This record is not of mild reads, so let’s start with a little negging. Usually, of course, folks take those to the beach and pool. One may assume that a magazine may be easier to read for such times, but that’s typically when I try to read the Claremont Review again, which is also not a light read. Its size is gentle for me, offering only content rather than complete books.
I always have been a book monster, hungry for words, phrases, words, terms. We may not be as numerous as we are today, but I believe we are the true elite. What makes our ruling class really elite is that it knows nothing. What makes a person elite is that it has the attention span to endure lengthy and complex turns of argument and plot and to keep an idea in your mind without having to accept or reject it right away. That takes practice and effort.
Additionally, I’ve always believed that best friends always give excellent book advice. But, in the heart of intellectual friendship, I’d like to share this list of books I’ve been reading recently and am bringing with me on family trips this summer. We start with narrative and ending with literature.
Sharyl Attkisson, The Stain
I’m on a Sharyl Attkisson back-catalog blow, which I got excited when I discovered this 2018 guide on a table at a traditional event a fortnight ago. As many users did understand, her books are outstanding. They’re also very helpful for me skillfully in terms of media history and media criticism.
The Smear is mostly being listened to via ebook, but I also have the hard duplicate so I can move between formats. I find ebooks more fact- deep than audiobooks. So, it’s more difficult to half-listen to them while you’re doing something else. In this year’s unpredictable first summer heat and moisture, they make up for the long hours spent on the typical summer highway trips and outdoor watering the lawn.
The Smear focuses on the socialist methodology of going after a statue’s character more than his discussion. As a young who was n’t socially conscious in the 1990s, its analysis of the Clinton station skulduggery has been particularly helpful to me. It’s fascinating to watch how the same Clinton supporters who smear” Bill’s bimbos” also helped build and blanch Donald Trump’s attacks.
I love Attkisson’s reporterly independence between right and left. She reads many more impartially than most social authors, which is refreshing both as a change and as a way to broaden my own writing options. Regardless of which political party is hiring them, she also has a strong moral compass that shows in her refusal to tolerate slander functions. I also picked up href=”https://bookshop.org/p/books/slanted-how-the-news-media-taught-us-to-love-censorship-and-hate-journalism-sharyl-attkisson/15214116?ean=9780062974693″ target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>her 2020 book Slanted and ca n’t wait to get into it.
Great Intel, J. Michael Waller
Big Intel explains how American intelligence firms, especially the CIA and FBI, evolved into Biden’s “brownshirts.” This exciting book came out earlier this year. In his great discussion with Tucker Carlson this month, J. Michael Waller, an unusual Federalist writer, discusses some of the history that the regime-change operations that the United States intelligence agencies started funding worldwide after World War II have now come home.
Waller goes on to share a wealth of information about the agency history, particularly regarding the FBI and CIA being ingrained by Communist Soviet agents from their inception. His history adds to my mental archive on the Communist infiltration of high- ranking American government positions from the New Deal to the Cold War to today. It turns out that actual Communist agents were involved in numerous significant and successful efforts to subvert the United States Constitution and its citizens, dating back to FDR. Dig out your M. Stanton Evans and Diana West if you want to read more about that.
In a way, it’s no surprise that the State Department and CIA were early infiltrated by Communists. According to Walsh, it took longer than expected for that change to occur in the FBI, and it is demonstrated by how the organizations ‘ allegiance to what I call the regime-change ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion is demonstrated by the agencies ‘ public allegiance. It serves as a crucial backgrounder on the intense state struggles that are currently affecting our politics.
Informing Statecraft, Angelo Codevilla
I then picked up several others from Waller’s book, starting with Angelo Codevilla’s Informing Statecraft. I read about Codevilla, a Claremont Institute fellow and professor of Boston University, with great anticipation up until his unexpected and untimely passing away in a car accident in 2021.
Many readers will know Codevilla from his 2010 book, The Ruling Class, expanded from an essay of the same name in The American Spectator that year. Codevilla explained the gap between ruling and the ruling that has led to the rise of Trump and the public’s awareness of the cold civil war that has surrounded us since self-styled progressives have broken the U.S. Constitution in the past century.
Codevilla’s archive is well worth revisiting because of its long-standing expertise in foreign policy and wealth of practical experience. Waller gave me a place to start by recommending Informing Statecraft. It’s wonderful that Codevilla left behind enough for us to continue learning while awaiting his return in time.
Controligarches, Seamus Bruner
This is the latest in a series of books from the investigative researchers at the Government Accountability Institute. Controligarches were released in November 2023. It provided a compelling and readable overview of the numerous ways that the ruling class Codevilla defined is trying to control every aspect of American, Western, and even global life. It honestly kept me up at night so much that I had to stop reading it before bedtime, my usual reading opportunity.
Bruner provides eye-opening insight into the way that global multigazillionaires are attempting to return the rest of us to the old custom of serfdom. His meticulously researched chapters cover the world’s largest “health” industry, big ag and the centralization of global food supplies, pharmaceutical and nutritional experiments on unsuspecting populations, the Great Reset, technocratic environmentalist doomsday cults, BlackRock and other mega-financial attempts to control entire economies, and more.
It’s part thriller, part investigative exposé, and it will keep you on the edge of your chair while also informing you of massive global schemes designed to erase self- government. The first response to adversity is through fear.
