Love The Devil's Chessboard? Readers share 100 books like The Devil's Chessboard...

By David Talbot,

Here are 100 books that The Devil's Chessboard fans have personally recommended if you like The Devil's Chessboard. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Grapes of Wrath

Greg King Author Of The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods

From my list on exposing the hidden underbelly of the American empire.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in western Sonoma County, California, surrounded by forests, rivers, and the Pacific Ocean. Yet this idyllic setting was shaken by the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Vietnam War; civil rights riots; Nixon and Watergate; the Pentagon Papers; Weather Underground bombings; Patti Hearst with a machine gun; and four students killed at Kent State. These events led me to major in Politics at UC Santa Cruz and become an investigative journalist. I soon realized the U.S. is built not only on equal rights and freedom but also on systemic disparity, injustice, and violence.

Greg's book list on exposing the hidden underbelly of the American empire

Greg King Why did Greg love this book?

Set within the greatest mass migration in American history, Steinbeck’s 1939 classic follows the Joad family as they join nearly three million others who escape the Dust Bowl of the American Midwest.

Usurious banks have foreclosed and crushed the bereft farmers. More than 200,000 refugees head for California, and the Joads join them in an ambling caravan of rattling jalopies. Young Rose of Sharon moves pregnant across the continent, emblematic of both the promise and the peril of the human condition. She’s surrounded by family and hangers-on who ford the wasted continent, only to face a glut of labor in the vast farms of California and the brutal exploitation of the owner classes. The Joads are slapped with the bitter understanding that the promise of California exists largely in myth. Yet always Steinbeck returns to the promises of human connection and even happiness that beckon from just over the next…

By John Steinbeck,

Why should I read it?

21 authors picked The Grapes of Wrath as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.'

Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and powerlessness, yet out of their struggle Steinbeck created a drama that is both intensely human and majestic in its scale and moral vision.


Book cover of The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.

Anita Bartholomew Author Of Siege: An American Tragedy

From my list on plots to overthrow the US government.

Why am I passionate about this?

I'm a long-time contributor to Reader's Digest (and former contributing editor), specializing in narrative nonfiction who has covered social and geopolitical issues for the magazine. I'm also a political junkie who loves to dig into little-known aspects of history and current events. 

Anita's book list on plots to overthrow the US government

Anita Bartholomew Why did Anita love this book?

Throughout the early 20th century, General Smedley Butler was the go-to commander for overthrowing other countries' governments on behalf of US interests. So, when American fascists conspired to oust then-recently elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt, they recruited Butler to lead their coup attempt. The fascists’ error: they failed to take Butler’s remorse seriously when, in a 1931 speech, he lamented his career as a "…high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and the bankers." The Plot to Seize The White House details how Butler brought the conspiracy down.

I was reminded as I read that there always were—and will be—powerful people eager to topple the barriers democracy puts in their way. But it’s also a reminder that, as in the 2020 election, principled people, in the right positions, make all the difference. 

By Jules Archer,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Plot to Seize the White House as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"Fascinating and alarmingly true."-Time Magazine. The true story of a plot to overthrow Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the nearly forgotten Marine who saved American Democracy.

Many simply don't know that in 1933, a group of wealthy industrialists-working closely with groups like the K.K.K. and the American Liberty League-planned to overthrow the U.S. government and run F.D.R. out of office in a fascist coup.

Americans may be shocked to learn of the plan to turn unhappy war veterans into American "brown shirts," depose F.D.R., and stop the New Deal. They asked Medal of Honor recipient and Marine Major General Smedley Darlington…


Book cover of Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876

Anita Bartholomew Author Of Siege: An American Tragedy

From my list on plots to overthrow the US government.

Why am I passionate about this?

I'm a long-time contributor to Reader's Digest (and former contributing editor), specializing in narrative nonfiction who has covered social and geopolitical issues for the magazine. I'm also a political junkie who loves to dig into little-known aspects of history and current events. 

Anita's book list on plots to overthrow the US government

Anita Bartholomew Why did Anita love this book?

Accusations of ballot fraud, election challenges, dueling slates of electors, threats of political violence—even a new civil war. It sounds eerily like the 2020 presidential election, but it happened in 1876. The legitimate winner that year was Democrat Samuel Tilden. His rival, Rutherford B. Hayes, who eventually ascended to the presidency, and Tilden both, according to Morris, went to bed on election night, believing Tilden was the winner. The fraud, this time, was initiated, not by the candidate himself, but by Republican operatives behind closed doors who worked to propel Hayes to the top, in exchange for an end to Reconstruction—which led inexorably to the Jim Crow era. 

