1. Richard Land, The Divided States of America? Land, who chairs the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, preached at our church yesterday, and I picked up a copy of the book after his message. I've read the first few chapters and the last chapter, and it has been a pleasant surprise so far. Subtitled "What Liberals AND Conservatives are missing in the God-and-country shouting match!", it's a refreshing departure from the shrill squawking that characterizes most left- and right-wing polemics about the relationship between church and state; indeed, a common theme among the back-cover blurbs is that the book is unique in that it is very calm and very measured. I look forward to finishing it.

2. Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism. I'm finally reading this one from cover to cover. Fogel argues that according to available measures, we are in the middle of a Fourth Great Awakening of religious fervor, and he draws on the historical experiences of the first three Great Awakenings to make predictions about how the Fourth Great Awakening will influence social policy. Fogel applies his economist's reverence for clear theory and explanation and his historian's reverence for facts and evidence to a very important question in the social sciences very generally.

3. Jim Powell, FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression. This was one of the free books available to students at last week's IHS seminar, so I decided to take a look at it before I gave my lecture on the Great Depression and World War II. Powell offers a very useful intellectual history of the Great Depression, and I recommended that students read this book after reading Atlas Shrugged. The parallels between the New Dealers' rhetoric and the statements made by some of Rand's villains are instructive. For students: the Ayn Rand Institute is sponsoring an essay contest, and I'm pretty sure they'll send you a copy of Atlas Shrugged if you ask for it. Powell's book is an excellent introduction to the New Deal; for a deeper, more analytical treatment, I recommend Robert Higgs's Depression, War, and Cold War.

4. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb. Since this is one of those books that is likely only "read" in title only, I wanted to at least skim it before giving my IHS lecture on the limits to economic growth. I was surprised to discover that it is an explicitly political tract. As much as I would like to say so, the book's proper place is not the dustbin of history. Instead, I hope that future courses in intellectual history assign Ehrlich's writings alongside Julian Simon's writings to show how and how not to think about social phenomena.

*-Meme: Marginal Revolution.