What does the NAS staff read in their spare time? All sorts of books. The sort of person who ends up working for a higher education policy institute is likely to be a bookworm. Read down, gentle reader, and you’ll find our back-to-school essays: “What I Read For My Summer Vacation.”
Partly this is so NAS members and other readers of the website can get a better sense of who the NAS staff are and what we do for fun when we’re off the clock.
Partly this is us saying,“A college education ought to make you interested in reading good books for fun, and here’s how we do it.”
And most importantly, we’ve been enjoying these books, and we wanted to share them. We hope you’ll take a look at some of them!
Seth Forman
Norman Lebrecht’s Genius and Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847–1947 (2019) is a sweeping cultural history that traces how Jewish thinkers, artists, scientists, and political figures reshaped modern civilization during a tumultuous century of both material progress and human destruction. This is far from an exercise in Jewish triumphalism or hagiography: Lebrecht doesn’t flinch from discussing, in his full malevolence, Karl Marx. (And did you know that German-Jewish scientist Fritz Haber discovered the cyanide gas Zyklon A, which led to the development of Zyklon B used in Nazi concentration camps?)
Lebrecht, who is fluent in several languages, is a journalist and author best known for his work on classical music, utilizes archives and private collections of papers to give us captivating profiles on Freud, Einstein, Kafka, Heine, Proust, Mendelssohn, Trotsky, Mahler, Disraeli, Herzl, and many others.
The time period Lebrecht studies is a fascinating one that is rarely given such a broad systematic treatment: the era of Jewish emancipation. After centuries of ghettoization, Jews were slowly but inexorably granted full rights of citizenship in most of Europe, and large numbers of them burst through the ghetto walls with a ravenous hunger for the bounty of the secularizing and industrializing but still Christian world.
A significant number of emancipated Jews hit the ground running, transforming chunks of Western civilization in ways, according to Lebrecht, that reflect their own historical experience. The combination of innovation and creativity (“genius”) and the persistent fear that it could all be taken away in an instant (“anxiety”), Lebrecht contends, reshaped such fields as physics, psychology, literature, music, theater, academia, industry, and government.
The book is a series of evocative portraits and vignettes, ending with the horror of the Holocaust, the participation of Jewish scientists in the making of the atom bomb, and the emergence of the state of Israel. Lebrecht does not completely succeed in convincing us that the changes to society he attributes to individual Jews are, in fact, Jewish in any way. But whatever the reason, it does seem that a lot of Jews in this time period were determined to make their mark.
Jared Gould
The United States once set the global gold standard in higher education, but the luster is fading. Enrollment is declining, tuition keeps rising, and public trust is crumbling. Richard Vedder’s Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education argues the problems are not just political but structural—and beyond repair.
Vedder takes aim at bloated administrations, credential inflation, and the federal loan system, which he calls the most disastrous blow to higher education. Guaranteed federal money, he explains, gives colleges a blank check to hike tuition, fueling an affordability crisis while saddling graduates with debt. Meanwhile, administrative staff have ballooned tenfold, often outnumbering faculty and diverting funds to "diversity, equity, and inclusion" campaigns, sustainability offices, and other distractions. If universities had kept 1970s staffing ratios, tuition could be 20 percent lower today.
He also skewers athletics, arguing that most programs are hemorrhaging money. Title IX complications only add to the dysfunction.
Vedder’s prescription is let failing colleges collapse. Shielded from market pressures by subsidies, loans, and bailouts, universities function more like monopolies than dynamic institutions. Creative destruction, he argues, would force innovation, lower costs, and restore higher education’s intellectual mission.
Chris Kendall
George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture is a deep exploration of the history of fundamentalism in America. Beginning with early strains of fundamentalism, Marsden traces a unique, distinctive character throughout American history, and finds a notable continuity within this tradition of American religious thought.
Teresa R. Manning
A delightful summer read is Scottish author Muriel Spark's 20th century novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961),which also has an excellent 1969 film adaptation featuring Dame Maggie Smith. Set in an Edinburgh girls' school during the 1930s, the story follows a group of students mentored by the unconventional if melodramatic teacher, Jean Brodie. They're known at the rather conservative Marcia Blaine school simply as "the Brodie set.”