The bitter battle left Tilden and the country with grievous losses. The country is still recovering.

By Jr. Roy Morris,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Fraud of the Century as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this major work of popular history and scholarship, acclaimed historian and biographer Roy Morris, Jr, tells the extraordinary story of how, in America's centennial year, the presidency was stolen, the Civil War was almost reignited, and Black Americans were consigned to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South.

The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden is the most sensational, ethically sordid, and legally questionable presidential election in American history. The first since Lincoln's in 1860 in which the Democrats had a real chance of recapturing…


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Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

Book cover of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

Anita Bartholomew Author Of Siege: An American Tragedy

From my list on plots to overthrow the US government.

Why am I passionate about this?

I'm a long-time contributor to Reader's Digest (and former contributing editor), specializing in narrative nonfiction who has covered social and geopolitical issues for the magazine. I'm also a political junkie who loves to dig into little-known aspects of history and current events. 

Anita's book list on plots to overthrow the US government

Anita Bartholomew Why did Anita love this book?

It’s quite a trick to overthrow a government without firing a shot. It’s an even better trick to do it without most people noticing what you’ve done. Dark Money shows how a cadre of American oligarchs, who believed the US had gone too far in reining in people like them, poured barrels of cash into undermining the average American’s economic, labor, and civil rights progress. They created think tanks. They bankrolled TV pundits. They funded departments at top universities—and micro-managed the curriculum—intent on influencing new generations of politicians, economists, and judges. In the end, they completely reshaped American thought and jurisprudence.

Ever wonder how the US of FDR and JFK could have taken such a sharp turn to the extreme right? I recommend you read Dark Money.

By Jane Mayer,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Dark Money as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Who are the immensely wealthy right-wing ideologues shaping the fate of America today? From the bestselling author of The Dark Side, an electrifying work of investigative journalism that uncovers the agenda of this powerful group.

In her new preface, Jane Mayer discusses the results of the most recent election and Donald Trump's victory, and how, despite much discussion to the contrary, this was a huge victory for the billionaires who have been pouring money in the American political system.

Why is America living in an age…


Book cover of The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It

Anita Bartholomew Author Of Siege: An American Tragedy

From my list on plots to overthrow the US government.

Why am I passionate about this?

I'm a long-time contributor to Reader's Digest (and former contributing editor), specializing in narrative nonfiction who has covered social and geopolitical issues for the magazine. I'm also a political junkie who loves to dig into little-known aspects of history and current events. 

Anita's book list on plots to overthrow the US government

Anita Bartholomew Why did Anita love this book?

The Steal documents what happened in the weeks between the 2020 presidential election and January 6th in swing states that Biden won, where Trump persuaded local loyalists that the election had been rigged. Avid Trump supporters embraced every wild conspiracy theory Trump World tossed their way—imagining minor glitches to be bulletproof evidence of massive fraud. 

As the author of another narrative about the collateral damage wrought by purveyors of the Big Lie, I had obvious reasons to be drawn to The Steal. It deftly see-saws between besieged election workers and officials trying to do their jobs in the face of unrelenting pressure, and those who—truth, law, and logic be damned—applied that pressure. The Steal fascinates, both as a commentary on human nature and a ground-level account of an attempted coup.  

By Mark Bowden, Matthew Teague,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Steal as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“A gripping ground-level narrative…a marvel of reporting: tightly wound… but also panoramic.”—Washington Post

“A lean, fast-paced and important account of the chaotic final weeks.”—New York Times

In The Steal, veteran journalists Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague offer a week-by-week, state-by-state account of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

In the sixty-four days between November 3 and January 6, President Donald Trump and his allies fought to reverse the outcome of the vote. Focusing on six states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—Trump’s supporters claimed widespread voter fraud.

Caught up in this effort were scores of activists, lawyers, judges,…


Book cover of Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America

Greg King Author Of The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods

From my list on exposing the hidden underbelly of the American empire.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in western Sonoma County, California, surrounded by forests, rivers, and the Pacific Ocean. Yet this idyllic setting was shaken by the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Vietnam War; civil rights riots; Nixon and Watergate; the Pentagon Papers; Weather Underground bombings; Patti Hearst with a machine gun; and four students killed at Kent State. These events led me to major in Politics at UC Santa Cruz and become an investigative journalist. I soon realized the U.S. is built not only on equal rights and freedom but also on systemic disparity, injustice, and violence.

Greg's book list on exposing the hidden underbelly of the American empire

Greg King Why did Greg love this book?

