Six books on history and interpretation

Historical essays

History Matters

David McCullough
Simon & Schuster, 192 pages

Before the smash musical Hamilton was ever a twinkle in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s eye, before the studio that is producing the new movie Young Washington even existed, David McCullough had taken Founding Father John Adams and made him the subject of a 750-page biography that was the go-to summer beach read of 2001. The lawyer from Braintree had neither the colorful genius of Hamilton nor the commanding charisma and courage of Washington, yet in the hands of McCullough his life was fascinating enough to warrant a bestseller, a Pulitzer Prize, and a subsequent HBO series. McCullough managed the same magic with topics as diverse as Harry Truman, Theodore Roosevelt, the Wright brothers, the Panama Canal, and the Brooklyn Bridge. After 10 works of history recounting some of the most interesting feats and figures of our nation’s past, his final book is a collection of speeches, essays, and interviews posthumously published by his daughter and his longtime research assistant. In the book’s foreword, fellow writer John Meacham describes the collection that follows as an opportunity to “listen once more to a man who loved art, music, drama, adventure, and courage; we can see the world as he saw it, feel it as he felt it, and love it as he loved it.” That’s true, but McCullough’s greatest gift as a writer was to see the world through the eyes of his subjects, writing with sympathy and insight. In a speech honoring a friend and mentor, writer Paul Horgan, he says, “His work is a calling, and he gives himself to it entirely. In all, one senses it is an act of devotion.” Horgan, he continues, “can take us into other times, into the hearts of other men and women, because he can himself enter into their lives so fully, not just as an actor playing a part, but as a fellow human being.” How true that was of McCullough’s own style. His books were written with the same empathy, the same great heart, invested fully into the lives of Harry Truman, John and Abigail Adams, and Teddy Roosevelt. McCullough loved the world and its various cultural facets, but he loved America specifically and specially, and his genuine patriotism flows through this brief volume. Those who love McCullough’s other works, his magis­terial biographies and monumental histories, will enjoy these anecdotes and insights from the man behind their favorite books. But any citizen of this great land can enjoy and appreciate better her past, and thus have greater faith in her future, by seeing both through the sparkling eyes of one of her greatest storytellers. —Daniel Suhr

Religious history

Christianity and the Qur’an

Gabriel Said Reynolds
Yale University Press, 288 pages

This book challenges the long-standing assumption—echoed in both Muslim apologetics and early Western scholarship—that Muhammad’s world was a religious vacuum. For centuries, Muslims have claimed that the Qur’an was revealed in a purely pagan environment, untouched by the Scriptures of the Jews or Christians. This traditional claim serves a crucial Muslim purpose: to insist that Muhammad could not have “borrowed” from prior revelations, and thus his message must have been a miraculous, independent disclosure from heaven. Yet, as Reynolds shows with devastating clarity, that premise is historically and textually indefensible. The central premise of the book: The Qur’an was born not in isolation from Christianity and Judaism, but within their orbit—saturated with their vocabulary, Biblical figures, imagery, and even theological debates. For Reynolds, the Qur’an is shaped in conversation with Biblical ideas, although it tweaks, reinterprets, and reconfigures Biblical narratives to serve Islam’s own rhetorical and theological aims. One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in its combination of rigorous historical analysis and careful literary reading. Reynolds masterfully guides readers through the complex history of how both Muslim and non-­Muslim scholars have understood the origins of Islam. In our time, when interreligious dialogue often wavers between sentimentality and suspicion, Reynolds offers a model of intellectual integrity rooted in Christian conviction. —A.S. Ibrahim

Read WORLD’s full review of this book here.

Historical studies

Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View

Edward McPherson
Astra House, 304 pages

This fiercely intelligent and deeply unsettling collection of essays investigates what it means to see across time. Moving through American landscapes—oil fields, uranium dumps, charter schools, data farms—McPherson shows how our obsession with the future often blinds us to the damage already done. Whether examining drone surveillance in Texas or the algorithmic creep into education, he reveals the hidden costs of progress and the lies we tell ourselves about where we’re heading. Each essay stands alone, but together they form a powerful indictment of the American tendency to conflate vision with virtue. McPherson’s prose is razor-sharp, poetic, and, from start to finish, entirely unapologetic. Split into three parts—Before, Then, and Beyond—the book explores the aerial view as a powerful but perilous lens. McPherson’s argument is clear: Seeing far is not the same as seeing well. He recounts how Apollo 14 astronauts, equipped with detailed lunar maps, still got lost, proving that even at great heights, we can fail to understand what’s right in front of us. Look Out doesn’t offer comfort. Instead, it offers a mirror. With lucid urgency, McPherson dis­mantles the illusion that perspective equals wisdom, reminding us that the unchecked long view can render us blind. —John Mac Ghlionn

Read WORLD’s full review of this book here.

