Tuning out the noise of daily life to soak in new ideas can be a rewarding experience. Books are a wonderful gift at any time but particularly around the holidays, when leisure time is more abundant.
Our 2024 Holiday Book List is a compilation of compelling books authored by Bradley Prize recipients and others whose work is aligned with The Bradley Foundation’s mission. We hope you’ll find one or more to give to someone – even if that someone is you.
American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation - And Could Again
by Yuval Levin
Blending engaging history with lucid analysis, American Covenant recovers the Constitution’s true genius and reveals how it charts a path to repairing America’s fault lines. Uncovering the framers’ sophisticated grasp of political division, Levin showcases the Constitution’s exceptional power to facilitate constructive disagreement, negotiate resolutions to disputes, and forge unity in a fractured society. Clear-eyed about the ways that contemporary politics have malfunctioned, Levin also offers practical solutions for reforming those aspects of the constitutional order that have gone awry.
Hopeful, insightful, and rooted in the best of our political tradition, American Covenant celebrates the Constitution’s remarkable power to bind together a diverse society, reassuring us that a less divided future is within our grasp.
by Colum McCann with Diane Foley
Diane looks back on the early days of Jim’s childhood, his journey to journalism, and the killing fields of the world from which he reported with indefatigable determination and insight into the plights of those caught up in the agonies of war. She guides us through her family’s history and the difficulties they faced when Jim was captured. The compelling narrative that unfolds will take readers on a journey of strength, resilience and radical empathy.
by Abigail Shrier
In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations. Youth suicide rates are climbing, antidepressant prescriptions for children are common, and the proliferation of mental health diagnoses has not helped the staggering number of kids who are lonely, lost, sad and fearful of growing up. What’s gone wrong with America’s youth?
In Bad Therapy, bestselling investigative journalist Abigail Shrier argues that the problem isn’t the kids—it’s the mental health experts. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with child psychologists, parents, teachers, and young people, Shrier explores the ways the mental health industry has transformed the way we teach, treat, discipline, and even talk to our kids. She reveals that most of the therapeutic approaches have serious side effects and few proven benefits. Mental health care can be lifesaving when properly applied to children with severe needs, but for the typical child, the cure can be worse than the disease.
by Marcus M. Witcher, Kevin L. Hughes, and Allen Mendenhall
There has never been conformity or unanimity among conservatives. Conservatism contains many different factions and varieties of thought. Founded in 1964, The Philadelphia Society has always been dedicated to fostering conversation, serving as a venue for conservatives and libertarians to discuss the “foundations of a free and ordered society.” This new collection of the Society’s speeches and essays is published in that spirit.
by Scott Winship, Yuval Levin, and Ryan Streeter
Material hardship among American children has never been lower. This seeming victory in the War on Poverty, however, has failed to loosen the connection between family origins and where kids end up. Children born to the most disadvantaged parents today are no less likely than in the past to become the most disadvantaged adults when they grow up. Indeed, because of the perverse disincentives in our safety net, policy may have simultaneously reduced hardship while impeding upward mobility.
But if progressive proposals to expand the opportunities of poor kids have disappointed, the challenges those children face have never sufficiently preoccupied the right. This volume provides proposals that are grounded in the insight that greater opportunity requires shoring up the relationships of children and adolescents and the strength of the institutions to which they are connected—in short, rebuilding social capital.
Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative
by Glenn Loury
Economist Glenn Loury is one of the most prominent public intellectuals of our time: he’s often radically opposed to the political mainstream and delights in upending what’s expected of a black public figure. But more so than the arguments themselves―on affirmative action, institutional racism, Trumpism―his public life has been characterized by fearlessness and a willingness to recalibrate strongly held and forcefully argued beliefs.
Loury grew up on the south side of Chicago, earned a PhD in MIT’s economics program, and became the first black tenured professor of economics at Harvard at the age of thirty-three. He has been, at turns, a young father, a drug addict, an adulterer, a psychiatric patient, a born-again Christian, a lapsed born-again Christian, a Black Reaganite who has swung from the right to the left and back again. In Late Admissions, Loury examines what it means to chart a sense of self over the course of a tempestuous, but well-considered, life.
Leisure with Dignity: Essays in Celebration of Charles Kesler
by Michal Anton and Glenn Ellmers
Charles R. Kesler, an eminent scholar and prodigious editor, has exerted a profound influence on the study of American politics and the practice of American conservatism.
A precocious high-school student, he impressed a visiting William F. Buckley Jr. who, before becoming a life-long friend, wrote him a recommendation letter to Yale. Kesler asked for another—to Harvard, where he completed his undergraduate degree and earned a PhD under the legendary professor Harvey C. Mansfield. An early passion for political journalism, played out largely on the pages of National Review, led Kesler to author an NR cover story on his third great influence, Harry V. Jaffa.
Kesler became a faculty colleague of Jaffa’s at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University and is perhaps best known as the editorial helmsman of the Claremont Review of Books. In this volume, Kesler’s students, friends, and colleagues commemorate his four-decade career as a teacher, mentor, and scholar.
by Randy Barnett
From prosecuting murderers in Chicago, to arguing before the Supreme Court, to authoring more than a dozen books, Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett has played an integral role in the rise of originalism—the movement to identify, restore, and defend the original meaning of the Constitution. Thanks in part to his efforts, by 2018 a majority of sitting Supreme Court justices self-identified as “originalists.”
After writing seminal books on libertarianism and contract law, Barnett pivoted to constitutional law. His mission to restore "the lost Constitution" took him from the schoolhouse to the courthouse, where he argued the medical marijuana case of Gonzeles v. Raich in the Supreme Court—a case now taught to every law student. The engaging story of his rise from obscurity to one of the most influential thinkers in America is an inspiring how-to guide for anyone seeking real-world advancement of justice and liberty for all.
by Jeffery Sikkenga and David Davenport
America faces a crisis in civic education that imperils the long-term health of the country. Too many Americans―especially young people―do not have the knowledge of history and principles necessary to sustain the republic. In what has become a vicious cycle, young people are not learning about their country―its history and how it works―and they grow up disengaged and distrustful.
Too many young people do not understand the principles of self-government on which America was founded. And they do not understand America’s history as the story of the struggle to live up to those principles of freedom articulated in documents like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Instead, too many believe that America’s story is essentially one of oppression, not freedom―injustice, not hope. In the first half of the book, authors Jeff Sikkenga and David Davenport diagnose the problem while proposing solutions in the second half.
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by David Charles Stone
In fewer than two-hundred pages, David Stove leaves the well-established and widely regarded edifice of the academic philosophy of science in smoldering ruins.
This book provides a modern history of scientific reasoning, from David Hume’s inductive skepticism to Karl Popper’s outright denial of induction, to the increasingly irrational and absurd scientific views that followed. When Popper untethered science from induction, Stove argues, he triggered a postmodernist nightmare of utter nonsense culminating in Paul Feyerabend’s summation that “anything goes” when it comes to defining or describing science.
With undeniable logic, a deft analysis of the linguistic slight-of-hand that make absurd arguments seem reasonable, and regular displays of wit, Stove gives the reader a front row seat to one of the greatest unforced errors in the history of modern thought.