With 2019 coming to a close, we asked some of our scholars to tell us about their favorite books that they read this year. We’ve got something for everyone — from history to public policy to fiction. Just in time for last-second Christmas gift ideas, too.

Hal Brands — Resident Scholar, Foreign and Defense Policy

Modern geopolitics might well be said to have originated with the writings of British geographer Halford Mackinder. In the early 20th century, Mackinder popularized the notion of Eurasia as a distinct geopolitical space, and he argued that whoever controlled the Eurasian heartland would become the world’s dominant power. My book of the year, Super Continent: The Logic of Eurasian Integration by Kent Calder, explores the reemergence of this idea by demonstrating that the rise of China has brought back the concept of a coherent Eurasia.

The United States was able to achieve global power,
Calder reminds us, by using an integrated North American “super continent” as a
springboard to overseas theaters. In the same way, China’s Belt and Road
Initiative represents an effort to create a Beijing-centric geoeconomic and
geopolitical space spanning much of Eurasia. That project is both ambitious and
highly contingent — it is bringing China into contact, and conflict, with
actors from Southeast Asia to Europe.

The great value of Calder’s volume is that it reveals
the historical and theoretical underpinnings of Beijing’s bid to create a new
super continent in Eurasia — an effort that would seem quite familiar to some
of the great geopolitical thinkers of the past.

Daniel Cox — Research Fellow, Politics and Public Opinion

Growing up — so we are told — means letting go of the all the petty concerns and trivialities that defined our adolescent existence. One of the benefits of adulthood is supposed to be that we care less about goals such as being popular. Not so, writes child psychologist Mitch Prinstein in a fascinating book, Popular: Finding Happiness and Success in a World That Cares Too Much About the Wrong Kinds of Relationships. Prinstein presents persuasive evidence drawing from personal stories and research in social psychology to show that popularity is not simply a preoccupation of our high school selves, and that its effects last far beyond our teenage years.

Prinstein identifies
two distinct types of popularity: status and interpersonal likability (and only
rarely both). It is popularity that is based on likeability — not status (fame,
money, or Instagram likes) — that is associated with greater career success and
the ability to form more satisfying personal relationships. Status-based popularity actually
has long-term negative consequences; it’s associated with higher rates of
addiction, depression, and relationship challenges. This is a thought-provoking
exploration of how our early experiences with popularity shape how we engage
with others into adulthood, and how those behaviors may be changed with
intention.

Nick Eberstadt — Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy

History is
full of momentous “what ifs.” While the past is fixed, as Wellington
said shortly after Waterloo, “it was the nearest-run thing you ever saw in
your life.” A slightly different conclusion to that near-run thing would
have set 19th century Europe on a dramatically different course. 

Lately I’ve
been mulling another “what if” — this one in China. The Taiping Rebellion
(1850-1864) may have cost over 20 million lives, and it came within an ace of
overthrowing the decrepit Manchu court — and may well have done so had the West
not intervened in the Qing Dynasty’s favor.

This tragedy is the subject of Stephen R. Platt’s masterpiece, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom. (“Heavenly Kingdom” was the name that the charismatic and ultimately doomed rebel leader Hong Xiuquan assigned to the absolutist Christian-ish state he envisioned.) Platt’s account is learned, riveting, and beautifully written. It’s my favorite book of the year — not least for the thoughts it provokes.

What would
have happened if Hong and his forces had prevailed? Would China have been
spared its nightmare of 20th and 21st century totalitarianism? Would the
“Heavenly Kingdom’s” ostensibly reformist and pro-Western orientation have
altered the East Asia’s awful great power rivalry? Would liberalism have made
earlier, and more secure, beachheads in East Asia if this “Kingdom” had indeed
taken root in China in the 1860s?

Perhaps the
potentiality for liberalism on the Mainland may have been greater than many
assume — may still be greater today, for that matter. We can only wonder.
Platt’s saga of the Taiping Rebellion invites us to contemplate such “what ifs”
from this momentous road-not-taken.

