A few weeks ago, Matt Continetti had an item at TWS listing some of the books that had most shaped his thinking over the years, and he asked for input from readers on their influences. Aware that my conservatism owes itself to more than just repeated muggings by reality, I tried to walk it back in books. It's easy enough to trace it to a beginning point somewhere between Nixon's resignation, which I celebrated as a 21-year old, and Carter's weakness, which served as a wake-up call.
Limiting the influences to books per se is problematic in itself, since so much of what I've consumed in political thought over the last 20 years has been online, and in column or blog formats. Still, at the risk of appearing pretentious (I read them, so you should) or presumptuous (like someone cares), here are ten books that came to mind when I gave some thought to my own political influences...in no particular order...(all links to Amazon)
1984 - George Orwell
Witness - Whittaker Chambers
Radical Son - David Horowitz
The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Conservative Mind - Russell Kirk
The Vision of the Anointed - Thomas Sowell
Reagan: In His Own Hand - Skinner, et al (Editors)
The Black Book of Communism - Stephane Courtois, et al
The Road to Serfdom - Friedrich von Hayek
Liberal Fascism - Jonah Goldberg
---
A couple others by Horowitz might well make a hypothetical second ten...Destructive Generation, or the more recent compilation Left Illusions for example....as might another Sowell title or two...Basic Economics for sure. A few other "just missed" books like Tocqueville's Democracy in America or Common Sense by Thomas Paine got consideration, but if I start going there, it never ends.
Of the ten above, only two are of 21st century vintage, and since I can fairly be accused at times of bearing the imprint of the last person to sit on me, some more contemporary reading is worth citing too. So here are another 15 (published since about 1995) that informed or entertained or otherwise spoke to me, and that I can recommend as worthwhile reads...again, in no particular order..
The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright
Imagining the Future; Science and American Democracy - Yuval Levin
Willful Blindness - Andrew C. McCarthy
Bury the Chains - Adam Hochschild
Infidel - Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Red Hot Lies - Christopher Horner
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe; Immigration, Islam and the West - Christopher Caldwell
The Secret Life of Bill Clinton - Ambrose Evans Pritchard
The Rape of Nanking - Iris Chang
Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East :1776 to the Present - Michael Oren
The Age of Reagan - (Part II) - Steven F. Hayward
In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage - John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr
America Alone - Mark Steyn
Ex-Friends - Norman Podhoretz
The Skeptical Environmentalist - Bjorn Lomborg
Posted by dan at April 30, 2010 9:35 PM