Books like The Long Peace Process

As executive director of the New York chapter of the progressive National Lawyers Guild, O’Dwyer was on the front lines in fighting the Red Scare, a reactionary movement that found its most visible protagonist in Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

I found Nye’s account of the red herrings, fear-mongering, and scapegoating that gave rise to the term “McCarthyism” dismayingly familiar in today’s political ecosystem of castigation and misinformation. (McCarthy’s youthful chief counsel on the committee dedicated to rooting out Communists and their fellow travelers from the government, Roy Cohn, would serve decades later as the henchman-like lawyer for the litigious real estate titan Donald Trump.)

As a child and youth, O’Dwyer witnessed the depredations committed during the Irish War of Independence by British troops and their much-feared and resisted recruits, the Black and Tans. In this extensively researched biography, journalist-historian Coogan traces how the former accountant Michael Collins, as director of intelligence for the Irish Republican Army (IRA), astonished British governments used to crushing prior Irish rebellions.

After signing a controversial treaty creating the Irish Free State (with concessions opposed by the O’Dwyer family), Collins fell victim to an assassin’s bullet. I finished this biography filled with questions about Collins’ death and what might have happened to the formally partitioned nation had he survived.

I grew up with stereotypes about Tammany Hall as a nest of New York political corruption. Golway offers a knowledgeable corrective that shows how the urban machine garnered votes from new immigrant groups and maintained its power by pioneering then-radical social reforms such as child labor laws, workers’ compensation for those maimed on the job, and a minimum wage.

He traces the organization’s decline to changing New York City demographics and a lost ability to respond to the emerging challenges and changes of the post-WWII era—trends that left it vulnerable to a group of college-educated young Democratic Party reformers, both men and women, that Paul O’Dwyer allied with in the late Fifties and Sixties.

From a former speechwriter for New York governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo–and current historical detective novelist and essayist that I have long admired—this wise and witty memoir summons up a lost world: an Irish Catholic Bronx enclave of the 1950s and 1960s before economic and social change transformed the borough.

Quinn’s prose style is lively and gripping, as befits the primary drafter of then Gov. Mario Cuomo’s famous speech at the Democratic National Convention of 1984 assailing “Reaganomics.”

I am sometimes put off by ‘big’ sprawling works of history, that cover hundreds of years in hundreds of pages and may end up sitting on my shelf both goading and embarrassing me for my failure to do them the courtesy of finishing them. (Although admittedly, maybe looking good when people pop around!).

Paul Bew’s engaging examination of over 200 years of Irish history is an exception to this. Written by one of Ireland’s most eminent historians, it manages to combine academic rigor with accessibility (no mean feat). Bew offers a survey of the development and course of conflict in Ireland as well as an analysis of the decisions (and mistakes) made by key leaders along the way.

It covers a period much longer than the years Northern Ireland has existed as a political entity, but I found the analysis helpful in explaining its emergence and development.

The late nineteenth century is key to understanding the modern relationship between Britain and Ireland and no book does a better job of defining and exploring that relationship than this one.

The author deftly transitions between Charles Stewart Parnell, the Land War, and the Home Rule movement in Ireland on the one hand and Prime Minister William Gladstone, Queen Victoria, and British parliamentary politics on the other. The central focus, though, is on a murderous conspiracy that had long-range implications for both Britain and Ireland and includes a detective story to solve the murders that could have come straight out of the pages of Arthur Conan Doyle.

The book also includes the story of the informer whose attempts to escape retribution constitute an adventure story in its own right. 

This is a gem. It is the story of a discreet legal mechanism by which Britain hoped to check the Irish desire for independence even after the foundation of the Irish state.

Mohr’s close reliance on verifiable sources stands in marked contrast to what has been seen since its publication in 1935 as the standard authority on Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations (Peace by Ordeal by Frank Pakenham, later Britain’s Lord Longford, a work that I have come to see as deeply unsatisfactory if not deliberately propagandist).

As a former foreign correspondent based in India, Beijing, and Washington I found myself wanting to press this book by former top UK diplomatic and national security advisor Peter Ricketts into the hands of every British politician I have ever met.

Having spent more than a decade overseas reporting on the UK’s struggle to stay relevant, I was struck on my return to the UK in 2015 at just how myopic and insular British politics had become.

Brexit was the most obvious expression of this. It has left the UK piggy-in-the-middle, between the US and the EU and this book sets out, alongside a wealth of personal anecdote and experience, how the UK needs to think strategically if it is to retain a place at the global top table.

In May 1940, as Britain fought for its survival against Nazi Germany, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain resigned to be replaced by the determined and forceful Winston Churchill. Chamberlain had been the face of appeasement, negotiating peace with the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in the hope of buying him off. Many felt that he had brought Britain to the brink of disaster. Two months later three journalists—Michael Foot, Peter Howard, Frank Owen—writing anonymously as Cato, published this scathing attack on Chamberlain and the other appeasers, naming and shaming the guilty men responsible for betraying their country.

Written from a standpoint outside of Britain yet offering such great insight, this book offers a highly convincing account of the stupidity of Brexit. The author pours his wrath onto Brexit and Brexiteers and is a brilliant polemicist. It’s well-written and entertaining.

What I like about this book is that, unlike a lot of academic writing, it doesn't pull any punches and the author is rhetorically committed to a single perspective that he adheres to with great consistency.