A book I can't recommend highly enough is Fareed Zakaria's The Post American World. I love big-picture books, ones which don't focus just on what's happening in the United States, but put the US in a global context.

With that title, your instinct as a nationalistic and maybe thin-skinned American is to think, "Oh, he's knocking America, saying we're a nation in decline."

Zakaria, a Newsweek writer, answers that assumption in the first sentence: "This is a book not about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else."

I hate to disappoint the doomsdayers who think the world's going down the toilet, and that's why the Second Coming will occur next Friday. But the reality is, the world is experiencing a time of unprecedented economic prosperity and of peace.

• We see the prosperity most noticeably in China and India, where hundreds of millions of people are rising out of poverty. But you also see "the rise of the rest" in Brazil and other parts of South America, in Russia, in some of the Eastern European countries, in the Muslim countries (which are beginning to invest in infrastructure for their countries, instead of just Swiss bank accounts for Muslim princeling playboys), and in various other countries here and there (like Vietnam).
• Wars, particularly wars among major countries, are becoming a thing of the past. The threat of terrorism remains on our minds, but in most of the world, peace reigns. Has the world ever been this peaceful?

Zakaria (an immigrant from India who is now a US citizen) says the United States will continue being the strongest economy and the only superpower for many years. But no longer will we call all the shots.

In the years ahead, global economics, not politics, will rule the day. Central planning, the centerpiece of communism, has been thoroughly discredited. Capitalism (with or without democracy) is now the way to organize a country's economy.

It's a wonderful, big-picture book. And he gives some great insights into why America has been so strong, and why it will remain so. I'll be writing more about this book.