Book of the year: How a 12-pound tome can save Western civilization

If “The Golden Thread,” the new two-volume history of the Western tradition, landed with a thud, it’s a matter of sheer weight. Altogether about 12 pounds of book and 1,968 pages of text, “The Golden Thread” is a prodigious product — and an even more prodigious achievement.At a time when Western civilization has been successfully “de-centered” in academia and Western civ classes relegated to the dustbin of history, the book is a counter-cultural act.It’s devoted to the idea that learning about our own civilization should take priority over learning about others, and that we won’t realize why it’s so vital to defend our tradition without first understanding it. “It should come as no surprise,” co-authors Allen Guelzo and James Hankins write in the introduction, “that the recent generations of Westerners who believe that the West is uniquely evil have been taught nothing at all about it.”“The Golden Thread” is a textbook, but accessible to the general reader.Usually, such large surveys are too general to include compelling details and too conventional to make arresting conclusions — in other words, they fall down as books. In contrast, every page of “The Golden Thread” is highly readable and brims with insight. On top of this, the work is lavishly illustrated with gorgeous maps and reproductions of art, and layered with timelines, excerpts from primary sources, and mini-essays on key figures and trends.The book’s beauty as a physical object matches its emphasis on Western achievement, not least in the arts. Hankins, a longtime Harvard professor who left the school over its abandonment of instruction in Western civilization, wrote the first volume, covering the ancient world and Christendom.The Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo picks up the baton in the second volume about the modern and contemporary West.One theme of “The Golden Thread” is how deep our civilizational roots go.The Greeks provided us the ideal of self-govern...