100 books like Politics and the English Language

Sent to me by a dear friend just when I needed it, this delightfully cheeky book about writing gave me the push to be courageous and truthful both in life and in my written endeavors.

Full of candid advice, hilarious anecdotes, and helpful information, this book is half manual and half a memoir of Lammott’s escapades in authorship. It speaks directly to the part of us that holds our deepest stories and silently longs to make them into something useful, beautiful, and meaningful–whether or not we plan to share them with the world. 

This one didn’t change my life, but it did provide me with a no-nonsense guide to pesky things like conjunctions and clauses, superlatives and synonyms, prepositions and pronouns, and, obviously, alliteration. Ha. 

What I liked most about this book is that it isn’t written like a textbook. I read what is widely considered to be the writer's bible, The Elements of Style by William Struck and E.B. White, and considered giving up on my dream of becoming a writer because the book made me feel as if only someone with an Einstein-like intellect could write. 

But, as Mr. King wrote, the story is what matters; everything else is just dressing. But in saying that, being able to string together sentences helps (I think my jokes are funny, but no one else does), and this book gives a simple explanation of how to make your copy sing.

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.

Every biographer must do battle with Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, a monumental account of urban planner Robert Moses, whose God-like power redesigning postwar New York City effectively remade the capital of the twentieth century. Over the course of 1,336 pages, Caro details Moses’s world-making vision while also acknowledging problematic issues, such as Moses’s reported use of racial slurs and his remapping of roads and overpasses to exclude poorer communities.

Today, half a century since its first publication, The Power Broker remains one of the greatest English-language biographies. It's also a landmark in showing how world-historical change can begin with aesthetic power. Like all foundational texts, its comprehensive documenting of both the ambitions and the prejudices of that era also lays a path for future insight. In gesturing toward Moses’s faults, this magisterial work also leaves room for subsequent generations to re-examine the problems of the past. 

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.

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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.’