Ben Sasse’s book The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-Of-Age Crisis—And How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance recently came out and I just finished reading it yesterday. Because my reading list isn’t huge (50+ books a year), I try to pick good, impactful books to read. This isn’t always easy so I’m constantly looking for sources to help me populate my reading list.
That’s one reason I wanted to read this book but it unexpectedly delivered more than a source for great literature. He went into the mechanics and techniques of making great readers. Whereas I did have some moments of pause and reflection (I’ll need to read other books to weigh his points), reading this book didn’t cause me to outright disagree at any point; that’s very rare for me.
Something I found very reassuring was that I’d read so many of the books he refers to or suggests. The shear number of books he referred to impressed me so much that I collected them in a rough bibliography. Here it is:
Bibliography for The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse
- Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz (retired Yale professor)
- Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood by Christian Smith (a Notre Dame sociologist)
- The Great Disruption by Francis Fukuyama
- The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman
- The Affluent Society by C. Wright Mills
- Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman
- The Waste Makers by Vance Packard
- Outside Lies Magic by John R. Stilgoe
- Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch
- The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (philosopher and classicist)
- Agamemnon by Aeschylus
- Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
- Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
- On Old Age by Marcus Tullius Cicero
- Shop Class for Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford
- Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
- John Dewey (Sasse disagrees with atheist Dewey and mentions these books, in particular, as to why he disagrees with him):
- Democracy in Education
- Self-Realization as the Moral Ideal
- The Primary Education Fetich [sic]
- The School and Society
- My Pedagogic Creed
- The Humanist Manifesto
- Dumbing us Down by John Taylor Gatto
- Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
- Escape from Camp Fourteen by Blaine Harden
- Children of Dictators by Jay Nordlinger
- White Collar by C. Wright Mills
- Common Sense by Thomas Paine
- Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
- Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman
- Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt
- Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck
- Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart
- Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
- The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
- Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte
- Moneyball by Michael Lewis
- Religion
- Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
- Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
- Christianity and Liberalism by J. Gresham Machen (Sasse disagrees with this book but it’s a great book to read)
- Book of Genesis in The Bible
- Book of Matthew in The Bible (especially Sermon on the Mount)
- Commentary on Galatians by Martin Luther
- The Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin
- Greek Roots
- Ethics by Aristotle (starter book)
- Crito by Plato (starter book)
- Odyssey by Homer
- History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
- Three Theban Plays by Sophocles
- Homesick Souls (or, Fundamental Anthropology)
- Confessions by Augustine
- Why God Became Man by Anselm of Canterbury
- Bondage of Will by Martin Luther
- Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas
- Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
- Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Sasse has a long struggle with this book; he ultimately sees Rousseau as wrong)
- Shakespeare
- Romeo and Juliet
- Hamlet
- King Lear
- Julius Caesar
- Macbeth
- Sonnets
- The American Idea
- Declaration of Independence
- U. S. Constitution
- The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay
- Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an America Slave by Frederick Douglass
- Markets
- Politics by Aristotle
- Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
- The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 by Charles Sellers
- Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman
- Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
- Tyrants
- Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (laid the intellectual foundation for communism and, hence, the murder of more than 100 million people)
- Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (the best analysis of the rise of scientific racism and anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century Europe, which led directly to the Holocaust)
- The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek (explains the close relationship between fascism and communism)
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- The Nature of Things (or, a Humanistic Perspective on Science)
- On the Nature of Things by Lucretius
- Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
- Elements of Geometry by Euclid
- American Fiction
- Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
- O, Pioneers by Willa Cather (a Cornhusker substitute for Death Comes for the Archbishop)
- Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (about his alienation as a black and gay man growing up in Harlem with an abusive Baptist minister as his stepfather. This is a disturbing book in many aspects. It illustrates the ways in which religious life can turn hypocritical and repressive.)
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
This a great list to dig through and start reading which, in itself, is an exciting prospect.
