It’s summer, the long-dreamed-of season brimming with beaches, barbecues, and … books. Who doesn’t love diving into a good story while soaking up the sun? Here are some titles to add to your reading list.
Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health, by Casey Means, M.D., with Calley Means: Dr. Casey Means is the founder of Levels, a health-technology group focused on reversing the global crisis in metabolic health. Metabolic function is the root of many chronic, often deadly conditions, including cancer, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, insomnia, heart disease, anxiety, and depression. Preventing and reversing these illnesses is within our reach, and more accessible than most of us realize. “The key is our metabolic function, the most important and least understood factor in our overall health. … [N]early every health problem we face can be explained by how well the cells in our body create and use energy.” The revelations in this book are life-changing. I encourage everyone to read it, even if you’re not battling symptoms.
The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, by Jonathan Turley: The First Amendment, a bedrock of America and Western Civilization, is under assault. “[T]oday there is a systemic effort to bar opposing viewpoints on subjects ranging from racial discrimination to police abuse, from climate change to gender equity. … The Indispensable Right places the current attacks on free speech in their proper historical, legal, and political context. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were not only written for times like these but also in a time like this. … By taking us through the figures and failures that have shaped free speech in America, Turley exposes the unique dangers of the current anti-free speech movement.” Without free speech, America is just an idea. This is required reading.
Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, by Rod Dreher: Named after Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous 1974 essay encouraging Soviet citizens to resist the lies of its government, Dreher’s book asks, “What if we really are witnessing a turn toward totalitarianism in the Western liberal democracies, and can’t see it because it takes a form different from the old kind?”
This important title is equal parts chilling and inspiring. Like the Soviets before us, we Americans face a looming threat from an increasingly heavy-handed state that punishes opposition.
Dreher spoke to many who’d lived under repressive regimes and found that they drew parallels between Soviet communism and what has developed in the West: “Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups—ethnic, sexual, and otherwise—and to think of Good and Evil as a matter of power dynamics among the groups. A utopian vision drives these progressives, one that compels them to seek to rewrite history and reinvent language to reflect their ideals of social justice.”
In his original essay, Solzhenitsyn wrote, “We are approaching the brink; already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble: ‘But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.’”
Despair isn’t an option. We are Americans, long fueled by love of liberty, freedom, and self-governance. We needn’t adhere to lies spawned by a corrupt, power-hungry government and its morally bankrupt mouthpiece called mainstream media.
Dreher’s book reminds us how to resist the soft totalitarianism on the horizon. It starts with our commitment to the truth—not living by lies—and promoting it within our families and close circles.
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