With just a few days left before Christmas, you could give that friend or family member a garish tie or a basket of cheese. But as gifts go, it's hard to beat a great book. For the second consecutive year, Ben Boychuk and Pia Lopez offer their suggestions.

BEN BOYCHUK

Liberty, tyranny and bitters

The Nobel-winning Austrian economist, F.A. Hayek, is enjoying a popular revival thanks in no small part to the big-government designs of President Barack Obama. Although Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom" is his best-known book, it isn't his most important. That would be "The Constitution of Liberty."

My friend Steven Hayward, an author of many fine books of his own – including the magisterial, two-volume "Age of Reagan" – led a seminar this past semester at Ashland University in Ohio on Hayek's 1960 masterpiece, and posted a series of short articles he called "Hayek Applied" at www.powerlineblog.com.

Hayward's posts reminded me that I hadn't read Hayek in nearly 20 years. As luck would have it, the University of Chicago Press is republishing Hayek's major works. A heavily annotated "definitive edition" of "The Constitution of Liberty" appeared earlier this year.

Hayek challenges conservatives to re-examine their premises, and question their policy certitudes. At the same time, Hayek's observations on law and order, Social Security, the rise of the welfare state, and the dangers of administrative tyranny may be more relevant today, in the era of Obamacare, than they were 50 years ago.

Speaking of White House follies, Pascal Bruckner's "Tyranny of Guilt" (Princeton University Press) is a fiercely courageous polemic against the official masochism that corrodes the West from within. Bruckner, a French novelist and intellectual, offers a potent antidote to the dreary multiculturalism that dominates Europe and threatens the United States.

"We need to celebrate heroes instead of scoundrels, righteous persons, not traitors, and remain loyal to what is best in us," Bruckner writes. "To the duty to remember (our failings), we need to oppose the duty to our glories."

After grappling with Hayek and Bruckner, you may want a nightcap. Nothing beats a rye Manhattan. But don't forget the Angostura! For amateur and professional mixologists alike, Brad Thomas Parsons has written the definitive book on the salt-and-pepper of cocktails: "Bitters: A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All with Cocktails, Recipes and Formulas" (10 Speed Press).

Finally, need some stocking stuffers for your tea party pals? Look no further than Encounter Books' "Broadsides" – a series of short, lively pamphlet-sized booklets covering everything from health care and education reform to tax- and public pension reform. There's even one on net neutrality!

Pia Lopez

Nature, freedom and China

Ben has heavy reading on his list. Really – a 400-page work of political philosophy from Austrian economist F. A. Hayek, expounding on freedom from coercion?

I'd like to offer a different tour on the theme of freedom.

For offbeat fun, a trip into poetry, Beat personalities, park history, little-trod hiking trails, visual splendor and the making of woodblock art, I recommend "Tamalpais Walking: Poetry, History and Prints" by Tom Killian and Gary Snyder (2009). For my Christmas hike, I'm hoping to do the "circumnabulation route" around Mount Tamalpais that Snyder pioneered in 1965.

Then there's China, a concrete example of tendencies that Hayek feared.

Henry Kissinger's "On China" (2011) is a sweeping, admiring account of Chinese history from the perspective of strategy and statesmanship, from third century B.C. to present. The aim of the book, Kissinger writes, is to understand China on its own terms because it "will play such a big role in the world that is emerging in the 21st century."

In the end, Kissinger remains optimistic that competition between the United States and China will be economic and social, not military – an antidote to gloomy forecasts of confrontation.

Kissinger is a keen observer of Mao Zedong as a superior strategist, a "colossus" he calls him, who "unified China and launched it on a journey that nearly wrecked its civil society." In revealing form, Kissinger brushes over the devastation that Mao wrought with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Millions died, oh well.

For a very different perspective on China, "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China" by Jung Chang (1991, reprinted in 2003) provides a riveting tale of human freedom in the face of deep struggles and suffering. Jung Chang's grandmother was a warlord's concubine whose feet were bound ("3-inch golden lilies"). Her mother lived through Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, which she aptly calls the "Great Famine" and "Great Purge."

Her own story is gripping, too.

This is family history and autobiography par excellence. But it is also about larger currents of history and how individuals "tossed about by wars, foreign invasions, revolutions and then a totalitarian tyranny" find their place in it. Jung Chang reveals a past that the Communist Party has largely erased from official accounts, a nice counterpart to Kissinger's tale of high strategy.

In the lottery of life, we are born into different places not by our own choice and we each have to find our own way to freedom – from artist to poet to dissident to solitary walker. And those journeys make fine holiday reading.

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Ben Boychuk is associate editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal (www.city-journal.org/california" target="_blank">http://www.city-journal.org/california). Pia Lopez is an editorial writer at The Bee.