Campaign books are usually forgettable, uniformly boring, and go mostly unread. However, Sen. Rand Paul's recently published addition to the genre is neither forgettable nor boring: if it goes largely unread then that will be a shame. For it is a sincerely written, even passionate defense of liberty in the tradition of Barry Goldwater's The Conscience of a Conservative – the book that launched the contemporary conservative movement and eventually landed Ronald Reagan in the White House.

It covers a wide range of subjects, from the economy to our criminal injustice system, many of which are outside the purview of this column. Yet Taking A Stand: Moving Beyond Partisan Politics to Unite America does such a good job of weaving all these separate strands together into a comprehensive worldview that deciding where to mark the cutoff point is a difficult task.