It’s that time of the year, again. Time to review the books I’ve read this past year. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I first started making a New Year’s resolution to read at least two books a month in 1998.

Since 1998, I’ve read 1110 books! This discipline of reading more books and watching less television has made me more knowledgeable of the world we live in and given me much more lasting pleasure than another episode of Law and Order.

Here are my top ten books for 2025, not necessarily in order and not necessarily newly published books:

1. Life After Power – Jared Cohen – This recently published book discusses the lives of several presidents after they left office. The author discusses seven presidents – Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush. This is an excellent book and you’ll learn much about these men you never knew before.
2. Confronting the Presidents – Bill O’Reilly & Martin Dugard – This team of historians does a great job of giving us brief biographies of all the U.S. presidents. A must read for all history buffs.
3. A Golfer’s Life – Arnold Palmer – This is an old book I got out and read again with much delight. If you’re an Arnold Palmer fan like me, you’ve got to read this autobiographical work by the King of golf.
4. Great Souls – David Aikman – This is another old book I got out and read for the third time! It’s one of the truly great books I’ve ever read. You’ll read about six individuals who Aikman says “changed the twentieth century.” They include Billy Graham, Nelson Mandella, Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Elie Wiesel. It’s still available on Amazon.
5. The Story of God and Us – Jonathan Murphy – Jonathan Murphy is the new pastor of Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco, Texas and the hand-picked successor of Chuck Swindoll to the church he founded. This book is a great review of the bible intended for those unfamiliar with its contents but equally valuable for reading by long-time bible teachers like me.
6. Looking in All the Right Directions – Chuck Swindoll – This small book recently published gives us the last five sermons of Pastor Swindoll focused on the book of II Timothy. The last words of the Apostle Paul are preached by this great preacher in his last words from the pulpit.

7. The Disappeared – C. J. Box – Another great book from this brilliant author of dramatic fiction based on the character of Joe Pickett, game warden in Wyoming. If you’re not a Joe Pickett fan yet, you will be if you read any of Box’s books.
8. Revenge Tour – Mike Lupica (Robert Parker characters) – If you loved Robert Parker’s books, Lupica does a great job of continuing the deceased author’s success. This one is about Sunny Randall; lady detective closely associated with the characters of the infamous Spenser.
9. The Waiting – Michael Connelly – Another great book by one of the best fiction writers of our time. This one is about Rene Ballard; lady detective closely associated with the characters of the very successful Harry Bosch series.
10. Reagan – Max Boot – I hesitate to include this book on the list, but it was recently published and is a biography of one of our greatest presidents. But you won’t get that impression from reading this book. This author clearly never voted for Reagan.

That’s it for this year. I hope you’ll enjoy these books but the most important thing is that you read more books. You’ll be glad you did.

Happy New Year!

You wouldn’t think of calling an arsonist to put out a fire. But that’s essentially what Democrats are telling the public. They set fire on the American healthcare system with their unilateral change of the system to ObamaCare (ACA) in 2010 without a single Republican vote, yet now they want the American people to believe they’re the best ones to fix the problem. They made promises of a cheaper system that would not separate you from your doctor, but now they’re unrepentant when all those promises were broken.

Republicans have been trying to fix the problem ever since, but every time they try their efforts are thwarted by Democrats, and even some of their own. This is healthcare madness!

The problem is Democrats believe in socialized medicine – complete government control of all healthcare – and ObamaCare is their best ticket to achieve that goal. They don’t care that costs are skyrocketing due to the intrinsic problems of ObamaCare. That only gives them more excuses to ramp up government subsidies. They did that under the Biden administration using the Covid pandemic as an excuse for “temporarily increased subsidies.”

But nothing in Washington is ever “temporary.” Now they want these subsidies to become permanent, or at least extended another three years without any changes to the system. That’s what they demanded in the government shutdown that lasted 42 days and that’s still what they are demanding. They’re trying to convince the American people they’re looking out for them, when they’re really just looking out for their socialized medicine agenda and whatever political advantage they can achieve making Republicans look uncompassionate.

Natalie Andrews, writing for The Wall Street Journal, says, “Republicans suffered through a recurring nightmare this week: their inability to replace or at least unwind the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare program.”

For the past decade, President Trump and the party have raged against the 2010 law, only to see legislative attempts to decouple it from the American economy fail. This week was no different, as a Republican proposal to replace ACA subsidies with sending federal funds directly to some households for out-of-pocket healthcare costs failed to advance in the Republican-controlled Senate. Although Republicans hold a slim majority in the Senate, it takes 60 votes to advance legislation.

