The best books on statesmen

The Story of Eliza Hamilton is an exploration of how Eliza went from a young girl during colonial times to an important keeper of history. She was married to Alexander Hamilton, a Founding Father who helped form the United States. After he died in a duel, she lived for another 50 years and started an orphanage and free school. It is because of Eliza that we know so much about Alexander and his place in history.

Nikola Tesla gave us the radio, robots, and remote control. His electric motor runs our appliances and factories, yet he has been largely overlooked by history. When his first breakthrough—alternating current, the basis for the electric grid—pitted him against Thomas Edison’s direct-current empire, Tesla’s superior technology prevailed. Unfortunately, he had little business sense and could not capitalize on this success. His most advanced ideas were unrecognized for decades: forty years in the case of the radio patent, longer still for his ideas on laser beam technology. Although penniless during his later years, he never stopped imagining. In the early 1900s, he designed plans for cell phones, death-ray weapons, and interstellar communications. His ideas have lived on to shape the modern economy. 

While writing for a kids’ TV series, The Magic School Bus, I became amused by the level of political correctness and censorship for children. It led me to the question: “What will be the last minority to be recognized and embraced by our multicultural society?” My answer: vampires. They’re a persecuted bunch with special needs, and they suffer from the hate crime of staking.

Suck it Up is the story of a teenage boy, Morning McCobb, who’s a rather wimpy vampire; he drinks a soy-blood substitute called Blood Lite. Morning is selected as the first Undead American to come out of the casket and prove that vampires are citizen worthy. Of course, he falls in love with a mortal girl, triggering his baser instincts, and the troubles begin.

The book portrays the American inclination to experiment with forms of settlement, evident in both utopian and pragmatic efforts at reconceiving how and in what shape our towns, cities, and urban regions should grow. Such aspirational approaches to community and city-building have served as a parallel to the political efforts to establish a republic dedicated to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” As post-revolutionary America expanded the frontiers of social and political institutions, the reevaluation of old-world institutions and traditions also extended to pondering how better to gather spatially in communities. 

Each of the chapters explores an effort, cultural trend, or belief about what makes a good neighborhood, a better town, a more humane city, and about some of the consequences of proceeding to build such places. 

A Persistent Peace tells the story of John’s journey as a wild Duke student who decided to become a priest and journeyed to Israel in 1982 to see where Jesus lived, only to find himself in the middle of its war on Lebanon. While visiting the Chapel of the Beatitudes, where Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” he saw Israeli warplanes fly over the Sea of Galilee on their way to bomb Lebanon, and decided then and there to dedicate his life to peace and nonviolence. From then on, as a peacemaking priest, he’s traveled the warzones of the world, spoken about peace to a million people, organized hundreds of demonstrations against war and nuclear weapons, been arrested 85 times in nonviolent civil disobedience, and spent nearly a year in prison.

With the sole exception of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, was the single most important publication of the American Revolution. In the winter of 1775-76, a time when colonists remained deeply reticent about the prospect of leaving the British Empire, Common Sense convinced tens of thousands of readers that an independent United States was not only possible, but was also urgently necessary. The alternative, Paine explained in the plainest of terms, was tyranny.

In the years following, Paine came to see new barriers to American independence—not kings and empires, but political division and factionalism. Technology, Paine believed, offered a solution. Tom Paine’s Iron Bridge: Building a United States is the story of Paine’s quest to solve a political problem with technology.

Memory is Our Home is a thirty-year account that reveals the vibrant life of my family and of Eastern European, twentieth-century Jewish history and culture. The firsthand accounts link together Jewish life during the interwar years, Poland under the Nazi’s murderess grip, and the fate of Jews surviving throughout Russia and Uzbekistan during WWII.

My mother survived against all odds, and in the midst of all the tragedy, she even experienced love. What followed was a shocking repatriation home to Poland, to the “vast graveyard” and Jewish life under a new kind of oppression, communism. Interwoven with my mother’s journals are stories she told me throughout my life and my own recollections from life in the shadows of the Holocaust aftermath into the late 1960s.

Before Winston Churchill made history, he made news. To a great extent, the news made him too. If it was his own efforts that made him a hero, it was the media that made him a celebrity - and it has been considerably responsible for perpetuating his memory and shaping his reputation in the years since his death.

The story of Churchill and the news is, on one level, a tale of tight deadlines, off-the-record briefings, and smoke-filled newsrooms, of wartime summits that were turned into stage-managed global media events, and of often tense interactions with journalists and powerful press proprietors, such as Lords Northcliffe, Rothermere, and Beaverbrook. Uncovering the symbiotic relationship between Churchill's political life and his media life, and the ways in which these were connected to his personal life, I ask if there was a 'public Churchill' whose image was at odds with the behind-the-scenes reality, or whether, in fact, his private and public selves became seamlessly blended as he adjusted to living in the constant glare of the media spotlight.

Britain’s Greatest Prime Minister: Lord Liverpool unpicks two centuries of Whig history to redeem Lord Liverpool (1770-1828) from ‘arch-mediocrity’ and establish him as the greatest political leader the country has ever seen. Past biographers of Lord Liverpool have not sufficiently acknowledged the importance of his foremost skill: economic policy (including fiscal, monetary, and banking system questions). Here, Hutchinson’s experience in the finance sector provides a specialised perspective on Liverpool’s economic legacy.

From his adept handling of unparalleled economic and social difficulties, to his strategic defeat of Napoleon and unprecedented approach to the subsequent peace process, Liverpool is shown to have set Britain’s course for prosperity and effective government for the following century. In addition to picking apart his domestic and foreign policy, Hutchinson advances how a proper regard for Liverpool’s career might have changed the structure and policies of today’s government for the better.

This will be the third and final volume of my three-volume life of Napoleon, which will be published in summer, 2022. It covers the years 1811-1821, delving into the weaknesses of Napoleon’s hegemony at its height, in 1811, and explores the complex reasons behind his fateful decision to invade Russia in 1812, particularly Napoleon’s failure to understand the character of his opponent and nemesis, Tsar Alexander I. Russia was not the end, however, and I spend a great deal of time examining the last years of the wars, and what they reveal about the man and his empire in their last crisis, drawing extensively on the new edition of his correspondence and the rich modern historiography spawned by the drama of these years.