Just over a year ago, I wrote a post titled, Worldview Wars. In that post, I discussed how Tamillia Valenzuela, a self-described “neurodivergent Queer” and member of the Washington Elementary School board in Arizona made national news by opposing the board’s cooperation with a Christian University. Valenzuela opposed cooperating with the university because of the school’s “Biblically-informed values.” Ms. Valenzuela knows her worldview and, through her opposition, defends it. Few Americans can define worldview much less provide support for it.

Conservative radio host, public speaker, and author Eric Metaxas has written a new book titled, Letter to the American Church. This bestselling book calls upon the American church not be silent like the German Church was during the rise of the Nazis. He exhorts the American church to speak out against abortion, gay marriage, critical race theory, and the Marxist ideology that he believes is behind it all.

Alex Jones, a radio talk show host, doesn’t like globalists or any group that wants to control humanity. I don’t want that either. Jones uses his radio program, websites, and books to spread his message but, many call him conspiratorial. I’d prefer to avoid that label so, until recently I hadn’t paid much attention to Jones or his favorite targets such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Klaus Schwab. The WEF and its progressive, liberal members are convinced that if they ruled the world it would be a better place but are they a real threat?

Battle for the American Mind, Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, is the latest book on American education by Pete Hegseth, co-host of Fox and Friends Weekend on Fox News. For this release, Pete has teamed up with classical educator David Goodwin.

As a teacher, I had a growing awareness of problems in American education even before such concerns spread like wildfire during the pandemic lockdowns.

For the last seven hundred years the terms sex and gender have been synonyms. However, recently the world has gone crazy, and now, on many college campuses, if you ask how many genders there are the students would be hard-pressed to answer. For most of us, sex and gender still refer to a person’s biology. The LGBTQ movement would like to change the definition of gender into what people think, or believe, is their sexuality. They demand that society should accept that gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, pansexual, asexual, genderqueer, aromantic, cisgender, genderfluid, pangender, non-binary, and hundreds of such terms should now be used to describe gender. Wikipedia currently lists 110 possible genders.

Jacob's New Dress is a short picture book of twenty-nine colorful pages aimed directly at young children. The title gives away much of the story. The protagonist, Jacob, is a very young boy who enjoys playing dress-up. However, when he plays he enjoys being a princess. For Halloween, he dressed as a witch. He even made a simple dress using a towel. Many of the LGBTQ children’s books that I review contain graphic sexual content or images. This book does not have that but is it appropriate for a public or school library?

I recently went back to school. Well, sort of. I’m taking a class called Constitution Alive!, A Citizen’s Guide to the Constitution. During my high school days, teachers never did more than mention the Constitution. In college, I majored in political science and studied the philosophy of government, international relations, international law, and economics but, not the Constitution. There are less than 5,000 words in the entire document. I’ve read longer chapters in a book during an evening but, when I graduated from college I had never read this founding document of my country.

Let’s Talk About It is a graphic novel (comic-style) book by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan and is published by Penguin Random House. On the front cover the book is described as, “The teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human.” On the back, it states the book is, “Open, modern, and intelligent. An essential addition to any library.” Those are the claims but, is it appropriate for school libraries, public libraries, and children? As always, that is the question I want to answer for parents as I review the book.

Gender Queer is the graphic (comic-style) memoir of Maia Kobabe, published by Oni-Lion Forge Publishing Group and released in 2022. We are told that the 256-page book was originally written for adults but it seems to this reader that it is aimed directly at middle-grade students. The book won the American Library Association Alex Award for its “special appeal” to teenagers, but is it appropriate for school libraries and children? That is the question I want to answer for parents as I review the book.

Toward the end of his 325-page memoir, Mike Lindell quotes a billionaire acquaintance as saying, “You’re not like any other CEO we’ve ever seen.” For thirty years, cocaine and gambling controlled his life. My wife read the book first and told me that his addictive habits continued even after he founded his now-famous pillow company. I wondered how anyone could start such a company, have it flourish, and keep it while addicted.

“What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money—That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!” That’s the theme of Rich Dad Poor Dad, a 294-page financial education book by Robert Kiyosaki. This insightful book begins with young Robert asking his father, a schoolteacher with degrees from several prominent universities, how to get rich. His father told him to use his head. The author laments that schools focus on scholastic and professional skills but not on financial education. He states, “A person can be highly educated, professionally successful, and financially illiterate.”

If you’ve read a few of my past reviews and you’re now reading this one, you probably believe America is in trouble. The nation has forgotten its founding Judeo-Christian values. Do What You Believe: or you won’t be free to believe it much longer is a 141-page guide that speaks directly to Christians worried about the country.

Some books can be read through quickly, others take time to ponder and digest. Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam is definitely the latter. “The modern woke-industrial complex divides us as a people. By mixing morality with consumerism, corporate elites prey on our innermost insecurities about who we really are. They sell us cheap social causes and skin-deep identities to satisfy our hunger for a cause and our search for meaning, at a moment when we lack both.”

“What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing?” That is a quote from the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Some books become so intertwined with the culture that they must be read to fully understand what it means to be an American. In the political sense of that awareness are books like Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville, 1984 by George Orwell, and Atlas Shrugged, the most extensive statement of Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. Released in 1957, the novel received many critical reviews but it has been cited by readers as a very influential novel and it remains a best seller.

I recently reviewed Laptop from Hell by Miranda Devine. That story of greed and grift in the Biden family reminded me of a book I had read years ago, Clinton Cash written by Peter Schweizer in 2015. While the details of the influence-peddling were different, the motive was the same—greed. Because of the similarities, I retrieved my copy and read it again for this review.

Christian Toto is a journalist, conservative movie critic, and editor of the website Hollywood in Toto. So, his view on how wokism has taken hold on the movie industry is insightful and important for those both inside and outside the industry. His book, Virtue Bombs: How Hollywood Got Woke and Lost its Soul, uses 231 pages to divide the topic into its many parts. Covering Hollywood culture, the woke movies they make, censoring comedians and actors, and how to fight back among, other related topics.

A “disheveled man, smelling of booze and cigarettes” drops off a laptop for repair at a Wilmington, Delaware, computer shop. After examining the liquid-damaged device, the proprietor, John Paul Mac Isaac, asks for the owner’s name and has him sign the work order. Later, Mac Isaac retrieves the data from the laptop and makes several unsuccessful attempts to contact the owner.

The disheveled owner of the laptop was Hunter Biden.

When many were trying to find a path to freedom, Dr. Joseph Warren led the way. It’s a shame that today he’s largely ignored in public school history classes. This country would be better served if more books like The Adversaries were available. As I read the story I couldn’t help but ask what would have happened if people had made different choices?

It’s disturbing that we live at a time when parents must check the content of their children’s pre-school and kindergarten books but as A is for Activist shows—they must. Written and illustrated by Innosanto Nagara, A is for Activist masquerades as a board book for teaching ABCs but as it states on the back cover, the book is for “families who want their kids to grow up in a space that is unapologetic about activism, environmental justice, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and everything else that we believe in and fight for.”

If a valid idea rests upon a solid grounding of facts then Stamped, by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi rests upon nothing more than sand. Within its pages, I found repeated generalizations. Inconvenient facts were glossed over and there were repeated factual errors.