“The Third Revolution argues that Xi Jinping’s dual-reform trajectories—a more authoritarian system at home and a more ambitious foreign policy abroad—provide Beijing with new levers of influence that the United States must learn to exploit to protect its own interests.”

“Alberta offers something more ambitious than a tale of palace intrigue.... The abiding theme of the book is that almost every influential figure in the Party has come to accept or submit to the President. Although Alberta is clearly not an admirer of the President, he is not unsympathetic to the voters who have embraced him and their feelings of resentment toward what they see as an increasingly liberal culture.”

“Woodward and Costa make a powerful case that America has had a narrow escape. It leaves all Americans, in particular the Republican Party, with some thinking to do.”

“Olson is a crisp writer who brings clarity to complex subject matter...[he offers] hope based on his faith in human brilliance, tenacity and ingenuity to meet our challenges — the kind of traits and talents that made the Manhattan Project possible in the first place.”

“Ted Sorensen’s Counselor is that rare gift to history: an account of mighty events by a participant who stood at their heart, and a writer masterful enough to make us understand them as well.”

“Revelatory... Laugh-out-loud funny. If the whole story weren’t so tragically and disgustingly real, “Pandemic Inc.” could be mistaken as the script for a “Saturday Night Live” skit. But embedded in the mirth is a wholesale indictment of this toxic brew of unfettered capitalism and greed.”

“Enrich compellingly shows how unchecked ambition twisted a pillar of German finance into a reckless casino where amorality and criminality thrived.”

“This ambitious yet unconvincing history tracks the influence of Nordic culture on the world from the Bronze Age to the rise of Silicon Valley.”

“Brilliant, fascinating, timely . . . With compelling narratives of past eras of strife and disenchantment, Meacham offers wisdom for our own time.”

“With his lively language and to-the-point examples, Zakaria tells the story well, while resisting boilerplate as served up by the left and the right. … Read Ten Lessons. It is an intelligent, learned and judicious guide for a world already in the making.”

“The most comprehensive and damning catalog yet of [Trump’s] failings in office”

“How did our democracy go wrong? This extraordinary document … is Applebaum’s answer.”

“There is hardly any aspect of French life during that period which the authors do not explore, always with compelling liveliness and omniverous zeal... I shall return gratefully to it again and again.”

“[A] smart, solid biography with a lesson: Despite our current fixation on political showmanship, politics works best in a complicated democracy like ours when its practitioners can navigate their way through the byzantine cloakrooms of power.”

“Ms. Kolbert shows in these pages that she can write with elegiac poetry about the vanishing creatures of this planet, but the real power of her book resides in the hard science and historical context she delivers here, documenting the mounting losses that human beings are leaving in their wake.”

“[A] wonderful account, the deserved winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction . . . The virtue of Griswold’s reporting is that, though it’s never sentimental, you understand and sympathize with these men and women.”

“Washington is — and always will be — a town that struggles between outcomes and principles. It’s a place where compromise is both necessary and invariably suspect. This sentiment comes from the opening pages of a new book — a book about Washington when it was a different town that worked in a different way, and about a man who excelled at getting things done in that distant Washington.”

“As a portrait of finance, politics, and the world of avarice and ambition on Wall Street, the book has the movement and tension of an epic novel. It is, quite simply, a tour de force.”

“So the “ugly truth” about Facebook is that it’s an immensely powerful corporation with a toxic business model, led by an autocratic founder who is hell-bent on world domination. A prominent critic of the company once observed that “the problem of Facebook is Facebook”. Wrong. The problem of Facebook is Zuckerberg. And the question posed by this splendid book is: what are we going to do about him?”

“A book of panoramic breadth … managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.”

“A book that will leave few readers unmoved.”

“[Snyder’s] litany of the many ways the United States bungled the coronavirus response is eloquent and pointed. . . . His cry of rage is certain to get your attention.”

“Caro achieves a special tension, too rare in history books but essential in epic poetry: the drama of a hero who is wrestling with his enemies, his limitations and his fate to achieve something truly lasting . . . In his hands, the obscure fight over legislation becomes nothing less than a battle for the soul of America . . . It’s a terribly important work, unblinkingly delineating the inner workings of our democracy.”

