A World Undone, by G. J. Meyer

This is an excellent choice for those who are looking for a good overall history of World War I, who have not studied this war before, or the background history of the major players.  For the amount of material it covers, it is a short book.  G. J. Meyer intersperses "Background" sections at well chosen points in his narrative, that give information about persons, countries, or other entities that the reader is about to encounter, such as the Ottoman Empire, for example, or the Romanovs.

This is only the second book I've read about World War I, after Barbara Tuchman's <i>Guns of August</i>, and compared to that book, which focuses primarily on the Western front, this one gives a more comprehensive view.

Fatima for Today, by Father Andrew Apostoli

We've just passed the centenary of the Fatima apparitions, so I wanted to learn more about them.  This book makes an excellent one stop shop about the apparitions.  Everything you could possibly want to know about them is in here.  Fr. Apostoli relates the content of what the three children saw, the historical context in which they happened, biographical information about the children and their families, and about the history of their town and of Portugal, how the Fatima apparitions were determined to be reliable, how they meshed with other preceding and contemporaneous apparitions given to other visionaries, the Church's interpretation of the visions, how successfully the Church has followed the instructions of our Lady, and how the predictions came to pass.  There is also practical information in the book about how to do the devotions properly, as well as the prayers taught to the three children.

Tortured for Christ, by Richard Wurmbrand

In his  1978 Harvard commencement speech, Solzhenitsyn said:

Through intense suffering, our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive...A fact that cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger.  68 years for our people, and 30 years for the people of Eastern Europe: during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience.

If you were to become curious about the nature of the spiritual training Solzhenitsyn means, Richard Wurmbrand's life provides a good example.  Wurmbrand was a Romanian who grew up in a secular Jewish family, converted to Christianity as a young man, and became a Lutheran pastor.  When the Soviets took control of Romania after driving out the Nazis, they established a Communist totalitarian government that drove the genuine churches underground.  For standing up to them, Wurmbrand and his wife were both sentenced to lengthy terms in what can only be described as a torture camp.  Despite the horrific conditions, this is an inspiring story of hope, endurance, and the great consolation of faith in God.

One Word of Truth- Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Lecture

This speech is just as good as A World Split Apart, and that's really saying something.  He describes the existential gulf between people living under oppressive governments and those in free countries.  There is a disconnect between the two, and the latter group very often cannot understand where the former is coming from.  As a representative of the former group transplanted into the world of the latter, Solzhenitsyn cites art as the means by which the gap can be bridged.
It is the means by which one can enter into another person's experience.

He also talks about the "spirit of Munich" and how it has dominated the 20th century (inclination of the free world to appease and tolerate unjust violence elsewhere provided it left the West alone) and how violence inevitably requires lies to maintain its position of power-- to deceive people about its true nature and give itself legitimacy.

The task of the artist above all is to remain honest in the face of violence and lies.

"Let the lie come into the world, even dominate the world, but not through me."

The Solzhenitsyn Center has released a video made with an excellent (English) reading of this speech, which is available to view here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ITbFdTaB_E.

Understanding Europe, by Christopher Dawson

This is an outstanding analysis of Europe and Western civilization.  The book is divided in two parts.

In the first part, Dawson describes what Europe is: a society of peoples whose culture was shaped both by Christianity and the Greco-Roman heritage.  Through comparisons, he explains what differentiates it from Asia, describes the special case of Russia, and discusses the regional differences among the different peoples.  These were produced by the splintering of Christianity during the Reformation and the different styles of government in the different regions, contrasting the parliamentary governments that sprung up in Western Europe with the large military empires that developed in Central and Eastern Europe.  He also devotes two chapters to Europe's overseas colonies: the dual nature of European colonialism and how each nation's colonial effort differed in character from one another.

The second part of the book is about the decline of Western culture and the revolt, starting in the eighteenth century, against the ideas and norms that used to unify Europe.  He describes the rise of the large totalitarian and authoritarian states, how the ideas behind this style of government originated in Hegelian philosophy, and how the two world wars came about.

For a relatively short (230 page) book, he covers a lot of ground, and it's definitely a book that you have to read more than once in order to properly digest the material.  It's best to have a reasonably good general knowledge of the history of the various European countries in order to appreciate this book properly.

A World Split Apart- Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Commencement Address, 1978

I think this is one of the best speeches ever written. On anything. Alexander Solzhenitsyn turns his keen powers of observation and understanding, sharpened by long years of oppression under a totalitarian regime, on the West and diagnoses the cause of its ills: a decline in moral courage. Despite having been written 40 years ago, it's even more relevant now than it was then.

