So Many Books, So Little Time

My son-in-law asked me to name the 10 books he ought to read. That is a specific question with a fairly open ended answer. The topics are not specific; fiction, history, politics, religion, sports, etc. I have been thinking hard on this one and I have not come up with 10 yet. I have come up with 5 so far and I will list then not necessarily in any order of importance.

1. America Alone by Mark Steyn. This is a book full of grave and important information laced with some pretty good humor. I think it lays out the land on geopolitics and demography for the next 40 years or so. It was published in the fall of 2006 and nothing I have read in a similar vein is even close.
2. Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. Here is the lay person's chance to get a great exposure to fundamental economics, a voodoo subject if there ever was one but this guy makes it easy to understand and follow--this coming from an accounting major who had a ton of econ in undergrad.
3. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. This book is a tremendous history of the development of Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This book won a Pulitzer Prize. If you want to have any kind of inkling what is happening out there with these guys you need to read this book.
4. This is a tough one. It would be easy to say The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith but The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek would be just as good in many ways and it is a lot shorter. The problem is once you read Hayek you will want to read Smith
5. Radical-in-Chief by Stanley Kurtz would be my 5th recommendation right now. It has been the book of the year as far as I am concerned. This is a dispassionate and disinterested analysis of the President Obama from his days at Occidental College to the White House. It is incredibly well researched, it is an example of better than 'peer reviewed' work. This one gets two thumbs up and two big toes up.

I will continue to think hard on the next five in the list of 10 and hopefully have them available next week.