“America’s biographer-in-chief . . . charts his own extraordinary life . . . The most delicious parts are behind-the-scenes snippets from interviews . . . Fellow journalists will delight in intrepid shoe-leather escapades.”

“A breathtakingly dramatic story about a pivotal moment in United States history [told] with consummate artistry and ardor . . . It showcases Mr. Caro’s masterly gifts as a writer: his propulsive sense of narrative, his talent for enabling readers to see and feel history in the making and his ability to situate his subjects’ actions within the context of their times . . . Caro manages to lend even much-chronicled events a punch of tactile immediacy . . . Johnson emerges as both a larger-than-life, Shakespearean personage—with epic ambition and epic flaws—and a more human-scale puzzle . . . Mr. Caro uses his storytelling gifts to turn seemingly arcane legislative maneuvers into action-movie suspense, and he gives us unparalleled understanding of how Johnson used a crisis and his own political acumen to implement his agenda with stunning speed. Taken together the installments of Mr. Caro’s monumental life of Johnson form a revealing prism by which to view the better part of a century in American life and politics.”

“No scientist brings more experience from the laboratory and field, none thinks more deeply about social issues or addresses them with greater clarity, than Jared Diamond as illustrated by Guns, Germs, and Steel. In this remarkably readable book he shows how history and biology can enrich one another to produce a deeper understanding of the human condition.”

“Frank is a formidable controversialist — imagine Michael Moore with a trained brain and an intellectual conscience.”

“Stony the Road presents a bracing alternative to Trump-era white nationalism. . . . In our current politics we recognize African-American history—the spot under our country’s rug where the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept. Stony the Road lifts the rug.”

“This book gave me a better sense of what it is like to be very poor in this country than anything else I have read. . . . It is beautifully written, thought-provoking, and unforgettable.”

“[A] riveting, vivid history of modern disease outbreaks … Honigsbaum has written a fascinating account of a deeply important topic – for if the past 100 years have taught us anything, it is that new diseases and viral strains will inevitably beset us.”

“How are voter suppression, mass incarceration, and jeopardy to the American-born children of undocumented immigrants possible in the land of the free? Eric Foner brings his masterful knowledge of Reconstruction to illuminate the transformative constitutional amendments following the Civil War, and powerfully conveys the ongoing struggles over their meaning.”

“Eric Foner has done it again. The Fiery Trial explores the pivotal subject of Lincoln and slavery free from the mists of hagiography and the muck of denigration. With his usual stylish mastery, Foner advances enlightened debate over our greatest president, the origins and unfolding of the Civil War, and the abolition of southern slavery. His book marks an auspicious intellectual beginning to the sesquicentennial of the American Iliad.”

“Urgent work, by the foremost champion of ‘progressive capitalism.’”

“A huge success for Putin’s people has proved a terrible tragedy for the rest of the world—a tragedy that also touches ordinary Russians. In her epilogue, Belton notes that in seeking to restore their country’s significance, Putin’s KGB cronies have repeated many of the mistakes their Soviet predecessors made at home. They have once again created a calcified, authoritarian political system in Russia, and a corrupt economy that discourages innovation and entrepreneurship. Instead of experiencing the prosperity and political dynamism that still seemed possible in the ’90s, Russia is once again impoverished and apathetic. But Putin and his people are thriving—and that was the most important goal all along.”

“The most honest book yet written about the UFW. For anyone interested in this iconic union, this is indispensable reading.”

“A truly gripping biography of George Washington... I can’t recommend it highly enough—as history, as epic, and, not least, as entertainment. It’s as luxuriantly pleasurable as one of those great big sprawling, sweeping Victorian novels.”

“The Pursuit of Power is required reading for anyone looking to understand what is at the foundation of today’s global economy, the difficulties between nations, or for those simply wondering how Europe as a whole came to its current form.”

“Dazzling. . . . Treats the distant, snowy world of the Arctic as a place that exists not only in the mathematics of geography but also in the terra incognita of our imaginations.”

