Our Recommended Reading Guide seeks to provide intellectually curious college students with a resource to help them encounter thought and ideas they do not typically engage with in their classrooms. Of course, because of the enduring nature of the below works on non-fiction and fiction, this list is fit for any curious mind.
We asked our students, supporters, and our whole Buckley community for their favorite books and recommendations. We are so grateful for the tremendous response and participation we received!
Please enjoy the Recommended Reading Guide below.
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The Buckley Program Recommended Reading Guide
William F. Buckley, Jr.
Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr., Chambers and Buckley (1969)
Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, William F. Buckley, Jr. (1997)
Let Us Talk of Many Things: The Collected Speeches, William F. Buckley, Jr. (2001)
Classics of Conservatism
History of Ideas: Works of Politics, Philosophy, and Economics
Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke (1790)
The American Republic: It’s Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny, Orestes Brownson (1866)
The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, Auberon Herbert (1885)
The Politics of God and the Politics of Man, Jacques Ellul (1972)
Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-famine, Robert Conquest (1986)
Fear No Evil: The Classic Memoir of One Man’s Triumph Over the Police State, Natan Sharansky (1988)
The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, Deirdre McClosky (2007)
The Crisis of Modernity, Augusto Del Noce (Translation 2014)
Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left, Roger Scruton (2015)
The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (2018)
Past Buckley Program Speakers
Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, Christina Hoff Sommers (1994)
The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men, Christina Hoff Sommers (2000)
A Student’s Guide to Political Philosophy, Harvey Mansfield (2001)
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, Carlos Eire (2003)
The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, Yuval Levin (2014)
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, J.D. Vance (2016)
Fiction