As always this time of year, the Times Book Review has published its 100 Notable Books of 2008 list, in case you don’t normally read book reviews or are looking for a decent gift idea. Here are some of the books I’ve read about that sound worth reading.

Fiction:

A BETTER ANGEL: Stories. By Chris Adrian. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) For Adrian — who is both a pediatrician and a divinity student — illness and a heightened spiritual state are closely related conditions.

DEAR AMERICAN AIRLINES. By Jonathan Miles. (Houghton Mifflin, $22.) Miles’s fine first novel takes the form of a letter from a stranded traveler, his life a compilation of regrets, who uses the time to digress on an impressive array of cultural issues, large and small.

HOME. By Marilynne Robinson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Revisiting the events of her novel “Gilead” from another perspective, Robinson has written an anguished pastoral, at once bitter and joyful.

Nonfiction:

DESCARTES’ BONES: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason. By Russell Shorto. (Doubleday, $26.) Shorto’s smart, elegant study turns the early separation of Descartes’s skull from the rest of his remains into an irresistible metaphor.

MORAL CLARITY: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists. By Susan Neiman. (Harcourt, $27.) Neiman champions Enlightenment values with no hint of over¬simplification, dogmatism or misplaced piety.

A SECULAR AGE. By Charles Taylor. (Belknap/Harvard University, $39.95.) A philosophy professor thinks our era has been too quick to dismiss religious faith.

The rest are right here.

James Hitchcock and the editors of Touchstone have published this editorial condemning believers who abandoned the abortion issue in the recent presidential election.

If 2008 is remembered as the year of the “bailout,” when the federal government spent billions to rescue the nation’s financial system, it should also be recalled for another kind of bailout—Christians with impeccably pro-life records who suddenly abandoned what they declared to be a sinking ship.

Abortion seemed to be one of the few issues on which Senator Barack Obama had an unambiguous and unchangeable position during the campaign, as he promised that “the first thing I’d do as president is to sign the Freedom of Choice Act,” something that would nullify all existing laws restricting abortion.

Hitchcock goes on to make his case and proffer examples of Christians who’ve essentially forgotten about the unborn. Now, the abortion issue is a big one, possibly the most implicative, historical issue of this and recent generations – although it could be a long, long time before history recognizes that. But at the risk of drawing the ire of a thousand readers here, I might suggest that the issue is not as simple as A) voting for the pro-life candidate or B) voting for the pro-choice candidate. I’m not saying that we ignore a historic, foundational issue like the protection of the unborn – I’m just saying that Christians hurt their own cause by appearing to champion a single issue without consideration for other issues that are important, pressing, momentous, and so on. We have given the impression, at times, that we would support a candidate with the intellect of a yam, as long as he was pro-life. When yams aren’t always what the country needs.

Rumors are that Barack Obama will announce Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state soon.

But The Washington Post writes that the U.S. Constitution might be standing in her way.

The Constitution forbids a member of Congress from becoming a cabinet member if the salary of the cabinet member was raised during the member’s time in Congress.

In Clinton’s case, during her current term in the Senate, which began in January 2007, cabinet salaries were increased from $186,600 to $191,300.

President Nixon got around the Constitution in the “The Saxbe Fix” in 1973 when he nominated Sen. William Saxbe as attorney general, though the AG’s salary had been raised during Saxbe’s time in the Senate. Saxbe instead took the a lower, pre-1969 salary.

But Democrats in the past have inveighed against this sleight-of-hand. In the Saxbe case, 10 senators, all Democrats, voted against the ploy on constitutional grounds. Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), the only one of them who remains in the Senate, said at the time that the Constitution was explicit and “we should not delude the American people into thinking a way can be found around the constitutional obstacle.”

Call it the Hillary Amendment?

WORLD’s current cover story illustrates how a crisis arises when the streets are not safe for girls to go to school and for men to run a business. Thankfully that’s not the story everywhere in Iraq, but where it’s true it has forced millions of Iraqis to shutter their stores and to leave their homes (not to mention bury their loved ones), many of them for good.

