by Robert A. Waters
Several friends have asked me to list my favorite books. I hesitated for several reasons. One problem is that there are so many great books, it’s almost impossible to slim down to ten. Also, if I pick out ten today, I might change them tomorrow. However, I’ve read each of these books more than once, and in some way, each has influenced my life. So, for what it’s worth, here goes.
(1) The Holy Bible – The greatest book ever published is going out of style in America. Like it or not, when we no longer use Biblical principles as our moral guide, this once-great civilization built by our Founding Fathers will fall.
(2) Hound of the Baskervilles and all Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.
(3) 1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell – 1984 frightened me into hating communism and totalitarian governments of all stripes.
(4) In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.
(5) Hank Williams: The Biography by Colin Escot.
(6) The Blooding by Joseph Wambaugh.
(7) Digging Up the Bible: The Stories Behind the Great Archaeological Discoveries in the Holy Land by Moshe Pearlman. I love books about archaeology, and this is one of the best.
(8) Lords of Sipan: A True Story of Pre-Inca Tombs, Archaeology, and Crime by Sidney Kirkpatrick.
(9) The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn. The author once said: “A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.” Gulag destroyed the New York Times-sanctioned liberal version of Soviet history by detailing Russia’s concentration camps from 1918 to 1956.
(10) Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak-Catchers by Tom Wolfe. Published in 1970 during the height of the black power movement, this is one of the great politically incorrect books of our day. (I always wondered how he even got it published.)
Good list.
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