The most recommended new politics books

As expected from this author, this book is very funny in parts, but it’s also alarming as commentary on decline in our political leadership.

Borowitz chronicles the emergence of ignorance and stupidity as political credentials rather than disqualifiers, starting with Reagan, flowering with Dan Quayle and GWBush and Sarah Palin, and surpassing absurdity with the multiply-impeached and indicted former president and his imitators and sycophants.

Borowitz makes the point that public ignorance is no longer the embarrassment that it once was, but the opposite, becoming a criterion for electability that shows commonality with an electorate for whom knowing what you are talking about is seen as elitist. There’s a lot of blame to go around for this, but whatever the reasons, Borowitz is depressingly convincing that it doesn’t bode well for US democracy.

Sure, people objected to pandemic mitigation measures in other countries. Only in the United States were objections partisan.

This book elegantly relies on public opinion surveys to demonstrate the costs of partisanship in the pandemic. The authors discuss the economy, immigration, and voting. They document the Trump administration’s efforts to make mitigating the pandemic partisan. Masks are not inherently partisan. Our friends in medicine wear them all the time. In parts of Asia, many have used them to limit viruses’ spread.

Even before the pandemic, in the United States, partisanship had become at least as much about personal identity as policy differences. Every personal decision could signal partisanship. By meticulously capturing the pandemic and partisanship, the authors warn of the ongoing difficulties of managing disasters in a divided country.

I needed a gripping story for a drive across Australia, 800 miles from Sydney to Adelaide. I wanted one that would grab me and keep me awake and alert. This one really got my brain fizzing because it lifts you out of today and transports you into a future that could easily come true (let's hope it doesn't!).

It's the sort of audiobook that has you still sitting in your car, listening to the end of the chapter in your driveway because you can't turn it off!

Although I don’t work in government, this is a book I’ll come back to whenever I need a reminder to put user needs ahead of process or wisdom about how to work inside a large bureaucracy to make that happen. Where Meltdown focuses on spectacular blow-ups, this book explores run-of-the-mill failures—like long, complicated online forms and websites that only load in specific, outdated browsers. (Though bigger failures, like the launch of healthcare.gov, get airtime too.)

I appreciated this book’s thoughtful analysis of how government software gets built—it goes beyond the stereotype of the incompetent government employee and digs into the underlying reasons that even competent and dedicated public servants can struggle to deliver critical software. Many of those reasons apply to private companies, too. 

This is the best book on the first great American political crisis of recent memory. It’s unlikely ever to be surpassed. 

Its author, an experienced journalist, offers up almost 700 pages of propulsively brisk prose about the astonishing corruption, amateurishness, and stunning incompetence of the presidential administration of Richard Nixon. Even for someone who knows much of the scandal, it’s revelatory.

Were the book’s characters for real? Why did such a natively intelligent president fall prey to such destructive paranoia and surround himself with such fools?

Read as an adventure story, the book equals such rip-snorting classics as Treasure Island, such noir novels as the best of Raymond Chandler, and such comedies as those of the preposterous ones of P. G. Wodehouse. Hard to put down, it’s as close to being definitive as possible. Unfortunately, it remains timely.  

I hope readers internalize this book's message: grappling with past threats to our democracy is vital in facing down future threats carrying a greater likelihood of success. 

Maddow’s impressively researched book recounts the period of U.S. history corresponding to the rise of Nazism in Germany and the spread of European fascism. Her laudable goal is ensuring more citizens know the story of leading American figures—captains of industry, Congressmen, and Governors—sympathetic to Nazism and willing to undermine vital democratic norms, embrace anti-Semitism, and engage in coordinated violence to bring fascism to the U.S., and of those unsung heroes who refused to let them succeed.

Maddow rightly views education as vital to ensuring that past isn’t prologue.

I am in awe of Erik Larson, a writer of such carefully researched histories that he will not report that a person smiled unless the expression is documented in multiple sources.

This story of the attack on Fort Sumter reads like a novel, as it describes the people and events that led to the start of the Civil War. I found myself moving quickly through the multiple short chapters, anxious to understand the many forces that led to the division of our nation.

Preventing Polarization is, as the title implies, a guide for educators on how to reduce polarization in the next generation. So, it’s unlikely to lead to immediate progress with polarization—but who knows, maybe some adults in positions of power might take some lessons from it as well.

Anyway, I love the premise here as I do think that education is probably crucial for long-term progress with this difficult part of human nature. Just as we must teach our kids to be tolerant and kind toward those from different racial and religious backgrounds or are different from ourselves in any number of ways—we must teach our kids to not be excessively effective polarized!

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. 

Anna Rosenberg is a name I never heard of, despite being a US History and US Government teacher. I was spellbound by the life she made for herself as a Hungarian immigrant, imprinting her stamp on this Country as a public servant, spanning President Roosevelt through Eisenhower.

I was entranced by how effortlessly she navigated the male-dominated political and military arenas, rising to become the first and only Female Assistant Secretary of Defense. I love her approach to always looking for a mutually agreeable solution to the problems she has to resolve. Having three daughters of my own, Anna Rosenberg is a role model I truly want my girls to emulate.