Recommended Reads, 13th in a Quarterly Series

Stuff I'd recommend from the past few months:

Sex and the Supremacy of Christ (Piper).  A good, Biblical perspective on sexual sin - why it's wrong, why we do it anyway, and why and how to overcome it.

 

Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (Kaplan).  We've all read Lincoln bios, but this one is a fun lens by which to understand the one many consider to be our greatest president, which is as a crafter of written arguments.

The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (Brands).  Even though I grew up in California and studied the gold rush in grade school, I had no idea how big, how global, and how transformative it was.

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America (Egan).  A dramatic account of a huge fire and the before and after politics of the Forest Service.
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SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (Levitt).  Levitt and Dubner at their best, with clever and counter-intuitive arguments culled from econometric analysis and economic theory.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Diamond).  Diamond goes way way way back, and gets at the fundamental causes behind regional differences in human advancement.

A Short History of Nearly Everything (Bryson).  Not nearly as laugh-out-loud funny as his other stuff, but just as engaging.