Last minute Christmas gifts
What was your favorite book you read in 2022? Anything you’d recommend to me?
Below are approximately 10 of my favorites from the last year -- in case you need a last minute present for someone or want to take advantage of the break to get some reading done.
10. The Wealthy Renter makes most of the arguments for why renting where you live can be better for your wealth than owning. A needed contrarian perspective previously reviewed here.
9. “Twenty years ago, I was a Montessori skeptic” is the first sentence of Montessori: the Science Behind the Genius. The author proceeded to write this book in an attempt to provide a balanced assessment of where the evidence supported the Montessori teaching method and where it didn’t -- and came away concluding that the evidence was predominantly positive. Helped inspire my family’s decision to raise Knox Montessori from the Start.
8. Pieces of Eight: the Monetary Powers and Disabilities of the United States Constitution is an exhaustive originalist analysis of what the Constitution has to say about money from quadruple Harvard degree holder Edwin Vieira. Check out my review here to see how the dollar once limited government.
7. Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall is the powerful memoir of a woman’s investigation of the totalitarian East German regime and its discontents in the aftermath of the Cold War. In Nazi Germany, there was one Gestapo agent for every 2,000 citizens. In Stalin's USSR, there was one KGB agent for every 5,800 citizens. In East Germany, there was one Stasi officer or regular informant for every 63 people. When irregular informants are counted, it's one for every 6. Filled with striking stories that make you grateful to be free. Also: check out the movie The Lives of Others.
6. What I loved the most about Father, the Family Protector is the idea that you’re raising your children for their future spouses, since they will wind up having the deepest insight into their character. The book condemns not only absent fathers but morally absent dads who give their best to their workplace but default to being tired playmates at home. A call for dads to be the best they can be.
5. I wish that the The Myth of the Robber Barons had a different title because it concedes too much to the mainstream narrative - but it more than makes up for it with splendid revisionist history that differentiates between the Gilded Age’s political entrepreneurs (Stanford, Fulton) who exploited the state’s corrupt generosity and market entrepreneurs devoted to delivering the best product at the cheapest price (Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, James J. Hill). A must-read for those interested in American history.
4. This year I wound up reading 2-3 books about each of the most popular homeschooling pedagogies. The Well-Trained Mind is the classic guide to Classical homeschooling - and like that pedagogy, it is rigorous, articulate, exhaustive, putting kids on a firm foundation of the West’s greatest hits from age 6 to 18.
3. If you want to be highfalutin, you might call comic books “graphic novels,” but some of the best books I’ve read this year were graphic and nonfiction. Moonbound tells the story of Apollo 11. Tiananmen 1989 relates the tragic suppressed cry for freedom in Red China. And the Faithful Spy is a neat biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
2. In the typical biography, you know the subject succeeds. That’s why the biography exists. You know, amidst his darkest doubts, that Churchill winds up becoming Prime Minister. Like the Roman is different. It profiles the absolutely extraordinary Enoch Powell, one of only two men to go from private to general in the British Army in World War II, and you keep thinking the man is going to wind up at the top of the greasy pole. He doesn’t. But he does break the British political consensus. And thereby paved the way for Margaret Thatcher.
1. The Valley of the Vision may not be for everyone but this collection of Puritan prayers and devotions is the book I began reading to my son shortly after his birth and it has been a wonderful source of renewal. If you’re so predestined, pick it up. Merry Christmas!
PS. I had a quite a bit of correspondence about whether quitting is underrated and will be revisiting the question in my next email.