He has paced the living room for hours on many a night over the years, comforting a fussy baby. The babies are not babies anymore, but he is still their favorite book reader, bath giver, Monopoly player, waffle server, and the one more likely to say yes rather than no to any request. This weekend, my kids celebrate their favorite dad, the one who puts on the best show in the neighborhood all summer long. And I would like to add a short roundup of other wonderful reads for this weekend, because good dads really are a treasure.
Joel J. Miller credits his love of books to his father, a voracious reader of all the things. A taste:
My father was a Libertarian Party activist when my parents first married, and the home shelves bulged with Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, Leonard Read, Faustino Ballvé, Wilhelm Röpke, and Albert Jay Nock. As a teenager, I read them all as I eagerly awaited the arrival of the next Laissez Faire Books catalogue.
Dad was also into theology, some of it quite heavy. I remember slogging through Cornelius Van Til’s A Christian Theory of Knowledge at seventeen or eighteen. I got epistemology from Hayek and Mises, too. But I’m not sure I understood any of it until much later. The thing that eventually stuck with me was the need for intellectual humility—that most of our knowledge is really provisional and incomplete, dependent upon presuppositions of which we are mostly unaware.
Under Dad’s roof, I read an odd array of H. L. Mencken, John Calvin, Thomas Sowell, C. S. Lewis, P. J. O’Rourke, R. C. Sproul, G. K. Chesterton, Lysander Spooner, David Friedman, Frédéric Bastiat, Leonard Read, Francis Schaeffer, Herman Bavinck, Karl Hess, Lloyd Billingsley, Frank Meyer, Eric Hoffer, and Abraham Kuyper. And there were always more.
Meanwhile, a beautiful interview at Plough, as Robert Ellsberg and Chris Zimmermann talk about Daniel Ellsberg, who passed away this week. From the introduction to the interview, which you should read:
On June 13, 1971, the New York Times published the first installment of a set of highly classified documents that changed the course of American history. Secretly copied by a military analyst named Daniel Ellsberg, they electrified readers with their revelations of how Washington had snookered Congress and the public into supporting the Vietnam War – with billions of dollars, and tens of thousands of lives. In the immediate aftermath Ellsberg was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act. Two year later, however, the government’s proceedings against him fell apart, and all charges were dismissed.
Fast forward a half-century, and the story of the Pentagon Papers, as they became known, is familiar to anyone who has sat through a high school history or civics class. As for the man at its center, he spent the next fifty years resisting the powers that be as an anti-war activist and public intellectual. Diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer in February of this year, Ellsberg died on June 16. He was 92.Â
Also, recently at Current, I had the privilege of interviewing Francis Gary Powers Jr. about his dad, the Cold War hero whose plane was shot down in Russia on a mission in 1960.
Finally, Current editor Robert Erle Barham has written a number of beautiful pieces on fatherhood–his own and his father’s. You might start with the beautiful tribute to sending kids back to school at the beginning of a new year, Leave-Taking. You could also read Pyrotechnics about work done together–whether physical or intellectual. And if you are not afraid of crying while reading, you should read Look Not to the Dead and Dying.