Here are 100 books that Kabuki Democracy fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have spent the majority of my 25-year career working across the Middle East and Africa. From 2004-2006, I was one of a small group of American diplomats posted to Libya following the 2003 US deal with Gaddafi. During Libya's 2011 revolution, I returned to Libya as a private citizen to help build and became a witness to the 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi. I am particularly interested in the impact of domestic political warfare on US foreign policy and national security. My work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Salon,The New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, and Forbes, among others.
The book is an account of the US government’s pursuit and assassination of Anwar Al-Awlaki, a dual American-Yemen citizen and leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
Shane reveals the ways in which the domestic political environment and the (related) US reliance on drone warfare fanned the flames of war in Yemen, while creating thorny ethical questions back home. For me, the most fascinating part of this concerns internal White House discussions over how to react to the Christmas-day 2009 attempted “underwear bombing”, which Obama believed nearly scuttled his second term.
This incident has been mentioned elsewhere as having influenced the administration’s response to subsequent terror attacks, including Benghazi.
Objective Troy tells the gripping and unsettling story of Anwar al-Awlaki, the once-celebrated American imam who called for moderation after 9/11, a man who ultimately directed his outsized talents to the mass murder of his fellow citizens. It follows Barack Obama’s campaign against the excesses of the Bush counterterrorism programs and his eventual embrace of the targeted killing of suspected militants. And it recounts how the president directed the mammoth machinery of spy agencies to hunt Awlaki down in a frantic, multi-million-dollar pursuit that would end with the death of Awlaki by a bizarre, robotic technology that is changing warfare—the…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I have spent the majority of my 25-year career working across the Middle East and Africa. From 2004-2006, I was one of a small group of American diplomats posted to Libya following the 2003 US deal with Gaddafi. During Libya's 2011 revolution, I returned to Libya as a private citizen to help build and became a witness to the 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi. I am particularly interested in the impact of domestic political warfare on US foreign policy and national security. My work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Salon,The New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, and Forbes, among others.
Obama’s Former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes’ memoir is arguably the best (and best-written) inside-circle account of Obama’s foreign policy decision-making process, on which Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Communications, had an outsize influence.
It is also implicitly, in my view, a strong argument for the need to depoliticize and re-empower America’s core foreign policy and intelligence infrastructure (the State Department, CIA, FBI, etc.), without whose direct and coordinated input America will be forever chasing its tail.
'One of the most compelling stories I've seen about what it's actually like to serve the American people' BARACK OBAMA
A revelatory, behind-the-scenes account of the Obama presidency and a political memoir about the power of words to change our world
This is a book about two people making the most important decisions in the world. One is Barack Obama. The other is Ben Rhodes.
A young writer and Washington outsider, Rhodes was plucked from obscurity aged 29. For nearly ten years, he was at the centre of the Obama Administration - first as a speech-writer, then a policy maker,…
I have spent the majority of my 25-year career working across the Middle East and Africa. From 2004-2006, I was one of a small group of American diplomats posted to Libya following the 2003 US deal with Gaddafi. During Libya's 2011 revolution, I returned to Libya as a private citizen to help build and became a witness to the 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi. I am particularly interested in the impact of domestic political warfare on US foreign policy and national security. My work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Salon,The New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, and Forbes, among others.
Bob Woodward spares no president his unvarnished critique.
I found the most interesting part of the book not about Obama, per se, but the circumstances that led to Senator Hillary Clinton’s appointment as his Secretary of State, despite her known and strong disagreements with him on foreign policy.
In one part, Woodward relates a conversation between Clinton and a senior campaign advisor, in which she expresses deep concern that by accepting the position she might someday be caught between loyalty to the President and a hard place.
Fast forward to the 2012 Benghazi attack, which Republicans used to scuttle her 2016 Presidential bid, and in turn, allowed Donald Trump to dismantle much of Obama’s hoped-for legacy.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews with key administration officials, their deputies, and other first-hand sources, Woodward takes listeners deep into the national security state and shows how Obama debates, decides, and balances the enormous pressures facing the modern president. As always, Woodward also bases his work on extensive documentation, including internal memos, letters, detailed chronologies, and meeting notes that reveal the behind-the-scenes realities of the Obama era. Obama has learned that he is not commander-in-chief of the economy. Many of his high-profile domestic reforms - healthcare, education, and energy - were largely turned over to Congress. But the president has…
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
I have spent the majority of my 25-year career working across the Middle East and Africa. From 2004-2006, I was one of a small group of American diplomats posted to Libya following the 2003 US deal with Gaddafi. During Libya's 2011 revolution, I returned to Libya as a private citizen to help build and became a witness to the 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi. I am particularly interested in the impact of domestic political warfare on US foreign policy and national security. My work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Salon,The New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, and Forbes, among others.