Even better than reading this is hearing the man himself deliver it at Harvard in 1978-- the video of the complete speech, with a simultaneous translator translating it into English is available on Youtube. Awesome stuff.

And if you can, listen also to Dr. Peter Kreeft's excellent commentary on it and the impression it made on him as a member of that audience in 1978--also available on Youtube.

The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman

Back in 2014, the first of the World War I centenary years, I decided to get informed about World War I since I knew so little about it and it is frequently cited as the cause of various negative developments in the modern world (not the least of which was World War II).  But I'm a procrastinator so it took three years to get my rear in gear.

This book served as a great start. It's a military history covering the first month of the war on the Western front, including the frantic diplomacy and negotiation on the few days before the outbreak of the war, particularly in Belgium.  It ends on the eve of the battle of the Marne.  Tuchman only dedicates two chapters on Eastern front battles (Gumbinnen and Tannenberg), and one on the pursuit of the German light cruiser Goeben in the Mediterranean which resulted in the Turkish alliance with Germany, so if you're looking for a history of the Eastern front and an account of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife this is not it.

Tuchman is a skilled storyteller and includes just enough maps and technical information about military strategy and the technology of that time so a layman can understand the ramifications of the decisions made by the many generals, diplomats, monarchs, and politicians to whom he will be introduced. I had no problem following the progress of the war and learned a lot about the military thinking of the time. She also includes enough detail about the situations and people to draw the reader into the world of 1914. No mean feat.

The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, by Gertrude Himmelfarb

This book does a great job comparing and contrasting the differences of the Enlightenment as experienced in Britain, the U.S., and France.  It's like an introductory, comparative survey course of the various Enlightenment thinkers in the three countries, so do not expect in-depth or detailed analysis on any particular person.  This book is more to give you a general picture of the intellectual climate of those times.  The treatment of the American Enlightenment is the briefest of the three, which was fine with me because I am more familiar with the American founding fathers and the thinkers that influenced them than I am with French or British Enlightenment figures.

Caution:  Your to-read list will grow as a result of reading this book.

Marx and Satan, by Richard Wurmbrand

This is a very convincing book, written by a Romanian victim of Marxism, that brings forward the hypothesis that Karl Marx and some of his most infamous followers may have been strongly influenced by Satanism.  Wurmbrand cites excerpts from Marx's books, poetry, and correspondence that point in that direction, such that further research into the possibility is warranted.  I also did not realize that a very large portion of Marx's writings have been sitting in Russian vaults and kept from being disseminated, translated, and discussed. Very surprising for a thinker whose work has made such a huge, albeit negative, impact upon the world.

The Judgment of the Nations, by Christopher Dawson

This book is my introduction to British historian Christopher Dawson, and I think it's brilliant. Definitely going to be reading more of his work. He finished this in 1942, so he was working on it when WW2 broke out and in those tense and depressing years leading up to it. His purpose in writing it was to offer some reasons why the countries of the West, whose culture and values were formed by Christianity and the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome ended up fighting two horribly self-destructive world wars. 

He discusses the tensions that began to develop between nations as their styles of government diverged (constitutional vs. autocratic monarchies, nation-states vs. multilingual multiethnic empires, fundamentally civilian vs. military states), and as Christianity splintered into multiple denominations. Differences in belief do cause differences in worldview, which have practical ramifications. He also expounds on the Enlightenment, the scientific materialist world view that came with it, the impact of the Industrial Revolution, and of the Socialist movements of all stripes that aspired to bring the rapidly growing economies under state control.

The Crooked Timber of Humanity

In this series of eight essays, Isaiah Berlin recounts the intellectual dispute that took place in the late 18th to early 19th century that gave rise to the Romantic movement, and how ideas from both sides of the debate combined and recombined in the heads of various thinkers over the years so as to produce the fascist and socialist movements of the twentieth century.

One side of the dispute consists of those who believed in universal, objective truth, scientific rationalism, a common human nature, the possibility of an earthly utopia, and the non-contradiction of values. On the other side were those who believed in various degrees of relativism, the value of local traditions, even those that could not be traced to any rational basis, the possibility of different hierarchies of value that could contradict each other, and that human societies are ultimately founded on an irrational factors.

The second essay, called Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth Century Thought is particularly valuable because it explains how pluralism is different from relativism, and how pluralist thinkers of the eighteenth century (like Vico and Herder) are sometimes mistaken for relativists.  I read that one twice.

