Here are 100 books that Making Waves fans have personally recommended if you like
Making Waves.
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Ok, I am an academic economist, but my real passion is not exchange rates or public debt. It is understanding the origins of the institutions that shape the choices we make as a society. I have always found it puzzling that some societies managed to replace kings and queens with elected parliaments and universal suffrage, while others did not. At a time when these achievements are under pressure and democratic backsliding is increasingly common, it is especially illuminating to explore the large literature on these questions, spanning history, political science and, yes, economics too.
I loved this book because it made a distant historical episode feel extraordinarily human.
I found myself fascinated by the small group of impoverished craftsmen who, in 1820, convinced themselves that they could bring down the British government. What stayed with me was not simply what they tried to do, but who they were, what motivated them, and how they came to believe that revolution was possible.
I am also full of admiration for the historical detective work behind the book. It reconstructs these lives from tiny fragments of surviving evidence, yet never feels dry or academic. I found it a genuine page-turner.
Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, and a Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine Book of the Year. On the night of 23 February 1820, twenty-five impoverished craftsmen assembled in an obscure stable in Cato Street, London, with a plan to massacre the whole British cabinet at its monthly dinner. The Cato Street Conspiracy was the most sensational of all plots aimed at the British state since Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot of 1605. It ended in betrayal, arrest, and trial, and with five conspirators publicly hanged and decapitated for treason. Their failure proved the state's physical strength, and ended hopes…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Ok, I am an academic economist, but my real passion is not exchange rates or public debt. It is understanding the origins of the institutions that shape the choices we make as a society. I have always found it puzzling that some societies managed to replace kings and queens with elected parliaments and universal suffrage, while others did not. At a time when these achievements are under pressure and democratic backsliding is increasingly common, it is especially illuminating to explore the large literature on these questions, spanning history, political science and, yes, economics too.
I loved this book for the sheer breadth of its perspective.
I found it exhilarating to see democratic ideas and practices placed in a history stretching back thousands of years and ranging across China, the Americas, Europe, and beyond. For me, it was a genuine eye-opener.
It reminded me how easy it is to treat the rise and fall of democratic institutions in Western Europe since the French Revolution as the central story, when in fact it is only one small part of a much larger global history.
I came away from the book thinking about democracy in a completely different way.
"One of the most important books on political regimes written in a generation."-Steven Levitsky, New York Times-bestselling author of How Democracies Die
A new understanding of how and why early democracy took hold, how modern democracy evolved, and what this history teaches us about the future
Historical accounts of democracy's rise tend to focus on ancient Greece and pre-Renaissance Europe. The Decline and Rise of Democracy draws from global evidence to show that the story is much richer-democratic practices were present in many places, at many other times, from the Americas before European conquest, to ancient Mesopotamia, to precolonial Africa.…
Ok, I am an academic economist, but my real passion is not exchange rates or public debt. It is understanding the origins of the institutions that shape the choices we make as a society. I have always found it puzzling that some societies managed to replace kings and queens with elected parliaments and universal suffrage, while others did not. At a time when these achievements are under pressure and democratic backsliding is increasingly common, it is especially illuminating to explore the large literature on these questions, spanning history, political science and, yes, economics too.
I admire this book partly because I disagree with its central hypothesis.
Congleton argues that democracy emerged through a sequence of consensual constitutional bargains between kings and their parliamentary opponents, with the threat of violence playing little role. I find that claim provocative rather than convincing, and that is precisely what makes the book so rewarding.
I especially like the way it combines a clear theoretical framework with detailed historical case studies that put real institutional flesh on the theoretical bones. The cases are illuminating, deeply researched, and written by an author with an exceptional command of constitutional history.
It is a book I keep returning to, even when I want to argue with it.
Ok, I am an academic economist, but my real passion is not exchange rates or public debt. It is understanding the origins of the institutions that shape the choices we make as a society. I have always found it puzzling that some societies managed to replace kings and queens with elected parliaments and universal suffrage, while others did not. At a time when these achievements are under pressure and democratic backsliding is increasingly common, it is especially illuminating to explore the large literature on these questions, spanning history, political science and, yes, economics too.
I love Captain Swing because it showed me just how much historical detective work can reveal about protest, riots, and revolutionary threat.
