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          This is my newest book, fresh off the press in Spring of 2010. I wrote it in response to requests  by readers of an earlier book, 10 Books that Screwed Up the World. Obviously the latter book was focused on those works that had done the most to degrade and destroy civilization (see description below). When readers finished the first Ten Books, they quite reasonably wanted to know--and asked in a pleading voice--"What are the good books? Which ones will get us out of this mess?"

          Here they are: 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read, Plus Four Not to Miss and One Impostor. Of course, everyone wants to know, first of all, who the impostor is--that's why publishers hire marketing folk to make snazz-catchy titles.

          This book was written in the midst of a huge conservative upswell in this country. Unfortunately, contemporary conservatives, while they know what they are against (taxes, big government, intrusive bureaucracies), are far less clear about what they are for. To rectify this, I offer a book that takes readers into the deep heart of conservatism so that they may recover its profound fundamental principles.

WARNING: This is not a typical conservative-lite sell-quick book, such as comes from very famous folks. It is a thoughtful reading of the great conservative texts, where I act as a kind of mediator, helping the reader to understand the authors' most important points, and tying together the great themes found in all these conservative classics. Here they are, in order of appearance:

Aristotle, The Politics
G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers
The Federalist Papers
Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State
F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
God, et al, The Jerusalem Bible

And the impostor? Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

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          This is the first Ten Books, dealing with those books that the world would have been much better without, the Ten Books That Screwed Up the World. (Actually, since I include 5 Others That Didn't Help, readers get a 50% bonus.) The premise is simple enough. If ideas have consequences, then bad ideas have bad consequences. And so they have.

          As with Ten Books Every Conservative Must Read I take readers on a tour of the texts, lifting out the most important points and tying together the themes of the various authors. I do not advocate censorship--people need to read these books. In them, they will discover, in pristine form, the ideas that have done so much to deform the modern world. Here are the books, in order of appearance:

Machiavelli, The Prince
Descartes, Discourse on Method
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
J. J. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party
J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism
Charles Darwin, Descent of Man
F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
V. Lenin, State and Revolution
Margaret Sanger, Pivot of Civilization
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
S. Freud, Future of an Illusion
Margaret Mead, coming of Age in Somoa
Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

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          This is a book written with Dr. Scott Hahn focusing directly on the arguments of the West's current atheist laureate, Richard Dawkins. In it, we take on Dawkins point by point, showing the fatal flaws in each of his arguments against the existence of God.

          Just for the record, I think we have the most ingenious cover of all the anti-Dawkins books, and I admit that I'm quite disappointed that Dawkins himself hasn't contacted us for graciously making him so "buff." He is certainly far less buffy in real life.

          And speaking of buff, we apologize to anyone scandalized by Dawkins' appearance sans culotte, but his lying-in as the "Adam" of Michelangelo's famous, "The Creation of Adam" on the Sistine Chapel ceiling is highly symbolic. Even as God points to Dawkins--both as his Creator and the one even now offering him grace--Dawkins stretches out his accusing hand at God (with only the thin arguments of his own book to cover his nakedness).
         

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          This is one of my most popular books among homeschoolers, and was one of the funnest to write. It is really a book about the genius of scientific discovery, tracing out the long road from the first attempts in ancient Greece to uncover the fundamental elements, to the final construction of chemistry's Periodic Table of Elements. It is aimed at 12 to 16 year-olds, but (like all good children's books) it's a good read for all ages.

          So, if you remember staring up at that Periodic Table on the classroom wall (lo) those many years ago, and not understanding a thing, rejoice--your incomprehension is entirely curable. The best way to understand chemistry is to get at it through a pain-free and wonder-full tour of the history of chemistry, where all kinds of colorful folk contributed to the solution to the mystery of the Periodic Table of Elements. Needless to say, it works real well on kids too.

         

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          A Meaningful World (written with Jonathan Witt) is my contribution to the current cosmological debates. I think I'll let the reviewers/recommenders speak on its behalf.

"A Meaningful World is simply the best book I've seen on the purposeful design of nature. In sparkling prose Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt teach us how to recognize genius, first in Shakespeare's plays and then in nature. From principles of geometry to details of the periodic table, the authors portray the depth, elegance, clarity and pure cleverness of a universe designed to nurture the intelligent life that one day would discover that design."
MICHAEL J. BEHE, biochemist and author of Darwin's Black Box

"Drawing on the works of Shakespeare, Euclid, Lavoisier and others, A Meaningful World draws parallels between the genius of these men and the genius evident in nature. I am not exaggerating much to say that this book is in the same class as the works of genius its authors describe. It displays rare depth and breadth. Scientists should read this book to regain their justification for doing science, and poets should read it to regain a ground for the meaning of their texts."
GUILLERMO GONZALEZ, astronomer and co-author of The Privileged Planet

"I have been reticent to affirm the value of the cosmological argument from design, but no longer. Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt have convinced me that from literature to mathematics, physics to biology, the very phenomena of the world breathe intelligence. A Meaningful World is a masterful argument, a tour de force, framed with brilliance and wit. Here is a convincing case for a universe charged not only with meaning, but with the glory of God."
JAMES SIRE, author of The Universe Next Door

        

                               
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          This is a biography of Charles Darwin, which I originally wanted to be entitled Darwin, Warts and All. In it, I provide a very sympathetic treatment of Charles Darwin the man (separating fact from myth), but also show clearly that his particular theory of evolution was, and still is, poisonous.

          This is NOT a diatribe against evolution, but rests on a careful distinction between Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the actual facts of evolution. To put it in short form: evolution is not the problem; Darwinism is the problem.  Darwinism is the purely materialist take on evolution, that tries to reduce the splendid development of species to random variation and blind mechanistic laws. As a philosophy, it has its roots in ancient Epicurean materialism that sought to fashion a cosmos in which the gods had no part.

          The real poison in Darwin's theory is evident when Darwin himself, in his Descent of Man, applies the principle of natural selection to human beings with the inevitable and unconscionable result of making racial slaughter and the destruction of the weak the engine of human evolutionary progress, both in the past and in the future. Darwin therefore rightly earns the honor of the Father of Modern Eugenics. This is doubly sad, because these repugnant moral implications are totally at odds with Darwin himself, who was a stellar husband and father, a man of honor, a gentle neighbor, a compassionate citizen, and a devout abolitionist.  
     

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          Moral Darwinism was my very first book. In it, I argue that modern materialism (including Darwinism) is actually a new form of ancient Epicureanism, the materialist philosophy that was designed by the pagan Greek philosopher Epicurus to exclude the gods from the cosmos. An indication of the truth of this thesis is that both Epicurus, and even more his Roman disciple Lucretius, have evolutionary accounts that sound just like Darwin's. But Epicurus and Lucretius weren't prophets before their time; rather, Darwin was one of the many heirs of the revival of Epicureanism in modernity.

          There is much more to the argument. Darwinism is merely a species of materialism, and I trace out all the destructive implications of  modernity's embrace of Epicurean materialist notions.