Letter from a Reader 8.3.25
The '5 best books' on big families, more dumbing-down at the New York Times Book Review, and a vacation bump in female genital mutilation
Will big families make a comeback? Donald Trump has said that he wants to be known as “the fertilization president,” and he wasn’t talking about spreading Miracle-Gro on your dahlias.
Trump is worried about America’s declining fertility rate, which reflects how many babies a woman will have, on average, in her lifetime. That rate has hit an all-time low of 1.6 infants when the population needs 2.1 to replace itself. The decline has helped to inspire the so-called pro-natalist movement here.
The president said at a Women’s History Month event in March that his administration would have “tremendous goodies in the bag for women” when it came to fertilization and more. By now that line may have inspired enough jokes by late-comedians.
So I’ll just add that, when it comes to big families, books have treats in the bag, too. The Wall Street Journal reminds us of it in the latest installment of its estimable Five Best series, which each week serves up brief reviews of five books on one topic chosen by an expert in the field.
Take the Journal’s August 2 Five Best column. It has reviews of five books about large families, selected by the author Christopher Scalia, a former English professor and the eighth of the nine children of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
Jane Austen and ‘Cheaper by the Dozen’ make the cut
Scalia makes a worthy case for three of the books he taps:
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