Here are 100 books that Kabuki Democracy fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have spent the majority of my 25-year career working across the Middle East and Africa. From 2004-2006, I was one of a small group of American diplomats posted to Libya following the 2003 US deal with Gaddafi. During Libya's 2011 revolution, I returned to Libya as a private citizen to help build and became a witness to the 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi. I am particularly interested in the impact of domestic political warfare on US foreign policy and national security. My work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Salon,The New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, and Forbes, among others.
The book is an account of the US government’s pursuit and assassination of Anwar Al-Awlaki, a dual American-Yemen citizen and leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
Shane reveals the ways in which the domestic political environment and the (related) US reliance on drone warfare fanned the flames of war in Yemen, while creating thorny ethical questions back home. For me, the most fascinating part of this concerns internal White House discussions over how to react to the Christmas-day 2009 attempted “underwear bombing”, which Obama believed nearly scuttled his second term.
This incident has been mentioned elsewhere as having influenced the administration’s response to subsequent terror attacks, including Benghazi.
Objective Troy tells the gripping and unsettling story of Anwar al-Awlaki, the once-celebrated American imam who called for moderation after 9/11, a man who ultimately directed his outsized talents to the mass murder of his fellow citizens. It follows Barack Obama’s campaign against the excesses of the Bush counterterrorism programs and his eventual embrace of the targeted killing of suspected militants. And it recounts how the president directed the mammoth machinery of spy agencies to hunt Awlaki down in a frantic, multi-million-dollar pursuit that would end with the death of Awlaki by a bizarre, robotic technology that is changing warfare—the…
I have spent the majority of my 25-year career working across the Middle East and Africa. From 2004-2006, I was one of a small group of American diplomats posted to Libya following the 2003 US deal with Gaddafi. During Libya's 2011 revolution, I returned to Libya as a private citizen to help build and became a witness to the 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi. I am particularly interested in the impact of domestic political warfare on US foreign policy and national security. My work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Salon,The New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, and Forbes, among others.
Obama’s Former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes’ memoir is arguably the best (and best-written) inside-circle account of Obama’s foreign policy decision-making process, on which Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor for Communications, had an outsize influence.
It is also implicitly, in my view, a strong argument for the need to depoliticize and re-empower America’s core foreign policy and intelligence infrastructure (the State Department, CIA, FBI, etc.), without whose direct and coordinated input America will be forever chasing its tail.
'One of the most compelling stories I've seen about what it's actually like to serve the American people' BARACK OBAMA
A revelatory, behind-the-scenes account of the Obama presidency and a political memoir about the power of words to change our world
This is a book about two people making the most important decisions in the world. One is Barack Obama. The other is Ben Rhodes.
A young writer and Washington outsider, Rhodes was plucked from obscurity aged 29. For nearly ten years, he was at the centre of the Obama Administration - first as a speech-writer, then a policy maker,…
I have spent the majority of my 25-year career working across the Middle East and Africa. From 2004-2006, I was one of a small group of American diplomats posted to Libya following the 2003 US deal with Gaddafi. During Libya's 2011 revolution, I returned to Libya as a private citizen to help build and became a witness to the 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi. I am particularly interested in the impact of domestic political warfare on US foreign policy and national security. My work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Salon,The New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, and Forbes, among others.
Bob Woodward spares no president his unvarnished critique.
I found the most interesting part of the book not about Obama, per se, but the circumstances that led to Senator Hillary Clinton’s appointment as his Secretary of State, despite her known and strong disagreements with him on foreign policy.
In one part, Woodward relates a conversation between Clinton and a senior campaign advisor, in which she expresses deep concern that by accepting the position she might someday be caught between loyalty to the President and a hard place.
Fast forward to the 2012 Benghazi attack, which Republicans used to scuttle her 2016 Presidential bid, and in turn, allowed Donald Trump to dismantle much of Obama’s hoped-for legacy.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews with key administration officials, their deputies, and other first-hand sources, Woodward takes listeners deep into the national security state and shows how Obama debates, decides, and balances the enormous pressures facing the modern president. As always, Woodward also bases his work on extensive documentation, including internal memos, letters, detailed chronologies, and meeting notes that reveal the behind-the-scenes realities of the Obama era. Obama has learned that he is not commander-in-chief of the economy. Many of his high-profile domestic reforms - healthcare, education, and energy - were largely turned over to Congress. But the president has…
I have spent the majority of my 25-year career working across the Middle East and Africa. From 2004-2006, I was one of a small group of American diplomats posted to Libya following the 2003 US deal with Gaddafi. During Libya's 2011 revolution, I returned to Libya as a private citizen to help build and became a witness to the 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi. I am particularly interested in the impact of domestic political warfare on US foreign policy and national security. My work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Salon,The New York Times, Foreign Policy, the Financial Times, and Forbes, among others.
