I'll add my perspective to the cacophony of recommended books being disseminated by print and online publications at the end of this year.  Let's start with politics.  Mitt Romney's No Apology:  The Case for American Greatness (St. Martin's) provides excellent analysis of the domestic economic and international challenges facing the U.S. and how the Obama Administration is failing miserably in both of these areas.  We need an intellectually coherent candidate to go up against the inevitable campaign of distortion Obama and his minions are likely to put out in 2012 to deflect responsibility from their execrable record of presidential leadership these past two years.  Romney's work is a good introduction to the type of arguments he and other GOP presidential candidates need to present to the electorate who let itself be seduced by Obama's charismatic contortions.

Former President George W. Bush's Decision Points (Crown) is also recommended reading.  The commercial success of this book is evidence of how much better he is looking to Americans as Obama's follies become more apparent with each passing second.  Bush made mistakes during his presidency, but he remains a man of honor, integrity, and geopolitical prescience, who kept America safe from post 9/11 terror attacks and took the fight to the enemy instead of naively believing that Islamist terrorism could be defeated by Western legal documentation and discourse.

Presidential biographies can also be instructive reading for comparing the personalities and issues of bygone epochs with contemporary developments.  Edmund Morris' Colonel Roosevelt (Random House), the concluding volume of his biographical trilogy of Theodore Roosevelt, is an excellent example of narrative history and insightful analysis.  This covers Roosevelt's post-presidential  years and chronicles his exploring expeditions in Africa and South America, his quixotic 1912 third-party presidential campaign including surviving an assassination attempt in Milwaukee, his virulent and justified criticism of Woodrow Wilson's timid reaction to German atrocities and Wilson's messianic delusions of creating a new world order, and the events of his personal life including the death of his son Quentin in France during World War I.  Roosevelt is a titan of American history.  He can arguably be considered America's intellectually premier President with a prolific output on politics, natural history, and numerous other subjects.  While America's economy required some increased economic regulation during his presidency and post-presidency, he had insufficient understanding of how excessive regulation could throttle American productivity and ingenuity.

However, this deficiency is more than compensated by his brutally realistic understanding of international politics and military force and their relationship to sinful human nature.  Roosevelt would have known how to deal with contemporary Islamist terrorists, Julian Assange and Wikileaks, Mexican drug cartels, maritime pirates, and other national and transnational threats to U.S. security.  He would not have felt the need to cultivate the liberal media and foreign policy establishments but would have decisively defended U.S. interests.

Traveling to Australia earlier this year, helped increase my awareness of that amazing country's political and historical development and the role of Australian conservatism in that country's ongoing political development.  Peter Costello served as Australia's Treasurer from 1996-2007 as part of John Howard's government and helped eliminate that country's national debt.  The Costello Memoirs:  The Age of Prosperity  (Melbourne University Press) documents his role in sustaining the economic prosperity Australia enjoyed during the Howard government and documents the byzantine relationship he had with Howard over whether he would succeed Howard as that country's Liberal Party leader.  I received Howard's memoir Lazarus Rising (Harper Collins) for Christmas and look forward to plunging into it in the not to distant future.  Tony Abbott is the current leader of Australia's conservative coalition and his Battlelines  (Melbourne University Press) provides the insights of this thoughtful leader who narrowly lost an election earlier this year to Prime Minister Julia Gillard's Labor Party who's failure to deliver is rivaling the Obama Administration's.  Anything by Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey is enjoyable, including his History of Victoria (Cambridge University Press) and Miriam Estenson's The Life of Matthew Flinders (Allen & Unwin) which chronicles the life of this late 18th and early 19th century British explorer who mapped much of modern Australia and got to experience incarceration by the French in Mauritius during the Napoleonic Wars.

While we were in Sydney, there was a demonstration by local leftist dimwits protesting Israel's seizure of a Turkish ship attempting to supply weapons to Hamas in Gaza.  The Palestineans are having disturbing success convincing elements of international opinion that they are a "unique" people entitled to a nation state as a means of compensating for purported Israeli "racism, imperialism, and occupation."  Ephraim Karsh's Palestine Betrayed (Yale University Press) is a wonderful antidote to such stupidity as it irrefutably demonstrates that Palestineans have been betrayed by their own leaders and self-serving Arab countries who seek maintain them in their victimhood instead of encouraging them to become productive law-abiding citizens in a democratic Israel or being productive law-abiding citizens within other Arab countries.

My wife and I enjoy visiting art museums and I enjoy art museum handbooks and books about various artists and artistic schools I like.  Something I just finished reading today is Linda S. Ferber The Hudson River School:  Nature and the American Vision (Skira Rizzoli and New York Historical Society) which showcases and describes works by Hudson River School painters such as Frederic Church,Thomas Cole, Jasper Cropsey, Asher Durand, and others in the New York Historical Society's collection.  Both of us also visited the Big Apple for our 10th anniversary and I've enjoyed works on this metropolis' history including Yasmin Sabrina Khan's Enlightening the World:  The Creation of the Statue of Liberty (Cornell University Press) and Kenneth T. Jackson, ed. The Encyclopedia of New York City 2nd ed. (Yale University Press).

With the unfortunate liberal social encroachments made during the Obama Administration, as evidenced by judicial attempts to overturn Proposition 8 in California and impose same-sex marriage and this administration's and the 111th Congress' moronic decision to allow open military service by homosexuals, its high time for a scholarly and ideologically polemical work to document and ultimately discredit the insidious rise of this political, judicial, legal, and social movement to normalize this perverse lifestyle and criminalize the speech of those determined to oppose this threat to our culture.  One possible title for such as work could be Deconstructing Stonewall in "honor" of the riots in New York City's Greenwich Village section which launched the gay rights movement and has become a symbol of political mythology and iconography within that movement.
 
Happy New Year and good reading to fellow conservatives in 2011!