In the foreword to her new book, Peggy Noonan writes that she drew its title from the first line of Charles de Gaulle’s War Memoirs: “All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” A Certain Idea of America: Selected Writings (Portfolio, 352 pp., $31) gathers some of Noonan’s best recent writing from her long-running column in the Wall Street Journal. Her idea of America is that it is good, valuable, providential—still. She writes about its problems and weaknesses, as a political columnist must (one section of her book is tilted “I Don’t Mind Being Stern”), but she is continually drawn back to what is ennobling, inspiring, and great in America’s past and present. The collection includes appreciations of Ulysses S. Grant, Bob Dylan, Tom Wolfe, Billy Graham, Senator Margaret Chase, and the boys of Pointe du Hoc—alongside pointed criticism of whatever, in her view, degrades, divides, or endangers the country. Of her old boss Ronald Reagan, Noonan observes that in his formative years he saw himself as a craftsman and an artist, an outlook she recommends to today’s Republicans: “The thing about artists is that they try to see the real shape of things. They don’t get lost in factoids and facets of problems, they try to see the thing whole. They try to capture reality.”

In The Bible: A Global History (Basic Books, 528 pp., $35), Bruce Gordon, a professor at Yale Divinity School, follows the life of an “infinite and inexhaustible” book. Its impact has been, he writes, “sublime and perplexing,” owing to its status as “divine words written by human hands—a complex partnership” (to put it mildly). Gordon’s enlightening account spans continents and millennia, from early Christianity in the ancient world, to medieval Europe, to the Reformation and Renaissance, to early modern England, to America, to global Pentecostalism. There is, he makes clear, no authoritative Bible with a single point of origin—“its life has always been in translation”—and this has always led to argument and division. He corrects some common misconceptions. It is not true, for instance, that most people in the Middle Ages had no access to scripture. It was experienced in liturgy, seen on the stage and in images, and heard in song: “In a mostly illiterate world, the Bible was simply known.” It may seem that it is much less known—though still ubiquitous—in our more literate time, but that would be to ignore its role in Asia, Latin America, and, especially, Africa, where the church is alive and growing. The story of the book of books is still being written.

“Poetry criticism today is often a plea for remembrance,” writes the poet and critic Dana Gioia in the preface to Poetry as Enchantment: And Other Essays (Paul Dry Books, 272 pp., $21.95). In Gioia’s hands, the plea takes the form of a glad offering. He presents the reader with fresh thoughts on famous poets (Robert Frost, Philip Larkin) and introduces largely forgotten or obscure ones (the British poet-critic Donald Davie, the American poet-soldier John Allan Wyeth). The collection’s title essay is a consideration of poetry’s timeless human purposes and its changing role in education. By “enchantment,” Gioia means that verse, with its rhythm and musicality, can cast a kind of spell that creates a heightened experience of reality. As he writes of W. H. Auden’s poems, “they didn’t enter from the eye and go to the brain, they came through the ear and went to the heart.” One reason Gioia left the academy (he dropped out of a literature graduate program at Harvard) was his realization that the dominant methods of modern literary criticism tended to exclude this way of encountering poems. Readers who may doubt that poetry is for them will find in Gioia a discerning guide to its power and pleasures.