Here are 100 books that All Politics Is Local fans have personally recommended if you like
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I began advocating for the rights of California prisoners and their families while incarcerated. As co-director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC), in 2003, I cofounded All of Us or None (AOUON), a grassroots movement of formerly incarcerated people working on their own behalf to secure their civil and human rights. AOUON is now the policy and advocacy arm of LSPC, which I have led as executive director since 2011. Collective victories include ending indefinite solitary confinement in California, expanding access to housing and employment for formerly incarcerated people, and restoring the vote to those on parole and probation.
I knew Michelle when she was teaching at Stanford University before she wrote this book, but I didn’t know then how much of the work she’d done. Her book is so profound that when I first read it, I was in Vegas on vacation, and I couldn’t get out of the room because I was so deep into reading her book. I couldn’t get to the great food or the penny slots because she was putting together all the pieces I had read about or heard discussed in different places, and she built a picture of the system of oppression Black people live under in the United States.
She affirmed what I had suspected: that incarceration continues the enslavement of Black people. I called a colleague and said, this book will have more impact than I could making speeches to a thousand people at a time, a hundred times a…
Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that 'we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.'
I’ve been obsessed with politics and social justice since I was a kid, have been writing professionally for over a decade, and have twice interviewed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I wroteThe Rise of a New Left because I was covering a new generation of political candidates who were challenging old orthodoxies, and I was curious about the leftward shift in U.S. politics: where it came from, who was driving it, how deep it went, and how durable it might be. I try to convey a broader and more nuanced view of the American left and give young women and people of color the credit they deserve for reinvigorating it.
Grim is a brilliant veteran reporter who always looks beyond, behind, and beneath the official story. This book is original, insightful, and animated by genuine curiosity about how power works. It tells an important story about what led to the political period, circa 2015 to 2022, that I covered in my own book. It’s also a fun and informative read for anyone interested in American history or politics, and inspirational and invigorating for those who, like me, are more drawn to mass movements than to corporate hackery and love the idea of people triumphing over profit.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may seem like she came from nowhere, but the movement that propelled her to office – and to global political stardom – has been building for 30 years.
We’ve Got People is the story of that movement, which first exploded into public view with the largely forgotten presidential run of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a campaign that came dangerously close to winning. With the party and the nation at a crossroads, this timely and original book offers new insight into how we’ve gotten where we are – and where we're headed.
I’ve been obsessed with politics and social justice since I was a kid, have been writing professionally for over a decade, and have twice interviewed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I wroteThe Rise of a New Left because I was covering a new generation of political candidates who were challenging old orthodoxies, and I was curious about the leftward shift in U.S. politics: where it came from, who was driving it, how deep it went, and how durable it might be. I try to convey a broader and more nuanced view of the American left and give young women and people of color the credit they deserve for reinvigorating it.
Crispin is funny, acerbic, trenchant, and a little bit mean. Her 2017 polemic takes contemporary feminism to task for what she sees as its feckless devolution from fervent, world-changing force to toothless irrelevancy. It’s a challenging read, especially for anyone who is, like me, a longtime feminist. But Crispin’s voice is fresh and compelling, and whether or not you agree with her entirely, her critique is impossible to ignore.
Outspoken critic Jessa Crispin delivers a searing rejection of contemporary feminism . . . and a bracing manifesto for revolution.
Are you a feminist? Do you believe women are human beings and that they deserve to be treated as such? That women deserve all the same rights and liberties bestowed upon men? If so, then you are a feminist . . . or so the feminists keep insisting. But somewhere along the way, the movement for female liberation sacrificed meaning for acceptance, and left us with a banal, polite, ineffectual pose that barely challenges the status quo. In this bracing,…
I’ve been obsessed with politics and social justice since I was a kid, have been writing professionally for over a decade, and have twice interviewed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I wroteThe Rise of a New Left because I was covering a new generation of political candidates who were challenging old orthodoxies, and I was curious about the leftward shift in U.S. politics: where it came from, who was driving it, how deep it went, and how durable it might be. I try to convey a broader and more nuanced view of the American left and give young women and people of color the credit they deserve for reinvigorating it.