Miss Brodie sees herself as artistic, poetic, and “deeply emotional” yet willing to forgo the artistic life to devote herself to her pupils, “putting mature heads on young shoulders.”
The set is comprised principally of four girls, roughly age 12 at the novel's start and age 18 by the end, though the text upsets the timeline with flashes both back and forward, dropping truth bombs on readers in an amusingly understated way.
The most important student is Sandy, the smart one, but who also has emotions, of course, as most young women decidedly do. Sandy eventually chafes at Miss Brodie’s influence, deeming it excessive and also dangerous, though jealousy is a considerable part of the mix. It is Sandy who brings about Miss Brodie's downfall; the story is her retelling of these school years after Sandy has become a nun.
The book reminds readers how influential teachers can be and how impressionable students are – and how the teacher-student relationship can change dramatically and in unpredictable ways. It also reminds us that any single action can have many motives - some good, some not.
Are there heroines here? Maybe. Remorse? Maybe.
It's all great food for thought and the reader is engaged and changed after completing this small but mighty book.
David Randall
Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset (1963) is an achingly moving Arthurian novel. Sutcliff generally wrote (mature and sophisticated) children’s books, including others in her Arthurian world; this realism-and-no-magic version of Arthur’s life shifted into an adult register. Excellent sentence by sentence, with sharp characterization and gripping plot, the battle scenes are astonishingly good: some 300 men mounted on large Gothic horses can perhaps hold off the Saxons, the Picts, and the Irish in a series of battles where at most a few thousand men fight on each side. The literary elements of Arthurian mythos find real-world correlates: Guinevere brings with her a dowry of 100 fighting cavalry, and when Arthur must put her away for infidelity, his high kingdom is permanently weakened because the cavalry at once depart for her family’s kingdom. Sutcliff’s Arthur self-consciously fights to preserve the last of Rome, knowing he will fail, hoping that the struggle someday will be remembered. That is what raises this work higher in my judgment than Mary Stewart’s fine Arthurian books: how brilliantly it evokes the sadness of fighting for something worthwhile, knowing you can only delay the darkness.
Glenn Ricketts
My leisure reading selections for the summer include the following titles. As the first two indicate, I’ve been on a history binge of sorts:
1) Triumph and Tragedy, the sixth and final volume in Winston Churchill’s magisterial ops magnus, The Second World War. A monumental and permanent addition to the classics of history as literature, in the style of Gibbon and Mommsen.
2) History of the Goths, by Herwig Wolfram, professor emeritus of medieval history at the University of Vienna and who, at age 91, continues to ply his trade. This work focuses on the often-neglected twilight years of the late western Roman empire and the transition into what would become medieval civilization. The author, a frequent visiting professor at UCLA, has done some outstanding spade work, and is able to draw on sources in German, Latin, Greek, French, English, Italian and Bulgarian. His rigorous objectivity – no insertion whatsoever of contemporary politics or social commentary – provides a glowing example of historical research as it can and should be done.
3) A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift’s first major work, composed in 1696-97, but not published until 1704. The “tale” is a typical Swiftian satire, in this case on the religious controversies in which Britain had recently been embroiled. Great Britain is the “tub,” and the three occupants – Peter, Martin and Jack the three principal Christian denominations then at odds: Peter representing the superstitious, dishonest papists, Martin the reformed but somewhat imperfect Anglican church and Jack the Calvinist wild men and fanatics for whom Swift saves his sharpest barbs. Readers who enjoyed Gulliver’s Travels should find this work eminently worthwhile as well.
Scott Turner
The “war between science and religion”? Think again, argues Nicholas Spencer in his remarkable book, Magisteria. The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion.
Nick Spencer is a senior fellow at Theos, a UK-based think tank that seeks to “stimulate debate about the place of religion in society. His previous works include Atheists: the Origin of the Species, published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Press.
