100 Books Like America's Geisha Ally

I’ll probably still be citing this book when they drag me into professorial retirement, yelling, “Did you know that popular representations of Israel as a hypermasculine superman helped justify the U.S.-Israeli alliance, particularly after 1967?!” “Obviously,” my colleagues will yell back, “that’s only one of the reasons why we are still assigning this book, even during the great 2051 AI-Robot rebellion!”

McAlister’s Epic Encounters came out around 2001 as many Americans were wondering, “Why do they hate us?” The ones that did not grab the Qur’an (wrong era, peeps!) or rightwing polemics, grabbed this excellent history of U.S. interests in the Middle East. McAlister interprets that word, “interests,” broadly, offering a holistic account of how Americans – not just diplomats – have imagined Southwest Asia and North Africa throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

This book contains significant touchpoints, from 1950s Biblical Epics to Black Power’s connections with… show more.

“Where are the women?” So goes this 1989 classic’s opening gambit.

We think politics is the domain of men, Enloe points out, but women have long been out there doing vital and often invisible work, whether as diplomats’ wives, sex workers recruited around US army bases, farmers, or labor leaders.

Bringing this gendered labor to the forefront of international relations is Enloe’s strength. She discusses how images of women “work,” as in the Chiquita Banana ads that introduced American housewives to this unusual fruit and helped expand United Fruit’s bloody empire, but also studies women’s transnational labor organizing.

Reading this book in graduate school guaranteed I would never think of those little stickers on bananas in the same way. Like many other historians of US foreign policy, I still assign sections from Enloe regularly, particularly in my “Transnational America” class. 

What makes this book so exceptional and ground-breaking decades after its publication is embedded in the subtitle: Kristin Hoganson argues that gender politics “provoked” the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, through which the United States acquired most of its overseas colonies.

Hoganson connects domestic and foreign policy, analyzing correspondence, political speeches, and newspaper articles. When jingoes – people we would know now call hawks – depicted Cuba as a beautiful damsel in distress or accused the war-averse president McKinley of having “no more backbone than a chocolate eclair,” they were counting on associations of manhood with militarism. Ultimately, they were successful in pushing the United States to war with Spain over Cuba and locking the country in a bloody quagmire in the Philippines.

I love this book because it never flinches from its focus on gender, intersecting with race and class. Transcending its temporal and geographic focus, it works as a… show more.

In the opening salvo of the second wave feminist movement in the West, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir memorably argued that men's gender often goes unnoticed, as if manhood were simply the neutral human condition.

Dean's book counters this common blind spot by demonstrating how the supposedly neutral categories of manhood, class privilege, and whiteness have significantly shaped US foreign policy. Specifically, he examines how a homogeneous group of upper-class white men led to disastrous US policy decisions in Vietnam.

These policymakers, raised in exclusive boarding schools, men's clubs, and military hierarchies that excluded women and people of color, used gendered and sexualized metaphors to justify policies that contradicted their claims to rational pragmatism. They also orchestrated the "lavender scare"—purging non-heterosexual Americans from government during McCarthyism.

This book reminds me that every analysis of US foreign policy should pay attention to who is making the decisions. Positionality matters.

The Nobel-prize winning laureate has written many more famous books dealing with the human condition, most notably The Remains of the Day and Never Let me Go, but this is, to my mind, his best rumination on humanity's familiar ache. Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is a flawless book and similarly themed, but there is something about the post-war regrets, delusions, and self-justifications of the aging Japanese artist Masuji Ono that just slay me and make me want to weep. Ishiguro is of course the king of unreliable narrators, so I don't want to give away the big reveal here, but how denial of the truth and self-delusion can misdirect us in life, is at the core of this masterful insight into the human condition.

Unexpected for a book about kamikaze, this is a quiet and gentle story, about two young people—Taro, a kamikaze pilot, and Hana, one of the Nadeshiko Tai, assigned to serve the pilots—who meet through a shared vital love of music. They both know the inevitability and finality of Taro’s upcoming mission; they both are at the mercy of circumstances beyond their control. Yet their hopes and dreams remain larger than the war. This is another one that will stay with you for a long time.

Floating Clouds tells the story of a young woman who returns to Tokyo from Japan’s ex-colony in Indochina after the war and resumes the love affair with the man she met there. Their relationship is tormented and ultimately broken, like Japan’s dreams of empire and the promises of youth. The author, who had experienced destitution when she was young, weaves into the story the contrasting luxuriance of the colony’s tropical forests and the grime and spiritual emptiness of post-war Tokyo. This is such an honest and heart-wrenching novel.  

This is a World War II memoir by United States Marine Eugene Sledge, first published in 1981. 

It is a powerful depiction of war, honest and authentic, describing what it was like to fight in some of the fiercest battles of World War II. The writing is vivid and gripping, sometimes humorous, but mostly reflective of the horrors of war. There is a very refreshing “non-commercial” tone to the narrative.

Sledge originally wrote this as a private memoir for his immediate family, a way to finally tell them what he could never verbalize in person. Sledge’s passion comes through on every page, a reminder that the best books come from the heart.  

Tojo Hideki, a general in Japan’s army, became the country’s Prime Minister in October 1941, was still at the helm when the Pearl Harbor attack occurred on December 7, 1941, and remained in power until 1944. Although Tojo was later vilified as a war criminal, he did take to heart Emperor Hirohito’s request in October 1941 that he explore ways to avoid war with the United States – but soon convinced the Emperor that there was no alternative to war. Butow, a professor of US-Japanese relations at the University of Washington, shows how Tojo rose to power in Japan’s convoluted system of government, how the decision to proceed with the Pearl Harbor attack unfolded, and how that decision affected Tojo.

At last (2015) there is a balanced and carefully researched study of a central figure in the modern history of Japan and the war in the Pacific. The substantial utilization and integration of Japanese sources enhances the work but does not lead to any distortion of the real picture.