The focus on health-insurance premiums has moved the political discussion onto one of the few topics on which Democrats have an advantage. Americans’ approval of the ACA edged up to a new high of 57% in December, according to a Gallup poll. An NBC poll in October found that Democrats hold a 23-point advantage among registered voters over Republicans on the party best equipped to deal with healthcare. In other words, these people want the arsonists to put out the fire!

This simply shows the ignorance of the average voter. This was clearly demonstrated in New York City recently when they elected a socialist mayor who made them promises he’ll never be able to keep. Democrats in Congress are doing the same thing with healthcare. They are relying on the ignorance of the electorate when it comes to the evils of socialism, especially as it concerns socialized medicine.

In every socialized medicine system in the world, the people get free healthcare (albeit with greatly increased taxes) which inevitably leads to reduced access to healthcare (long waiting times), rationed healthcare (when it costs too much) and denied healthcare when the government determines the elderly and the disabled don’t merit the expense. The American people don’t want this, but they’ll get exactly that if they give Democrats the political power they want.

Doctors can be killjoys! First it was the bacon double cheeseburger you love and they told you it would lead to a heart attack. Then it was the low-fat diet that was sure to protect you from a heart attack – until it wasn’t! Then they told you eggs were bad for you – and now they say they’re good for you! What’s next?

What’s next is melatonin. If you’ve ever suffered from insomnia, and who hasn’t, you’ve probably taken melatonin to help you sleep. Veronique Greenwood, writing for Time, tells us between 1999 and 2018 the number of adults taking melatonin has more than quintupled. Available over the counter, melatonin is marketed as a natural sleep aid. However, because it’s classified as a supplement, not a medicine, it is not evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

What do the sleep experts say?

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine does not recommend melatonin for insomnia according to Marie-Pierre St. Onge, director of the Center of Excellence for Sleep and Circadian Research at Columbia University.

The effects of taking the hormone daily for long periods of time are not well-understood. In November, preliminary, unpublished results reported at the American Heart Association meeting found a connection in adults between taking melatonin for more than a year and heart failure. Although that study may be less informative about melatonin than about the link between heart disease and insomnia, it highlights the fact that there is relatively little known about using melatonin the way an increasing number of people are.

What melatonin does

In the evening, your body begins to produce melatonin, which is made primarily by the pineal gland. Melatonin levels peak in the early morning and taper down after sunrise. The hormone is thought to provide the body with a sense of how long the night is, to help synchronize biological processes with the sun.

Once it’s floating around, however, melatonin affects more than sleep. Some decades ago, scientists were surprised to find that it tunes the immune system, increasing and decreasing different forms of inflammation. A lack of melatonin leads to increased fat accumulating in the livers of mice. There is evidence that tissues other than the pineal gland, including bone marrow, make their own melatonin, and the list of cell types with receptors allowing them to sense melatonin turns out to be immense. The hormone also appears to help direct the death of cells, so scientists are curious what role it might have in aging more generally.

Careful studies of melatonin and its metabolites in people’s blood and urine have revealed that there are a number of disorders where its levels are disrupted, including depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, Type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer. Some people with Alzheimer’s disease may have very little daily cycling of melatonin, perhaps contributing to the sleep difficulties that are a feature of the neurodegenerative disorder.

Taking melatonin under a doctor’s advice can be helpful for people in these situations. Studies have shown, too, that blind people whose natural melatonin cycles get out of whack, leaving them with a form of constant jet lag, can benefit from supplementation. Children with autism can sometimes benefit from being prescribed melatonin, says Owens. It’s also been explored as a potential therapy after heart attacks, says Dr. Tom Scammell, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

There is a big gap between how researchers and doctors think about melatonin and how many people are using it. To try to trace connections between long-term melatonin use and other health conditions, some researchers have turned to electronic health records.

On November 3, an abstract from an American Heart Association meeting described an unpublished study using this type of data. It included some startling numbers: Over the course of five years, adults who were prescribed melatonin and took it for a year or more had a 90% greater risk of heart attack than people of a similar health status who didn’t take melatonin.

However, it’s not necessarily the case that melatonin caused the heart failure documented in this study. In fact, points out Scammell, insomnia and heart disease often travel together, with 50% of people with heart failure having insomnia compared to 15% in the general population. So, people who have insomnia and are given melatonin by their doctors in an attempt to cope may already be on the way to developing more serious heart problems. “It is possible that the poor sleep that triggered use of melatonin was an early sign of heart problems,” Scammell says.

Is occasional use of melatonin dangerous? Not likely, but it makes sense to study the issue further. If you are having trouble sleeping, a better choice, St-Onge and Owens agree, is to try changing behavior around bedtime. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-1 is the gold-standard treatment for sleeplessness in both children and adults. Studies show that this modification–which involves a number of stages designed to set you up for better sleep–has a longer lasting, better effect than any sleeping pill.