If You Can Keep It

Eric Metaxas takes his title from Ben Franklin's 1787 answer to a woman who asked what the framers of the Constitution had given Americans: a republic, if they could keep it. Part history and part call to action, the book weighs what the founders intended and how well Americans have kept to it since. Metaxas argues that America is bound together not by ethnicity or geography but by an idea built on liberty, and he stresses how fragile that experiment in ordered liberty is. He calls the country a nation of nations and warns that its greatness depends on citizens living out what the founders entrusted to them. It reached the New York Times best-seller list in 2016.

Doug McMillon included it in a Facebook post listing some of his favorite reads from 2017.