McLean County Republican
As an added benefit to joining the McLean County Republican party, those who enroll as General or Primary Members will receive an opportunity each quarter to receive a new book and an invitation to participate in a casual gathering to discuss the merits of that book. The books chosen will be based on the response to the survey you have been asked to complete. There is no promise that the books listed will be selected. Final selections will be based on broad-based interest and availability. This survey will give us a way to determine what type of books would be of interest to our members. These books range from political commentary biographies, and fiction. Please review the sampling below and then complete the survey, answering yes or no about your interest in each book.
1. American Playbook by Clay Travis 
Popular radio host and bestselling author Clay Travis offers a unique playbook approach to politics, outlining how Republicans can win elections and win back the country through the lens of sports metaphors.
Republicans are in a losing period. The last election should have been a wake-up call for the current moment. If the GOP wants to turn its luck around, it’s time to toss the old playbook and find new ways to win elections and attract enthusiastic voters.
2. Tucker by Chadwick Moore 
For tens of millions of Americans, Tucker Carlson was long the only voice on cable news providing a counternarrative to establishment Washington and the mainstream press on the most important issues of our time: the Covid-19 vaccine, January 6, the Ukraine war, and even UFOs, just to name a few.
Who is Tucker Carlson off camera? How did his upbringing contribute to who he is today? What motivates the man who has been (and will surely reemerge) as the most influential and, in the establishment’s eyes, the most dangerous voice in American politics and culture?
Author Chadwick Moore was granted unprecedented access to Carlson’s professional and personal life. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Carlson, his family, colleagues, acquaintances, and enemies, Tucker offers an inside look into one of the most beloved—and polarizing—media figures of our time.
3. Battle for the American Mind by Pete Hegseth 
FOX News host Pete Hegseth is back with what he says is his most important book yet: A revolutionary road map to saving our children from leftist indoctrination.
Behind a smokescreen of “preparing students for the new industrial economy,” early progressives had political control in mind. America’s original schools didn’t just make kids memorize facts or learn skills; they taught them to think freely and arrive at wisdom. They assigned the classics, inspired love of God and country, and raised future citizens that changed the world forever.
Today, after 16,000 hours of K-12 indoctrination, our kids come out of government schools hating America. They roll their eyes at religion and disdain our history. We spend more money on education than ever, but kids can barely read and write—
Battle for the American Mind is more than a book; it’s a field guide for remaking school in the United States. We’ve ceded our kids’ minds to the left for far too long—this book gives patriotic parents the ammunition to join an insurgency that gives America a fighting chance.
4. Well Versed- Biblical Answers to Today's Tough Issues by James L. Garlow 
Conservative Christians admit that they do not speak out on political or cultural issues because they do not know how to support their beliefs from a biblical basis, according to a recent poll. Instead, they remain silent on critical issues like marriage, racism, and transgender issues because they feel uninformed and ill-equipped to defend their beliefs.
New York Times bestselling author and pastor James L. Garlow offers the solution—a practical, biblical guide for the 21st century Christian. Well Versed: Biblical Answers to Today’s Tough Issues informs and prepares readers to tackle the important issues of the day and engage with those around them in a loving, Scripturally-based manner.
5. The Devil's Chessboard-Rise of America's Secret Government by David Talbot 
An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful—and secretive—colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers.
America’s greatest untold story: the United States’ rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA. Drawing on revelatory new materials—including newly discovered U.S. government documents, U.S. and European intelligence sources, the personal correspondence and journals of Allen Dulles’s wife and mistress, and exclusive interviews with the children of prominent CIA officials—Talbot reveals the underside of one of America’s most powerful and influential figures.
6. Andrew Jackson and the Miracle of New Orleans: The Battle that Shaped America's Destingy by Brian Kilmead 
The War of 1812 saw America threatened on every side. Encouraged by the British, Indian tribes attacked settlers in the West, while the Royal Navy terrorized the coasts. By mid-1814, President James Madison’s generals had lost control of the war in the North, losing battles in Canada. Then British troops set the White House ablaze, and a feeling of hopelessness spread across the country.
