Looking for a gift for the smartest person you know? Regnery has harnessed some of the greatest minds of our time, and the result has been George Gilder’s Life After Google, Anthony Esolen’s Nostalgia, and Dennis Prager’s The Rational Bible. Read on to discover three books that will impress even the snobbiest of your family members with their depth and insight – and then go ahead and check that person of your Christmas list.
Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
By George Gilder (2018)
The Age of Google, built on big data and machine intelligence, has been an awesome era. But it’s coming to an end. In Life after Google, George Gilder—the peerless visionary of technology and culture—explains why Silicon Valley is suffering a nervous breakdown and what to expect as the post-Google age dawns. Google’s astonishing ability to “search and sort” attracts the entire world to its search engine. And everything it offers is free, or so it seems. Instead of paying directly, users submit to advertising. The system of “aggregate and advertise” works—for a while—if you control an empire of data centers, but a market without prices strangles entrepreneurship and turns the Internet into a wasteland of ads
Gilder wants you to know that the future lies with the “cryptocosm”—the new architecture of the blockchain and its derivatives. Enabling cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether, NEO and Hashgraph, it will provide the Internet a secure global payments system, ending the aggregate-and-advertise Age of Google. Silicon Valley, long dominated by a few giants, faces a “great unbundling,” which will disperse computer power and commerce and transform the economy and the Internet. Life after Google, Gilder says, is almost here.
Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World
By Anthony Esolen (2018)
Alone among the creatures of the world, man suffers a pang both bitter and sweet. It is an ache for the homecoming. The Greeks called it nostalgia. Post-modern man, homeless almost by definition, cannot understand nostalgia. If he is a progressive, dreaming of a utopia to come, he dismisses it contemptuously, eager to bury a past he despises. If he is a reactionary, he sentimentalizes it, dreaming of a lost golden age.
In this profound reflection, Anthony Esolen explores the true meaning of nostalgia and its place in the human heart. Drawing on the great works of Western literature from the Odyssey to Flannery O'Connor, he traces the development of this fundamental longing from the pagan's desire for his earthly home, which most famously inspired Odysseys' heroic return to Ithaca, to its transformation under Christianity.
Esolen is a professor of English at Thomas More College, an editor at Touchstone magazine, and an editor and translator of several epic poems. This is a literary work of the highest order – an examination of every man’s innate desire for homecoming - and how he attempts to attain it.
By Dennis Prager (2018)
Why do so many people think the Bible, the most influential book in world history, is outdated? Why do our friends and neighbors – and sometimes we ourselves – dismiss the Bible as irrelevant, irrational, immoral, or all these things? This explanation of the Book of Exodus, written by Dennis Prager of Prager University, will demonstrate that the Bible is not only powerfully relevant to today’s issues, but completely consistent with rational thought.
Do you think the Bible permitted the trans-Atlantic slave trade? You won’t after reading this book. Struggling with parental relationships? Doubting the existence of God? This book will give you reason after reason to rethink your doubts. The title of this commentary is, “The Rational Bible” because its approach is entirely reason-based. The reader is never asked to accept anything on faith alone. As Prager says, “If something I write does not make rational sense, I have not done my job.”
The Rational Bible is the fruit of Dennis Prager’s 40 years of teaching the Bible to people of every faith, and no faith. On virtually every page, you will discover how the text relates to the contemporary world and to your life. His goal: to change your mind – and then change your life.
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