Included among the essays is an exposition of the life and thought of Joseph de Maistre, who is often mistaken for a conservative Catholic reactionary, but whose ideas contradicted those of Church and those of other conservatives, such as Edmund Burke, on important points, and whose dark, illiberal, eerily modern outlook presages twentieth century totalitarian movements.  Berlin recaps much of the content of this essay in this lecture.

The last two essays in the series, The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will and The Bent Twig are about how in the Romantic movement, the will, particularly in art, began to displace objective truth and nature, and how appreciation for local customs, thought to be the least enduring part of the Romantic movement, morphed into the nationalist movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries, from the desires of small ethnic or linguistic minorities to become independent states, or the sense of entitlement of large states to take over regions in other states inhabited by people of the same race or language.

I learned a lot reading this.  Great read if you're interested in the art, literature, and thought of the Romantic era, how ways of thinking we now take for granted originated, and in the causes of some of the most important events in twentieth century history.

L'Alsace Est-Elle Allemande Ou Française? Réponse A M. Mommsen

After reading La cité antique, I knew I found a new favorite author, so I was researching around the internet for other books he wrote.

This little pamphlet, whose title translates into: Is Alsace German or French? was written during the Franco-Prussian war as a response to some letters to the Italian press written by German historian Theodore Mommsen, which justified the Prussians taking the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine by insisting that the provinces should be a part of Germany due to the race and language of their inhabitants.  Fustel de Coulanges demolishes Mommsen's argument that race and language are what determine nationality and shows how other factors are much more important.  Great reading for those interested in the Franco-Prussian war, the aftermath of the 1866 war of the German League against Prussia, and in the historical events and ideas leading up to World Wars I & II.

For those who don't read French, I translated de Coulanges's text into English and posted it online in blog form.  Feel free to check it out here.  I included links to Fustel de Coulanges's original French text as well as to an English translation of Theodore Mommsen's letters, so you can get both sides of the debate.

The Hall of Uselessness, by Simon Leys

Great collection of essays from an author whom I think is one of the best essayists ever!  The topics in this collection are wide ranging, from literature to China to history to the sea.  My favorites were the ones on Chinese art and history (a subject I know little about, so I learned a lot reading them), and the ones on Cervantes, Victor Hugo, and Magellan.  Included in this collection is the one where he (rightfully, in my opinion) excoriates Christopher Hitchens's negative comments about Mother Teresa.

Reflections on History, by Jacob Burckhardt

Interesting and concise study of various patterns that often appear in history, particularly those involving the interactions among the three powers Burckhardt identifies at the start of the book: State, Religion, and Culture. Reading this book, which is not specific to any particular time or country, will make one more alert to spotting and remembering these patterns when they are encountered in studying the history of any time or people.

Europe: Today and Tomorrow, by Pope Benedict XVI

In this book, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) analyzes the source of the malaise that has affected the West through most of the 20th century: the currents of thought that brought it about, why it persists, and how it can be cured.  Very worthwhile read and gives a lot of food for thought. Given its short length, it took much longer than I thought to finish it because I often had to stop and think about what I had just read and how it related to popular ways of thinking and acting.

The Catholic Classics, by Dinesh D'Souza

This book makes a great introduction to 10 Catholic authors and the works for which they were best known:
1. St. Augustine (Confessions)
2. Boethius (Consolation of Philosophy)
3. St. Bede (Ecclesiastical History of the English People)
4. St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica)
5. Dante Alighieri (Divine Comedy)
6. Blaise Pascal (Pensées)
7. Thomas à Kempis (Imitation of Christ)
8. John Henry Newman (Apologia pro vita sua)
9. G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
10. Thomas Merton (Seven Story Mountain)

The introductions to each author are concise and include biographical information about each author, the main features of their thought, the circumstances in which they wrote their books, and how their books were received. This book is a great choice for anyone with an interest in learning about these 10 authors or who might be starting to read their works.

This Age of Fable: The Political and Economic World We Live In, by Gustav Stolper

Gustav Stolper has the ability to explain complicated concepts in clear concise language that is very accessible to the general reader who is not a specialist in politics and economics.  This book was published in the 1940's during World War II and some of the fables he debunks are still widely believed in today, particularly the ones about European colonialism, how capitalism works, the business cycle, and what really makes a "have" vs. a "have not" nation.  It's a great choice if you are a layman wishing to learn more about these topics (all listed in the book description above) or have a historical interest in what public opinion was like in the 1940's when the war was going on and its outcome was uncertain.

