HUNTER BAKER

For your summer-reading consideration this year, I recommend the following books (all with a Cold War element):

Witness, by Whittaker Chambers — Witness remains one of the greatest memoirs ever written. We live in a time when everyone under 40 (give or take a few years) has essentially forgotten about the Cold War. Possibly better than any other volume, Witness spells out the stakes involved and tells an amazing human story of colliding lives at the same time. I cannot remember the last time a book captured me as fully as this one did. I tried to collect the best passages and found myself simply retyping giant sections of the book.

Tortured for Christ, by Richard Wurmbrand — Keeping with the Cold War theme, readers should take the opportunity to read Richard Wurmbrand’s account of being beaten and tortured (mentally and physically) as a Lutheran pastor by the Communists. As I recently read about Wurmbrand’s sufferings (and those of many other Christians in prison with him), I was struck by the fear that their trials might be forgotten. This is more than a record of suffering, though. Tortured for Christ is a story of faithfulness and triumph in addition to martyrdom.

Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World without Becoming a Bore, by Peter Berger — There is an Austrian trio of the 20th century that has profoundly influenced my thinking. Its members are F. A. Hayek, Peter Drucker, and Peter Berger. Here in his autobiography, Berger relates the story of a female friend who was enthusiastic about the Soviet Union. When Berger introduced her to a Latvian couple who had been persecuted by Communist enforcers, she put her hands over her ears to avoid hearing any more. Her religion had been threatened. Contrary to the title’s implicit fear of sociology’s tie to boredom, Berger never has been anything other than provocative and interesting. This excellent personal history helps explain an improbable career, unusual publishing success, and the thoroughly individual life of an intriguingly religious man who often refers to himself as a “Godder” and is therefore an oddity in the academy.

Christ and Culture, by Richard Niebuhr — Every now and then we will hear a reference to Reinhold Niebuhr’s work, but his brother Richard was also a spectacular thinker. At a time when conservative Christians sometimes appear to be working in a spent political movement, the opportunity is ripe for revisiting fundamental issues. Niebuhr’s famed classifications of Christ against Culture, Christ of Culture, Christ above Culture, Christ and Culture in Paradox, and Christ Transforming Culture offer an excellent guide to reflection. His book The Kingdom of God in America is also worth every second spent reading it.

Stained Glass, by William F. Buckley Jr. — So far, all of my recommendations have involved the Cold War or Cold War–era writers. Since it’s the summer, I shouldn’t miss the opportunity to provide you with a good spy novel. Stained Glass is my favorite in the genre. John le Carré is the writer we think of when it comes to portraying the painful moral complexity of the intelligence world, but Buckley proved to be highly adept at exploring that landscape as well. His Blackford Oakes stars, as usual, but the real hero (and a tragic one) is Buckley’s young German noble Axel Wintergrin, who is determined to achieve the “spiritual mobilization” of the German people against the Soviets.

— Hunter Baker is the author of The End of Secularism and Political Thought: A Student’s Guide. He is the dean of instruction at Union University.

GINA DALFONZO

Summer, I’ve always heard, is a great time for trashy romance novels on the beach. I wouldn’t know, because I loathe trashy romance novels. But if you feel like packing a really good love story for your beach read, why not try the classics shelf? Here are a few of my favorites.

Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand — He was ugly, he was poor, and there’s never been another hero as romantic. In one of the best-loved plays ever written, Cyrano is a brilliant poet, a dashing swordsman, and a truly selfless and noble soul. The play itself is packed with wit, adventure, and heartbreak, and I never get tired of rereading it. (I suggest either the Brian Hooker or the Gertrude Hall translation.)

Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L. Sayers — Set at Oxford University in the 1930s, this one is considered by many, including me, to be Sayers’s best detective novel. It’s actually next-to-last in her Lord Peter Wimsey series, but you can read it first — I did, and I didn’t have any trouble picking things up. Harriet Vane is a plainspoken, practical, delightful heroine, and Lord Peter an ideal partner in both crime-solving and romance.

Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens — If you’re in the mood to lose yourself in one of those great big rambling Victorian novels, try this tale of poverty and riches in 1820s London. As usual with Dickens, there’s a boisterous cast of supporting players. But the two central characters, Amy Dorrit and Arthur Clennam, are quietly appealing, and their love story, while understated, is deeply satisfying.

— Gina Dalfonzo is editor of BreakPoint.org and Dickensblog.

DAVID GELERNTER

Chartres is the latest and most spectacular volume in the Grâce d’Une Cathédrale series. It’s a large quarto, approximately 500 pages, weighing five tons (approximately), with contributions from 50-odd authors ranging from the field’s leading big shot, Alain Erlande-Brandenburg, to young scholars and experts in a dozen fields. Its hundreds of photos are literally unprecedented, because the interior had its most spectacular restoration and repainting to Gothic specifications last year, and because computer superpositions of separate exposures in single photos allow you to see things that have never been seen before — such as the choir in brilliant sunshine, with the cathedral’s celebrated 12th-century glass luminous instead of washed out. This book fills a hole whose existence was a disgrace to France herself. There are a million books on Chartres but, until now, not one comprehensive collection of modern photographs, including detailed studies of all the glass. Those who are put off by the book’s being in French should back off: its only serious forerunner and competitor is the multivolume Chartres in the Schöpfungsbau und Ideenwelt im Herzen Europas series. So count your blessings.

In rereading John Sumerson’s The Classical Language of Architecture, I’m struck again that a single caption by Sumerson can be worth all competing books put together. Figures 53 and 54 show two marble window surrounds. Both are Renaissance-ish, with their complex pediments on top, columns down each side, elaborate carvings along the bottom, and other decorations. “Every element in this window [left] by Raphael in the Palazzo Pandolfini . . . can be described in Vitruvian terms. But to describe this niche [right] by Michelangelo in the Medici Chapel . . . would be beyond the Vitruvian vocabulary: its intensity of feeling defies technical description.” To achieve intensity of feeling using mere decorative details is a feat of which only the greatest of history’s artists and architects was capable.

Memoirs d’outre-tombe (Memoirs from beyond the grave) by the great François–René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) is one of most striking autobiographies ever written. He was born to the nobility under the ancien régime and grew up in a vast (largely empty) medieval chateau; his brother and sister-in-law were executed during the Terror; he traveled to America, to Jerusalem, to England; returned to France; left and returned again, invented the French romantic (in the sense of “romantic movement”) novel; writes with moving lucidity, honesty, and simplicity — and has become nearly invisible. Evidently no English version has appeared since the 1960s, and even the Pliéade edition (from the line that is dedicated to preserving France’s patrimony) is out of print. Perhaps because the author was not only a thinker, author, and adventurer of distinction, but also passionate Catholic and defender of the faith?

— David Gelernter is the author of America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats).

STEVEN F. HAYWARD

I have to confess to having a touch of Michael Dukakis in me; that is, I tend to read serious books at the beach in the summer, rather than pulpy novels. Of course, I live at the beach these days, so summer isn’t much different from the rest of the year. And at least I don’t read about Swedish land-use planning, as the Duke reportedly did. (Although if Swedish land-use policy is like Swedish tax policy these days, it is probably superior to ours, so we might well want to read up on it.)

Anyway, start with William J. Bennett and David Wilesol’s Is College Worth It? The “college bubble” is not a brand-new theme, but whoa there — when a former secretary of education is throwing down on the issue, you know there’s something deeply wrong with higher ed. Today’s higher-education blob (Bennett’s great term from the 1980s) has ruined good education for many, while making quality education at elite private schools a luxury good once again, in exact contrast to what the liberals who run the universities say they want to do.

