14 books like The House of Rothschild

Like Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August to which this compares in the breadth of scope and depth of knowledge, this is a huge, rich feast of a book and one of the best you can read on World War I as well as on the formative geopolitics of the modern Middle East. Like the greatest of the imperial geographers, David’s scholarship was omnivorous but his original discipline was law: his discussion of the rashly-drawn boundaries that are at the heart of A Peace to End All Peace is without peer.

Full disclosure: David was also a friend who, like his book, was incredibly generous. I owe my book to a particularly compendious footnote in A Peace to End All Peace. It caught my eye and I became obsessed with why I didn’t know more about such an enormous presence, eventually traveling to Britain, France, Israel, and the Isle… show more.

Over the past forty-plus years, the Middle East has seen more than its due of wars and chaos. Kim Ghattas, a Lebanese journalist who currently writes for The Atlantic, writes in Black Wave of the impact throughout the Middle East of three heavy-duty events—the fall of the Shah of Iran and his replacement by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Republic, the attack on the Grand Mosque of Mecca by a Saudi Arabian fundamentalist, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and gives a sense of the why and the how behind the events she documents.

Ghattas tracks the impact of these events throughout Iran and Afghanistan but also in Pakistan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt. She handles the sheer volume of material by focusing on the repression of regimes and the ideologies they represent as seen through the voices of novelists, journalists, intellectuals, and religious figures. Her account emphasizes issues often seen as… show more.

This book was a pertinent reminder of the prevailing yet misplaced, western-centric historical epicenter by realigning the map toward the East while providing a fresh, cosmopolitan perspective of our shared saga. Frankopan traverses the dynamic Eurasian Steppe and Silk Roads, which, for millennia, have connected and coupled people, products, pathogens, economies, armies, inventions, and ideas that shaped our global village.

I loved the way this anti-colonial narrative turns our idea of colonialism in India on its head. It goes beyond the obvious wrongs of the Raj to examine the 17th—and 18th-century roots of the empire—namely, the corporate greed, corruption, and outsized influence of the East India Company. It's an incredible read!

Professional investors troop to Wharton School to sit at the feet of professor Siegel and learn about why stocks – or shares – should be the bedrock of any investment strategy for the very obvious reason that it’s the best way to capitalise on the steady growth of the American economy. And by implication, other growing economies. If you haven’t got skin in the game, you’re on the sidelines. A dry book unless you have an intellectual interest in investment, it is nevertheless extremely thought-provoking and enlightening. It’s been through several editions and is routinely updated to reflect the latest developments such as exchange-traded funds, the phenomenon of the millennium.

The book does an outstanding job in describing the people and events that produced the October 1929 stock market crash in a highly entertaining style. Galbraith wrote more like a witty and insightful journalist than the award-winning economist that he was. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to learn about American financial history. The book is a model for writers who want to educate non-experts about public policy issues.

Money is not the root of all evil, as this book makes clear in a highly entertaining romp through the major events in the history of coin and their derivatives. The author, who made his name with Empire, covers everything that really matters including the rise of the loan sharks, historic bubbles, the development of currencies, the egregious behaviour of a few very greedy and/or crooked people, supposedly fool-proof money-making schemes that backfired, and much else. If you want to understand how money works, you can hardly do better.

Apart from revealing and sometimes dismaying insights into the workings of the White House, this legendary chairman of the US Federal Reserve presents a tour d’horizon of the economic thought that underpins the creation of wealth. As such, it should be obligatory reading for anybody interested in how nations prosper (or don’t), how governments routinely make disastrous interventions even if they aim to act for the right reasons, why Adam Smith continues to influence our lives (even though we don’t know it), and why capitalism is so foolishly demonised by banner-waving grandstanders.

Loewen’s book, updated since its original publication, explodes some of the many myths and falsehoods contained in textbooks on American history. Whether stories of the first Thanksgiving or America and the Vietnam War, the book challenges interpretations presented as facts and facts that are contested. The result is an indispensable argument for trying to get the facts right when discussing American history.

I’ve always wondered why history turned out the way it did—why some societies enjoy wealth and security and others live in dire poverty. I didn’t know that where we physically live on the planet had such a critical impact on our societies until I read this book. This is literally the history of the world going back to before the Neolithic Revolution. 

The environments we take for granted—for example, whether there are domesticateable large mammals in our midst or whether there is coal near the surface of the ground—have incredible consequences for the inequalities in the world today. I was blown away by reading this book, which explained the world as we know it to me.