100 books like Politics and the English Language

Anne is the first one to tell you that writing is hard. And often, what you write as a first draft is terrible…and an essential step.

She helps take away the overwhelm by having you focus on one step at a time. It’s a lot easier to write knowing improving your work is part of the journey…vs expecting perfection at the onset. This is the essential writing book for new and experienced writers.

Each time I read it, I remind myself of something new and explore a new angle in my writing practice. This is a must-have for the creative person’s shelf.

I first read this book when I was pursuing my Master’s in Arts Criticism, and found it to be a wonderfully approachable guide to honing the more creative and intangible skills of writing, not just the more tactical things like grammar and punctuation.

The latest edition (from 2016, with the blue cover) is even better than the previous one, since it includes sections on more personal and memoir-style writing, which is going to be key for differentiating from the bots. (At least until the bots start having lived experiences to draw from in their writing.)

Plunkitt infected me with “the political bug.” George Washington Plunkitt’s “very plain talks on very practical politics” showed me the joys of playing the political game, of devising and executing strategies and tactics, of outwitting opponents. I first read Riordon’s classic for grade school and loved its gritty romp through turn-of-the-century New York. I reread the book for a college history course and came to appreciate politics as the art of the possible – and to see the innate conflict between ambition and conscience. After seven years in journalism, I “crossed to the dark side” and became a political operative, partly because Plunkitt had shown me that playing politics can be far more rewarding – and fun – than watching it.

Do you remember watching the news during the pandemic, when you could see everybody’s bookcases for the first time? 

There’s a reason that everyone kept noticing this book over and over and again. First, it’s really long, which means it’s thick and the spine is very recognizable. More importantly, most people read it because of what Caro has to say about the nature of political power.

It’s a biography of Robert Moses, who held multiple state and local positions that allowed him to build most of the infrastructure in and around New York City during the mid-twentieth century: highways, bridges, parks, etc.

I love it because it explains why New York City is the way it is. The chapter on the Cross Bronx Expressway may be the best piece of urban history ever written.

Here’s Lyndon B. Johnson again. As a bright young lawyer, McPherson left Texas to work for a year with Johnson, thinking the experience might open his eyes—and a few doors—at the beginning of his legal career. McPherson stepped onto the rocket sled of politics and never stepped off. This grand old man of Washington paused mid-career to give us the ultimate learning-the-ropes memoir of life inside politics.

Why would anybody in their right mind put themselves through the agonies of a presidential campaign? And what does it take to win? Cramer’s account of the crowded 1988 campaign is less about strategy and tactics than the personality and character of the candidates (including Joe Biden, Bob Dole, and George H. W. Bush). Ego and ambition, courage and cowardice are on display here, but so too is an almost across-the-board sense of honor and duty that’s in rare supply today.

If I had to choose just one book on language that all American college students should read, it would be this one.

The author wrote early versions of this book in 1939 and 1941, when World War II was breaking out, and the world came to understand the poisonous nature of Nazi propaganda. The study of semantics turns out to be more than an abstract consideration of language. The responsible use of language is the antidote to disinformation, a lesson we can carry into our own times.

Why neutral reports are crucial to democracy and self-government; how connotations of words reveal bias; the power of climbing up and down the ladder of abstraction so readers can see and understand; all these are introduced to the reader in this groundbreaking work.

This book is now more than a century old and has sold countless millions in numerous editions.

In my book about writing books I argue that this brief volume is not one book at all, but two books. Each part offers a different, some might say a contradictory view of what we mean when we talk about a writer’s “style.”

The original handbook was written by William Strunk Jr., a professor at Cornell, in 1918.  E.B. White was one of his students. Strunk preached consistency in grammar, usage, brevity, and rhetorical techniques. If you wanted to be a good writer, you had to adhere to his style book.

White rediscovered the book in the 1950s, and published an additional set of guidelines. For White, style is what sets an individual writer apart from others, the effect of a combination of good writing moves.

It is cheap. It is popular. It… show more.

Natalie Jenner sets her story of post-World War II feminism in a bookstore in England.

Three women, each of whom has proved their worth during the war years, must now face the fact that men are taking the reins once again. And yet, as Jenner makes clear, it is the women who have the intelligence, the ideas, and the skills to make this stagnant bookshop a vibrant and thriving place.

Jenner has done her research, and I love the way the setting and characters come alive, as do some real-life literary characters (always wonderful when that works). It's never a question that things will change at the shop—but how that happens makes for a delightful and satisfying read.

This is an encyclopedia for anybody who wants to doublecheck the official version of events in US history starting from George Washington all the way through the presidencies of Nixon, the two Bushes, and Barak Obama. Investigative journalist Robert Parry worked for Associated Press and Newsweek on the Iran-Contra affair and spent years on the October Surprise, that cost President Jimmy Carter a second term. If you want to understand the role of the arms industry on US foreign policy since World War II, this is a great start. Or as President Eisenhower put it in his farewell address: “… we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”