While we’re on the subject of higher ed, let’s take a moment to put in the forefront the cliché of the multicultural Left that the great books of the Western tradition are just tools of white oppression, or whatever comforting nonsense they are using these days to excuse their intellectual laziness. And then take in Earl Shorris’s new book, The Art of Freedom: Teaching the Humanities to the Poor. Turns out low-income Americans — even prison inmates — respond much better to classic literature than to the latest gender-studies deconstruction.

Next month the French author Pascal Bruckner will come out with The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse, a searing attack on the environmental movement. I’m enjoying the galleys right now. As with his previous romp against the European Left, The Tyranny of Guilt, Bruckner will leave some marks. He deserves to be much better known to American audiences.

If you haven’t read Jesse Norman’s new biography, Edmund Burke: The First Conservative, run, don’t walk, to the bookstore to get a copy. Roger Scruton commented to me a week or so ago that it is refreshing to see a member of Parliament who can think and write with the facility of Norman. Shows there’s hope for the Tory party yet. And for revitalizing the memory of Burke.

Balance: The Economics of the Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America, by Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane, just came out on May 20, and though I’ve only peeked through its pages so far, it appears to be a shorter and more sensible version of Paul Kennedy’s famous Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. I may revise that judgment after I get through it more carefully, but it clearly is a compelling and well-presented case.

— Steven Hayward is the Thomas Smith Fellow at the Ashbrook Center. In August he will become the inaugural scholar on conservative thought and policy at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

HUGH HEWITT

For summer fun, treat yourself to the Joe Pickett novels by C. J. Box, set for the most part in the mountains of Wyoming. Even if you think of a golf course as wilderness, the Pickett series is a treat and Joe an everyman hero.

For popular history at its best, William Dalrymple’s Return of a King is the riveting account of the first British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 and its tragic aftermath. Read it along with Steven Pressfield’s novel of Alexander the Great’s invasion of the same land (with nearly the same result), The Afghan Campaign. Then layer on Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Little America, and Jake Tapper’s The Outpost, and a picture begins to emerge of the immense challenge taken on by the American military in 2001. Tapper’s book will make you weep, but leave you convinced that no army has ever tried to do more for the Afghan people, and for the right reasons and with higher aims, than ours has.

— Hugh Hewitt is author of In, But Not Of: A Guide to Christian Ambition and the Desire to Influence the World.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ

Do not be bored this summer. Make some time for leisure — for refreshment. It is good to do so every day. But especially when kids are out of school and perhaps work slows because others are on vacation!

Others will mention this, but Mary Eberstadt’s How the West Really Lost God is an extremely important book for reasons even beyond what I mention here and here.

Anyone wanting to understand where the Catholic Church is, and just might be going, needs to read George Weigel’s Evangelical Catholicism. If you find Pope Francis fascinating, read On Heaven and Earth, a translation of conversations he had with an Argentine rabbi. And I continue to recommend Austen Ivereigh’s How to Defend the Church without Raising Your Voice, and far from only because of its great title.

The end of the world, by the way, is going to be awesome, my colleague Kevin Williamson says in his smart new book The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome (speaking of winning titles). Next to be read is Rich Lowry on Lincoln and the American dream and us!

My purse reads: What I pick up during train and plane rides and mental- and spiritual-health breaks: A few G. K. Chesterton classics, including a recent collection, In Defense of Sanity. Another recent collection, Saint Ignatius Loyola’s Letters to Women. I confess I have never read The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne, though I’ve had it in my Amazon shopping cart since a friend recommended it while standing on a rooftop overlooking Sant’Agnese in Agone in Piazza Navona last fall, and I plan to make the buy and read it before I see you in September!

Next to my nightstand is the Knox translation of the Bible — an “Englishing” by Monsignor Ronald Knox — which I’ve been dipping in and out of but, one of these coming days, will just go from cover to cover with. It’s been recently reissued in a beautiful edition by Baronius Press in the U.K.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a director of Catholic Voices USA.

