100 books like The Fifth Risk

Hacker explores the connection between America’s present yawning inequality and the deliberate decisions made by key political figures throughout the last 50 years. While off-shoring and technological innovation have contributed to the ever poorer job prospects and conditions for the poor and working-class, he argues that our government is just as much to blame. We could have taken action to protect these constituencies but rather defended the interests of corporate America and the radical rich (his term for wealth conservative donors such as the Koch Brothers). The book is very well-researched and easily digestible.

Why The Right Went Wrong is a wicked, detailed, and easily digestible account of how the Right was overtaken by power-hungry ideologues bent on destroying government. This is not hyperbole. Dionne painstakingly documents the ascendancy of those radicals in the Republican Party, and how our present moment – of chaos and near-civil war – is in large part due to this movement outlined in his book. A must-read for anyone seeking to understand how we got “here.”

In his characteristically funny and sardonic style, Andersen guides us through the historical connection between corporate America and the Republican Party. Needless to say, the relationship has been strong and fruitful (Democrats are guilty as well, but it’s hardly a comparison). He reports on the key conservative figures in both the private and public spheres who have funded and enabled the transformation of our laws and society. It is a remarkable story of power and greed written in concise witty prose. Highly recommend!

President Nixon’s former White House Counsel, John Dean, has had the inside seat to Republican malfeasance and corruption. He utilizes his deep experience in government to write about his former party (Republican) of the 1990s and 2000s. He painstakingly documents the brutal no holds barred tactics of Republican leaders in Congress and in the executive branch. The damage former Speaker Newt Gingrich and Vice President Dick Cheney wreaked on our democracy are incalculable. Dean proves this definitively. 

Dwight Chapin joined former Vice President Richard Nixon’s staff in 1962, in connection with his unsuccessful California gubernatorial run. He functioned as Nixon’s personal aide for the next decade, spending hours and hours as his “body man.” I knew and worked with Dwight for the four years of Nixon’s first term as president, but worked on domestic policy initiatives and never had the “face time” with the President that he did.

Dwight’s book reflects fifty years of musings about one of our greatest presidents, yet one who resigned in disgrace because of Watergate. His stories, his insights, and his understandings of our 37th President are without parallel. 

I’m in awe of this author’s trilogy of award-winning novels about Zimbabwe’s colonial history. Haunting and hypnotic, they blend magical realism, epic history, and social satire. Although they form a series with some recurring characters, all are standalone reads.

Her first, The Theory of Flight, won South Africa’s biggest literary award. The second, recommended here, is a sustained act of grace in which the author climbs into the skin of an alpha white male Rhodesian, Emil Coetzee, whose ambitions lead to his running the doomed colony’s sinister secret police. It humanizes him without excusing him in an imaginative tour de force that asks a burning question: why do we sometimes choose evil?

If you love this book (you will), Ndlovu’s third novel, The Quality of Mercy, brings the series to a redemptive close.

I’m going to end on a happy note with Going Postal. This book is part of Terry Pratchett’s expansive Discworld series, but can be read standalone and actually served as my entry point.

Moist Von Lipwig (gross name to read, but appropriate) is a con man that tries so hard to do the wrong thing, and yet inevitably ends up an accidental hero. Pratchett twists common tropes by making the main character the hero to everyone but himself. Moist sees himself as being purely self-serving, which makes it that much more delightful when he ends up helping others. 

Pratchett’s humor and biting wit about the ails of modern society are on full display and had me laughing aloud through much of this story. It’s endearing, upbeat, and filled to the brim with sarcastic charm. In other words, my kind of book.

This beautiful book is possibly the most important book of my writing career. I found it in a second-hand bookstore in Dublin on a rainy afternoon and, like the plot, I felt that my finding it was a stroke of providence. I was so moved by the story that I immediately signed up for a writing workshop with the author. That workshop was a defining moment in my life – after it, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Although this story is not directly about art, it shows how a man’s calling, his compulsion to paint, plays a key role in the lives and the destinies of others. The novel has a fairytale-like quality to it, a poetic timelessness that captures the essence of spirituality and love.

Creating Public Value was published in the 1990s but it is, I think, still the best text for explaining what governments (should) do. 

The overarching goal of managers of businesses is to create shareholder value. This is more important even than making profits. As many tech firms have shown, it is possible businesses that have not made a profit for ten years or more to have enormous share valuations.

Moore’s theory is that public sector managers do something similar. They have to take the scarce resources available to them and create services that are valued by the public. The aim is for the value enjoyed by the public using a service to exceed the total cost of all the resources used to create it. If it does not, the public manager is destroying value rather than creating it.

Between 1640 and 1660, England, Scotland, and Ireland experienced civil war, invasion, religious radicalism, parliamentary rule, and the restoration of the monarchy. None of that will surprise historians of Britain, but they may not realize the impact of these events on Britain’s new colonies across the Atlantic. Some of them remained loyal to the king until his victorious opponents sent the first major Transatlantic expeditionary force to subdue them. 

Pestana shows how war and rebellion in Britain increased both the proportion of unfree labourers and ethnic diversity in the colonies. Neglected by London, several of them developed trade networks; some entered the slave trade. By 1660, the English Atlantic had become religiously polarized, economically interconnected, socially exploitative, and ideologically unstable.