As LGBTQ issues continue to take up national attention, more Bible-based books teach Christians how to respond. I favorably reviewed a bunch in our March 19 issue, and here are three more that are also worthwhile: Jeanette Howard’s Dwelling in the Land: Bringing Same-Sex Attraction Under the Lordship of Christ (Monarch, 2016); One Man & One Woman: Marriage and Same-Sex Relations, by Joel Beeke and Paul Smalley (Reformation Heritage, 2016); and Judith Hartzell’s By God’s Design: Overcoming Same-Sex Attractions (Ambassador, 2015).

Good to remember amid all the hubbub: J. Alan Branch’s Born This Way? (Weaver, 2016) notes: “Some genetic and biological factors correlate with a higher incidence of homosexuality among select populations. However, there are no genetic or biological factors that have been shown to cause homosexuality.”

Meanwhile, we’re not paying enough attention to killer problems. Failures of Imagination (Crown Forum, 2016) by House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Michael McCaul reasonably argues that the Obama administration has been lax concerning real dangers, so enemies now have the chance to attack America in eight different ways, including cyberstrike, massacre, and bioterror. ISIS: A History by Fawaz Gerges (Princeton, 2016) is a blow-by-blow description of evil coming to life.

Why are we doing so poorly? Paul Miller’s Armed State Building: Confronting State Failure, 1898-2012 (Cornell, 2013) shows why numerous efforts, including those by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, were not successful. Tawfik Hamid takes us Inside Jihad (Mountain Lake Press, 2015) and is very worried, as his subtitle indicates: How Radical Islam Works, Why It Should Terrify Us, How to Defeat It. Some academic books, though, counsel sleep: John Bowen’s On British Islam (Princeton, 2016) looks at Sharia councils across the pond and, unlike others, is not worried.

Raymond Garthoff’s Soviet Leaders and Intelligence (Georgetown, 2015) shows how ideology sometimes overwhelmed intelligence. Heroically, the United States persevered through the Cold War: Lee Edwards and Elizabeth Edwards Spalding’s A Brief History of the Cold War (Regnery, 2016) is exactly that, and a good one. Robert Service’s The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 (PublicAffairs, 2015) describes how nuclear disaster stopped being a national concern.

Jillian Cantor’s The Hours Count (Riverhead, 2015) spins a Cold War tale involving Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in 1953 for conspiring to commit espionage.

The dust jacket claims Cantor succeeded in “brilliantly melding fact and fiction,” and she does write well: The problem, though, is that she portrays both Rosenbergs as innocent, even though decoded cables in 1995 and other evidence confirmed the guilt of Julius.

Sadly, the United States in recent years has gained a worldwide reputation for unreliability. The gratuitous U.S. abandonment of Iraq was even worse than our abandonment of South Vietnam, which at least came under intense military pressure. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015) sharply recounts that horror through a potentially intriguing novel, but beware page-long paragraphs and too circuitous a route to the climax.

Bookmarks

John Piper’s Lessons from a Hospital Bed (Crossway, 2016) is a great booklet with advice both theological and practical, such as “Accept the humiliation of wearing the same unflattering gown everyone else wears.” James K.A. Smith’s You Are What You Love (Brazos, 2016) includes some telling observations: shopping centers as religious institutions, church youth programs designed by fear to imitate popular culture, and more.

Mary Eberstadt describes well the current culture war in It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies (HarperCollins, 2016). Nima Sanandaji’s Debunking Utopia (WND, 2016) undercuts the public relations myths of Nordic socialism. —M.O.