“With the Confederacy’s defeat, Reconstruction seemed like the dawn of a new era to blacks and progressive whites, but it was not to be. The Panic of 1873 (called “the Great Depression’’ until the 1930s) shattered hopes for a modernized and prosperous Southern economy. By 1870 the Ku Klux Klan had entrenched itself in nearly every Southern state, targeting black schools and churches. Many Northern philanthropists vigorously opposed integration; politicos rose to power by playing upon voters’ prejudices; patronage, racism and corruption were rampant. Despite its failures, Reconstruction initiated a massive experiment in interracial democracy, and as Foner demonstrates, blacks, far from being passive victims, helped set the political and economic agenda. This invaluable, definitive history re-creates the post-Civil War period as a pivotal drama in which ordinary people get equal billing with politicians and wheelers and dealers.”

“An elegant and engaging history of Mexican-ancestry labor in the Pacific Northwest....Well organized and well written. This book should be of interest to anyone seeking to understand the long history of Mexican-ancestry people in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest more broadly.”

“When the Americans chased the Taliban from Kabul after the 9/11 attacks, they put all their money on one man, a little-known leader named Hamid Karzai. Fifteen years later, the American mission is veering toward collapse, and Karzai looms larger than life. Joshua Partlow traces our catastrophe with peerless skill and style. A Kingdom of Their Own is the essential book for understanding how it all went so wrong.”

“State of Denial is brimming with vivid details about White House meetings, critical phone calls, intelligence reports, and military affairs....Impressively detailed and eye-opening revelations about the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war and its aftermath.”

“...recalls David Halberstam’s iconic ‘The Best and the Brightest’...The War Within’s controversial revelations are contentions and numerous...But, mainly, it is a study of what happens when men and women, charged with leading the country in wartime or with counseling those who lead, do not tell each other what they really think.”

“The Arabs of Israel are more than ever a major political issue, at a time when many want to re-draw the map of the Middle East […] At the mercy of Israel’s political elites, some of whom want to integrate the Arabs yet further while others want to expel them, their fate will be a major indicator of the balance of power and the fault lines in the region.”

“‘Spying on the South’ is every bit as enlightening and alive with detail, absurdity and colorful characters as ‘Confederates in the Attic’ was. That said, though, at a time when the American divide seems deeper and more entrenched, both books strike me as more somber than comic.”

“‘One Man Against The World’ is studded with gems. But perhaps its best part is the accounting of what Nixon has wrought in this country.”

“Epic. A brief review cannot convey the depth, range and detail of this fascinating story. Caro is a meticulous historian. Every page reflects his herculean efforts to break through the banalities and the falsehoods previously woven around the life of Lyndon Johnson . . . combines the social scientist’s interest in power with the historian’s concern with theme and context, the political scientist’s interest in system, and the novelist’s passion to reveal the inner workings of the personality and relate them to great human issues . . . A monument of interpretive biography.”

“Thrilling. Caro burns into the reader’s imagination the story of the [1948 Senate] election. Never has it been told so dramatically, with breathtaking detail piled on incredible development . . . In The Path to Power, Volume I of his monumental biography, Robert A. Caro ignited a blowtorch whose bright flame illuminated Johnson’s early career. In Means of Ascent he intensifies the flame to a brilliant blue point.”

“Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War is the best piece of war journalism I’ve ever read. He paints a portrait of war that is so nuanced, so filled with absurdities and heartbreak and unexpected heroes and villains, that it makes most of what we see and hear about Iraq and Afghanistan seem shrill and two-dimensional by comparison. And yet, as tragic as the events he describes are, the book manages to be a thing of towering beauty.”

“To understand the past and especially our own times, arguably no story is as essential to get right as the history of capitalism. Nearly all of our theories about promoting progress come from how we interpret the economic changes of the last 500 years. This past decade’s crises continue to remind us just how much capitalism changes, even as basic features like wage labor, financial markets, private property, and entrepreneurs endure. While capitalism has a global history, the United States plays a special role in that story.”

“Note that racial discrimination precedes its intellectual rationale. It is comforting, in a way, to believe that ignorance and hatred produce racist ideas and, in turn, racist actions; if so, greater education and understanding could break the cycle. But this progression is “largely ahistorical,” Kendi writes. Discriminatory actions, wrought by self-interest, come first. Then racist ideas are developed to justify them, and they spread. Hate and ignorance are symptoms, he argues, not causes. By the late 20th century, prejudice was less overt — “law and order” or “war on drugs” or “tough on crime” became the preferred organizing principles — but the arc of history bent in the same direction.”