Not because of its strongly Marxist framing—which it certainly has—or because of its classical `Hobsbawmian’ style, but because Hobsbawm and Rudé undertook an extraordinary effort to locate and document thousands of disturbances across England during the Swing riots of 1830–31, Britain’s largest rural uprising. I am fascinated by the way they used this evidence to reconstruct what happened and why.
I still remember accidentally stumbling across the book on a dusty library shelf five stories underground and discovering the extraordinary wealth of information behind this engaging piece of historical research.
For generation upon generation, the English farm labourer lived a life of poverty and degradation. Centuries came and went, but the lives of the rural poor remained essentially unaltered. With the onset of the industrial revolution, however, new forces came into play, which were to lead to profound change across society, including the world of the poor farm labourer and yeoman farmer. As capitalism penetrated ever deeper into the countryside, tension reached breaking point. From 1830 onwards, rural England was shaken by a series of uprisings known as the "Swing". There were riots across the counties of southern and eastern…
I am a Professor of History at Texas A&M University and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. I teach and research broadly in the histories of Britain and its empire, North America, and the Atlantic world. I am the author of four books, including Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen through the British Press and The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812. I am especially fascinated with how imperialism shape colonizers’ cultures.
Focusing on the Spanish Empire, this book explores two of the most imported goods from the Americas. Norton carefully examines the deep cultural significance of Tobacco and Chocolate amongst the indigenous peoples of the Americas and how the goods were adopted and adapted in Europe, ultimately highlighting the profound impact imperialism had on European cultures.
Before Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492, no European had ever seen, much less tasted, tobacco or chocolate. Initially dismissed as dry leaves and an odd Indian drink, these two commodities came to conquer Europe on a scale unsurpassed by any other American resource or product. A fascinating story of contact, exploration, and exchange in the Atlantic world, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures traces the ways in which these two goods of the Americas both changed and were changed by Europe.
Focusing on the Spanish Empire, Marcy Norton investigates how tobacco and chocolate became material and symbolic links to the pre-Hispanic past…
I am a historian and a professor of political management at George Washington University, and I became interested in the John Birch Society when I encountered the group while writing my first book, on Ronald Reagan's 1966 California governor's campaign. I'm also fascinated by debates about political extremism in modern America including such questions as: how does the culture define extremism in a given moment? How does the meaning of extremism shift over time? And how do extremists sometimes become mainstream within the context of American politics? These were some of the puzzles that motivated me to write Birchers.
Ben-Ghiat limns the traits that characterize authoritarians in modern times.
Drawing a line from Mussolini to Trump, the author guides readers in the authoritarian’s playbook, revealing how dictators corrode democratic norms and undermine institutional restraints on their power. This lucid, well-written history makes you think about dictatorship across time, cultures, and nations.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the "strongman" playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues from Mussolini to Putin-enabling her to predict with uncanny accuracy the recent experience in America and Europe. In Strongmen, she lays bare the blueprint these leaders have followed over the past 100 years, and empowers us to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future.
For ours is the age of authoritarian rulers: self-proclaimed saviors of the nation who evade accountability while robbing their people of truth, treasure, and the protections of democracy. They promise law and order, then legitimize lawbreaking by financial, sexual,…
An Heir of Realms tells the tale of two young heroines—a dragon rider and a portal jumper—who fight dragon-like parasites to save their realms from extinction.
Rhoswen is training as a Realm Rider to work with dragons and burn away the Narxon swarming into her realm. Rhoswen’s dream is to…
As a travel writer, author, broadcaster, speaker, and producer, I’ve reported from over 100 countries on 7 continents for major print and digital publications worldwide and networks like National Geographic and Travel Channel. I kicked off my career with a solo, 12-month round-the-world backpacking adventure, largely inspired by the formative books I read below. Embracing the world with insatiable curiosity, an open heart, an open mind, a sense of humour, and enthusiasm to share my stories clearly resonated. Here I am, two decades later, author of a half-dozen bestselling books that focus on my own eclectic travels, which will hopefully inspire others as these books inspired me.
Mass tourism is a funny world, and occasionally it deserves to be skewered with a wink and a smile. This tongue-in-cheek satire is so sharp I continue to cut my fingers on its pages, instantly recognizing the absurdity of some of my own adventures in Eastern and Central Europe.
