http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/fivebest/?id=110010279
One Nation
A cheer for these books about America.

BY DAVID GELERNTER
Saturday, June 30, 2007 12:01 a.m.

1. "On Two Wings" by Michael Novak (Encounter, 2002).

Michael Novak describes the nation's birth as it happened, not the way
our aggressively secular society likes to remember it. Two wings lofted
the American eagle into flight, writes Novak: Enlightenment philosophy
and the nation's compact with "the God of the Jews," meaning "the God of
Israel championed by the nation's first Protestants." Novak marshals
impressive evidence, including the remarkable scene in September 1774
when a clergyman read Psalm 35 to the Continental Congress. John Adams
described the scene to his wife: "It was enough to melt a heart of
stone. I saw tears gush into the eyes of the old, grave, pacific
Quakers. . . . I must beg you to read that Psalm." Novak's account may
be ignored but will never be contravened. His book may change forever
your ideas about America's founding.

2. "Fields of Battle" by John Keegan (Knopf, 1996).

John Keegan is the world's best-known military historian because his
books are alive with the sights, sounds, smells and feel of battle; they
are as evocative as a fistful of fresh soil. In "Fields of Battle"--a
series of related essays, like most of his books--he discusses his
American travels, the battle of Yorktown, Confederate fortifications and
Custer's last stand. His brilliantly lucid few paragraphs on the Wright
Brothers' first flight are worth the price of admission. He explains
exactly what knowledge the Wrights inherited and the "conception of
genius" that they added. And he tells us (as a bonus) why the famous
image of their first flight is "one of the most beautiful" photographs
of all. The vivid clarity of Keegan's writing has a similar rare beauty.

3. "The Religion of Abraham Lincoln" by William J. Wolf (Seabury, 1963).

This is one of the best (and shortest) of the huge and ever-growing pile
of Lincoln biographies. William J. Wolf is a humble historian who stands
back and lets Lincoln speak. The author doesn't try to resolve questions
that Lincoln himself never answered (was he a Christian?), but he does
show us Lincoln's evolving, ever-deepening faith in the Bible and the
Bible's God, and the direct connection between Lincoln's faith and his
conduct of the Civil War. Wolf also demonstrates Lincoln's tendency to
understand Americans (God's "almost chosen people," Lincoln called them)
in biblical terms. That a book about Lincoln's religious development
should read like a concise biography is an eloquent fact in itself.

4. "The Two-Ocean War" by Samuel Eliot Morison (Little, Brown, 1963).

If John Keegan's "Fields of Battle" is military history only in part,
Samuel Eliot Morison's "Two-Ocean War: A Short History of the United
States Navy in the Second World War" is the thing itself, the best book
I know about Americans in battle. Morison was a distinguished Harvard
historian who joined the Navy and sailed into war just to write this
authoritative history. His description of the battle of Midway (June
4-7, 1942), where Japan's relentless advance was finally thrown back in
confusion, is justly renowned. Wave after wave of heroic American flyers
were destroyed. Virtually the whole air-strength of the three U.S.
carriers on the scene had been used up when a lone squadron of dive
bombers finally turned the battle around. Remember the "threescore young
aviators who met flaming death that day," Morison urges, "in reversing
the verdict of battle. Think of them, reader, every Fourth of June. They
and their comrades who survived changed the whole course of the Pacific
War." Little enough to ask. (But too much, evidently, for our schools to
teach.)

5. "The Inheritance" by Samuel G. Freedman (Simon & Schuster, 1996).

A beautifully written, strangely moving book. There are many striking
chapters in this story, as the subtitle has it, of "How Three Families
and America Moved From Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond." But the most
striking of all recounts the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon--which
Normal Mailer celebrated in "Armies of the Night"--from the standpoint
of one of the young military policemen charged with facing down the
huge, surging mob of demonstrators. Samuel G. Freedman describes the
(generally) non-college-educated MPs who had been drafted and were
grimly, bravely doing their duty versus the privileged, patronizing
protesters who screamed hate, threw rocks and had no intention of doing
theirs. It is an unforgettable account.

Mr. Gelernter's "Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion" has
just been published by Doubleday. He a national fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute and a professor of computer science at Yale.