100 books like The Chairman

This is a sequel to the author’s famous The Robber Barons. His detailed primary research into campaigns and negotiations between politicians and their backers illuminates many subjects that later historians have too quickly passed over. Because he knew so much about the economy, Josephson also zeros in again and again on the driving forces that later work often dissolves into bromides about “concentrated wealth” and such. Josephson shows you the people and the institutions actually at work.

Readers looking to the past for inspiration about the possibilities of antitrust and progressive movements right now are being served a very weak and distorted account of what the most successful trust busters like Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson were actually trying to do and what they really accomplished. Kolko was a leader in exploiting primary sources that upended traditional accounts of who did what to whom.

So-called “New Brandeis” antitrust champions in particular overlook the realities of trust busting in American history and have much to learn from this masterpiece. 

Weinstein’s, like Kolko’s book above, is a vital corrective to much starry-eyed contemporary writing about Progressivism and the real nature of movements supporting the “vital center.” His accounts of how major American businesses supported early twentieth-century reform movements, hoping to head off popular upsurges while also accomplishing changes they thought they needed, are indispensable in our time. Modern readers are not used to these sorts of things and so they have a hard time seeing through promises of reforms that are anything but what they appear to be. Like Kolko’s, Weinstein’s work is greatly strengthened by his study of primary sources. 

This work is different from previous books suggested here. It is only recently published, but it presents revised versions of essays that sometimes date back a decade or more. Superbly written with great clarity, its strong points are the detail and care with which it spells out how economic factors are woven into American foreign policy and national security strategies.

The author’s subtle understanding of how nuclear weapons dilemmas, historical choices, industrial structures, and bureaucratic competition combine in actual policymaking puts most literature on international relations to shame. In a multi-polar world that is becoming ever more dangerous and in which the specter of nuclear war is again rising, Kurth’s discussions of imperial overextension, the limits of hegemony by one great power, and related topics are extraordinarily timely. Its accounts of major international crises and national security policy point up the shallowness of most American foreign policy discussions and the… show more.

This is a somewhat obscure work, a massive book that apparently did not sell well. But it offers a blow-by-blow description by a great British historian about how the Cold War started, and demonstrates how it was principally Stalin's actions that led to World War II morphing into a cold war.

Set in Holland during WWII, this autobiography gives an up close and personal look at life in a German concentration camp.

The vivid descriptions of the horrid living conditions and prevailing illnesses made me feel like I was there. Most memorable was the discussion of the flea-infested straw bedding and the notion of being thankful for the fleas. The author and her sister were devout Christians, but why be thankful for fleas? However, the guards left the women alone because of the fleas.

I will also always remember how the author was given a small bottle of liquid vitamin D and how she never hesitated to share it with the sick, yet it never ran dry. She makes it clear this was God’s work. 

The first and best of my list from the master spy himself.

It is a complicated plot that is skillfully and gradually laid bare in what starts as a murder investigation by a retired MI6 agent and ends as a political coup for the ‘Circus’ (MI6).

A great read from the start; I think this is one of Le Carre’s best and one that helped influence me in my writing. The book is much better than the TV or movie versions, and le Carre’s characterisation of Smiley is superb.

This is a thick history of the Cold War that breaks new ground in that it shifts the emphasis from Europe, where the Cold War started and ended, to the Third World where it was actually fought in a bloody manner through a series of proxy wars, large and small.

Set in the days of the full US-Soviet Cold War, this novel shows us a cat-and-mouse game played in the icy waters of the North Atlantic between an American destroyer and a Russian nuclear submarine. Nuclear weapons, the possibility of global war, and the extreme stress of decision-making under pressure are featured in a highly readable story. When I was an anti-submarine officer on a destroyer in the Cold War, I would literally wake up at night in a cold sweat about the possibilities of this kind of nightmare scenario unfolding due to a junior officer making a tragic mistake.

This book expands the horizon to include coverage of many of the crises and conflicts of the post-Cold War era. In doing so, it draws on an unusually rich range of primary sources for a book of this scope.

Its treatment of the role played by Congress is particularly notable, which should perhaps be no surprise given the author’s expertise in chronicling several of the major legislative battles in U.S. history. Somehow still coming in around the 500-page mark, the book’s briskly paced narrative makes it possible to devour it in one sitting. Indeed, you might find it hard not to.