Essentially a field manual for progressive organizers, this personal and engaging book offers hard-won insights into what works, what doesn’t, and how left-wing organizations can break the too-common cycle of isolation and marginalization and broaden their reach. Smucker imparts valuable lessons without being hectoring or pedantic; he is admirably generous and self-critical, and he writes like a real person rather than a jargon-spewing robot. This book reminded me why I got interested in politics in the first place and renewed my faith in our power to change our communities.
A guide to political struggle for a generation that is deeply ambivalent about power. While many activists gravitate toward mere self-expression and identity-affirming rituals at the expense of serious political intervention, Smucker provides an apologia for leadership, organization, and collective power, a moral argument for its cultivation, and a discussion of dilemmas that movements must navigate in order to succeed.
Hi, I’m Neil. We need to live our tiny, precious lives with intention. I write about failure, resilience, happiness, trust, and gratitude. I’m the New York Times bestselling author of 10 books and journals that have sold over 2,000,000 copies and spent over 200 weeks on bestseller lists, including The Happiness Equation, Two-Minute Mornings, and You Are Awesome. I host the award-winning, ad-free, sponsor-free podcast 3 Books, where I’m on a 22-year quest to uncover the 1000 most formative books in the world. Guests include Brené Brown, Quentin Tarantino, and David Sedaris. I give over 50 keynote speeches a year at places like Harvard, SXSW, and Microsoft.
Reading this book encouraged me to use my attention and even personhood as a form of resistance against our fitter, happier, more productive society. A ‘why’ book more than a ‘how’ book, Odell shaped and squeezed my brain the whole time I was reading it and showed me how to find happiness that wasn't tied to doing ever more things.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Time • The New Yorker • NPR • GQ • Elle • Vulture • Fortune • Boing Boing • The Irish Times • The New York Public Library • The Brooklyn Public Library
"A complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto."—Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times Book Review
One of President Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of 2019" Porchlight's Personal Development & Human Behavior Book of the Year
I was a history major when I left for a Havana study abroad semester in 2003, but I had not studied Cuba. My introduction was a University of Havana class on the period of the Cuban Republic, in which I sat surrounded by Cuban students. My classroom learning was aided by the public history representations all around me in the city. I was hooked. I wrote my undergraduate thesis at Yale on Cuban activist intellectuals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and a few years later went on the begin my doctorate in Latin American History at Columbia. I have been a historian of Cuba ever since, 20 years.
Robert Whitney’s classic work on popular politics in Cuba from 1920 to 1940 is a must for the reader interested in the history of Cuba’s 1930s, especially Cuba’s “other revolution,” the Revolution of 1933. The book covers an absolutely crucial time in the island’s political evolution, and yet this time period is too often glossed over between interest in the Cuban Wars of Independence on the one hand and the Cuban Revolution of 1959 on the other. Whitney’s book, however, follows the politics of the island from the high corruption of 1920, through anti-dictatorial and anti-imperialist struggles, to the triumphant (if short-lived) arrival of constitutional democracy in 1940. An important scholar of Fulgencio Batista, Whitney traces the Cuban leader’s political twists and turns during the era, beginning with his critical role as a revolutionary in the 1933 uprising.
Illuminates a critical period in Cuba's political evolution Between 1920 and 1940, Cuba underwent a remarkable transition, moving from oligarchic rule to a nominal constitutional democracy. The events of this period are crucial to a full understanding of the nation's political evolution, yet they are often glossed over in accounts that focus more heavily on the revolution of 1959. With this book, Robert Whitney accords much-needed attention to a critical stage in Cuban history. Closely examining the upheavals of the period, which included a social revolution in 1933 and a military coup led by Fulgencio Batista one year later, Whitney…
Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.
I loved the story Burns tells in this book of how John F. Kennedy began a trend of bucking the party establishment that told him to “wait his turn.” Kennedy’s ambition led him to overcome the establishment and win the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination.
Burns shows how subsequent presidents, to varying degrees, built upon the same trends. I found this book helpful as it contained powerful insights into Donald Trump.
