Two books worth reading side by side are Gideon Rachman’s Easternization: Asia’s Rise and America’s Decline: From Obama to Trump and Beyond (Other Press, 2017) and Carl Minzner’s End of an Era: How China’s Authoritarian Revival Is Undermining Its Rise (Oxford, 2018).

Late in 1899 a magazine known as The Christian Oracle changed its name to The Christian Century. In January 1900, its editors predicted that “glory’s mantle shall enwrap the world, and golden years enfold in an unbroken round of sweet and happy peace.” World War I began 14 years later.

Norman Borlaug—the wizard in Charles C. Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet (Knopf)—is the only plant breeder to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and that’s because he used new agricultural technology to increase global grain harvests, making it possible for the world’s population to increase. Borlaug became a scientist because he realized in 1932 that he would not be able to become a second baseman for the Chicago Cubs.

Factoring in government welfare payments, very few Americans lack food, shelter, and clothing—but what about purpose and productivity?

The Once and Future Worker by Oren Cass (Encounter) helps us understand America by pointing out a fundamental problem: trillions of dollars poured into low-income households to guarantee consumption, but very little to help those adults become productive.

Jay Sexton’s A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (Basic) is our Book of the Year in History because it presents a challenging new perspective in 200 tightly written pages. Instead of telling a conventional story of America’s evolution, he offers the historian’s equivalent of a biologist’s “punctuated equilibrium”: long periods of little change punctuated by dramatic disasters that create surprising benefits.

Before becoming WORLD’s chief editor, I sat on the board of directors of a Christian publishing house. When the editorial team spoke of upcoming books, it emphasized the intellectual worth of the book for readers and (since every enterprise needs to make at least a small profit) the material worth to the company. The job of authors was to write good books and do media interviews to promote them, but the marketing department did most of the selling.

Many Christian authors have produced tear-jerking books centered on a child’s death or a friend’s demise. It is good and right to cry about death stalking those we love—Jesus wept and thus gave all of us permission to weep—but manipulating emotion to gain more clicks or sell more books seems not only unseemly but sub-Christian.