At the close of each year, we ask the Public Discourse editorial team and Witherspoon Institute staff to write about the best book or books they read that year. We’ve listed the 2024 recommendations below. Happy reading!
Patrick Brown, Contributing Editor
Error is, inarguably, a more effective teacher than success, and Adam Higginbotham has made himself the foremost chronicler of catastrophic mistakes and what we can learn from them. My recommendation is twofold. Higginbotham’s recently released Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space follows up on the success of his Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster. I read them both this year, and, in addition to the reads-like-a-thriller narration, they provide a wonderful opportunity to contrast how the American and Soviet systems responded to unthinkable (yet, in retrospect, entirely predictable) failure: nationally-televised investigations seeking accountability on the one hand and careerist cover-ups and buck-passing on the other. You’ll not only come to a better understanding of these high-profile catastrophes, but of what bureaucracies and human nature are capable of, for better and for worse.
Alexandra Davis, Managing Editor
I admittedly turn far more to nonfiction than fiction, due in large part to my pathological need for everything I do in my spare time to feel “productive.” But desperate for a good-for-its-own-sake story, I picked up Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River, the first novel in a year-long book club I recently joined. Enger’s masterful use of metaphor aside (e.g., the sky isn’t just spotty and pale, it’s “jaundiced”), the characters are endearing not in spite of, but because of their believable flaws. Jeremiah Land threatens to take from Atticus Finch the title of “best literary father of all time,” from his brazen act of hope in commanding his ailing newborn son to “breathe” to his heroic sacrifice in the end. But he is not perfect, and neither are his two children, forced into precociousness by their mother’s absence and dire poverty. Faith and fierce loyalty sustain them, though, and in different ways, they all meet redemption, whether through the presence of a woman who might be interpreted as “the New Eve” for filling a maternal absence, to a providential entry into a literary career that might have seemed unattainable. It’s beautiful, and human, and rich with symbolism reminiscent of O’Connor.
John Doherty, Witherspoon Institute Director of Finance
It has been a little more than a year since the death of Henry Kissinger, one of the more interesting people who lived during the 100 years of his lifetime. His Jewish family fled Germany for the United States on the eve of World War II, in which he went on to serve as an American soldier. Kissinger came to identify strongly with his adoptive country, eventually serving as its Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under two presidents. With a brilliant mind and a Ph.D. from Harvard, Kissinger was a rare combination of scholar and statesman, guiding American foreign policy at crucial moments such as the conclusion of the Vietnam War and the reestablishment of American relations with China. Although his ideas and decisions were at times controversial, it is hard to think of many in contemporary national or international affairs who measure up to him in ability. For anyone interested in getting a sample of his thought, I recommend the book Diplomacy, Kissinger’s study of Western international relations from the 1600s to the mid-1990s. The tome is dense in information, yet highly readable; if you can’t manage the whole thing, at least read the first few chapters, and then try a later chapter about an incident in recent (or less recent) Western history that interests you. Kissinger’s historical and analytical depth will give you a new perspective on international affairs in our day.
Matthew J. Franck, Contributing Editor
In 2024 the most notable novels I have read are Tolstoy’s War and Peace and the first three parts (I’m currently in the fourth) of Thomas Mann’s great tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers. In historical and political writing, I have benefited from Allen Guelzo’s Our Ancient Faith and Yuval Levin’s American Covenant, each a valuable meditation on the past, present, and future of our constitutional republic.
For a better understanding of the state of the Catholic Church in America, one can do no better than Francis X. Maier’s True Confessions. For an exploration of the intellectual corruption of higher education by way of an ideological capture, read Carl R. Trueman’s To Change All Worlds. And for a fascinating—and beautifully written—combination of a group biography with an accessible treatment of modern analytic philosophy, check out Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb’s The Women Are Up to Something.
