A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II
Gerhard Weinberg's one-volume history of World War II across every continent, more about why things happened than about the battles. It's one of the two nonfiction books I keep rereading.
Category: Critical Thinking
Articles on reasoning clearly in a world engineered to prevent it. Covers spotting manipulation, testing claims before repeating them, recognizing your own biases, and the thinking habits that separate analysis from reaction. Draws on the Enemies of You series and decades of watching good people reach bad conclusions.
Critical ThinkingShattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway
Jonathan Parshall and Anthony Tully retell the Battle of Midway from the Japanese side, using Japanese records to overturn decades of accepted history. It's one of the two nonfiction books I keep rereading.
Critical ThinkingProfiles in Courage
John F. Kennedy's 1956 book about eight U.S. senators who risked their careers on unpopular votes. It won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and his aide Ted Sorensen later wrote that he drafted much of it.
Critical ThinkingLove’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
Irvin Yalom's 1989 collection of ten case stories from his psychotherapy practice. It reads like short fiction, it's unusually honest about the therapist's own mistakes, and it's the book I point clinicians to when they ask how to write about…
Critical ThinkingThe Library Book
Susan Orlean's 2018 account of the 1986 fire that destroyed 400,000 books at the Los Angeles Central Library, the man accused of setting it, and the long history of the library itself. It's a mystery, a history and a love…
Critical ThinkingThe Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads
Ammon Shea's 2010 history of the telephone directory, from a fifty-name list in 1878 to the doorstop that landed on every porch. It's short, funny and full of things nobody thought to ask about the phone book.
Critical ThinkingTime for a Turning Point
Charlie Kirk's first book, written with Brent Hamachek during the 2016 campaign and published that October, four years after he founded Turning Point USA at eighteen. It makes his case for free markets and limited government to young readers.
Critical ThinkingCampus Battlefield
Charlie Kirk's 2018 book on conservative students and American universities, with a foreword by Donald Trump Jr. It describes the campus activism Turning Point USA was built on and defends the organization's Professor Watchlist.
Critical ThinkingThe MAGA Doctrine
Charlie Kirk's 2020 book presenting Donald Trump's agenda as a coherent political philosophy. Broadside Books, a HarperCollins imprint, published it in March of the election year, and it debuted at number five on the New York Times nonfiction list.
Critical ThinkingThe College Scam
Charlie Kirk's 2022 book arguing that a four-year degree costs too much and delivers too little for many students. It's built as a ten-count indictment of higher education, followed by the alternatives he recommended, from apprenticeships to starting a business.
Critical ThinkingRight Wing Revolution
Charlie Kirk's 2024 book, published five months before the presidential election, laying out the cultural fight he wanted young conservatives to join and the personal habits he thought they needed for it. It was the last book he saw published.
Critical ThinkingStop, in the Name of God
Charlie Kirk's sixth and final book, about keeping a weekly Sabbath, finished in the summer of 2025 and published in December, three months after he was killed. Erika Kirk wrote the foreword, and it went to number one on Amazon…