Tom Holland, Dominion
It was thanks to Federalist colleague John Davidson’s new book, Pagan America, and our staff discussions about it that I picked up this history of Christianity’s creation of the West. Dominion tells a tale that is already well-known to Christians, but I want to see it more thoroughly and in-depth documented.
I’m particularly interested in how this book develops a theme that I picked up on in my most recent book: that Christians who hate God even use Christian language to express their opposition to Christianity. It’s like no other language is available than the Christian language for understanding the world, even in the mouths of people attempting to blaspheme. Is that a cosmic joke? Another example of the truth of Christianity? Perhaps both, and more.
Ideologies that compete with and reject Christianity, including atheism and identity politics, face the same challenge as being unable to express themselves without Christian terms and understandings. As a Christian, this makes perfect sense, but I still want to learn more and see more uses. I’ve just started Dominion, but the writing is also gripping, making this thick book yet another page- turner.
Michael O’Brien, Island of the World
This 800-page book is as difficult to describe as difficult to read and put down. The back cover aptly says that this story of a Yugoslavian born 90 years ago as World War II and the Cold War are set to brutalize his country is about” the crucifixion of a soul” and its “resurrection”. I’ve already been in heaven and hell twice since the book’s halfway point.
( Plot spoilers ) The main character, Josip Lasta, grows up in an idyllic mountain village destroyed before his eyes before he hits puberty. Josip discovers that he is writing poetry without the Communist government’s permission after graduating from college and about a year into his marriage. After a stand trial, he is nearly killed and taken to a labor camp where inmates are forced to eat uncooked food through their own remains. It’s a true account of Communism’s hellish degradations and the transcendent beauty of the human soul. ( End spoilers )
How many parallels did Josip’s Communist days have to our own, albeit thankfully less brutal ones, were chilling. Josip published what we now call samizdat, and so, in our Internet Iron Curtain days, do we at The Federalist. His work still irritated the regime and provoked a response, demonstrating its value even when the circulation was significantly sluggish due to its publication in totalitarian conditions. Even though it caused unfathomable suffering for Josip, that was encouraging.
It’s hard to imagine how an author could suffer such a story into existence. The Island of the World is both incredibly beautiful and incredibly terrifying. It expands the reader’s understanding of life, history, humanity, suffering, love, and God and challenges them. Truly a better classic than many listed on” classic books lists” from worthless universities, professors, and publications. Every serious reader would benefit from this.
The Saints of Whistle Grove, Katie Schuermann
Katie Schuermann recommended The Island of the World to me, and reading it reminds me of her latest book out in December, The Saints of Whistle Grove. Whistle Grove does so in a way that makes me want to breathe. Although it’s thankfully not as difficult to read as a story about a Communist concentration camp inmate, it does so in a way that makes me feel both the transcendent and the terrorizing.
I keep rereading this book, giving away my copy to friends, and buying a new one. It’s easier to do because the book is so inexpensive at just$ 15.
Whistle Grove is an illustration of how ordinary American lives can elicit incredible beauty and extraordinary suffering. In a rural American town, Schuermann tells a collection of tales from various eras. She moves readers back and forth in time, making this book also somewhat of a mystery as readers connect the names and their stories through time. I believe that almost everyone of us has gone through grief and loss like the characters in Whistle Grove do. Katie does n’t spare the sword, but she also spares the transcendental comforts that surround and endure through times of unavoidable suffering that we all experience at some point in our lives.
Whistle Grove is now available in an audiobook, for those of you who listen as you wash dishes, fold laundry, mow lawns, and weed gardens. Keep a corner of your T-shirt or a tissue handy, though, in case one of its neighbors in Whistle Grove is dragged into a personal Gethsemanes that all of us who have encountered our own will recognize.
Sign up for Katie’s free email list because she frequently hosts conversational, insightful discussions about books that help students learn to read.
In the Days of Alfred the Great, Eva March Tappan
Now for something slightly different that still reflects our underlying theme of triumph through suffering. For a mother-son book club, I recently read this with my oldest son. In the Days of Alfred the Great is a classic young person’s biography recovered by the wonderful Australian small business Living Book Press.
This epic tale of King Alfred the Great of England before it became England was enjoyed by my 13-year-old son and I for discussion and reading. He also faced seemingly insurmountable challenges, but he also resisted giving up. His choice to take on his people’s suffering — primarily through constant Viking raids that involved church desecration, village mass murder, and unspeakable violence — miraculously united and saved his tribal people from medieval terrorism.
LBP is having a 20 % sale through July 9 so head over and grab some books for the entire family. I have n’t been let down by anything I’ve purchased from them. This sale I bought The Odyssey for Boys and Girls by Alfred Church ( his paraphrases of ancient epics are excellent for young readers ), The Story of the Great Republic and The Story of the Thirteen Colonies by Helene Guerber ( another classic historian for younger readers ), and The Men Who Found America by Frederick Winthrop Hutchinson.
I choose children’s classics when I want a truly lighter book, which is another excellent beachside option. Anne of Green Gables author Lucy Maud Montgomery recommended Jane of Lantern Hill to me as a new book by Schuermann. It’s a book about divorce’s effect on children, with a happy ending.