Into this dire situation stepped Major General Andrew Jackson. Jackson had to convince President Madison and his War Department to take him seriously, even though he wasn’t one of the Virginians and New Englanders who dominated the government. He had to assemble a coalition of frontier militiamen, French-speaking Louisianans,Cherokee and Choctaw Indians, freed slaves, and even some pirates. And he had to defeat the most powerful military force in the world—in the confusing terrain of the Louisiana bayous.
In short, Jackson needed a miracle. The local Ursuline nuns set to work praying for his outnumbered troops. And so the Americans, driven by patriotism and protected by prayer, began the battle that would shape our young nation’s destiny.
As they did in their two previous bestsellers, Kilmeade and Yaeger make history come alive with a riveting true story that will keep you turning the pages. You’ll finish with a new understanding of one of our greatest generals and a renewed appreciation for the brave men who fought so that America could one day stretch “from sea to shining sea.”
7. The Democratic party hates AMerica by Mark Levin 
Insightful and hard-hitting as ever, Levin proves that since its establishment, the Democrat Party has set out to rewrite history and destroy the foundation of freedom in America. More than a political party, it is the entity through which Marxism has installed its philosophy and its new revolution.
As in a Thomas Paine pamphlet or a clarion call from Paul Revere, Levin alerts his fellow Americans to the destruction this country is facing, and rallies them to defeat the threat in front of us—more looming than ever. He writes, “Every legal, legitimate, and appropriate tool and method must be employed in the short- and long- run to defeat the Democrat Party. The Democrat Party must be resoundingly conquered in the next election and several elections thereafter, or it will become extremely difficult to undo the damage it is unleashing at breakneck pace.”
8. The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times' Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter Hisotry by Ashley Rindsberg 
The Gray Lady Winked pulls back the curtain on this illustrious institution to reveal a quintessentially human organization where ideology, ego, power and politics compete with the more humble need to present the facts. In its 10 gripping chapters, The Gray Lady Winked offers readers an eye-opening, often shocking, look at the New York Times’s greatest journalistic failures, so devastating they changed the course of history.
The result is an essential look at the tangled relationship between media, power and politics in a post-truth world told with novelistic flair to reveal a uniquely powerful institution’s tortured relationship with the truth.
Most importantly of all, The Gray Lady Winked presents a cautionary tale that shows what happens when the guardians of the truth abandon that sacred value in favor of self-interest and ideology—and what this means for our future as much as for our past.
9. The Last Jihad by Joel Rosenberg 
TheReleased in the stunning days just after 9/11, this eerily prophetic novel predicted an attack on the U.S. and the war in Iraq . . . but was written before any of it happened.
“One of the most entertaining and thought-provoking novelists of our day. Regardless of your political views, you’ve got to read his stuff.”
―Rush Limbaugh, radio host
“Buckle up! The Last Jihad is a high-speed, heart-pounding, edge-of-your-seat roller coaster ride into the heart of darkness. . . . Feels ripped from tomorrow’s headlines . . . this stuff could really happen.”
―Sean Hannity, radio host and #1 New York Times bestselling author
“A wild rocketing read. The Last Jihad is Tom Clancy writ large.”
―Vince Flynn, New York Times bestselling author of Consent To Kill
10. Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109 Year Old many by David Von Drehle 
When a veteran Washington journalist moved to Kansas, he met a new neighbor who was more than a century old. Little did he know that he was beginning a long friendship—and a profound lesson in the meaning of life. Charlie White was no ordinary neighbor. Born before radio, Charlie lived long enough to use a smartphone. When a shocking tragedy interrupted his idyllic boyhood, Charlie mastered survival strategies that reflect thousands of years of human wisdom. Thus armored, Charlie’s sense of adventure carried him on an epic journey across the continent, and later found him swinging across bandstands of the Jazz Age, racing aboard ambulances through Depression-era gangster wars, improvising techniques for early open-heart surgery, and cruising the Amazon as a guest of Peru’s president.
David Von Drehle came to understand that Charlie’s resilience and willingness to grow made this remarkable neighbor a master in the art of thriving through times of dramatic change. As a gift to his children, he set out to tell Charlie’s secrets. The Book of Charlie is a gospel of grit—the inspiring story of one man’s journey through a century of upheaval. The history that unfolds through Charlie’s story reminds you that the United States has always been a divided nation, a questing nation, an inventive nation—a nation of Charlies in the rollercoaster pursuit of a good and meaningful life.