The Bookmonger

Do we really need a U.S. Department of Education? Vicki E. Alger doesn't think so, and she makes her case in Failure: The Federal Miseduckation of America's Children. (The misspelled title is deliberate. Get it? Get it?)

In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Alger explains how the federal government got involved in education even though the Constitution doesn't say anything about it, whether abolishing the Department of Education is politically possible, and what the next president should do to improve America's schools.

Can Christianity save America? R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things, explains how it might in "Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society."

In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Reno describes why religious pluralism requires a Christian framework, why the United States has shifted away from its Christian roots, and whether churches bear any of the blame for the country's current direction.

When a day-care center refused to swaddle Abby Schachter's baby, the mother of four knew that she had crashed into the onerous rules of the nanny state. Now she's written No Child Left Alone: Getting the Government Our of Parenting.

In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Schachter explains that the problem goes far beyond swaddling. She also describes "free-range kids," talks about bike helmets and vaccines, and argues for letting parents have more control over how they raise their children.

Joining us from the devastated city of Homs in Syria is Marwa al-Sabouni, author of The Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria.

In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, al-Sabouni describes what life is like in Syria today, how architecture contributed to her county's problems, and how a Syrian woman comes to speak English and become an architect. She also talks about her relationship to Roger Scruton, who wrote the foreword to her book.

John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood were like Indiana Jones--except that they were real people rather than Hollywood fantasies, and William Carlsen tells their tale in Jungle of Stone: The True Story of Two Men, Their Extraordinary Journey, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya.

In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Carlsen describes what these adventurers and archaeologists accomplished in the 1830s and 1840s, and also discusses the achievement of Maya civilization as well as why it vanished long ago.

It's perhaps the easiest problem in America to ignore: the grinding poverty and dysfunction of Indian reservations--and Naomi Schaefer Riley gives it every bit of her attention in The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians.

In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Riley explains how the federal government makes life worse for these citizens, why property rights and better schools are part of the solution, and what 21st-century Americans owe to a group of people that Washington has abused for a long time.

"A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading," wrote C.S. Lewis. That's probably true, especially because the young man might read Lewis's own Mere Christianity, a book that has proven so influential it now has its own "biographer" in George M. Marsden, author of C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity: A Biography.

In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Mardsen explains how Lewis turned a set of radio broadcasts into an enduring work of apologetics, what made Lewis such a good writer, and why Mere Christianity is more popular today than ever before.