ERIC METAXAS

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life, by Rod Dreher. Dreher’s talents have never been on better display. The masterly told story of his sister Ruthie’s premature death from cancer and the story of his own subsequent return to small-town life is simply one of the best reads of the year. It will change lives.

A Free People’s Suicide: Sustainable Freedom and the American Future, by Os Guinness. Alas and alack, like most Americans of my generation I grew up essentially ignorant of the Founders’ concept of ordered freedom. Public schools ain’t what they used to be. But reading Os Guinness’s spectacular book was a tremendous wake-up call. Unless we recapture the Founders’ understanding of how our freedom was structured and raise the national consciousness on these foundational ideas, America will simply cease to be. I thank God for this book.

The Searchers: A Quest for Faith in the Valley of Doubt, by Joseph Loconte. If you know someone whose faith is having a tough go of it — or perhaps they never had any to begin with — this is the book for them. Never have I encountered something simultaneously so easy to read and yet so truly profound. If it seems written by a charming and fascinating history teacher, that’s because it was. And, oh yes, it answers that question of questions: Why am I here?

— Eric Metaxas is author of the new book Seven Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness.

JOHN J. MILLER

Heart of Ice, by P. J. Parrish — A good murder mystery needs a good setting. This one takes place on Michigan’s Mackinac Island, and I’m saving it for my own visit next month, when I’ll spend a night at the Grand Hotel for the first time.

Ice Hunter, by Joseph Heywood — Speaking of Michigan, I’ve been wanting to try a novel by Joseph Heywood, featuring Grady Service, a “woods cop” in the Upper Peninsula. I may go with this one, the first in a popular series — or possibly Heywood’s just-published collection of short stories, Hard Ground.

The Snowman, by Jo Nesbo — This book will accompany me on the upcoming National Review Cruise of the Norwegian fjords. Nesbo is a Norwegian author and I enjoyed his novel The Redbreast, which was one part Michael Connelly and one part Frederick Forsyth. Nesbo’s crime novels are set mainly in Oslo, which we won’t see, but at least it’s in the right country.

— John J. Miller is National Review’s national correspondent and the author of The First Assassin, a Civil War thriller.

COLETTE MORAN

Recently, I finally got around to reading two classics:

Night, by Elie Wiesel, was not light reading, but it is just as relevant today as ever. Taking in the lessons learned by Wiesel and his father about tolerating the evils of society — it is a mistake to think that we don’t have to stand up to evil because it won’t triumph — should give us the fortitude to fight today’s global ills.

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, is not only a great lesson about tolerance but a primer in mindful and patient parenting. Looking at the evils of the world through a child’s eyes is also such an enriching perspective.

Next on my reading list is The Children of Men, by P. D. James. This dystopian look at a future without children is even more prophetic than when James wrote it in 1992. She tells a tale that looks not only at the practical implications of such a world but at the effect it has on the human psyche.

And while I’m on that theme, I’ll also take a crack at What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, by Jonathan V. Last. I imagine that I will find it hard to make my way through his dour predictions that the world will not be able to bounce back from the current global trend toward underpopulation. But apparently it is an interesting look at the factors behind why couples are having fewer children.

— Colette Moran writes for NRO’s The Home Front blog.

CATHERINE RUTH PAKALUK

Here is what’s on my nightstand for summer reading — something new, something old, and something beautiful.

The New: How the West Really Lost God, by Mary Eberstadt. What came first, secularization or family breakdown? I have tended to believe that the causal arrow runs from families to society — since families yield first-order effects on people, whereas churches can only build on what has been supplied by the family. Mary Eberstadt tackles this question and makes a case for the same. This is essential reading if you care about the decline of the West and are a little tired of the cliché stories about it. This is also essential reading if you don’t believe in the decline of the West, or in secularization. If she doesn’t convince you that secularization has happened, she will at least convince you that something profoundly new has emerged as a dominant social model.