Soldiers on the street make an immediate difference. Following recent violence, Iraqi army units beefed up their numbers in Mosul to 35,000 and things are improving again. One of the lasting lessons of the Iraq War is that the United States did not put enough boots on the ground when it should have. It built concrete walls around Baghdad’s palaces and the Green Zone, sandbagged checkpoints at the airbases and government offices when it also should have been paying attention to the neighborhoods, the schools, the mosques, and the churches. But as one Iraqi recently told me, “The government can protect the church and it can protect the school, but it cannot protect every square meter.”

If civic institutions, small businesses, and ordinary folks don’t recapture their communities as places where children can play without being shot, where men can repair cars without being blown up, then Iraq’s cities won’t work again. The United States will leave the country poorer than it found it—possibly even a failed state someday like Somalia. No matter how strong a war opponent one is, this shouldn’t be acceptable from either side of the aisle in Congress or from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

So as U.S. forces look to begin a significant withdrawal of troops culminating in 2010-2011, I say: Now comes the hard part. Who will help Iraq remake itself?

One of my great privileges in Iraq was to spend a morning in September with about 20 high-school students who want to start a student newspaper. They attend Classical School of the Medes, one of three schools in the north supported by Nashville-based Servant Group International (SGI). Working with an Iraqi clergyman, SGI started the schools in 2000-2001 and regularly sends American faculty to augment the Iraqi leadership. (Servant Group ads sometimes pop up in WORLD’s classifieds, and I know at least one teacher who is there as a result.)

In 2002 I visited this school for the first time. It had 60 students in elementary grades. Today it has over 500 students, K-12, mostly Kurdish Muslims who are taught using a classical Christian curriculum with emphasis on humanities, English, math, and sciences. The school has just moved into its third building, a beautiful facility on a main thoroughfare built with the help of U.S. nonprofits and Kurds. All three schools, located in three cities, are succeeding because they are offering something wanted by the community—a college-prep education with emphasis on English language training—and because they are doing it with excellence. Note that I did not say they are doing it with ease and comfort, or behind blast walls. Last year a bomb did go off near enough to the home of a teacher to interrupt a regular game night with high-schoolers. This week the school is suffering through random power outages and water shortages. But as the community responds with appreciation and good will, security also grows.

Soon some of the students I met will be the school’s first graduates, and they are starting a paper, among other things, because they want to leave a legacy. They are counting on the future of Iraq, and so should we.

The United States has had its regions of lawlessness—dominated by bandits, con men, squatters, and outlaws. No cavalry of any size could have settled the place alone. It took a Homestead Act and families by the thousands to stake a claim and settle down. To own it.

One difference is that the United States was not also climbing out of decade upon decade of dictatorship. For that, there are not enough groups like Servant Group staking a claim. Doctors Without Borders, World Vision, TEAR Fund, CARE, and others, despite long track records in war zones, pulled out along with the UN in 2003 or before. Some of these groups actually made a pact not to work in Iraq—too costly, too risky, and no one liked the politics associated with it.

So when readers tell me they feel helpless about the war, I mention the small but serious works of a few like Servant Group International, Barnabas Fund, Open Doors, and Christian Aid Ministries. You don’t have to be a great Samaritan to make a difference in hard places, just a good one.

How many mistakes did you make yesterday, and how many will you make for the next four weeks? Farhad Manjoo has at least six mistakes he’s ready to warn you about, particularly regarding what you shouldn’t buy for loved ones.

Remember, retailers are counting on your irrationality—the whole point of a “doorbuster” sale is to get you into the store to seduce you to spend cash on more profitable items. So, check your shopping cart before you check out. Ask yourself: Do I really need this contoured lap desk, or am I just buying it because it’s half off?