Kendzior released Hiding in Plain Sight in 2020, just prior to the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol by Trump followers. The book quickly became a bestseller and an essential reference for anyone wanting to make sense of the increasingly authoritarian strain of American politics in general, and the Trump administration in particular. 

In 2012, Kendzior earned her PhD by studying authoritarian regimes that grew out of the states of the former Soviet Union. She brought that knowledge home and, in 2016, applied it to predict Trump’s unlikely electoral victory. Hiding in Plain Sight tracks Trump’s ascent through the history of America’s consolidation of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands and through the corruption inevitably associated with such inequity.

The book explores Trump’s tutelage under his reactionary mentor Roy Cohn, his rise in popularity through reality TV, his failed business dealings, and his ability to tap…

By Sarah Kendzior,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Hiding in Plain Sight as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The rise of Donald Trump may have shocked Americans, but it should not have surprised them. His anti-democratic movement is the culmination of a decades-long breakdown of U.S. institutions. The same blindness to U.S. decline - particularly the loss of economic stability for the majority of the population and opportunity-hoarding by the few - is reflected in an unwillingness to accept that authoritarianism can indeed thrive in the so-called "home of the free".

As Americans struggle to reconcile the gulf between a flagrant aspiring autocrat and the democratic precepts they had been told were sacred and immutable, the inherent fragility…


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Book cover of Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence

Need to Know by Nicholas Reynolds,

The authoritative but accessible history of the birth of modern American intelligence in World War II that treats not just one but all of the various disciplines: spies, codebreakers, saboteurs.

Told in a relatable style that focuses on actual people, it was a New Yorker "Best of 2022" selection and…

Book cover of An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873

Greg King Author Of The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods

From my list on exposing the hidden underbelly of the American empire.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in western Sonoma County, California, surrounded by forests, rivers, and the Pacific Ocean. Yet this idyllic setting was shaken by the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Vietnam War; civil rights riots; Nixon and Watergate; the Pentagon Papers; Weather Underground bombings; Patti Hearst with a machine gun; and four students killed at Kent State. These events led me to major in Politics at UC Santa Cruz and become an investigative journalist. I soon realized the U.S. is built not only on equal rights and freedom but also on systemic disparity, injustice, and violence.

Greg's book list on exposing the hidden underbelly of the American empire

Greg King Why did Greg love this book?

In this exhaustive, deeply researched study, Benjamin Madley examines in grim detail the relentless series of massacres and exterminations of peaceful Native American Indians in California that occurred from 1846 to 1873. During this era, writes Madley, “perhaps 80 percent of all California Indians died.” Survivors, especially children, were often enslaved. 

The brutality is systematic, if not endemic, to the construction of the American empire. Nearly half of the book is comprised of appendices that quantify most known Indian massacres in California during the mid-nineteenth century. (“~April 5, 1846. Number killed: 120-1,000. Location: Close to Reading’s Ranch.”) What emerges is a disturbing portrait of ceaseless violence inflicted by pioneers and settlers, by business owners and hired thugs, and by the state and federal governments against large, sophisticated human populations that had lived in place for thousands of years.

The nearly comprehensive genocide remains rarely invoked in modern times, no matter…

By Benjamin Madley,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked An American Genocide as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The first full account of the government-sanctioned genocide of California Indians under United States rule

Winner of the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Award for History and a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

"Gruesomely thorough. . . . Others have described some of these campaigns, but never in such strong terms and with so much blame placed directly on the United States government."-Alexander Nazaryan, Newsweek

Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal…


Book cover of War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

Greg King Author Of The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods

From my list on exposing the hidden underbelly of the American empire.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s in western Sonoma County, California, surrounded by forests, rivers, and the Pacific Ocean. Yet this idyllic setting was shaken by the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Vietnam War; civil rights riots; Nixon and Watergate; the Pentagon Papers; Weather Underground bombings; Patti Hearst with a machine gun; and four students killed at Kent State. These events led me to major in Politics at UC Santa Cruz and become an investigative journalist. I soon realized the U.S. is built not only on equal rights and freedom but also on systemic disparity, injustice, and violence.

Greg's book list on exposing the hidden underbelly of the American empire

Greg King Why did Greg love this book?

Few writers dig as deeply or as diligently into the underbelly of the American empire more than Edwin Black. One of his earliest books, IBM and the Holocaust, documents how the pioneering computing company sold Hollerith tabulation machines and the required punch cards to Germany’s Nazi government throughout World War Two, allowing the regime to identify and exterminate Jews. 

Two years later, Black published something of a prequel, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. It’s an extensive and exhaustively documented account of American white supremacists and their bogus but widely accepted theories of “eugenics,” or “race science,” that maintained a surprising legitimacy in the US during the first half of the twentieth century.

Eugenic policies led to the marginalization and forced sterilization of human “defectives” in the United States. Not long thereafter, employing lessons learned in America, the Nazi Third Reich…

By Edwin Black,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked War Against the Weak as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Genetics is in the news. What is not in the news are its origins in a racist twentieth century pseudoscience called eugenics, which was based on selective breeding. In 1904, the United States launched a large-scale eugenics movement that was championed by the medical, political and religious elite. History has recorded the horrors of ethnic cleansing, but until now, America's own efforts to create a master race have been largely overlooked. In War Against The Weak, investigative journalist, Edwin Black, reveals that eugenics had an incredible foothold in America in the early twentieth century, and was in fact championed and…


Book cover of Marina and Lee: The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy

Gerald Posner Author Of Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK

From my list on who killed JFK.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was in the fourth grade when JFK was assassinated. I grew up in the late 1960s as conspiracy theories about ‘who killed Kennedy’ flourished. Jack Ruby’s murder of Oswald made me suspect the mafia played a role. After Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 JFK film, I convinced a publisher to allow me to reexamine the assassination. I did not expect to solve the case. Halfway through my research, however, I realized there was an answer to ‘who killed Kennedy.’ It was not what I had expected. I discovered that the story of how a 24-year-old sociopath armed with a $12 rifle managed to kill the president was a far more fascinating one than I could have ever envisioned.

Gerald's book list on who killed JFK

Gerald Posner Why did Gerald love this book?

Author Priscilla McMillan was at the crossroads of history. She worked as a junior aide for Senator John Kennedy before she went to Moscow as a reporter during the height of the Cold War. There, in 1959, she interviewed an American marine who had recently defected to the Soviet Union. He was Lee Harvey Oswald. After JFK was killed in 1963, McMillan befriended Oswald’s widow, Marina, and spent hundreds of hours interviewing her. The result of McMillan’s unprecedented direct access to the Oswalds is an unmatched personal study of a troubled young man who turned into one of history’s most notorious assassins. 

By Priscilla Johnson McMillan,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Marina and Lee as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

“The single best book ever written on the Kennedy assassination” -- Thomas Mallon, author of Mrs. Paine's Garage: And the Murder of John F. Kennedy
 
“It is not at all easy to describe the power of Marina and Lee . . . It is far better than any other book about Kennedy . . . Other books about the Kennedy assassination are all smoke and no fire. Marina and Lee burns.” —New York Times Book Review

Marina and Lee is an indispensable account of one of America’s most traumatic events and a classic work of narrative history. In her meticulous—at…


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Book cover of Benghazi! A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink

Benghazi! A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink by Ethan Chorin,

Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…

Book cover of Spymaster: My Thirty-Two Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West

Mark Hollingsworth Author Of Agents of Influence: How the KGB Subverted Western Democracies

From my list on the KGB, Russia and espionage.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been writing about Russia for the past 20 years for all the UK national newspapers, The Spectator and contributed to several TV documentaries. I am fascinated by Russia which is a unique country and has been a major influence on the world for the past 100 years. Based on new documents, my book Londongrad - From Russia with Cash revealed how Russian Oligarchs made their wealth, moved it out of Russia, hid their fortunes and then parked and spent it in London. My new book - Agents of Influence - provides an insight into how the KGB influenced the West based on new archives.

Mark's book list on the KGB, Russia and espionage

Mark Hollingsworth Why did Mark love this book?

It is rare for a KGB spy to reveal so many secrets about the Soviet Union and Russian intelligence operations in the West and so this book is a revelation. 

Kalugin was a KGB officer based in the USA in the 1970s and he describes all their dirty tricks - fake letters, disinformation, honey trapping, and even attempts to bug the US Congress.

By Oleg Kalugin,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Spymaster as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Oleg Kalugin oversaw the work of American spies, matched wits with the CIA, and became one of the youngest generals in KGB history. Even so, he grew increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet system. In 1990, he went public, exposing the intelligence agency's shadowy methods. Revised and updated in the light of the KGB's enduring presence in Russian politics, Spymaster is Kalugin's impressively illuminating memoir of the final years of the Soviet Union.


Book cover of The Grapes of Wrath
Book cover of The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow F.D.R.
Book cover of Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876

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