The Old: The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni. In addition to its significance as a work of Italian literature, it is often recommended as one of the great “Catholic novels.” I am somewhat frustrated by the practice of calling literature “Catholic” and therefore am eager to read and discover for myself what sense there is in that description in this case. Given my scholarly interests, I have a particular passion for works of literature that deal with marriage in its various historical expressions — last summer I finally read Middlemarch, which was great fun — and so I expect at least as much from The Betrothed.

The Beautiful: The Elements of Style – not the old Strunk and White, but Stephen Calloway’s 20-year-old classic compendium on traditional interior design. The full title: The Elements of Style: A Practical Encyclopedia of Interior Architectural Details from 1485 to the Present. Why? In the past five years or so I’ve been completely in love with mid-century modern interiors, outgrowing my youthful crush on the traditional. Now I feel drawn to move beyond my flirtatious relationship with interior design and embark on a more serious engagement with the art form. Many recommend this as a solid starting place. The book is splendid in every sense.

— Catherine Ruth Pakaluk is an assistant professor of economics at Ave Maria University and a faculty research fellow at the Stein Center for Social Research. She studies economic models of the family, fertility, and gender. She lives near Naples, Fla., with her husband and seven children.

MIKE POTEMRA

Dan Brown will sell zillions of copies of his new book, which uses some Dante-based codes and clues. Why not skip him and instead read the greatest poem of all time? The Divine Comedy is a religion-fiction the way 2001: A Space Odyssey is a science fiction: It takes some of the profoundest truths and thought patterns available in its time and puts them in the service of a gripping narrative exploration of Man’s calling and destiny. You no more need to understand medieval Italian politics and theology to enjoy this work than you need to know astrophysics to get 2001. (In both cases, though, you will probably find yourself wanting to learn more about these subjects.)

I recommend John Ciardi’s translation as the best way to get into this work: It’s simultaneously true to the original and a compelling English poem in its own right. It is, incidentally, the translation Don Draper was reading on the beach in Hawaii at the beginning of this season of Mad Men: Don was reading the first part, about Hell, where he himself appears to be stuck; but the remaining two-thirds of Dante’s work point us to a higher destiny, to a contemplation of, and participation in, the Love that moves the stars.

— Michael Potemra is literary editor of National Review.

JULIA SHAW

At the top of my reading list this summer is Mary Eberstadt’s latest book, How the West Really Lost God. Eberstadt explores the relationship between family and faith, arguing that the West stopped having children long before it stopped believing in God.

But with the past year’s deluge of books and articles discussing women, the family, and professional life, what, if anything, should make a summer reading list? Everyone’s heard about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandburg inspiring young women to Lean In. Some have wondered if we’re witnessing “the end of men and the rise of women,” as Hanna Rosin puts it. But, for a different take, check out one of the most interesting books about the role of men and women in society, Manliness, by Harvey C. Mansfield. A philosophical defense of the virtue of manliness, it is written to appeal to smart women.

And speaking of smart women, no summer reading list is complete without a Dorothy Sayers mystery. One of the first women to graduate from Oxford, Sayers wrote a series of delightful mysteries following the escapades of Lord Peter Wimsey, a quirky aristocrat and amateur sleuth, and Harriet Vane, his detective-writing love interest. Two novels in particular deserve a look this summer:

In Murder Must Advertise, Wimsey goes undercover as a copywriter in an advertising agency to investigate the death of a copywriter who had recently reported a company scandal. While investigating the murder, Wimsey uncovers a cocaine ring and the raucous social life of the city’s bright young things. In a few pages, Sayers, who worked in an advertising agency, captures the day-to-day drama of such an environment better than a full season of Mad Men does.

In Gaudy Night, Wimsey’s love interest Harriet Vane visits her alma mater, Shrewsbury College of Oxford, only to discover a series of malevolent pranks tormenting the faculty and students on campus. While Vane tracks down the culprits, Sayers peppers the book with thoughtful discussions of marriage, family, and women’s education.

— Julia Shaw is a writer in Washington, D.C.