Since mid-century, America has witnessed an ominous decline in presidential leadership, culminating in the failing presidency of George W. Bush today. How did this happen? In Running Alone, the distinguished political scientist and leadership expert James MacGregor Burns finds the origin of the problem in John F. Kennedy's presidential style-and its influence on his successors in the Oval Office. Kennedy rejected collective leadership in favor of a highly personalized executive branch, run by a small group of hand-picked advisors. His successors followed his lead; each in his own way ran and governed alone, exploiting the party base while often ignoring…
I first became interested in how societies grapple with extremism when I studied abroad in Germany and learned about post-World War II education about the Holocaust. I then spent two decades studying and writing about how German schools were working to combat rising far-right extremism in the 1990s and 2000s. Today, I find there is much to learn globally, including in my own country of the U.S., from the German approach to combating extremism, which is rooted in the idea of “defensive democracy”—the notion that we can’t only combat the fringe itself, but also must equip the mainstream with the tools to be resilient to it.
Extremist movements today are not just driven by violent hate and ideologies—they are also deeply embedded in a wide range of conspiracy theories. Muirhead and Rosenblum’s book helped me understand how those conspiracy theories spread and why they are so dangerous to democracies around the world—especially for the ways they disorient individuals, delegitimize expertise, and carry antisemitic and Islamophobic ideas into the mainstream.
How the new conspiracists are undermining democracy-and what can be done about it
Conspiracy theories are as old as politics. But conspiracists today have introduced something new-conspiracy without theory. And the new conspiracism has moved from the fringes to the heart of government with the election of Donald Trump. In A Lot of People Are Saying, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum show how the new conspiracism differs from classic conspiracy theory, how it undermines democracy, and what needs to be done to resist it.
For my psychology podcast, I’ve interviewed many political and psychology experts on the subject of political polarization and conflict resolution. That led to me writing my book Defusing American Anger. I believe extreme us-vs-them polarization is humanity’s biggest problem: I see it as an existential threat not just to specific nations, including America, but to humanity as a whole, especially as our weapons and technologies get more powerful. And I think we need more people working on reducing our seemingly natural tendency to always be fighting with each other.
Due to the overly negative, pessimistic views we often have of each other, we'll often miss the many things we have in common. This is what Levendusky's book focuses on.
He examines survey results that show us that, despite many people's perceptions, Democrats and Republicans actually have a surprising amount in common. And this is especially true when you ask about people's policy preferences and remove the more polarizing party-associated language and labels.
Making our culture less toxic will require us to focus more on our common bonds, and less on those things that drive us apart. The more we adjust that focus, the more we'll shift how people view their fellow Americans and our divides, and the more we’ll create a culture of healthier disagreement.
A compelling exploration of concrete strategies to reduce partisan animosity by building on what Democrats and Republicans have in common.
One of the defining features of twenty-first-century American politics is the rise of affective polarization: Americans increasingly not only disagree with those from the other party but distrust and dislike them as well. This has toxic downstream consequences for both politics and social relationships. Is there any solution?
Our Common Bonds shows that-although there is no silver bullet that will eradicate partisan animosity-there are concrete interventions that can reduce it. Matthew Levendusky argues that partisan animosity stems in part from…
For my psychology podcast, I’ve interviewed many political and psychology experts on the subject of political polarization and conflict resolution. That led to me writing my book Defusing American Anger. I believe extreme us-vs-them polarization is humanity’s biggest problem: I see it as an existential threat not just to specific nations, including America, but to humanity as a whole, especially as our weapons and technologies get more powerful. And I think we need more people working on reducing our seemingly natural tendency to always be fighting with each other.
Talisse does a great job putting our divides in the context of the fundamental problem of democracy.
How can we maintain democratic principles when we see the "other side" as very wrong, or even as dangerous? Should we maintain those principles? What do we owe our fellow citizens even when we see them as very flawed?
In addition to these hard and important questions, Talisse focuses on a less examined negative aspect of polarization: us-vs-them animosity makes us less able to get along even with people who are politically similar to us. We become more fractured even on "our side," and less able to do the basic work of politics.
Democracy is not easy. Citizens who disagree sharply about politics must nonetheless work together as equal partners in the enterprise of collective self-government. Ideally, this work would be conducted under conditions of mutual civility, with opposed citizens nonetheless recognizing one another's standing as political equals. But when the political stakes are high, and the opposition seems to us severely mistaken, why not drop the democratic pretences of civil partnership, and simply play to win? Why seek to uphold properly democratic relations with those who embrace political ideas that are flawed, irresponsible, and out of step with justice? Why sustain democracy…