The Magisteria of the title refers to Stephen Jay Gould’s invocation of “Non-Overlapping Magisteria” (NOMA) as a means to calm the waters of the war of science and religion. It was, rather, a declaration of intellectual apartheid: religion inhabits its magisterium here, science inhabits its magisterium there. When one magisterium, presumes to intrude on the other, conflict ensues. Peace will reign as long as the two are kept separate.
Spencer takes us on a grand tour of these two magisterial, science and religion, beginning with the classical philosophers and winding up at the trouble brewing with the rise of artificial “intelligence.” Along the way, he pauses at various points ranging from the French philosophes, to the English naturalists and natural theology through Darwin to the Scopes trial, painting illuminating portraits of the principals and principles at play. We end up the tour with a remarkable conclusion. Not only is the “war of science and religion” mostly ahistorical and false, but that for much of human history, the magisterial have existed in harmonious and fruitful collaboration.
Look for my review of Nick Spencer’s Magisteria in a future issue of the NAS journal, Academic Questions.
Nathaniel Urban
I wanted to read a book about adventures during the summer, so I read A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin. It is a remarkable story about just that: a World War I veteran named Alessandro Giuliani. He recounts his life and time in the Italian Navy while walking through the Italian countryside with a young man. They were both thrown off a bus and had no choice but to travel together to the next closest town, a strange happenstance. Alessandro does not shy away from describing the horrors of WWI, and they were anything but adventurous for leisure's sake. But before the war, we learn Alessandro spent many days studying beauty in classical art and was on track to becoming a professor of aesthetics. He was also a gardener, equestrian, mountain climber, admirer of history, dear friend, and devout son. He was later wounded in battle, fell in love with his nurse, and became a husband and father. Alessandro reminds this young man that the causes of world events are usually out of our control, but through all the tragedies that happen, beauty and hope remain within us.
Hemingway's war novels depict the severity of loss and disillusionment of the Lost Generation after WWI. A Soldier of the Great War is one of those rare books that restores duty, goodness, and simplicity to the poor souls that survived that dreadful conflict.
Peter Wood
Wild Dark Shore is a 2025 novel by the Australian writer Charlotte McConaghy. It is "literary fiction," which is to say McConaghy has ambitions beyond entertaining her readers and selling a lot of books. Wild Dark Shore offers its quotient of mystery, suspense, and tragedy, but it really belongs to the contemporary genre of global warming apocalyptica, which is adjacent to the classic gothic novel, complete with sinister doings and ghosts.
In some very near future, the seas are rising and roiled by tempest; huge fires ravage the parched continents; vast numbers of plant species and animals are on the road to extinction; and people are running out of food. McConaghy is a deft enough writer to shove all this terrible news into the background and deliver it incidentally in a narrative that concentrates on a family that lives in near isolation on an island off the coast of Antarctica. In the novel it is called Shearwater, but in an endnote McConaghy explains it is modeled on Macquarie Island (34 kilometers long, five wide), where she spent some time on the Australian research base.
The story focuses on the Salt family: the widower, Dominic; his elder son Raff; daughter Fen; and younger son, Orly. The story opens as Fen drags ashore the body of a woman caught in the surf. Rowan is the sole survivor of a shipwreck and is nursed back to health by the family. But neither she nor they are honest about their doings. The main thing that we know is that the Salt family is on Shearwater to tend to a "seed vault" that was created to keep in deep hibernation seeds from all the world's plants lest they be lost in the climate catastrophe that is rapidly destroying their native habitats.
The trouble is that the rampaging ocean is now erasing the island itself and the Salt family is desperate to save as many seeds as possible. The characters are vivid but the story, somewhat like the fictional island, is battered by waves of implausibility. McConaghy’s greatest strength is her invocation of the atmosphere of this spit of land inhabited by myriad seals, sea lions, and penguins, and visited by whales and albatrosses.
But I couldn’t escape the sense on almost every page that this is a work of propaganda meant to scare young and naïve readers about the deadly peril of climate change. Building a fiction on a greater fiction is, I suppose, fair game for a science fiction novelist. But I would recommend that anyone attracted by the novel, start by visiting Macquarie Island on the internet, where this outpost of the extreme Southern Hemisphere can be seen as alive and well.
