Recommended reading for ACTION PHILOSOPHERS #2
Thomas Jefferson, Saint Augustine and Ayn Rand

E.M. Halliday. Understanding Thomas Jefferson. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.
The essays in this book tackle all the major controversies of Jeffersonia (of which there are many) in a straightforward and convincing fashion. From the Sally Hemmings affair to the writing of the Declaration itself, there's something for everyone.

St. Augustine. Confessions. Translated from the Latin by Henry Chadwick. Oxford University Press, 1991.
For a 1,500 year-old book Confessions is quite fun and engaging, assuming you can get past, y'know, all that Jesus stuff. An autobiography as told from the dim privacy of the confessional, in which Auggie details all his sins from, literally, birth (coveting Mom's teat is gluttonous to the Lord, apparently) to baptism at age 32. The last third is far less personal, in which Augustine tries to force the Creation as told by Genesis to make something resembling coherent sense, which I can't recommend to anyone except students of mythology and adherents of "Intelligent Design."

Oh wait, sorry: those are the same people.

Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden. The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. New York: Signet Library, 1964.
Essays on the Objectivist stance toward ethics, human rights, government, racism, psychology and more by Rand and her disgraced lover, Branden. To be frank I find Rand's novels turgid and dated (the plot of Atlas Shrugged hinges upon the centrality of passenger railroads to the American economy, for example), but she is perhaps the most entertaining writer of philosophy since Nietzsche (whom she rejects as a non-rational pseudo-hedonist).