A Descent into the Maelstrom, the short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Marshall McLuhan maintained that this tale demonstrated how people can keep their minds and souls intact amid the onslaught of ever-new electronic media and other rapid technological changes.
The Roots of American Order, by Russell Kirk. He who fails to learn the history of what happened before he was born will remain forever a child, said Cicero. This, therefore, is adult reading about the mainsprings of our civilization.
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, by Walker Percy. An excellent companion is Aliens in America: The Strange Truth about Our Souls, by the political philosopher Peter Augustine Lawler. Both books try to explain who and what we really are.
Happy Days Were Here Again, by William F. Buckley, Jr. This or most any other collection of Buckleys newspaper columns and essays still provide a cheerful guide to political sanity. Statecraft as Soulcraft and other works by George F. Will are worthy companions to Buckleys writings.
Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and Americas Decline, by Robert H. Bork. Profoundly insightful as to the perils of corrosive ideologies, notably those threatening the institutions of marriage and the family. (Bork should write a sequel about the twelve years since Slouching was published. He should call it Sprinting Towards Gomorrah.)
From Under the Rubble, edited by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Essays written by Solzhenitsyn and other persecuted Russian authors envisioning, during the darkest days of the Brezhnev tyranny, a post-communist Russia. Our situation, of course, is not quite like theirs, but they can teach us profound lessons about the moral clarity and strength that we will need to overcome the dictatorship of relativism.
Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion, by P. T. Bauer. If the great economist Bauer had had as much as one percent of Jack Bauers audience, sanity might have had a fighting chance during the past decade. Worthwhile sequels on foreign-aid waste and travesty are William Easterlys The Elusive Quest for Growth and The White Mans Burden. Wilhelm Roepkes A Humane Economy also is a solid foundation for economic understanding.
Mugged by Reality, by John Agresto. Recounts the misadventures in nation-building by callow know-it-alls. They imagined that the culture of political liberty under law was as easy to transfer across oceans and deserts as prefab structures and freeze-dried meals, but they understood nothing about how our ancestors had taken centuries of learning and living to build our nation. A worthy companion book is Sands of Empire by Robert W. Merry.
Understanding Media and The Classical Trivium, also by Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan was a scholar of medieval and Renaissance literature who had profound insight into how new media and new technologiesbeing extensions of manchange people. The Classical Trivium is an excellent history and interpretation of great tradition of the liberal artsthe arts of being free. Both books can help us recover our equilibrium in a dizzying technological environment.
Politics and Culture in International History, by Adda S. Bozeman. This book is to international politics what McLuhans work is to media and the liberal artsprofound investigations into how we must understand others not as just like us, but as others.
Dictatorship and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics, by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick. Some of the best essays of the late, sorely missed moral realist.
Scouting the Future, by William J. Casey. Collected speeches of the wise and courageous strategist who, like Kirkpatrick and a few others, was of the core group that helped Reagan win the Cold War without firing a shot.
The Reagan Diaries by Ronald Reagan. How he did it, day by day, in his own words.
The Prince of Darkness, by Robert D. Novak. Candid, insightful memoirs by the Washington reporter par excellence.
The Labyrinth of Solitude, by Octavio Paz. This book by the great Mexican poet and diplomat shows how one of the most perceptive of the others saw the United States, and his own country. It may be no mere coincidence that the mysterious homeland of Paz, without heavy-handed nation-building or other assistance from Washington, has found its way from its own roots to hold two free and dramatic national elections since 2000, each resulting in a conservative, free-market, God-fearing Christian, pro-life President. At the rate things are going, it may not be long before American conservatives seek to ford a great river and climb a border fence to find a culture and a regime hospitable to understanding, enterprise, faith, family, and freedom.
and I can really mess things up...
proposition...
I msut know so i can make...they look like a mouth full of fun for Christmas 
I don't even know where the Old Dominion is!!
I'm trying to multi-task...like doing laundry and making dinner, etc. 