The book appears to be out of print, which is a shame.  The edition I was able to find is a vintage hardback one from 1942.

The Second World War: Milestones to Disaster, by Sir Winston Churchill

This is the first volume of the abridged version of Winston Churchill's series on the Second World War.  It mostly covers the events leading up to the war, from the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the formation of the League of Nations, the defense treaties of Locarno, and the unwise manner in which the treaties were enforced, with the former Allies putting undue emphasis on Germany's reparations payments while at the same time being lenient about seeing to it that Germany stayed disarmed.  Churchill also discusses how the economic conditions of the 1920's and 1930's destabilized German society and brought about conditions favoring Hitler's rise to the chancellorship and also the presidency after the death of Hindenburg. This book spans all the way up to the German takeover of Czechoslovakia and Poland, and Churchill's own rise to the prime ministership.  I would say that the most important lesson of the book is how the biggest war in history was brought about by an inordinate desire for peace.

Besides his knowledge and being one of the major players in World War II, Churchill is an excellent writer and storyteller.  I listened to the CD twice.  The reader of this audiobook, Christian Rodska, does an excellent job and his voice is somewhat like Churchill's so that you feel rather like the author himself is reading the book to you.

Sur le paupérisme (Memoir on Pauperism), by Alexis de Tocqueville

This book contains 2 essays Tocqueville presented to the Royal Academic Society in Cherbourg in 1835 & 1838.  Both are about poverty and the pros and cons of various measures undertaken to alleviate it.

In the first part, Tocqueville outlines the paradox of the wealthier, more prosperous nations (e.g. Great Britain) having much larger percentages of their populations claiming poverty and getting on the dole than poorer nations have (such as France and Spain).  He talks about the Poor Laws (basically an early government welfare program), which originated under Elizabeth I after Henry VIII destroyed the monasteries and seized their property, leaving the English poor without recourse, charitable works having once been one of the functions of the Church.  By Elizabeth I's time, the problem was so bad that the Poor Laws were passed, which made it the responsibility of each town council to tax their residents to support the poor in that town.  Tocqueville outlines the corrupting effects of these laws both on the poor and on those who are taxed to support them. He sat as an observer in a court of a British justice of the peace, where these poverty cases were heard, and his observations are as logical and as prescient as those in <i>Democracy in America</i>.

The second part is about the advantages and disadvantages of the French <i>caisse d'épargne</i>, a sort of special savings bank reserved for the poor.  It pays a higher interest rate than normal and it is meant to teach the poor to practice thrift and acquire habits of capital accumulation.  Tocqueville gives a very clear explanation how this institution works and his thoughts about it such that even a non-economist like me found it easy to follow.

I highly recommend this slim little book to anyone interested in the problem of poverty and the ways in which various solutions to the problem that look good on the surface can make it worse.

Update 8/22/16: In order to make this book more accessible to English speakers, as well as to practice my language skills, I decided to start translating this book into English and post it online in blog form.  You can access it <a href="http://tocquevillememoironpauperism.blogspot.com/2016/08/first-memoir-on-pauperism-first-part.html">here</a>.  It is not finished yet, but I plan to post a part of it every day until I get through!

Stages on the Road, by Sigrid Undset

This is a collection of six essays written by Sigrid Undset in the 1930's.  The theme that is common to all is that each details how various ideas or attitudes that had been established by the Catholic Church and that helped shape Western culture were lost when the faith in which they originated was lost or adulterated--starting with the Reformation.

In the first four essays, she presents a Catholic idea or custom, how it disappeared or is disappearing, then shows how that idea was manifested through the life of a prominent Catholic, many of whom are now canonized as saints.  I liked how she picked less well-known people because it gave me the opportunity to learn about them.  The four are:
- Spanish mystic Ramon Lull de Palma, who established a monastery in North Africa to enable friars to study Hebrew and Arabic, and whose goal was to spread the faith through persuasion and argument as Christ had directed
- English martyrs St. Robert Southwell and St. Margaret Clitherow, victims of the state taking control of the church
- Italian founder of the Ursuline order, St. Angela Merici, whose life shows how women with unconventional callings were respected in Catholic societies

<I>To St. James</I> is about the harmfulness of the sin of gossip--one that is only all too neglected today.
The last,  <I>Reply to a Parish Priest</I> deals with later developments in the Christian world that are controversial issues even today, such as changes in the definition of marriage, and euthanasia.