Fans pick 100 books like The School of the Americas

How could ordinary policemen be implicated in the Holocaust by participating in mass shootings of Jews? After SS leader Heinrich Himmler took over the police forces in 1936, he was able to call up regular (i.e., non Nazified) police battalions and order them into Nazi-occupied Poland.

The historian Browning's book is based on the post-war interrogations of some of these policemen for trial. Browning delves into the reasons they went along with the mass shootings, even though they could have opted out and requested a different assignment.

His gripping analysis shows how peer pressure shapes individuals, and how participation in unspeakable, genocidal crimes becomes possible in an order-based hierarchy.

Green investigates The Commander’s Dilemma in the Salvadoran Revolution through a combination of questionnaires with ex-combatants from the FMLN and government forces, interviews, documents, and secondary resources. She argues that all military commanders everywhere confront the dilemma of ensuring that troops are skilled in meting out violence but that they reign in their violent tendencies so as to respect the human rights of civilians and adversaries that have been wounded and captured. The rebel FMLN educated its troops far more than the government military and according to the United Nations and other organizations committed but a small percentage of the wartime human rights violations.

I came across the work of Nick Turse while working on the fifth chapter of my new book. I had been struggling to find a critical voice in the assessment of the American war in Vietnam that was sustained by a keen historical eye and the pure, intellectual critique of a scholar. When I found Turse, I found my answers.

Turse’s assessment of the unmitigated brutality of the American war in Vietnam chilled me; his powerful critique brought a new voice and vigor to my own burgeoning criticism of that U.S. slaughter in Southeast Asia.

Anyone looking for a strong voice condemning wholesale the U.S. anti-communist paranoia of the era and/or the indiscriminate killing capacity of the U.S. military machine need look no further than Turse and Kill Anything that Moves. 

Anthropologist Alpa Shah spent a week traveling 150 miles clandestinely with India’s Naxalite rebels, a long-standing opposition group formed among an ethnic minority subjected to intense state repression and capitalist incursion. Shah provides historical and sociological context to this Maoist movement and insight into the ideological indoctrination that minimizes human rights violations among its adherents. 

Bob Woodward spares no president his unvarnished critique.

I found the most interesting part of the book not about Obama, per se, but the circumstances that led to Senator Hillary Clinton’s appointment as his Secretary of State, despite her known and strong disagreements with him on foreign policy.

In one part, Woodward relates a conversation between Clinton and a senior campaign advisor, in which she expresses deep concern that by accepting the position she might someday be caught between loyalty to the President and a hard place.

Fast forward to the 2012 Benghazi attack, which Republicans used to scuttle her 2016 Presidential bid, and in turn, allowed Donald Trump to dismantle much of Obama’s hoped-for legacy.

I like this book because the author’s writing is cogent and clear. It has helped inform my own views about maritime strategy. More importantly, I admire the way the author blends military, economic, and technical insights in addressing the challenges America faces in the South China Sea.

The author, Droste Sadler, successfully tells me that the U.S. is most ill-prepared for the competition we are facing from China. He effectively sounds the alarm that we are at an inflection point, and we need to become more competitive now before it is too late.

In this book, the closest thing we have to a traditional work of national security on this list, the brilliant (and funny) iconoclast John Mueller asks a simple question: Why don’t more people realize just how stupid war is?

Why, for instance, as Greek soldiers loaded into boats to attack Troy because of a kidnapping, did no one comment on the sheer stupidity of the whole operation? Mueller reviews the history of this stupidity and recommends that his country give more consideration to steering clear of them in the future.

All wars the United States fights are, to use the common parlance, “wars of choice.” We always have the option to not engage, a choice that would usually leave us better off.

This updated edition of Grandin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book charts the long history of the United States’ imperial domination of Latin America through gunboat diplomacy, invasion, hard and soft coups, mercenary wars, and covert actions.

Often considered its ‘backyard,’ Latin America is where the United States “learned how to project its power, worked out effective and flexible tactics of extraterritorial administration, established legal precedents, and acquired its conception of itself as an empire like no other before it.” Grandin illustrates this history with numerous historical and contemporary examples, including the 1973 US-supported coup in Chile, which brought to power Augusto Pinochet’s bloody dictatorship.

With the help of University of Chicago economists Frederic Von Hayek and Milton Friedman, the dictatorship pioneered the first neoliberal imperial “workshop.” Chile would become the template for other attempts at regime change in the region, from the 1980s wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua to… show more.

Two of Sarduy’s most extraordinary writings from the 1970s, these twin works chart a territory of radical transformation. In the first part of the book, Cobra makes their gender transition with the support of a slew of unusual characters who also shape-shift via the mysterious and violent rites of a motorcycle gang and a group of Tantric Buddhist lamas. Metamorphosis continues in the second half of the book, wherein a Cuban-Chinese cook reincarnates as the Buddha, in the midst of the Cuban revolution. The wild tales create a distinctive space for being otherwise.

Besides being intricately involved in the history of U.S. foreign policy, baseball has also pursued its own foreign policy, projecting the game beyond American borders but always controlling the sport wherever it’s played.

This book examines the colonization of baseball in the Caribbean and Latin America. After breaking the color barrier, black Americans began emerging in the sport. An amateur draft was added and then free agency, both driving up the cost of ballplayers until organized baseball realized the gold mine of inexpensive players available south of the border.

The Latin player influx has helped baseball diversity but it has caused a dramatic decline in U.S. black ballplayers. Meanwhile, baseball owners are making billions, partly through their firm control over Latin leagues and players. This book is a call to action against this exploitation.