Burrough tells the story in such a way that the reader will understand why these infamous gangsters appeared as such glamorous figures to the public. Yet, as the story unfolds the gangsters lose their glamour as the evil and murderous violence of their crime spree shocked Americans into understanding evil in a whole new context.

Bryan Burrough tells the story well and documents his account with care. Readers will be fascinated with the twists and turns of the story and with the sheer audacity of figures on both sides of the “war on crime.” Beyond this, the details reveal just how far this story reaches into our history. I was fascinated to learn that J. Frank Norris, one of the best-known fundamentalist preachers of Baptist history, had once sought to negotiate the surrender of pretty boy Floyd to the FBI. Similar surprises abound within the book.

An excerpt:

The spread of bank robberies was the result of technology outstripping the legal system. Faster, more powerful weapons, especially the 800-bullet-per-minute Thompson submachine gun introduced after World War I, allowed yeggs (gangsters) to outgun all but the best-armed urban policeman. But the greatest impetus was the automobile, especially new models with reliable, powerful V-8 engines. While a county sheriff was still hand-cranking his old Model A, a modern yegg could speed away untouched. A Frenchman may have been the first to use a car to escape a bank robbery, in 1915; one of the first Americans to try it was an aging Oklahoma yegg, Henry Starr, who used a Nash to rob a bank in Harrison, Arkansas, in 1921. The practice caught on.

The post Reading Log, August 6, 2009 Public Enemies appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.

Thinking this week about Fathers Day, I was particularly reminded of significant memoirs that relate to fathers and sons. One of the most touching of these was written by J. R. Moehringer. His memoir, The Tender Bar, is one of the most elegant and moving accounts of father loss to be found anywhere in modern literature. J. R.’s father disappeared when he was an infant, but the boy grew up in New York City listening to his father’s voice. His father was a prominent disc jockey whose voice came through the radio. Listening to the radio, the boy was filled with a hunger those represented by “The Voice.” Looking for father figures, he found his way to the local bar, where he began to hang around with the men who frequented there.

J. R. Moehringer came to understand that his father was a man of talents, “but his one true genius was disappearing.” The men at the bar, on the other hand, tended to come around and hang around. They befriended the young boy and became, in the main, the only positive adult male influences in his life. They taught him both honorable and dubious male habits and introduced him into the world of men.  Speaking of one particular summer, he reflected: “Everything the men taught me that summer fell under the loose catchall of confidence. They taught me the importance of confidence. That was all. But that was enough. That, I later realized, was everything.”

I was deeply moved by reading The Tender Bar and the story of this young boy who so desperately wanted his father, even as he listened to “The Voice” on the radio. Moehringer’s experiences with the men in the bar, though formative and hugely important to him, could never replace the authentic role of his father.  How many boys are still listening in hope of hearing ‘The Voice” of their fathers?

Another important memoir on fatherhood, written by a son, is Closing Time by Joe Queenan. A well-known author and contributor to leading newspapers and magazines, Joe Queenan is a professional writer who brings great skill to his memoir. In Closing Time, Queenan offers a grim, humorous, touching, and haunting story of his coming-of-age in Philadelphia during the 1960s. He offers some sweet reminiscences of times with his father, including a break-neck trip in a delivery truck through the streets of Philadelphia. Nevertheless, most of his account is about a man who is deeply tormented by alcoholism. Queenan was abused in both body and soul by a father whose presence was more often than not a threat to his family.

Queenan traces his father’s decline through a series of jobs he could not hold and through neighborhoods of one or another sort of trouble. “My father got broken when he was young, and he never got fixed. He may have wanted to be a good father, a good husband, a good man, but he was not cut out for the job. He liked to drink, but unlike some men who liked to drink, it was the only thing he liked to do. Among our relatives, he had a reputation as a happy-go-lucky fellow who, once he got a few beers in him, would turn into the life of the party. He was not the life of our party.”

Closing Time is a moving book and I learned a great deal about Joe Queenan, Philadelphia, and life as a boy there in the 1960s. Given the chronological overlap of our lives, I could not help reflecting on the fact that my boyhood was so different than his. Reading the book made me all the more thankful for my own father and more greatly concerned for the many children, both boys and girls, who knows such pain at the hands of an abusive and/or alcoholic father.

After reading those two memoirs, one may wonder if many sons are moved to write memoirs about their appreciation and affection for fathers. At this point, it is good to remember that literature favors disaster over peace, conflict over calm, and, in a general sense, pain over pleasure. A father doing a good or adequate job as father does not make for the kind of character and plot that drives so much literature. Furthermore, too many writers in our own day would be frankly embarrassed to write a memoir in which they honor and celebrate their fathers. It simply isn’t done.

That is what makes Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir by Paul Clemens such a refreshing surprise. Clemens, who grew up in one of Detroit’s transitional neighborhoods during the 1970s and 1980s, saw the city transformed before his eyes and came to know his father as the great Gibraltar that held his family together. Clemens’s father appears as a normal dad in the context of his working-class neighborhood. Dads were just there and they did what they had to do for their families. They may have been short tempered at times, but they were occasionally capable of much fun with their children and they showed their absolute dedication to family by the fact that they gave themselves to such hard work under such difficult circumstances. More often than not, they were tired to the bone, even as they had to patch a wall or discipline a son.  As Paul Clemens relates, fathers in his neighborhood demonstrated a central task of manhood by doing what, under almost any circumstance, just had to be done.

He writes: “Families were fundamental to the way the area was organized, which is not to say that anyone spent much time getting sentimental over them as a concept. Families were viewed like most other things in this life, which is to say as sometimes dreary and ultimately disappointing, but preferable to a long list of even less desirable alternatives. . . Though they cursed aloud while doing so — and, internally, likely cursed the days they’d wed our mothers and fathered us — the men in our neighborhood, whether in hats and gloves during the dead of winter, or sweating and swearing up a storm in the middle of the summer, somehow manage to fix broken carburetors, replace drafty windows, and keep basement furnace is going a little bit longer, while their wives bought box after box of whatever was on sale and saw to it that their children didn’t waste all their money at McDonald’s. . .”

In his own way, in Made in Detroit, Paul Clemens demonstrates a model of respecting and honoring his father while telling the story, warts and all. His book is unique in being both gritty and sweet. I would suggest that Christian men — and fathers in particular — would do well to read this kind of literature. These secular memoirs, filled with both pain and promise, tell us a great deal about the world around us and, at the same time, remind us of our own calling — even as we hear that voice through words of pain.

Happy Father’s Day.  Let’s be sure our children hear our voices and know our love.

The post Reading Log, June 19, 2009 Fathers and Sons appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.