Washington Post correspondent Craig Whitlock’s book on the last phase of the US war in Afghanistan packs a big punch – which seems to have been left unabsorbed by the mainstream media.
Based on a rich archive of official interviews and oral histories, Whitlock presents a detailed case that the Obama administration hid the extent of the failure of the Afghan “surge” because of its fear that any 9/11-linked fiasco would damage the President’s 2012 reelection chances.
As with the other work profiled here, this book helps explain why the Obama administration’s Benghazi narrative appeared both unlikely and confused, and how the Right exploited the American public’s discomfort with it to create its own increasingly aggressive and deranged narrative.
The groundbreaking investigative story of how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public year after year about America's longest war, foreshadowing the Taliban's recapture of Afghanistan, by Washington Post reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Craig Whitlock.
Unlike the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had near-unanimous public support. At first, the goals were straightforward and clear: to defeat al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of 9/11. Yet soon after the United States and its allies removed the Taliban from power, the mission veered off course and US officials lost sight of…
I’ve always been fascinated by power and how people use it. From the time I was tiny, I’ve loved reading about how people left their fingerprint on history, and boy, do presidents leave their mark. Given these interests, it’s unsurprising that I’ve been my career this far examining how early presidents crafted the executive branch. The president’s oversized role in American life is also at the heart of my podcast work (I cohost The Past, The Promise, The Presidency with the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. Each season we explore a different element of the presidency and its relationship to history). In my future scholarship, I plan to continue this exploration long after George Washington left office. Stay tuned for more, and in the meantime enjoy these great reads!
Most twenty-first-century presidents write autobiographies after leaving office, but not all autobiographies are created equal. A Promised Land gives an honest, unflinching view of the presidency. Obama is straightforward about his goals, successes, mistakes, and lessons learned the hard way. Whether or not you like him or agree with his policies, this book will give you a behind-the-scenes look at the presidency in a way that few others books can provide.
I got interested in American guns and gun culture through the backdoor. I’d never owned a gun, participated in gun control politics, or thought too much about guns at all. Guns might not have interested me—but ghosts did. I was beguiled by the haunting legend of the Winchester rifle heiress Sarah Winchester, who believed in the late 1800s that she was being tormented by the ghosts of all those killed by Winchester rifles. As I scoured the archives for rare glimpses of Sarah, however, it dawned on me that I was surrounded by boxes and boxes of largely unexplored sources about a much larger story, and secretive mystery: that of the gun industry itself.
Busse offers the new perspective of an insider—an erstwhile gun executive. I’ve always held that the gun industry has gotten far too little attention historically, and that commercial forces substantially helped to create and then maintain the American gun mystique and culture long after the “frontier” closed. Busse’s work shows just how explicitly the gun industry today, since 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, relies on “manufactured fear” to push products. The book teems with examples of fear marketing, including endorsements from social media celebrities that created a new breed of “couch commandos,” steeped in the “glorification of violence, the utter rejection of political correctness, and the freewheeling masculinity and objectification of women.” And in Busse’s view it’s not just that gun marketing has changed, but that the gun industry has transformed American culture itself, radicalizing it and shifting it toward authoritarianism.
A former firearms executive pulls back the curtain on America's multibillion-dollar gun industry, exposing how it fostered extremism and racism, radicalizing the nation and bringing cultural division to a boiling point.
As an avid hunter, outdoorsman, and conservationist–all things that the firearms industry was built on–Ryan Busse chased a childhood dream and built a successful career selling millions of firearms for one of America’s most popular gun companies.
But blinded by the promise of massive profits, the gun industry abandoned its self-imposed decency in favor of hardline conservatism and McCarthyesque internal policing, sowing irreparable division in our politics and society.…
I have spent my working life as a journalist, author and storyteller, aiming to uncover complexity that sheds new light on stories we think we know. I got my training at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times—and from the wonderful editors of my twelve books. An Innocent Bystander, my book that deals with the Middle East, began as the story of a hijacking and a murder of an American citizen. But as my research widened, I came to see this story couldn’t be told without understanding many perspectives, including the Israeli and the Palestinian, nor could the political be disentangled from the personal.
My Promised Land is beautifully written, a story deeply informed by the author’s family history and the body of knowledge he built as an influential Israeli journalist.
Shavit loves the place of his birth but doesn’t retreat from hard questions. He tells a powerful, poignant story of a state-created out of tragedy and the brutal reality of what Jewish statehood has wrought for yet another disinherited group.