Washington Post correspondent Craig Whitlock’s book on the last phase of the US war in Afghanistan packs a big punch – which seems to have been left unabsorbed by the mainstream media.
Based on a rich archive of official interviews and oral histories, Whitlock presents a detailed case that the Obama administration hid the extent of the failure of the Afghan “surge” because of its fear that any 9/11-linked fiasco would damage the President’s 2012 reelection chances.
As with the other work profiled here, this book helps explain why the Obama administration’s Benghazi narrative appeared both unlikely and confused, and how the Right exploited the American public’s discomfort with it to create its own increasingly aggressive and deranged narrative.
The groundbreaking investigative story of how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public year after year about America's longest war, foreshadowing the Taliban's recapture of Afghanistan, by Washington Post reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Craig Whitlock.
Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: to defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of…
I’ve always been fascinated by power and how people use it. From the time I was tiny, I’ve loved reading about how people left their fingerprint on history, and boy, do presidents leave their mark. Given these interests, it’s unsurprising that I’ve been my career this far examining how early presidents crafted the executive branch. The president’s oversized role in American life is also at the heart of my podcast work (I cohost The Past, The Promise, The Presidency with the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Each season we explore a different element of the presidency and its relationship to history). In my future scholarship, I plan to continue this exploration long after George Washington left office. Stay tuned for more, and in the meantime enjoy these great reads!
Most twenty-first-century presidents write autobiographies after leaving office, but not all autobiographies are created equal. A Promised Land gives an honest, unflinching view of the presidency. Obama is straightforward about his goals, successes, mistakes, and lessons learned the hard way. Whether or not you like him or agree with his policies, this book will give you a behind-the-scenes look at the presidency in a way that few others books can provide.
America is the greatest ideal in history: “all men are created equal…” Sadly, Americans have never quite lived up to America. Only twice (Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement) have they even tried. As a black man, I live daily with the fruit of that failure, so I have an obvious personal investment in the subject. But I’m also drawn intellectually by an appalled fascination with the idea that any human beings can believe themselves superior by dint of their paint job or religion, or sex organs, or how they choose to use said sex organs. Why are we like this? That question has long vexed my reading and writing.
My God, the way this man writes. There is an unforced elegance to his sentence structure and word choice that never fails to leave me with my metaphoric mouth agape, whether I’m nodding along with his arguments or, as sometimes happens, debating with him in my head.
Either way, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a clear-eyed and unsentimental observer of the hypocrisies, betrayals, and stubborn resilience that have characterized the African-American sojourn.
'I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates' Toni Morrison
'Searing. One of the foremost essayists on race in the West... [He] is responsible for some of the most important writing about what it is to be black in America today' Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant
An essential account of modern America, from Obama to Trump, from black lives matter to white supremacists rising - by the bestselling author of Between the World and Me
Obama's presidency was a watershed moment in American…
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas… for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,…
I grew up in Massachusetts, which produced four presidents and untold presidential candidates including Mitt Romney, Mike Dukakis, John Kerry, Elizabeth Warren, and Gov. William Butler, who ran in 1884. My first career was as a newspaper reporter and editor, and I worked for papers in Massachusetts, New York, Colorado, and Washington state. I’ve dabbled in politics myself, working as a campaign press secretary for the late Washington Gov. Booth Gardner. Newspapers gave me an abiding hatred for adverbs, the passive voice, and bias in word selection. (No, historians shouldn’t use “patriot” in describing the Revolution’s American rebels, because loyalists and Indian nations were just as patriotic in their own minds.)
Imagine you’re Vice President Lyndon Johnson on Nov. 22, 1963. The Secret Service just hustled you into a secure room at the Dallas hospital where doctors are desperately trying to keep President John F. Kennedy alive after an assassination attempt. What’s going through your mind? If Kennedy dies, what are your next steps? Robert Caro found out. Pulitzer-winner Caro is the greatest historian of our lifetime—and a brilliant, accessible writer who makes it impossible to put down a 700-page nonfiction book. The Passage of Power is the fourth of a planned five-volume biography of Johnson, the man who helped turn Martin Luther King’s dream into reality, and then self-imploded with the Vietnam War. Caro’s final volume will be an instant best-seller.
