Conservative icon Thomas Sowell offers his summer reading list for National Review:

Instead of fighting the Japanese for every island stronghold as the Americans advanced toward Japan, MacArthur sent his troops into battle for only those islands that were strategically crucial. In the same spirit, parents who want to bring their brainwashed offspring back to reality need not try to combat every crazy idea they picked up from their politically correct professors. Just demolishing a few crucial beliefs, and exposing what nonsense they are, can deal a blow to the general credibility of the professorial pied pipers.

For example, if the student has been led to join the crusade for more gun control, and thinks that the reason the British have lower murder rates than Americans have is because the Brits have tighter gun-control laws, just give him or her a copy of the book Guns and Violence by Joyce Lee Malcolm. The facts in this book demolish the gun-control propaganda fed to students by their professors, and that can create a healthy skepticism about other professorial propaganda.

There are other books that can likewise demolish other politically correct beliefs that prevail on campuses. My own recent book Intellectuals and Race has innumerable documented facts that expose the fallacies in most of what is said about racial issues in most college classrooms.

For those students who have bought the campus party line on Third World nations, the classic study of that subject is Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion by the late P. T. Bauer of the London School of Economics. He made a veritable demolition derby of most of what has been said in politically correct circles about the relationship between rich and poor countries.

For those students who have been conditioned to regard the welfare state as the solution to social problems, there is no book that exposes the actual human consequences of the welfare state more poignantly than Life at the Bottom by British physician Theodore Dalrymple. ….

If your student has been led to believe that “comprehensive immigration reform” — amnesty, in plain English — is the only way to go, a devastating book titled Mexifornia, by Victor Davis Hanson, introduces some cold, factual reality into a subject usually discussed in sweeping and lofty rhetoric.

A book that offers a choice between the island-hopping strategy that General MacArthur used in the Pacific and the all-out assault across a broad front that was used by the Allied armies in Europe is titled The New Leviathan. It has thirteen penetrating articles by leading authorities on such subjects as national security, Obamacare, environmentalism, election frauds, and more.