Twelve Eye-Opening Books For Christmas

© Jack Cashill
WND.com - December 6, 2007

“In my later years,” Jim Jones reflected shortly before his apocalyptic demise at Jonestown, “there wasn’t a person that attended any of my meetings that did not hear me say, at one time, that I was a communist.”

“And that is what is very strange,” Jones added, “that all these years I have survived without being exposed.”

No, it was not strange at all. Nor is strange that the mass grave containing the bodies of the 250 or so children Jones murdered could be located right in Oakland, California and that almost no one would know or care.

Jones’ story, truthfully told, serves no useful progressive political purpose. Better to write him off as a crazy, almost comical Christian nut—Kool Aid, anyone?--than to explore his purposeful attempt to advance the communist cause by undermining Christianity from within.

In writing What's The Matter With California, so often did I run into stories like Jones’, willfully ignored, that I created a shorthand to summarize the phenomenon: ABETTO, a blind eye to the obvious.

Happily, this past year has witnessed an unprecedented explosion of eye-opening books on a wide array of truly consequential topics.

To read these books is to re-think just about everything the media have told us and that historians have very nearly sold us. Let them be your twelve drummers drumming this Christmas.

Blacklisted by History. In this masterful instant classic, M. Stanton Evans sets out to tell the “Untold Story of Joe McCarthy” and does so definitively.

It is hard to believe that the media and their friends in the academy could so dramatically mis-tell a story of this scope, but they have and still do. From here on in, anyone who uses the word “McCarthyism” as a pejorative is merely displaying his ignorance.

My Grandfather’s Son. If Clarence Thomas had done no more than tell of his coming of age under the firm hand of his extraordinary grandfather the book would be worth the price of admission.

Throw in a riveting inside look at his harrowing confirmation to the Supreme Court, and you have a memoir very nearly in the class of Witness. To believe Anita Hill after reading this book is a flat-out cry for psychiatric help.

Sacred Causes. Secular British historian Michael Burleigh does for Pope Pius XII what Evans does for Joe McCarthy. He unravels one of history’s greatest libels and traces it to its very red roots.

In recounting the horrific tale of how the 20th century’s epic totalitarian movements mimicked religion but without God to lighten the way, Burleigh provides a perfect Christmas antidote to the Dawkins and Hitchens of the world.

The Forgotten Man. Of course, the New Deal was a botch. Eight years after FDR launched it, the unemployment rate was still in excess of 10 percent. ABETTO indeed! Amity Shlaes brings the obvious to light in this highly engaging, eye-popping book.

Shadow Warriors. Ken Timmerman tells another “Untold Story,” and that is of the relentless sabotage of the Bush administration by its myriad enemies in the CIA and State departments and their friends in the media, particularly the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Timmerman also provides the single best-documented account I have seen of the fate of Saddam’s very real weapons of mass destruction. The perfect Christmas gift for those slackers in your life with the “Bush lied, people died” bumper stickers.

Sabotage, by Rowan Scarborough, sheds additional light on “ America's Enemies Within the CIA” and is absolutely worth the read.

Target. In this scary and straightforward account, Kathleen Willey reminds us how only the willful blindness of the media has kept Hillary’s career alive.

As Willey shows through her own unnerving experience with Hill and Bill, the Clintons have come to resemble no American family more so than the Corleones. A stocking stuffer for your feminist friends.

Until Proven Innocent. Although Stuart Taylor is associated with the liberal Brookings Institute you would never guess it in reading his and KC Johnson’s unsparing deconstruction of the Duke Lacrosse case.

The authors take on the legal establishment, the media, and especially the unsalvageable rot of the politically correct university. As they show, there is nothing funny about “PC” when its apparatchiks come to power.

In my California book I tell the story of Steven Nary, an unprotected 18 year-old caught in the PC grinders of San Francisco injustice. (To learn more or contact Steven, please see cashill.com).

As Taylor and Johnson show, even defendants with resources risk ruin in the Maoist confines of the contemporary university. Parents, read this book before you send your kids off to college.

Unholy Terror. The Democratic anti-intervention crowd has purged its memory banks of the Clinton era Balkan misadventures, the most dishonestly reported military affair since the Spanish Civil War.

In this deadly serious book John Schindler sets the record straight. Say what you will, in Iraq and Afghanistan we are at least fighting against the bad guys, Al Qaida. In Bosnia, we were fighting for them.

Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years. No bigger fraud has been perpetrated on the American people in my lifetime than global warming, and no more dangerous a one.

The battle for the future is now being fought in your local Chamber of Commerce. Arm yourself by reading Fred Singer and Dennis Avery’s surprisingly entertaining book, now out in an updated edition.

What's So Great About Christianity. Dinesh D'Souza slices and dices his way through the anti-religion, anti-Christian media clutter and reminds so many of us why we adhere to what is easily the world’s most successful tradition. Buy this book for all the Christian students in your life—and quiz them on it.

Lone Survivor. During World War II, every school kid in America would have known the story of Marcus Luttrell and his Navy Seal comrades in Afghanistan. Today, the media conspire to keep stories of such extraordinary valor and patriotism out of the news and out of the theaters.

This one is powerful enough to force it way in. Keep those hankies at the ready and have a Merry Christmas!

Cashill’s newest book, What’s the Matter with California, is available in bookstores - or you can order your autographed copy online . Please order before Dec 15 to have it by Christmas.