Spellbound by Einstein, Stevenson, and Trump 

This summer I’ve read two ambitious books that succeed, two that partly succeed, and an unpretentious one that holds true to its roots.

Let’s start with Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump (Forum, 2025). Molly Worthen walks us through four centuries of mystery history: Some leaders gain followers by charm but charisma is more powerful, and sometimes rational explanations for their success fall short.

Worthen’s writing itself is charming. She punctures the arrogance of early 20^th century psychological rationalists: “A reasonable observer might have concluded that these men had captured the Holy Spirit. If they had not shot and mounted the Spirit as a trophy, at least they caged him for close observation. That impression was wrong.” 

Spellbound includes memorable vignettes of people we would expect to find in a book on the unexpected—what economists call black swans—but also those we might not expect in a book on charisma, like Albert Einstein and Adlai Stevenson. Worthen’s conclusion: We naturally “reach out for meaning” and in the process worship idols.

The next success is Timothy Carney’s Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be (Harper, 2024). With four children I restrain myself from advising young parents. Maybe Carney with six gets a hall pass, yet some potential readers will dislike being told not to be a helicopter parent and not to enroll children in travel sports.

Such parents, of course, are exactly those who should be gifted this book. Potentially benevolent book-buyers should take comfort in knowing that Family Unfriendly shows fathers and mothers to be as much victims as perpetrators. We are a society with some sidewalk-less suburbs, lots of stranger-danger paranoia, and many who never learn that God loves us even if we or our children don’t get into Yale.

Now, on to the semi-successes. Percival Everett’s James (Doubleday, 2024) is a lot like Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and not just because James is a semi-brilliant rendition of Twain’s character Jim, the escaped slave who rides a raft with Huck down the mighty Mississippi.

National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize judges probably chuckled often as they read with delight and made James a winner. So did I. The title cleverly reflects a major premise: Everett has Twain’s “Jim,” speak in a slave dialect despite knowing perfectly grammatical standard English. Bright and literate, James deliberately plays into white master prejudices that slaves are dumb and grunting.

Part of the book’s suspense lies in how long it will take Huck to learn that Jim is really James: Huck starts to understand when a snake bites James and sends him into a delirium during which he discourses with John Locke. But Mark Twain’s great book lags at a certain point as it descends to low comedy, and so does Everett’s as it ascends to high preachiness.

The other semi-wonder is Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy (Yale, 2025). Author Jonathan Rauch grew up despising Christianity and still attacks the Bible’s opposition to the same-sex marriage he has. But Rauch had a good Christian roommate at Yale and has learned from Tim Keller and Russell Moore. He now writes, “I came to see that people who believe in God have an ability I lack. They receive frequencies I can’t detect, which gives their worlds a dimensionality, a layer of meaning, that my work lacks.”

Cross Purposes includes two terrific chapters on the problems of “thin Christianity,” 20^th century modernism ashamed of its core, and “sharp Christianity,” 21^st century Christianity in which politics edges out theology. But Rauch goes awry in his final chapter on “thick Christianity,” which emphasizes character formation and moral reasoning, because he underestimates the centrality of original sin. Many belief systems deny it and urge us to make ourselves better. Christianity uniquely says we are unable to do so and thus desperately need a Savior.

Finally, John Erickson’s Small Town Author (Texas Tech, 2025) is an unpretentious memoir of a writer finding his calling. Erickson gave up East Coast aspirations and gained contentment in the Texas panhandle as he found “a slow but honest way to build an audience.”

Erickson has now published 83 novels about Hank the Cowdog, who styles himself “Head of Ranch Security” and, like some East Coast writers, thinks himself smarter than everyone else. He isn’t, but in #83 Hank has to face the depredations of a wart-spreading toad and two thugs, Buster and Muggs, out to ruin the ranch’s Fourth of July picnic.