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE, THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE, THE AMERICAN HISTORY BOOK PRIZE
Book Four of Robert A. Caro’s monumental The Years of Lyndon Johnson displays all the narrative energy and illuminating insight that led the Times of London to acclaim it as “one of the truly great political biographies of the modern age. A masterpiece.”
The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career—1958 to1964. It is a time that would see him trade the extraordinary power…
My passion for Mexican and military history came from many sources. Wandering in my 20s in Europe and Asia honed my appreciation for the historical experience. Good friends in the Canadian military made me curious about the odd rituals and strange subcultures they inhabited. As I moved from Calgary to Vancouver to Tucson I devolved from degree to degree, studying deviance, military history, Mexican culture, and finally finishing a dissertation that combined these elements into one work. And now I happily get to inflict all of this history on my students in California.
While maybe a bit conventional, this is one of very few military history books that gets deeply into the army during this incredibly turbulent period. De Palo provides a clear and well-researched study that is sure to appeal to specialists and armchair buffs. It is especially good at describing the strengths and limitations of the armed forces at this time. He offers a reliable reference for an era of revolving door presidencies, coups, and foreign invasions.
The army of thirty-five thousand that engineered Mexico's independence was a melting pot of insurgent and royalist forces held together by the lure of rapid promotions and other military remuneration. Overwhelmed with internal threats such as Indian skirmishes and peasant uprisings, this poorly motivated, ill-trained army seldom enjoyed the respite, resources, or direction necessary to overcome challenges to territorial sovereignty posed by Spain, France, Texas, and the United States during Mexico's first three decades of nationhood. William A. DePalo, Jr., studies the birth and tumultuous adolescence of the Mexican National Army and examines how regional, social, political, and economic factors…
I am a historian of the U.S. South. While writing a biography of Mississippi Governor William Winter, I discovered that a factor contributing to his future racial moderation was his service as an instructor of black troops in World War II’s segregated military. While historians have long recognized that WWII changed the region, I wanted to know more about how wartime economic and military mobilization impacted the South and Southerners. I explored some little-known wartime case studies, such as stories about the Ingalls Shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi, the Bell Bomber Aircraft Plant in Marietta, Georgia, and the Black 364th Infantry Regiment story.
This book provides a captivating look at America in a year when the outcome of World War II was still in doubt.
I like how this book is organized—one chapter focused on each of the twelve months of 1942. During this pivotal time, Americans struggled to reshape the U.S. economy for war production and transform its relatively small military into a force capable of successfully fighting on two fronts.
This fascinating chronicle of how the character of American society revealed itself under the duress of World War II "place(s) today's myriad social traumas and dislocations in perspective."-George Will, Washington Post
Winner of the New-York Historical Society's Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize
The Second World War exists in the American historical imagination as a time of unity and optimism. In 1942, however, after a series of defeats in the Pacific and the struggle to establish a beachhead on the European front, America seemed to be on the brink of defeat and was beginning to splinter from within.
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
During the later Cold War, I grew up in neutral and peaceful Switzerland. My German mother’s family lived apart in divided Germany. I knew as a child that I would become a historian because I wanted to find out what had happened to my mother’s home and why there was a Cold War in the first place. My father’s service as a Swiss Red Cross delegate in Korea after 1953 raised my interest in East Asia. After learning Russian and Chinese, I wrote my first book on The Sino-Soviet Split. When I was finishing the book, I resolved to reinvent myself as a global historian, which is why I wrote my second book as a reinterpretation of the global Cold War as a series of parallel regional Cold Wars in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.
Ned Richardson-Little explores the mostly forgotten history of the human rights discourse in a Communist dictatorship. Believe it or not, East Germany tried to pose as a promoter of human rights in international and domestic affairs. It spent much effort and many resources on constructing an alternative to Western-dominated human rights debates. Even if Communist Germany disappeared in 1989/90, its warped human rights discourse beforehand had exerted a major influence on dissidents and their increasing opposition to the authoritarian police state in which they were living.
Richardson-Little exposes the forgotten history of human rights in the German Democratic Republic, placing the history of the Cold War, Eastern European dissidents and the revolutions of 1989 in a new light. By demonstrating how even a communist dictatorship could imagine itself to be a champion of human rights, this book challenges popular narratives on the fall of the Berlin Wall and illustrates how notions of human rights evolved in the Cold War as they were re-imagined in East Germany by both dissidents and state officials. Ultimately, the fight for human rights in East Germany was part of a global…
