Introduction to Conservatism: Four Book Recommendations

I sometimes wonder (and I’m sometimes asked) what I think would be the single best thing to read, what book I would recommend, to introduce someone to the ideas of conservatism for the first time, or to persuade those not yet persuaded.  (To date, I’m not sure I have an answer.  Mark Steyn’s America Alone and Arthur C. Brooks’s Who Really Cares—and of course C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity—were significant and influential for me, but I’m not sure any of them is a direct answer to that question.)

In a recent interview, Ben Shapiro asked Jonah Goldberg more or less the same question; Goldberg gamely offered some impromptu thoughts on the subject.  Here’s the list: