Some people like big-picture overviews written in grandiose prose, but my journalistic preference is for humbler works that appeal to both mind and heart and teach me something I don’t know.

Take Todd Buchholz’s The Price of Prosperity: Why Rich Nations Fail and How to Renew Them (Harper, 2016), please. Big-picture Buchholz rightly notes that America may be on a downslope, only to conclude that exhortations from leaders will bring us back. When Buchholz does offer some specificity, his proposals concerning employment make sense: Give job seekers mobility credits if they move to another state to take a job, eliminate licensing requirements for nonhazardous jobs, and reform the federal disability program so partially disabled workers continue to work.

Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic (Basic, 2016) makes similar proposals as he explains how a renewed focus on civil society and mediating structures could help Americans work together without growing government. Happily, Levin comes down the ladder of abstraction to note how cronyism, professional-certification requirements, education loans biased toward four-year colleges, and other mobility impediments hurt the poor, and how “compassion at a personal level” will help them.

Levin’s premise of fracturing makes great sense: Mainline churches sidelined, lifetime corporate employment gone, dependence on hotels and taxis gone as Airbnb and Uber offer options, mainstream TV gone as 14 percent rather than 65 percent of Americans tune in to a top-rated show. Levin’s book suggests that the tide is turning against centralization: It’s more perceptive than John D. Inazu’s Confident Pluralism (University of Chicago, 2016), which argues that Christians should be able to live in peace with “progressives.” (Given recent trends, Inazu’s good intentions don’t leave me with much confidence.)

R.R. Reno’s Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society (Regnery Faith, 2016) is a better big-picture book. Reno sees clearly that the deepest and most destructive effects of poverty in America are not economic but moral. He points out how “when it suits progressives, they play up the fixed nature of identity” (homosexuality as an inborn trait) but at other times “identity is plastic and open-ended, something to be discovered, even invented.” Still, the right four words conclude Reno’s book: “The future is God’s.”

Bookmarks

Dec. 7 is the 75th anniversary of the day Franklin Roosevelt said would live in infamy—but as those at Pearl Harbor during the Japanese attack fade away and die, many forget what it was like. The Other Side of Infamy (NavPress, 2016), a memoir by 103-year-old Jim Downing (born Aug. 22, 1913), aided by James Lund, provides a vivid reminder: Downing fought the flames on his battleship and later served with the disciple-making Navigators for more than 50 years.

Dec. 23, 1913, should also live in infamy, according to John Tamny’s Who Needs the Fed? (Encounter, 2016). Tamny calls for abolition of the central bank created on that day—no one needs it, he says. Timothy Sandefur in The Permission Society (Encounter, 2016) shows that we should not have to rely on government permits to use our own property, grow raisins, or get medical treatment, or bow before officials so as to have other liberties.

Students of the predestination/free will debate will value Peter Thuesen’s Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (Oxford, 2009), an intellectual history, and Scott Christensen’s What about Free Will? Reconciling Our Choices with God’s Sovereignty (P&R, 2016), a readable overview.

Jeremy Beer’s The Philanthropic Revolution (University of Pennsylvania, 2015) rightly cheers for local charity and criticizes grand philanthropy’s Big Idea social experiments.

Speaking of Homosexuality (Baker, 2016) is helpful because author Joe Dallas in chapter after chapter shows ways to counter common gay lobby claims. John Freeman’s Hide or Seek (New Growth Press, 2014) looks at America’s pornography plague and God’s antidote. Religious Freedom and Gay Rights (Oxford, 2016) is a multiauthor academic book with dull detail. —M.O.