“[T]he second volume of what will surely rank as one of the greatest historical achievements of our age . . . few other biographies have so succeeded in showing how one man shaped his times, and how his times shaped him. This is a book not just about Stalin but about the entire spectrum of world affairs in the 1930s, its focus constantly shifting from the tiniest personal details to the grand sweep of international strategy. Kotkin’s project is the War and Peace of history: a book you fear you will never finish, but just cannot put down. The ending is perfectly judged. It is the night of Saturday, June 21, 1941. In his office, Stalin paces nervously, waiting for news. And on the border, Hitler’s war machine prepares to strike.”

“Genuinely shattering.... I have never seen a book like it.”

“Beard does precisely what few popularizers dare to try and plenty of dons can’t pull off: She conveys the thrill of puzzling over texts and events that are bound to be ambiguous, and she complicates received wisdom in the process. Her magisterial new history of Rome, SPQR…is no exception…. The ancient Romans, Beard shows, are relevant to people many centuries later who struggle with questions of power, citizenship, empire, and identity.”

“Reading Beschloss’s well-crafted synopses, one is reminded how often major wars are started on a false pretext, a fabricated crisis or exaggerated hostility that is used to drum up congressional and public support. Beschloss clearly describes how easy it is for the United States to slip into war and how flimsy the separation of powers is — as a check on war-making or as a protection for civil liberties in war time.”

“With a rich sense of Cherokee culture and history . . . the authors . . . recount a human story, not only tragic but also unbelievably heroic.”

“A useful and thoroughly readable recall of the decade 1945-55, done objectively, perceptively, and with a keen sense of its significance in the changing pattern of America.”

“Notaro intermingles laugh-out-loud moments from her childhood with her crazy mother and stepfather and sweet romantic times as an adult. Throughout her brief work, the author is frank, at times humorous, and anything but melodramatic.”

“Long stretches of this bio make for painful, even depressing reading, despite a truckload of gemlike anecdotes, incisive mini-biographies of all the Marx Brothers and invaluable film and stage criticism. Still, the book’s first half, which follows the brothers’ comic quartet from struggling vaudeville act to stardom, is exhilarating. ”

“Thoughtful, unsettling...Baptist turns the long-accepted argument that slavery was economically inefficient on its head, and argues that it was an integral part of America’s economic rise.”

“Richard Dudman, a lean, perceptive, honest reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, has written a lean, perceptive, honest account of an extraordinary experience—his captivity by the Communists in Cambodia . . . refreshingly free of pretentious analyses and grandiose generalizations. And yet, more than all the academic studies and polemical treatises, it provides most profound insights into the nature of the enemy soldiers who have held the United States at bay in Indochina for years.”

“Taubman, professor emeritus of political science at Amherst College, and the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Nikita Khrushchev, devotes a full third of this work to Gorbachev’s early years, and with great skill lays bare the evolution that was so important to his later actions. Taubman shows that as he rose through the ranks, Gorbachev harbored profound doubts about all he saw, culminating, upon taking office in March 1985, in his declaration to Raisa during another stroll: “We just can’t go on living like this.” Gorbachev was a juggernaut, an unseen agent of radical change sneaking up on the calcified Soviet Politburo. But his intent was not to destroy. He thought he could save the Soviet Union and make socialism great again. In Taubman’s hands, the journey is an extraordinary story of one man and history in a tense wrestling match. The man wins by losing.”

“Halberstam’s conclusions are not original—see Daniel Ellsberg’s “Stalemate Machine” fueled by the “lesson of China” in Papers on the War—but his ability to interrelate the decisions and the policy-making processes with the makers’ personalities and intellectual biases results in a tour de force of contemporary political journalism. ”

“One of the first books to take an effective panoramic view of what was happening, not only in Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, and the Arab regions of Asia but also in Afghanistan and central Asia....Readers will come away from A Peace to End All Peace not only enlightened but challenged—challenged in a way that is brought home by the irony of the title.”

