The best books on the politics of the United States

When Stieg Larsson died, the author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had been working on a true mystery that out-twisted his Millennium novels: the assassination on February 28, 1986, of Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister. It was the first time in history that a head of state had been murdered without a clue who'd done it--and on a Stockholm street at point-blank range.

Internationally known for his fictional villains, Larsson was well acquainted with their real-life counterparts and documented extremist activities throughout the world. For years he'd been amassing evidence that linked their terrorist acts to what he called "one of the most astounding murder cases" he'd ever covered. Larsson's archive was forgotten until journalist Jan Stocklassa was given exclusive access to the author's secret project.

In The Man Who Played with Fire, Stocklassa collects the pieces of Larsson's true-crime puzzle to follow the trail of intrigue, espionage, and conspiracy begun by one of the world's most famous thriller writers. Together they set out to solve a mystery that no one else could.

“This is a truly remarkable book. Patrick Maney gives us a penetrating, comprehensive, and thoroughly balanced account of the Clinton presidency, along with a shrewd, insightful assessment of the character of this fascinating and often infuriating denizen of the White House. This book will stand as the gold standard of works on this man and his era.” - John Milton Cooper Jr., Pulitzer Prize finalist for Woodrow Wilson: A Biography

Hijacking History analyzes the high school world history textbooks produced by the three most influential publishers of Christian educational materials. For them, history is the story of God's actions interpreted through the Bible and a weapon to condemn civilizations that do not accept the true God or adopt "biblical" positions. These textbooks use history to identify ideas God abhors and has punished, including evolution, humanism, biblical modernism, socialism, and climate science. These judgments lead students to believe that God sanctions rightwing social and political views and that America must advance them as well as their sectarian, intolerant Christianity as “biblical truth.”

As Hijacking History argues, the ideas these textbooks promote have significant implications for contemporary debates about religion, politics, and education, and pose a direct challenge to a pluralistic democracy.

This book basically tells the story of how slaveholders generally ran the country—and ran it for their own benefit—in the years before the Civil War. They held the presidency for 50 of its first 72 years, the Speaker’s office for 48 of the same years, along with 18 of the 31 Supreme Court seats. And the only men to be reelected president during those years were slaveholders—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson. All have been celebrated for their accomplishments. Usually left unsaid, however, was that the political system had been rigged in their favor. 

The Rise of a New Left traces the growth of a women-led, multiracial, multi-class, new “new left” in the United States—from Occupy Wall Street to the insurgent campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the mass uprisings of 2020—and its historic and growing influence on American politics. The book draws on dozens of interviews with candidates and organizers throughout the country whose priorities are more urgent than ever in 2023: confronting climate change, managing a global pandemic, upholding human rights, ensuring that Black lives matter, and replacing failing American institutions with truly democratic bodies.

In telling the story of the 1911 factory fire at the Triangle Waist Co.—New York’s deadliest workplace disaster prior to 9/11—I tried to account for the profound effect of this event in a time when workers died on the job routinely. That turned out to be a rich and moving story of women’s rights, of labor organizing, of reformist zeal, and of gritty give-and-take inside a notorious political machine.

The Rise of a New Left traces the growth of a women-led, multiracial, multi-class, new “new left” in the United States—from Occupy Wall Street to the insurgent campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the mass uprisings of 2020—and its historic and growing influence on American politics. The book draws on dozens of interviews with candidates and organizers throughout the country whose priorities are more urgent than ever in 2023: confronting climate change, managing a global pandemic, upholding human rights, ensuring that Black lives matter, and replacing failing American institutions with truly democratic bodies.

From the contest that pitted Thomas Jefferson against John Adams in 1800 through 2020’s vicious, chaotic matchup between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, Stuckey documents the cycle of despicable discourse in presidential campaigns. Looking beyond the character and the ideology of the candidates, Stuckey explores the broader political, economic, and cultural milieus in which each took place. In doing so, she reveals the conditions that exacerbate and enable our worst political instincts, producing discourses that incite factions, target members of the polity, encourage undemocratic policy, and actively work against the national democratic project.

Keenly analytical and compulsively readable, Deplorable provides context for the 2016 and 2020 elections, revealing them as part of a cyclical―and perhaps downward-spiraling―pattern in American politics. Deplorable offers more than a comparison of the worst of our elections. It helps us understand these shameful and disappointing moments in our political history, leaving one important question: Can we avoid them in the future?

This book basically tells the story of how slaveholders generally ran the country—and ran it for their own benefit—in the years before the Civil War. They held the presidency for 50 of its first 72 years, the Speaker’s office for 48 of the same years, along with 18 of the 31 Supreme Court seats. And the only men to be reelected president during those years were slaveholders—Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson. All have been celebrated for their accomplishments. Usually left unsaid, however, was that the political system had been rigged in their favor. 

The Rise of a New Left traces the growth of a women-led, multiracial, multi-class, new “new left” in the United States—from Occupy Wall Street to the insurgent campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the mass uprisings of 2020—and its historic and growing influence on American politics. The book draws on dozens of interviews with candidates and organizers throughout the country whose priorities are more urgent than ever in 2023: confronting climate change, managing a global pandemic, upholding human rights, ensuring that Black lives matter, and replacing failing American institutions with truly democratic bodies.