The best books for surviving an American presidential election

I love this book—and almost anything Mencken wrote—because he brings his unsparing but good-natured critical intelligence to bear on the politics of his day and on the cultural controversies of the time. Readers will realize if they don’t already, that the absurdities of the present campaign are nothing new, despite what we are told. Mencken’s independence spirit is also refreshing given the tiresome orthodoxies of political pundits today.

Mencken’s bracing intellect and his vivid, bouncy prose are a tonic at any time. He makes today’s journalists seem weak, unreflective, and shallow. 

I recommend this book because it uses Washington’s own expense accounts submitted to Congress—$400,000 worth of reimbursements he expects—to cast a comic light on the sober and solemn business of war. We tend to take figures like Washington so seriously that we do not see the human—and humorous—side of their lives and works. Kitman did a superb job of showing the lighter side of commanding the Continental Army without diminishing Washington’s greatness.

I love this book because it is consistently amusing when so many books on George Washington are so serious in tone. Kitman manages to humanize Washington, which too few authors do, and in the process, helps the reader keep his or her perspective on the momentous events of the American past. Also, the book is just a lot of fun. We take ourselves much too seriously these days, especially in a presidential campaign year.

I love this book because it might be the quintessential American book. Mark Twain brings an American perspective to his European travels that has, to my mind, never been matched.

His pose—the comic character he creates—is at once naïve and shrewdly intelligent, penetrating in his take on Europe and the Middle East. I love this book, but I also love Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. With Mark Twain, you can’t go wrong. 

I love this book because Flaubert has meticulously—and with a bracingly acidic intelligence—listed the cliches of his day…meaning what people, without thinking, automatically say about almost any subject, including the stock phrases that must accompany any subject. He exposes superstitions and absurdities that must have driven Flaubert nuts to hear. An American writer, Frank Sullivan, did something similar when he invented “the cliché expert” who would testify before Congress.

I recommend this book because we need to be reminded that our everyday speech and thinking are saturated with thoughtless absurdities. We take so much for granted that it is totally unexamined and ridiculous if it is only pointed out to us, which Flaubert does a masterful job of doing. As the book jacket puts it, “Throughout his life, Flaubert made it a game to eavesdrop for the cliché, the platitude, the borrowed and unquestioned idea with which the ‘right thinking’ swaddle their minds.” 

I love this book, although it is not an “easy read” and should not be. Fischer meticulously catalogs the fallacies that even first-rate historians fall prey to in works that are important in our own time.

He names names and exposes weaknesses in their arguments (I wonder if any of his colleagues spoke to him after the book’s publication) and alerts the reader to errors of thinking and argument that plague historical writing and, I’d add, journalistic writing (and speaking) as well. All reporters should have to read this book, and all well-informed citizens would benefit as well.