Sowell: Christmas Books

Creators Syndicate ^ | December 10, 2013 | Thomas Sowell

[jazusamo]

As Christmas approaches, the shopping mall can become a shopping maul. One of the ways of buying gifts for family and friends, without becoming part of a mob scene in the stores, is to shop on the Internet. However, for many kinds of gifts, you want to be able to see it directly, and perhaps handle it, before you part with your hard-earned cash for it.

One gift for which that is unnecessary is a book. Books are ideal Christmas presents from the standpoint of saving wear and tear on the buyer.

There are the traditional coffee table books, featuring marvelous photographs by Ansel Adams or the moving human scenes in the paintings of Norman Rockwell, both of which are very appropriate books for the holiday season. But there are also more serious, or even grim, books that some people will appreciate as they read them in the new year.

One of these latter kinds of books is the recently published "Why We Won't Talk Honestly About Race" by Harry Stein. It is a bracing dose of truth, on a subject where sugarcoated lies have become the norm.

This book says publicly what many people say only privately, whether about affirmative action, Barack Obama or the ongoing obscenity of gross television shows about paternity tests, to determine the father of children born to women whose lifestyle makes it anybody's guess who has fathered their children.

Hopeful signs from the past and the present are also covered, along with honest and insightful people like Bill Cosby and Shelby Steele. But the abuse to which such people have been subjected is a sobering reminder that it is still a struggle to confront racial issues.

[9YearLurker]

I think that’s a fair perspective.

Going the further step and saying we’ve got to nominate some sort of RINO/GOPe/Democrat-lite (which I know you’re not saying) is when we defeat ourselves.