100 books like Running Alone

I found this book so helpful in explaining why it wasn’t “the economy stupid” but values that moved voters. His work was helpful in illuminating my own extensive work on how values move voters.

Frank is especially good at describing the role of the evangelical movement in putting cultural issues, including abortion, front and center in our politics. I found that he was onto something important and that has helped my understanding of today’s politics. A very readable, down-to-earth book.

I knew Richard Wirthlin very well back in the 1980s. I loved the stories about his encounters with Ronald Reagan and how illuminating they were in describing the characters of both men.

The lessons Reagan imparted to Wirthlin explain why Reagan was so successful in politics and his ability to understand his audience. No one knew Reagan better or understood him as well than Richard Wirthlin.

Everett Carll Ladd was a mentor of mine. This book describes the politics of the 1970s and early 1980s.

I devoured it because he not only brought a unique understanding of electoral politics to the discipline of political science but wrote in such a way that he made it understandable and readable to a general audience. It is a powerful study of how the political parties had weakened, one that still resonates today. 

Hubert Humphrey was a hero of mine. I met him a few times as a teenager. I loved this book and learned things about him, especially his hardscrabble childhood, that I did not know before.

Traub describes his rise to power at the 1948 Democratic Convention when he gave a powerful civil rights speech and his later frustrations as vice president under Lyndon Johnson. I love good biographies, and this is an especially good one.

I love this book because it resonates with my leadership roles during various stages of my career. It is inspiring to read that Stacy Abrams, who has held successful leadership roles on a state and national level, faced and overcame many challenges.

She not only writes about the challenges, but she also provides practical advice and tools, such as activities that you can do to succeed in the face of challenges. I love the book because it is a source of motivation for being my authentic self and a resource for overcoming challenges in leadership roles. 

Myers presents a powerful narrative of Putin’s rise from being an apparent “accidental president” to his consolidation of power and ability to use state terror to achieve dictatorial power in an authoritarian regime. The biography chapters show Putin emerging as a teenage street thug whose family suffered during World War II to his rise in Leningrad and then Kremlin politics where he emerged as a KGB agent in Dresden during the Fall of the Soviet Union in 1989-90. Putin was obviously traumatized by this experience and returning to Russia he became involved in Kremlin politics, eventually succeeding Boris Yeltsin as President. Myers documents his increasingly authoritarian politics in the 2000s, including the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine and his increasingly aggressive oppression of his opponents in Russia, and threatening foreign policy toward his neighbors and the West. Although Myers’ analysis ends in 2015, his study sets the stage for his… show more.

In this short, but incredibly powerful book, Andrews asks questions every citizen should consider. The reader is confronted with questions about truth, freedom, and the price of apathy. This book transformed my understanding of oppression and why people allow it. It is a call to think, to seek truth, and to hold government leaders accountable. It can be read in about twenty minutes.

The last book on my list is on the transition from authoritarian rule. It draws on political leaders’ own understandings and perceptions of their political experience as distinct from the analyses of scholars. The latter are not entirely absent, for the interview with the leader of each of the many countries covered is preceded by an essay from a specialist on that country, putting the democratization process there in context. Among the most illuminating of the in-depth interviews are those with Fernando Henrique Cardoso, President of Brazil from 1995 to 2003, with former President of Chile (1990-94) Patricio Aylwin, with former Polish President (1995-2005) Aleksander Kwaśniewski, and with Felipe González, the head of the Spanish government from 1982 to 1996, who played a major part in consolidating Spain’s recently re-established democracy.

The Brezhnev era was when the Soviet elite decided not to come to terms with Stalin. This “fictional” memoir by one of Russia’s most interesting living writers is a penetrating meditation on fathers and sons, set against the backdrop of post-War Moscow. Erofeyev senior was Stalin’s official French interpreter, a believer in world revolution, avid tennis player, and tender parent. Erofeyev junior was a literary enfant terrible, who, by helping edit an almanac of underground writing in 1979, ended his father’s diplomatic career. The book is a beautifully crafted window into the personal and political of late communism.

Bueno de Mesquita and Smith emphasize the desire of leaders to seek political survival after all else. The authors show how democratic and autocratic leaders respond to the political institutions that they are embedded in, by having systemically distinct policy proclivities. The academic version of the theory is in their book The Logic of Political Survival. The Dictators’ Handbook is the version meant for popular consumption. It is full of examples of leaders making policy choices that benefit their political survival at the expense of their own people who they profess to rule for. I assign the book to illustrate the theory in classes in Comparative Politics. The examples in the book, all of which are non-fiction, are always popular with undergraduate students.