100 books like Tyranny in America

This book imagines a world where the United States succumbs to authoritarianism. Subsequent writers have explored this theme, but I love Lewis’s novel because it captures a precarious historical moment (the 1930s) that has a lot in common with the present day.

“Buzz” Winthrop, the politician turned dictator, whips up fears about threats to America, stressing the need to get back to the nation’s “true” values. It’s a chilling portrait of a nation that loses its way.

Judith Shklar’s account of the social harms caused by everyday cruelty is exceptional in its clarity and ethical value. She walks readers through vices that people often overlook—cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, misanthropy, and betrayal—showing how these “ordinary” ways of ignoring the needs of other people fray the norms of society.

The ideas are nuanced but her writing is crystal clear. I think this is the best book on ethics I have ever read. 

Even though it was written in the nineteenth century, few books have ever matched Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of the strengths and weaknesses of the American system of government.

Most interesting to me is his insistence that, for all its democratic precepts, there are few defenses against tyranny in the United States. Although people more often focus on his account of the tyranny of the majority or democratic despotism, he is equally clear on how racism creates kinds of tyranny and that the American emphasis on economics are also ways that tyranny can take root.

I learn something new each time I read it!

This book is based on a historical event: the 1898 overthrow of the democratically elected government in Wilmington, NC, by white supremacists. It is a novel that makes clear how racial hate leads to tyranny.

I think Charles Chesnutt is one of our great nineteenth-century writers and he captures the complications of the Black experience with nuance and unflinching clarity. This is a book that anyone who wants to understand the ongoing legacies of enslavement, as well as the dangers of tyranny, will be eager to read!

In this beautifully written study of Lincoln’s pre-presidential years, the political ethicist William Lee Miller, a warm and generous friend as well as a gifted scholar, argued that to “appraise Lincoln fairly” one “should not compare him to unattached abolitionists in Massachusetts or to anyone a century and a half later” but rather to “other engaged politicians in the Old Northwest in the 1850s,” who were far more skeptical about racial equality than Lincoln was.

Miller observed that Lincoln was consistently “cordial and welcoming in his treatment of individual African-Americans,” but that he was more than that. In Miller’s words, Lincoln’s interaction with those Blacks demonstrated “a racially inclusive egalitarianism.” Miller’s companion volume, President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman is an equally insightful examination of Lincoln’s presidential years.

Fitzgerald’s mastery of the English language is beautiful to behold. This book is one of the most eloquent expositions of the control of his prose while at the same time confronting his greatest weakness in life: an inability to find happiness and true love that loves him back. Set on the French Riviera, Tender is the Night is honest and painful. It’s an insight into Fitzgerald’s melancholy world of excess.

This is both fantastic to be a part of and tragic. The tragedy and the beauty are juxtaposed in the most fantastic way–this makes this book one of my favorite romances. I read this book for pure enjoyment. Each sentence makes me smile with its beauty and its profundity. 

In a world obsessed with schedules and statistics, I found myself drawn to this whimsical tale about a man who rolls a dice to make life's big decisions. It mirrored my own youthful spirit–a time when I lived very spontaneously, even writing novels as experiments in happenstance. It was a time of unexpected adventures, an antidote to dull routines.

Nowadays, over-planning and seriousness sometimes creep in. But thankfully, I have my children to remind me of the simple, healing joy of play–life doesn’t always have to be so meticulously planned.

This book asks policymakers to look beyond incentives when designing policies.

Whether we are trying do something at a personal level, such as have our children do chores, or achieve something much bigger, such as combat obesity, designing appropriate incentives (carrots or sticks) is generally believed to help us achieve our goals.

Bowles warns us that this view assumes that incentives and morality are independent and that such view is faulty. Numerous experimental evidence attests to his argument. In its stead, he suggests shaping norms as a much more viable option.

When I presented these concepts in my economics elective this semester, one student commented that this was a “paradigm shift” in their understanding of economics; hence, the reason why I recommend this book.

I appreciate Christopolous’ book because he renders concrete the abstract realm of papal pronouncements by studying their reception by sixteenth-century Italian women and their confessors. He also unearths the complexity of attitudes to abortion that existed even within the church establishment in this period.

When Pope Sixtus issued a 1588 edict declaring all who aborted their pregnancies were automatically excommunicated and reserving the right to absolve them to the papacy alone, bishops across Italy’s Renaissance states objected. They argued that neither they nor their confessants could afford to travel to Rome to seek absolution; they sought mercy and forgiveness for the women to whom they ministered.

With this example, and in other parts of his book, Christopolous treats his subjects with sensitivity and precision.

What would you do if you were taken by force from your home as a child and placed in a museum for strangers to look at you and touch you? And if two-thirds of the adults with you died almost immediately from this treatment? And if the man who did this to you was acclaimed as a hero?

This is the story of a boy from the Arctic lost in New York City, and his struggle to return home.