100 books like The French Revolution & What Went Wrong

Yurgin is the grandmaster of global energy politics, starting with his seminal, The Prize, and most recently The New Map. The latter is an amazing sweep of where global energy markets are heading, which takes into consideration the shift away from oil, gas, and coal to green or alternative sources of energy. His outlook is that the transition to a carbon-lite world is going to be much bumpier and more time-consuming than many people wish for, considering the issues of climate change, economic realities, and geopolitics. An insightful and excellent read.

This is one of the seminal books in Caribbean history, by one of the region’s foremost historians and long-time Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams. For me, the book was a wonderful introduction to Caribbean history as it opened up doors to peoples and places that had been neglected during much of my education in the United States. The chapters concerning colonial plantation agriculture, its dependence on the enslavement of Africans, and the geopolitics around King Sugar are memorable.

China experts Economy and Levi wrote one of the more far-seeing books on the internationalization of China’s development and its use of economic statecraft to secure access to strategic resources, ranging from oil and gas to agricultural goods and minerals (like copper, nickel, and cobalt). Although the book was published in 2014, it has held up well, especially in that China’s quest for energy, minerals, land, and water, pursued through a mix of investment, political and military means is fundamentally changing the world. At the same time, China’s resource hunt is also changing the Asian giant, forcing it to adopt to changing global power dynamics.  

Hillman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and director of the Reconnecting Asia Project, wrote a very topical book on China’s Bridge and Road Initiative (BRI), calling it “the project of the century.” Indeed, the BRI encompasses a projected $1 trillion in spending on new roads, railways, telecommunications, and other critical infrastructure, aiming to bind together the Eurasian landmass and Africa (key for natural resources) into a trade and investment zone dominated by Beijing. What I found the most noteworthy was the following: “Xi’s vision is constrained by neither geography nor even gravity. Since its announcement, the BRI has stretched into the Arctic, cyberspace, and outer space.”

Hillman readily acknowledges China making mistakes (over-lending to credit-challenged countries in particular) and that going forward Beijing will need greater skill, lower expectations, and a heavy dose of modesty to make it work. For anyone interested in major… show more.

In his memoirs Chateaubriand combined private life and public events, the autobiography of a Romantic with the history of the French revolution. A royalist writer, ambassador, and minister, he believed that ‘legitimate, constitutional monarchy’ was the ‘gentlest and surest path to complete freedom’. His memoirs give brilliant descriptions of the Bourbons, of whom he often despaired, including the ‘infernal vision’ of Talleyrand and Fouché entering Louis XVIII’s study, ‘vice leaning on the arm of crime’; and the bedsheets which royalist ladies converted into white Bourbon flags, to salute the entry of the allies into Paris in 1814.  For him the Hundred Days was the  ‘irredeemable crime and capital error’ of Napoleon; marriage, especially Chateaubriand’s own, was ‘the high road to all misfortunes’. Disabused of everyone, he asks: ‘is life anything but a lie?’

A thrilling and fully immersive description of the French Revolution; I loved this book in particular for its moving description of how the Jews of Paris were affected.

I found Madame Tussand’s story to be a wonderful frame for the upheaval in France at the time – especially as a highly layered, wonderful character whose strong personality helped her to survive troubling times.

It’s definitely my favorite Michelle Moran book – and that’s tough, considering how many amazing historical novels she’s written.

There are a thousand books on the French Revolution, but most of them focus on the foibles of the aristocracy, or the wild rage of the crowds, or the heroism of Napoleon. Popkin’s new history does a masterful job of covering all the key events and personalities in France in the years leading up to the Revolution and in its unfolding over almost two decades. He is particularly good at placing the Revolution in the context of world history (showing its relation to events in the New World, from the American Revolution to the Revolution in Haiti), and in keeping a focus on the role of the French Revolution in the history of liberty. Indeed, through the eyes of the revolutionaries and their followers in this book, you can watch the dawn of liberty arise in the early years of the Revolution, and then fade under the increasingly militarist and… show more.

This is not an easy read, but it is a seminal work by the greatest modern historian of the French Revolution, which made an enormous impression on me when I first read it as a student in the 1980s. It marked a decisive break with what up until then had been the standard view of the Revolution as a class struggle. For Furet, the Revolution’s real importance lay elsewhere, as the first modern experiment with democracy – in his eloquent words, "a beginning and a haunting vision of that beginning."

I loved this modern retelling of the story of Désirée Clary, which was somewhat rawer and more visceral than the original Désirée. It continued to help shape my own impressions of Napoleon, who does not come off well in this novel.

Pataki’s ability to capture life at court, Désirée’s continued entanglements with both Napoleon and Josephine, as well as her elevation to the Swedish court as princess and then queen (which she was never comfortable with), is brilliantly captured. 

I read this book first as a teenager and it was my original introduction to Napoleon and the French Revolution. The story of young love, betrayal, and the stirring events in France before, during, and after Napoleon becomes Emperor, the novel is told as a diary, which lends the book immediacy and poignancy.

As a Jewish reader, I particularly enjoyed Selinko’s description of how Désirée’s Jewish neighbors marched off to war, having been given citizenship for the first time in millennia.

I’ve read this book countless times, both as a young reader and as an adult, and it continues to be an all-time favorite. It also shaped my own approach to portraying Napoleon.