Among his suggestions of what not to buy:

1. “Blu-ray players”
2. “TVs that are too big, or too fancy”
3. “Extended warranties”
4. “Photo printers”
5. “Digital picture frames”
6. “FM iPod transmitters”

And he’s got good reasons for suggesting as much.

Here it is, Rants! & Raves!, your weekly chance to sound off about the week past. Remember the rules:

1. A Rave! is something that happened during the past week that you’re pleased about and is signified by the word “Rave!” and/or an appropriately peppy emoticon.

2 A Rant! is something that happened during the past week that you’re ticked about and is signified by the word “Rant!” and/or an appropriately grumpy emoticon.

3. You may Rant! about something a person said, did or wrote, but you may not Rant! about generally disliking a person.

Have fun!

Good morning!

Today’s quote is from a 20th century American author: “Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”

The early rush for bargains at a Wal-Mart in Valley Stream, N.Y., on Long Island, turned deadly this morning. A 34-year-old overnight stock clerk trying to hold back an unruly crowd just after the store opened at 5 a.m. died after he was knocked to the floor and stepped on. “He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” a co-worker told the New York Daily News. “They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down, too. … I literally had to fight people off my back.”

A pregnant woman also was knocked down in the rush to save on items such as high-definition TVs. She was taken to a hospital, where she and her unborn baby were said to be OK.

“The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority,” a Wal-Mart spokesman said. “Our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families at this difficult time.”

This is a sad commentary on our society. No bargain is worth someone’s life.

I had a rough childhood. Child Protective Services rough. And rougher, I’ll wager, than Georgia murderer Brian Nichols, who apparently needs so many Brownie points with the jury to keep him off death row that his lawyer felt compelled to beef up Nichols’ resume of childhood trauma with a particularly abusive fraternity hazing. The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports:

A Fulton County Superior Court jury rejected Nichols’ insanity plea and convicted him Nov. 7 for the March 11, 2005, murders of four people. Nichols killed them after escaping from a holding cell at the Fulton County courthouse, where he was to stand trial later that morning for the rape of a former girlfriend.

Nichols shot and killed the Superior Court judge in his case, Rowland Barnes, and court reporter Julie Brandau, in Barnes’ courtroom. He shot and killed Fulton County sheriff’s deputy Hoyt Teasley on the street outside the courthouse, and U.S. Customs agent David Wilhelm later that night in Buckhead.

Nichols’ cousin said she believes Nichols should be shown mercy. “He can still be productive to our family, to his daughter Jasmine, his son Evan, and maybe he can come back and be the real Brian,” Rollins said.

Witnesses for Nichols said they saw other children engaged in inappropriate touching with Nichols when he was a young boy. Also his mother was “emotionally absent,” his father was an alcoholic, and Nichols went to live with his aunt.

My question is, so what?

I had an alcoholic and neglectful mother who was married five times, and introduced me to drugs (at age seven) and motorcycle gangs. I was a victim of sexual abuse, and not in the “kids playing medical games” sense that appears to be part of Nichols’ tale. Drug dealers lived in my house. When I was fourteen, we were homeless and I lived in a tent. After my mother tried to choke me one day on a beach, I ran away. Child Protective Services placed me with my grandmother.

And yet those things did not drive me to rape and quadruple homicide.

There is crime and there is punishment. Setting aside the death penalty question for a moment, should juries really be getting into the business of retroactive psychoanalysis? Does it help or hurt our system of justice?

IMHO, we are entitled to a jury of our peers, not childhood reparations by our peers.

Christian singer-songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman has written and recorded a song in honor of President George W. Bush and has made it available on his website. A note on the site reads:

“Whether you voted for him & love him, or you’ve disagreed with all his policies and dislike him… Could we all agree on this? We owe President Bush a sincere thank you. As the historic Inauguration of President Elect Barack Obama approaches, StevenCurtisChapman.com pauses to thank our outgoing President for his service to our great country. This Thanksgiving weekend, we hope you’ll enjoy a new song by Steven written in President Bush’s honor.”

HT: Tim Challies