100 books like Politics and the English Language

Every time I start a new project, I run through all the reasons not to begin. Perfectionism is such an enemy to creativity.

Anne Lamott offers practical, hard-won advice on the creative process, getting over our self-imposed hurdles bird by bird (one by one). I resonated with her encouragement to compose a lousy first draft that we can then start to edit and refine. I’m so glad she challenged us to turn off the radio buzzing in our own heads.

We may not be able to see where our creative endeavors will lead, but Anne brings humor and humanity to the frightening process of plunging ahead. 

I know that many doctors, scientists, psychologists, and professionals of all stripes want to give voice to their personal and professional experiences. But here’s the rub: writing is a craft, no different from being an equestrian or an electrician, a musician, an actor, or a teacher. Which means you have to learn the craft. Then keep working at it.

New writers used to be directed to Strunk & White’s paene to grammar and syntax, The Elements of Style. Good for proofreading but not creating. Writing well was becoming an endangered species. One day, a cranky Yankee journalist and university teacher with a very big heart was complaining to his wife about how so few knew how to write. She said, “…well, do something about it!”

He wrote, On Writing Well, The Classic Guide To Writing Nonfiction. Its principles (with many helpful examples) are clarity, simplicity, brevity, and humanity.… show more.

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.

I love this book not just because of its enduring importance - Woolf remains a towering feminist figure - but because of its vivid, imaginative writing.

Based on lectures given to female students at Cambridge, Woolf’s essay argues powerfully for the intellectual independence of women. Such independence, she reasons, must first be materially possible, hence the female writer’s need for that famous "room of one’s own."

To exemplify this, Woolf imagines a certain Judith Shakespeare, the playwright’s equally talented sister: would she not be incapable of achieving the same success as her brother owing to the patriarchal structures of society? In our post-Me Too world a century later, the question remains vital.

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.

Writing in the sixteenth century, Montaigne essentially created the modern ‘essai’ as we know it. What I love about his writing, erudite though it is, is that there is nothing dry about it: his subject was himself, which is to say, by extension, ourselves.

Mixing references both Christian and Classical, learned and personal, Montaigne explores subjects ranging from cowardice to thumbs, and solitude to smells. In inventing the essay as a way of understanding ourselves, Montaigne invented our age of narcissism: ‘I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself.’