There are no easy answers, and Shavit offers none. But he presents the complexities and frustrations with intellectual rigor and literary grace.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND THE ECONOMIST
Winner of the Natan Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
An authoritative and deeply personal narrative history of the State of Israel, by one of the most influential journalists writing about the Middle East today
Not since Thomas L. Friedman’s groundbreaking From Beirut to Jerusalem has a book captured the essence and the beating heart of the Middle East as keenly and dynamically as My Promised Land. Facing unprecedented internal…
As a teacher and historian, I’m interested in the collision of cultures that resulted from western intervention in Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For young Asian nationalists, historical writing was a weapon to be wielded in the fight against imperialism. It is equally important for us to understand the forces that shape our collective memories and to recognize that historians don’t just uncover the past—they produce it.
In 1922, protestors in the northern Indian town of Chauri Chaura set fire to a local police station, killing the twenty-two policemen trapped inside. The event prompted Ghandi to question whether Indians were ready for independence and led to a suspension of the non-cooperation campaign. In his book, Amin explores how memory of this local affair, marked by violence, became entangled in a larger national narrative that emphasized non-violence. The result is a work that deconstructs how historical narrative is produced, and how the story of Chauri Chaura differs based on whether it's told by regional or state and national parties. This book is highly original in its presentation, use of source material, and methods of analysis.
Taking Gandhi's statements about civil disobedience to heart, in February 1922 residents from the villages around the north Indian market town of Chauri Chaura attacked the local police station, burned it to the ground and murdered twenty-three constables. Appalled that his teachings were turned to violent ends, Gandhi called off his Noncooperation Movement and fasted to bring the people back to nonviolence. In the meantime, the British government denied that the riot reflected Indian resistance to its rule and tried the rioters as common criminals. These events have taken on great symbolic importance among Indians, both in the immediate region…
I came to Hong Kong as a journalist in 1987, expecting to stay a few years and then move on to the next story. But the former British colony quickly got its teeth into me, not least because I was there during the tumultuous years of transition to Chinese rule. I am always in the market to understand more about this wonderful place, which I left reluctantly in 2021 in fear that the fast-bellowing crackdown on freedom of speech was coming my way. Departure has, if anything, given me a greater appetite for reading more about Hong Kong and China. I hope these books will explain why this is so.
This is arguably the best history of Hong Kong I have read. It is strongest in covering the colonial period, and I constantly find myself going back to it for reference.
The author carefully charts how a colony that the British never wanted in the first place evolved into a great financial and commercial center and played a pivotal role in the development of China as a whole.
In 1842 a "barren island" was reluctantly ceded by China to an unenthusiastic Britain. "Hong Kong", grumbled Palmerston, "will never be a mart of trade". But from the outset the new colony prospered, its early growth owing much to the energy and resourcefulness of opium traders, who soon diversified in more respectable directions. In 1859 the Kowloon Peninsula was sold to Britain, and in 1898 a further area of the mainland, the "New Territories", was leased to Britain for 99 years - the arrangement from which the present difficulties spring. Despite its extraordinary economic success, which has made it one…
My friend Lou Cannon, the great reporter and Reagan biographer, once told me, “if you want to really learn about a subject, write a book about it.” As a political journalist and author of several books about current and past politics, wanted to learn more about the Founding Fathers, and as a map buff I tried to understand how they understood a continent most of which was not accurately mapped and how they envisioned the geographic limits and reach of a new republic more extensive in size than most nations in Europe. The book is my attempt to share what I learned with readers, and to invite them to read more about these extraordinary leaders.
To understand the political struggles of the 1790s, read the Federalist Papers this way: first read all those attributed to Hamilton, then those attributed to Madison, and finish up with the five attributed to Jay.
You will find Hamilton urging an energetic executive and a prepared military and hinting at the need for a financial system including a unified national debt and a national bank. You will see Madison more concerned with countering the irresponsible actions of state legislatures and cabining in the power of one branch of government by incentivizing other branches to check it.
As for Jay, you may be surprised that this resident of the most ethnically and culturally diverse colony and state, New York, assures readers that Americans all share an identical religion though he himself was the descendant of Calvinist French Huguenots—a persecuted folk in what had been a century of violent religious wars.
A selection of nineteen essential essays from The Federalist Papers in their original lengths by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, with notes by Richard Beeman
Penguin presents a series of six portable, accessible, and—above all—essential reads from American political history, selected by leading scholars. Series editor Richard Beeman, author of The Penguin Guide to the U.S. Constitution, draws together the great texts of American civic life to create a timely and informative mini-library of perennially vital issues. Whether readers are encountering these classic writings for the first time, or brushing up in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of…