There are no doubt one or two PD readers waiting impatiently for my annually updated daily plan for reading all of Shakespeare’s works in a year: here it is. And I heartily recommend Judi Dench’s new book, Shakespeare: The Man who Pays the Rent, in which she is interviewed by fellow actor Brendan O’Hea. It is not just for the legions of Dame Judi’s admirers; the book is for anyone who wants to understand Shakespeare better as a dramatist. And for actors in particular: I once considered Sir Alec Guinness’s Blessings in Disguise to be the best book I’ve ever read on acting, but Dench’s Shakespeare is better still.
Devorah Goldman, Contributing Editor
Holiday reading should serve as a bit of a palate cleanser. In that spirit I recommend Norman Rockwell’s My Adventures as an Illustrator (see pages 426-27 for the lovely oil painting Home for Christmas, first published in December 1967 in McCall’s). It may be easy to knock Rockwell as a lowbrow sentimentalist, but it’s best to avoid and ignore such criticisms. Rockwell’s art, apart from being both beautiful and delightful, has an enduring claim on the American imagination because it captures something good about the American spirit. The artist’s humor and humanity—and affection for the American people—provide a nice break in this polarized moment; Rockwell describes painting portraits of both General Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson and finding both men “likeable and charming.”
Kelly Hanlon, Contributing Editor and Witherspoon Institute Director of Operations
Jonathan Haidt released The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness in Spring 2024. The volume expands on Haidt’s earlier work with Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind, to consider what is at the root of the increased rates of mental illness among young Americans. What sets The Anxious Generation apart, however, is that it moves beyond diagnosing the problem and makes prescriptive suggestions to reclaim an embodied childhood for our nation’s youth. From the mundane (limit screens, move more) to the seemingly extraordinary (make it normal for young children to walk to school again), the book offers hopeful suggestions for families, schools, and communities to work together to improve the well-being of our children.
Nathaniel Peters, Contributing Editor
Rowan Williams’ Passions of the Soul serves as a winsome introduction to the wisdom of the Desert Fathers. In a previous book, Williams argues that the classical metaphysical conception of God delivers us from a theology in which God is merely another being in the universe competing with human agency. As I noted in First Things, Passions of the Soul shows what this metaphysical view looks like when lived out in prayer and discipleship. Williams pairs the eight “passions of the soul,” the original name for the deadly sins, with the eight beatitudes, offering great insights into human psychology and the dynamics of sin and desire. This book would be a perfect companion for Lent 2025.
R. J. Snell, Editor-in-Chief
Some years ago I worked through several novels by Iris Murdoch and found they left me mostly indifferent. This September, though, I read some philosophy of hers, The Sovereignty of Good, and was far more engrossed. Particularly interesting, to me at least, was her claim that attention, as in paying attention, is a moral enterprise. She provides a famous example of a mother-in-law forming a judgment about her son’s new wife, and how flighty, juvenile, and simple she is. But she decides to try again, not to reframe or lie or will herself to think differently, but simply to attend, and she discovers that perhaps she had been hasty. Perhaps that flightiness is high spirits, the juvenile is liveliness, and simplicity is a refreshing honesty and lack of airs. To pay attention is to attempt to see things as they are, to get the person right, and to judge in keeping with reality. At a time when we are endlessly distracted, and entire industries exist to distract us, the reminder to simply take note, to see, to observe, and to attend, is a bracing call to reality.
Micah Watson, Contributing Editor
Aristotle cautions us in his Nicomachean Ethics that we can only expect as much exactitude from a subject as the subject allows. We don’t come to a book introducing elementary math with the same expectation for clarity as we do a work on continental philosophy. So it’s a great boon to find a book that tackles a complex, contested, and fascinating subject while showcasing the authorial virtues of clarity, charity, and concision. I found those virtues throughout David McIlroy’s The End of Law, a treatment of the philosophy of law that draws on Augustine and a host of other figures to illumine the thorny debates about the competing definitions of law and how law properly understood relates to the common good and even the will (and reason) of God. I highly recommend it both for readers just starting out and for seasoned veterans of the subject.
Image by nenetus and licensed via Adobe Stock.
