People who read the opinion pages are also people who love to get and give books as gifts. So some suggestions for those with some shopping still left to do:

• George Will's "The Conservative Sensibility" is the best book I have read on the ideas that animated the American founding.

Compare this to Will's earlier works ("Statecraft as Soulcraft") and you see a satisfying shift from the paternalistic Tory conservatism of Edmund Burke to the classical liberalism of James Madison (the book is dedicated to that quintessential Madisonian of the modern era, Barry Goldwater).

Will is never predictable, but reading him always produces the same result; more accurately, the same question: How can any intelligent person disagree with that?

It has always been my opinion that leftism is a sort of arrested intellectual development, an emotional impulse that was never outgrown, with what is commonly called conservatism usually the result of a reasoned journey away from that impulse. So give Will to a left-leaning friend and see if he still leans as far left after finishing it.

• The third volume of Charles Moore's authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher, "Herself Alone," covers the last quarter-century or so of her life, from her last electoral victory in 1987 to her passing in 2013.

Moore's volumes evenhandedly explore the ideas and policies of the "Iron Lady" and how they were often bitterly opposed not just by a reactionary left bent upon upholding a bloated British welfare state and the special interests that congealed around it but also by many of the "wets" in her own party. One is especially struck by how Thatcher belatedly modernized tradition-besotted "altar and throne" Toryism by infusing it with elements of American classical liberalism, including an enthusiastic embrace of the "creative destruction of capitalism."

It was that faith in classical liberal principles and revulsion with collectivism and its logical extrapolation in the form of Soviet communism that cemented Thatcher's relationship with Ronald Reagan and helped bring victory in the Cold War.

In this last volume Moore also homes in on how the Euroskepticism that caused Thatcher's downfall has now proven prescient in nearly every particular. In light of Boris Johnson's smashing victory in the recent British elections, she may prove more important for sounding the alarm on behalf of British sovereignty than for curing the "British disease" of statism.

• Amity Shlaes has made a remarkable career of illustrating the consequences of such statism in the American context. Her first major work, "The Forgotten Man," persuasively argued a point--that Franklin Roosevelt's interventionist policies made the Great Depression worse and last longer--that an increasing number of economists now agree with. Her next, "Coolidge," refurbished the image of the last American president who possessed viscerally anti-interventionist attitudes (Herbert Hoover, contrary to the malpractice of so many historians, was nearly as interventionist as Franklin Roosevelt)

Now we have "Great Society: A New History," which does as much to discredit the second installment of the welfare state (LBJ's) as "The Forgotten Man" did the first. The task this time around is admittedly bit easier, as not even the most ardent liberal Democrats can muster the energy these days to argue that the "War on Poverty" was anything resembling a success. To the contrary, as Shlaes persuasively demonstrates, there have been few more striking historical examples of good intentions producing disastrous unintended consequences, most conspicuously the growth of a large, multigenerational and government dependent underclass. As the saying goes, we declared war on poverty and poverty won.

The line connecting the Great Society and welfare-state dependency to family dissolution, illegitimacy and a range of intractable social pathologies runs about as straight as any we could draw. An unfortunate change was introduced to our culture by that failed experiment, one in which it suddenly became acceptable for government to do for people what people should do for themselves, and for otherwise able-bodied adults to spend their lives on the dole.

Maybe someone should tell our Democratic presidential candidates as they promise to make the same mistakes, on an even grander scale. Or simply send them copies of Shlaes.

• Finally, for those needing a break from politics of any sort, there is Paul Beston's wonderful "The Boxing Kings: When American Heavyweights Ruled the Ring."

It might seem strange from the present vantage point, but there was a time (including when I was growing up) when boxing was one of our most popular sports and the heavyweight champion was perhaps the most famous man on Earth. The "sweet science" also inspired the finest sportswriting this side of baseball, by names like London, Mencken, and Mailer.

Beston adds to this lineage by producing not just a colorfully written overview of the heavyweight champions but a broader commentary on how they fit into a changing nation's culture.

So give a gift of Dempsey and Louis and Marciano, perhaps packaged with a DVD of the great documentary, "When We Were Kings," about the "Rumble in the Jungle" and the most electrifying moment in the history of sports, when Muhammed Ali came off the ropes in Kinshasa and knocked out George Foreman.

Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.