This Spinal Tap for guidebooks looks at fictional hotels, towns, food, and activities. There are also follow-up guidebooks, one that roasts a mythical Southeast Asian country in a similar fashion and another that pokes fun at a fictional yet familiar country in Latin America.
Veteran travellers, and especially backpackers, will have a riot.
I fell in love with Latin America as I meandered around Mexico in the summer of 1969. The passion has never died. Within a year I walked into Brazil’s ‘wild west’ to research the violence along its moving frontier, while over fifty years later I am an emeritus professor of Latin American politics at the University of Oxford and an honorary professor at the University of Exeter. An early decision to look at politics from the ‘bottom up’ led to a life-long inquiry into the theory and practice of democracy, and the publication of many essays and books that are available to view on my Amazon author page.
This is an original, close-focus, and fully comparative account of the democratic politics of Latin America that demonstrates beyond any doubt that no analysis of its democracies can succeed without equal attention to the processes of State formation in the region. I do not say that I find its analytical approach well founded in every respect or that I agree with all of its conclusions, but it’s an argument that poses and wrestles with the difficult questions and engages with a wide range of theoretical and empirical inquiry into order to do so.
Latin America is currently caught in a middle-quality institutional trap, combining flawed democracies and low-to-medium capacity States. Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, the sequence of development - Latin America has democratized before building capable States - does not explain the region's quandary. States can make democracy, but so too can democracy make States. Thus, the starting point of political developments is less important than whether the State-democracy relationship is a virtuous cycle, triggering causal mechanisms that reinforce each other. However, the State-democracy interaction generates a virtuous cycle only under certain macroconditions. In Latin America, the State-democracy interaction has not generated…
I fell in love with Latin America as I meandered around Mexico in the summer of 1969. The passion has never died. Within a year I walked into Brazil’s ‘wild west’ to research the violence along its moving frontier, while over fifty years later I am an emeritus professor of Latin American politics at the University of Oxford and an honorary professor at the University of Exeter. An early decision to look at politics from the ‘bottom up’ led to a life-long inquiry into the theory and practice of democracy, and the publication of many essays and books that are available to view on my Amazon author page.
This is the most up-to-date and comprehensive account of the politics of Latin America and delivers a scintillating analysis of its democratic systems of government. It is written by two of the most dynamic and original scholars working in Latin America today, who are working here to a set of rigorous analytical standards. Their argument is supported and extended by numerous links to primary and secondary written materials, as well as photo and video archives. The argument is both lucid and accessible.
Taking a fresh thematic approach to politics and society in Latin America, this introductory textbook analyzes the region's past and present in an accessible and engaging style well-suited to undergraduate students. The book provides historical insights into modern states and critical issues they are facing, with insightful analyses that are supported by empirical data, maps and timelines. Drawing upon cutting-edge research, the text considers critical topics relevant to all countries within the region such as the expansion of democracy and citizenship rights and responses to human rights abuses, corruption, and violence. Each richly illustrated chapter contains a compelling and cohesive…
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've been interested in U.S.-Latin American relations ever since my junior year in college when I studied abroad in Chile, a country that had only two years prior been run by dictator Augusto Pinochet. Often referred to as America’s “backyard,” Latin America has often been on the receiving end of U.S. machinations and expansions. In terms of the history of American foreign policy, it's never a dull moment in U.S. involvement in its own hemisphere. I have now had the privilege to work inside the executive branch of the U.S. government on Latin America policy, stints which have forced me to reconsider some of what I had assumed about U.S. abilities and outcomes.
Lucidly written and soberly considered, Latin America’s Cold War is one top-five pick for a host of reasons, not least of which is that it forces us to consider that the usually potent Uncle Sam did mean that Latin American actors did not have influence, for good or ill. Rightist Latin American militaries, for a searing case, had their reasons for combatting leftist guerrillas, not just serving Washington’s bidding.
For Latin America, the Cold War was anything but cold. Nor was it the so-called "long peace" afforded the world's superpowers by their nuclear standoff. In this book, the first to take an international perspective on the postwar decades in the region, Hal Brands sets out to explain what exactly happened in Latin America during the Cold War, and why it was so traumatic.
Tracing the tumultuous course of regional affairs from the late 1940s through the early 1990s, Latin America's Cold War delves into the myriad crises and turning points of the period-the Cuban revolution and its aftermath; the…