“This remarkable account of Israel’s targeted-killing programs is the product of nearly eight years of research into what is arguably the most secretive and impenetrable intelligence community in the world. Bergman, an investigative reporter and military analyst, interviewed hundreds of insiders, including assassins, and obtained thousands of classified documents.”

“Stephen Kotkin, whose first book, Magnetic Mountain (1995), had the bold subtitle “Stalinism as a Civilisation”, is not one to shrink before challenges. His expansive study is just the first of a projected three volumes. The title gives nothing away: you can’t get much blander than “Paradoxes of Power” as a subtitle, and the brief preface is almost anodyne. He tells us, however, that “accident in history is rife”, dropping a clue that this is not going to be a story of historical inevitability or psychological determinism.”

“Drawing on newly released documents, Weiner follows the Bureau’s century-long war against foreign spies, terrorists domestic and foreign, and alleged domestic “subversives” from communists to civil rights activists.The war was carried on with warrantless wiretapping, bugs, burglaries, illegal arrests, and armies of informants. His most eye-opening revelations concern how the Bureau has engaged in wide-ranging overseas espionage and covert operations: it helped choreograph the 1965 American invasion that installed Joaquin Balaguer—an FBI informant—as president of the Dominican Republic, and placed a spy in the highest councils of the Soviet and Chinese governments during the Cold War. FBI despot J. Edgar Hoover dominates the story vividly in a revisionist portrait of the spymaster: “not a monster,” Weiner says, but rather “an American Machiavelli,” and Weiner shows how avidly his tramplings of constitutional rights were supported by presidents, who feasted on the secrets he fed them. ”

“In this beautifully written panoramic view of the Cold War, full of illuminations and shrewd judgments, the distinguished diplomatic historian Gaddis brings the half-century U.S.-Soviet struggle to life for a general audience. Seen in retrospect, the Cold War — from the Truman Doctrine and the Korean War to the Cuban missile crisis, détente, and the fall of the Berlin Wall — appears to lead inexorably to a Western triumph. Gaddis seeks to show otherwise: the contingencies of individuals, ideas, critical decisions, narrow escapes, lost opportunities, and lurking dangers all intervened to give the great contest its character and trajectory. ”

“In Weiner’s view, the story that emerges is “how the most powerful country in the history of Western civilization has failed to create a first-rate spy service. That failure constitutes a danger to the national security of the United States…. The annals of the Central Intelligence Agency are filled with folly and misfortune, along with acts of bravery and cunning. They are replete with fleeting successes and long-lasting failures abroad…. The one crime of lasting consequence has been the CIA’s inability to carry out its central mission: informing the president of what is happening in the world.”

“Meticulously fair and scholarly...[A] very fine work that deserves to be read by anyone interested in the Middle East. Iran is inevitably still central to events in the region and beyond, not just through the potential for war over its nuclear program, nor even because of its continued support for the Assad regime in Syria, but because it is, as Axworthy says, less a country than a continent, more a civilization than a nation.”

“[Preston] reminds us of our heritage of intolerance, still very actively felt today, and also — more encouragingly — of the many Americans who have resisted the dominant trend and have kept alive the freedom proclaimed by the Constitution.”

“The history engages us fully. . . . The remarkable texturing of the historic period and the description of responses by early Americans and their leaders . . . set Calloway’s book apart.”

“A rich, galloping narrative that spans the Arab world from Morocco to Yemen to Iraq… Rogan’s The Arabs: A History is an outstanding, gripping and exuberant narrative, full of flamboyant character sketches, witty asides and magisterial scholarship, that explains much of what we need to know about the world today.”

“Bestselling author and scholar James Laxer offers a fresh and compelling view of this decisive war, by bringing to life two major contests: the native peoples’ Endless War to establish nationhood and sovereignty on their traditional territories and the American campaign to settle its grievances with Britain through the conquest of Canada. At the heart of this story is the unlikely friendship and political alliance of Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief and charismatic leader of the native confederacy, and Major-General Isaac Brock, defender and protector of the British Crown. Together, these two towering figures secured what would become the nation of Canada.”