Legal memoir

Listening to the Law

Amy Coney Barrett
Sentinel, 336 pages

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s memoir is a welcome volume for understanding the role of the Supreme Court in the United States. In it, she provides a comprehensive overview of the court’s purpose, its history, its proscribed limitations, its preparations for hearing cases, the frameworks by which its justices interpret the Constitution, and the rationales underlying the court’s decisions. As Barrett is at pains to say throughout the book, the job of a Supreme Court justice is to put aside one’s own policy preferences and to objectively rule on cases whose outcomes may be against personal preferences, yet nonetheless yield the most accurate reading of the law itself. She writes: “We judges don’t dispense justice solely as we see it; instead, we’re constrained by law adopted through the democratic process.” Justice Barrett writes movingly of the courage needed to withstand the torrents of popular opinion that demand capitulation to social pressures rather than unbiased judicial analysis. For Barrett, proper interpretation requires understanding the original meaning of the words of the Constitution and statutory law at the time of their passage. While that may seem obvious, Barrett demonstrates that this constrained approach to legal interpretation is not universally accepted. I can’t recommend the book highly enough, as readers will find it to be as much a crash course in American civics as it is a manifesto on the Supreme Court itself. —Andrew Walker

Read WORLD’s full review of this book here.

History of religion and politics

In Defense of Christian Patriotism

Daniel Darling
Broadside books, 288 pages

Is excessive, uncritical self-congratulation the predominant danger facing our nation today? Dan Darling thinks not. America, he argues, suffers not from overconfidence but from a deficit of gratitude and love. For Christians, this is more than a civic failure; it’s a spiritual one. It’s a failure of Christian piety, for we cannot love God and hate our country. Scripture calls us to seek the welfare of the societies in which we live and to order our loves rightly. Longing for the city to come should not make us loveless toward the cities here below. If patriot­ism, rightly ordered, is a virtue, how, then, do we perform the duties of patriot­ism well? First, we must avoid national self-loathing—the temptation to view our country as utterly depraved, to interpret its history in the worst possible light, and to assume there is nothing good worth preserving. The second error is the opposite extreme: uncritical affirmation. A true patriot does not say, “My country, right or wrong,” or offer blind loyalty to any administration or policy agenda. Love of nation includes the courage to call it to repentance. In an age of cynicism and division, this book offers a timely reminder that love of country, like love of family, begins with gratitude. —James R. Wood

Read WORLD’s full review of this book here.

Literary criticism

Between Interpretation and Imagination: C.S. Lewis and the Bible

Leslie Baynes
Eerdmans, 350 pages

This book is an essential addition to C.S. Lewis studies due to Baynes’ detective work that shows what books influenced Lewis in the early years of his conversion and ­continued to the end of his life to color his reading and interpretation of Scripture. But despite its prodigious research, its skillful marshaling of Lewis’ multitudinous letters and personal marginalia, its balanced assessment of the books that influenced Lewis’ interpretation of Scripture, and its original, at times brilliant, linking of the Bible to the Chronicles of Narnia, Baynes’ book is also vexing because it’s filled with the same academic arrogance and scholarly condescension that blocked Lewis from receiving his much-deserved Oxford professorship. She takes numerous potshots at Lewis, claiming that if he read higher critics like Bultmann, Vidler, and others more carefully, he would have seen some of his theological errors. Baynes, however, trusts too much to modern techniques of Biblical criticism based on faulty biases that would never hold muster if applied to other ancient books. As Lewis argued with his signature wit, the “‘assured results of modern scholarship,’ as to the way in which an old book was written, are ‘assured,’ we may conclude, only because the men who knew the facts are dead and can’t blow the gaff.” —Louis Markos

Read WORLD’s full review of this book here.