100 Books Like A Pope and a President

Pope John Paul died when I was just on the cusp of manhood. Sadly, I never really understood who he was until he was already gone. He and Mother Teresa were the faces of Catholicism to me growing up. This book taught me, not just about his life, but the proper perspective on the last several hundred years of human history. While expansive, it is also deeply personal. This is a book I regularly consult for inspiration on leadership, fatherhood, virtue, and all these in the face of overwhelming odds.  

This is the most authoritative, expansive, and beautiful of the biographies of Pope St. John Paul II. Here is the story of the priest from Krakow who brought down Soviet Communism. George Weigel was personally chosen by His Holiness for this task, and it was an excellent choice.      

Peggy Noonan's biography of Pope John Paul is as much a memoir of Noonan, herself, and how she was shaped by the pope. Her portrait of John Paul II recounts his struggles against Nazism and communism and his work for freedom. 

One part that has always stuck with me—Noonan also describes her love of the Rosary. Pope John Paul helped foster this love of the Rosary in her. Noonan said of the Rosary, that saying it puts her whole day on the right trajectory. If she would just start the day with the Rosary, all her thoughts, words, and deeds would subtly shift, come together, and follow the path laid out for her by God. Days without the Rosary were more chaotic and jumbled.    

St. John Paul II was a prolific author in his own right. I would be remiss if I didn't add one of JP2's books to the list... or two. JP2 wrote many encyclicals as pope, not to mention thousands of homilies. I poured over these to write my own book and collected his insights into Jesus Christ's life.

John Paul II witnessed firsthand the horrors of the 20th century. He barely survived the mechanized evil of Nazism and the work camps of Soviet Communism. Communism created in Pope John Paul the seeds of its own destruction. Crossing the Threshold of Hope is one of the more autobiographical of JP2's writings. He gives his own passionate witness about the existence of God, the dignity of man, and about the purpose of pain and suffering. He talks about evil, eternal life, salvation, and, perhaps most of all, hope. 

St. John Paul II was also a brilliant philosopher and theologian. Here is his answer to errors of our modern age. Here is his antidote to the deconstruction and disintegration of the family, marriage, manhood, womanhood, and even sex, itself. I would list it higher, but it's not precisely about his life—though it is his greatest life's work. Like the falling of small stones that start an avalanche, this book is slowly restoring the world.  

This is a painstaking investigation into corruption at the highest level in Putin's Kremlin. 

The book demonstrates in vivid detail how Putin installed a group of former KGB officers in power who then carved up Russia's strategic assets for themselves.

They targeted one company after another, probing weaknesses and exploiting the chequered past of every businessman who had made a fortune in the chaos of privatisation during the 1990s.

Leffler’s book is about much more than North Korea, but it covers world events that are critical to understanding the communist Korean state, its birth, and its conflict with the United States. I drew heavily on Leffler’s work in my own book to place North Korea within the context of surrounding geopolitical developments.

Better known as The Mitrokhin Archive, these are the first (and practically only) books, two great volumes, truly based on the secret KGB archives showing Soviet foreign intelligence operations in Europe, the USA, and the rest of the world. They cover the period from the founding of the Cheka (predecessor to the KGB) in 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Again, both books are wonderfully written by Professor Andrew who had worked with Mitrokhin and his archive and represent an academic research of exceptional quality. All scholars, students and intelligence professionals must have these two books in their library. The same concerns all university libraries without any exception.

This book is a treasury of significant but unknown historical information. Even if you are well-read on the Cold War, the global perspective which the book gives will change what you think you know.

Structuring his argument chronologically and thematically, O. Westad makes the most comprehensive case for the Cold War’s impact on the Global South. I learned more about the modern history of Africa and East Asia and their subsequent decolonization and state-building than in any other book.

I also appreciated how the author does not take an ideological stance for the USA or the USSR but allows the readers to explore the political argumentation that arose in decisive historical moments.

This Martha is the real deal! Her autobiographical account begins in Laos during the Vietnam War when her husband, a CIA officer, is killed. Back in the USA, she puts heartache to one side and joins the CIA herself. Her first posting was in Moscow in 1975.

I was riveted by the raw details of her lonely arrival: the grim airport and grimy hotel room, her awareness of being watched. She plays an integral part in the running of Soviet agent Aleksandr Ogorodnik in Moscow, under cover of being an ‘unimportant’ embassy woman and using old-style tradecraft for hours to make sure she is not being followed. Eventually, she is arrested by the KGB and detained in the infamous Lubyanka Prison.

It’s utterly gripping, not least for Martha Peterson’s amazing courage. 

This book is the best proof that history can also be simply fun and insanely comical. The ten days that Khrushchev spent traveling through the U.S. in 1959, visiting both Hollywood and the farm of President Eisenhower, who gave him a calf, show, as if in a snow globe, all the comedy and tragedy of Soviet-American relations: the mutual fascination, the great similarities of wanting to please the world and dominate space, and the great mistrust that both sides could never quite put aside. And yet, these ten crazy days invite us to dream and speculate what would have been if the relations between the USA and the USSR had always been as good and cordial as in that September 1959. The US-Soviet story as a road movie with a happy ending!