100 books like Hiding in Plain Sight

Set within the greatest mass migration in American history, Steinbeck’s 1939 classic follows the Joad family as they join nearly three million others who escape the Dust Bowl of the American Midwest.

Usurious banks have foreclosed and crushed the bereft farmers. More than 200,000 refugees head for California, and the Joads join them in an ambling caravan of rattling jalopies. Young Rose of Sharon moves pregnant across the continent, emblematic of both the promise and the peril of the human condition. She’s surrounded by family and hangers-on who ford the wasted continent, only to face a glut of labor in the vast farms of California and the brutal exploitation of the owner classes. The Joads are slapped with the bitter understanding that the promise of California exists largely in myth. Yet always Steinbeck returns to the promises of human connection and even happiness that beckon from just over the next… show more.

Dwight D. Eisenhower served two terms as United States president, from 1952-1960. His administration is widely remembered for rapid economic growth and adept international diplomacy. Yet the pubic face of much of that growth and diplomacy masked Ike’s vehement prosecution of a brutal cold war—acts of attrition and deceit overseas that vastly expanded the US empire around the globe.

The brothers John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s secretary of state, and Allen Dulles, who was head of the Central Intelligence Agency, led the American rise to international preeminence. The Devil’s Chessboard focuses largely on Allen Dulles, who waged secret wars across the planet in service of American imperial objectives. Prior to World War Two, Dulles worked for an investment firm that had direct ties to Hitler’s Third Reich—Allen Dulles met with Hitler in 1933. During the war, Dulles joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, and was… show more.

In this exhaustive, deeply researched study, Benjamin Madley examines in grim detail the relentless series of massacres and exterminations of peaceful Native American Indians in California that occurred from 1846 to 1873. During this era, writes Madley, “perhaps 80 percent of all California Indians died.” Survivors, especially children, were often enslaved. 

The brutality is systematic, if not endemic, to the construction of the American empire. Nearly half of the book is comprised of appendices that quantify most known Indian massacres in California during the mid-nineteenth century. (“~April 5, 1846. Number killed: 120-1,000. Location: Close to Reading’s Ranch.”) What emerges is a disturbing portrait of ceaseless violence inflicted by pioneers and settlers, by business owners and hired thugs, and by the state and federal governments against large, sophisticated human populations that had lived in place for thousands of years.

The nearly comprehensive genocide remains rarely invoked in modern times, no matter… show more.

Few writers dig as deeply or as diligently into the underbelly of the American empire more than Edwin Black. One of his earliest books, IBM and the Holocaust, documents how the pioneering computing company sold Hollerith tabulation machines and the required punch cards to Germany’s Nazi government throughout World War Two, allowing the regime to identify and exterminate Jews. 

Two years later, Black published something of a prequel, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. It’s an extensive and exhaustively documented account of American white supremacists and their bogus but widely accepted theories of “eugenics,” or “race science,” that maintained a surprising legitimacy in the US during the first half of the twentieth century.

Eugenic policies led to the marginalization and forced sterilization of human “defectives” in the United States. Not long thereafter, employing lessons learned in America, the Nazi Third Reich… show more.

Legal scholars have offered a lot of insights into how democracies fall apart, but one of the more interesting books from constitutional scholars is How to Save a Constitutional Democracy. Using a case study of the US to illustrate, this book demonstrates how important constitutional design is in preventing democratic backsliding, as the book explains how would-be autocrats can take advantage of constitutions to flex their own power. And though the US constitution has often been heralded as a model document for new democracies to follow, somewhat surprisingly, it’s not ideal for maintaining a democracy; it actually suffers from two sins of being overly rigid on the one hand, and too vague in shaping the parameters of executive power on the other. This book is both a guide and a cautionary tale.

Authoritarian Goes Global is an edited volume by Larry Diamond, Marc Plattner, and Christopher Walker—all distinguished experts in the study of democracy—which explains why authoritarian regimes have been so resilient. More specifically, the book offers evidence of how authoritarian regimes have been able to defend against democracy promotion, and in some cases, spread authoritarian norms and tactics. To help understand this better, the book provides interesting case studies on some of the most notable autocracies such as China, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela—and also gives insights into how authoritarian regimes use new (and old) tools of propaganda and surveillance to control their citizens. For example, if you want to understand why Russia has shifted to a war footing, this book explains why this happened.

I was privileged to read Dr O’Brien’s book at his personal invitation before its formal launch. This arose from a shared interest in past/historical through to current threats to the achievements of inclusive, prejudice-free values, freedom of thought and expression, and respecting liberal values in parliamentary democracies.

Through ground-breaking research and masterly thought-provoking analysis of findings, this book evaluates the threats posed by totalitarian and authoritarian non-inclusive ideologies, political forces, and their justifiers and apologists.

It also examines the crucial role of supportive, disingenuous yet effective propaganda—from today's "fake news" (Trumpian, Brexit, anti-Trans, etc.) to state forces manipulating populist sentiments—enabling brutal and ethically unacceptable phenomena such as colonialism/neo-colonialism, 20th-century Nazism, Stalinism, and current menaces.

People learn democracy by practicing it. The Germans practiced and practiced, and eventually got better at it. This is the main argument of Margaret Lavinia Anderson’s stunning book. Scrutinizing hundreds of contested elections, Anderson shows how Germans gradually reformed their authoritarian structures without significant constitutional reform. She demonstrates that the grassroots struggle for more democracy brought voters out of their narrow communities and helped form a wider civic culture. Alas, however, practice did not make perfect, and Germany was not saved from its own aggressive militarism.

Cultural Backlash is aimed at sorting out the roots of the recent rise of what the authors call authoritarian populism, which is much the same thing as plutocratic populism.

They locate its origins in a backlash against the social consequences and policies that grew from socio-economic shifts that began in the 1960s and 1970s.

These include, obviously enough, the sexual revolution and changing gender norms, the civil rights movement and the increasingly multi-racial and multi-cultural character of modern societies, and the turn toward values that Inglehart, decades ago, termed post-materialist.

The book is distinguished by the vast amount of quantitative data it presents and deploys to illustrate its central argument.  

Karen Stenner's book presents a psychological perspective on the roots of authoritarianism and its relationship with populism. Stenner argues that authoritarian tendencies are triggered by perceived threats to societal norms and order, which populist leaders exploit to galvanize support.

Her research, based on extensive empirical data, shows how authoritarian predispositions lead individuals to favor conformity, obedience, and strong leadership, particularly in times of social change or crisis. Stenner uses examples from contemporary and historical contexts to demonstrate how populist rhetoric and policies activate these latent authoritarian inclinations, leading to support for anti-democratic measures.