David McCullough’s The American Spirit (Simon & Schuster, 2017) is a collection of speeches about our history by a historian who loves the saga of the Adams family. One of his best discusses the significance of two sentences from John Adams carved into a White House wooden mantelpiece: “I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house, and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof.”

When dishonest men ruled under that roof, trouble ensued. James Wright’s Enduring Vietnam: An American Generation and Its War (St. Martin’s, 2017) features gripping reporting at rice paddy level. Wright describes how nearly half of those below corporal rank who died in Vietnam were draftees, with a median age of 21. Press secretaries spoke of light at the end of the tunnel, but it was only twilight.

Carol Berkin’s A Sovereign People (Basic, 2017) gives two cheers for the Federalists: She says they steered the disunited states through the crises of the 1790s and birthed a beneficial American nationalism. The survival of the United States made America an example to the world rather than a warning: Jonathan Israel’s encyclopedic, 755-page The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775-1848 (Princeton, 2017) shows how American success influenced Canada, Ireland, Haiti, Greece, and other countries.

Philip Gura’s Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War (Harvard, 2017) is an academic book with chapters about George Ripley, Horace Greeley, and lesser-known social liberals who did not understand what Alexander Solzhenitsyn later declared: that the battle line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Instead, Gura writes, they had a “misguided faith in human nature” and “retreated into themselves, where they found what they regarded as unimpeachable certainties about how to behave.”

Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton, 2016) has 768 pages of words and numbers on the U.S. standard of living, which radically improved from 1870 to 1970 and has mostly flatlined since then except (and it’s an important exception) in computers and communication. Much we now take for granted—temperature control and cleanliness, clean water and night light, better health and (by historical standards) wealth—are innovations of the past 150 years. In 1870, taking a bath meant carrying cold water in pails from outside, warming it in the fireplace, and hopping into a tub located in a central room.

In Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy (William Morrow, 2017), Nicholas Reynolds shows that both the U.S. and the Soviet governments had Ernest Hemingway spying for them in and around World War II. Mark Stein’s Vice Capades (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) includes good detail about attempts throughout American history to restrict the spread of drugs, adultery, gambling, and other negatives, but snarky style undercuts the content.

BOOKMARKS

I received one more good Luther book too late to include it in our last issue’s roundup: Robert Kolb’s Martin Luther and the Enduring Word of God (Baker, 2016) details the work of Luther’s disciples. It’s too bad that Philip Jenkins in Crucible of Faith (Basic, 2017) accepts evolution-of-religion assumptions that Judaism had polytheistic roots and grew up with heavy influence from other ancient Near East beliefs.

Two books published by Encounter in 2017 stress American military needs. They have clear titles and subtitles: Seth Cropsey’s Seablindness argues that Political Neglect Is Choking American Seapower, and Jeremy Rabkin and John Yoo’s Striking Power shows How Cyber, Robots, and Space Weapons Change the Rules for War. David Woolner’s The Last 100 Days (Basic, 2017) accepts the dying Franklin Roosevelt’s contention that he could successfully “do business” with Josef Stalin.

Steven Curtis Chapman’s autobiography, Between Heaven & the Real World (Revell, 2017), has particularly moving segments about the death of a small daughter. John Frame’s Theology in Three Dimensions (P&R, 2017) is a brief introduction to his thoughtful “triperspectivalism.” —M.O.