John Konicki — Assistant Editor, AEIdeas; Research
Assistant, Economic Policy

The best book I read this year was actually released at the tail end of last year: Michael Tanner’s The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America’s Poor. In this book, Tanner reconciles his libertarian principles with a newfound understanding of the structural barriers faced by those in poverty. The result is a nuanced policy road-map that rejects both fatalistic criticisms of the “culture of poverty” and misguided calls for mindless redistribution. Tanner instead shows how changes to government policy — including housing deregulation, banking reform, and criminal justice reform — can allow America’s least fortunate to live self-sufficient lives by removing well-meaning but destructive barriers to economic opportunity.

I also read through the late Tom Wolfe’s four excellent novels this year, and my favorite was I Am Charlotte Simmons. The book is a well-paced and witty story of the titular character’s first semester of college, while also exploring — as Wolfe always does so well — the struggle for social status, with all of the arrogance, resentment, and emptiness that such a struggle can instill. The book was written fifteen years ago by a guy who was in his seventies at the time, so some of the college-age language is a bit dated, but Wolfe’s insight still rings true today.

Desmond Lachman — Research Fellow, Economic Policy

The past year has delivered two timely and important books on political economy that challenge the way in which we see the world. The first is Adam Tooze’s monumental Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World, and the second is Thomas Phillipon’s provocative The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets.

Adam Tooze’s Crashed
is must, albeit long, reading for anyone who wants to understand what went
wrong in the global political economy over the past decade. A particular
strength of this book is that it provides a detailed description of the
economic and political doom–loop created by the simultaneous crises in the
transatlantic dollar-based financial system and the Eurozone. Tooze is also
masterful in connecting the dots between the economic failures of the past
decade and the dismaying rise in political populism across the globe.

For his part, Thomas Phillipon provides a welcome and
convincing wakeup call for a more vigorous US anti-trust policy. He argues that
this is necessary to reduce the substantial barriers to entry across US
industries that have been sustained by active lobbying and campaign
contributions. He meticulously demonstrates how the US economy has dangerously
lost competitiveness over the past two decades and how this loss has hurt US
consumers and wage earners. 

Yuval Levin — Resident Scholar; Director, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies; Editor in Chief, National Affairs

The impossibly tangled thicket of problems facing the West in the 21st century doesn’t lend itself to easy analysis. Historical narrative and social-scientific distance only get us so far. Sometimes a great autobiography can go deeper. Michael Brendan Dougherty’s My Father Left Me Ireland is a model of how that can work.

Mr. Dougherty’s book is first and foremost a gorgeous,
moving memoir — the tale of a mostly fatherless childhood told with love and
gratitude but without recoiling from painful truths. These truths gradually
dawn upon the author as the anticipation of the birth of his first child leaves
him reflecting upon his own parents and upon the question of what fathers are
for. He pursues that question through a series of seven letters to his father.
And his answer emphasizes history and identity in particular: Our parents don’t
merely keep us fed and housed, they offer us a connection to a living past. The
fraying of family bonds in our time frays that connection, and the resulting
deformations unavoidably implicate culture, community, religion and nation. Mr.
Dougherty doesn’t force his story into any political mold, but in telling it
beautifully, he brings us closer to an understanding of the peculiar character
of our troubled time.

This contribution originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal, here.

Aparna Mathur — Resident Scholar, Economic Policy

My favorite read from this year is Myra MacDonald’s Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War. Having grown up in India, the book is appealing because it is the story of how and why two contentious neighbors — India and Pakistan — have evolved in diametrically opposite ways since the 1947 Partition.

MacDonald recounts a series of overt and covert wars ranging from the long-standing dispute over Kashmir that still continues, the conflict over Bangladesh, the hijacking of the Indian Airlines plane, the Kargil war between the two nuclear powers, and the attacks on Mumbai (see another fantastic book: The Siege) and the Indian Parliament.

But more than that, this
is a story of choices made by the leaders of India and Pakistan that have had
long-term implications for both countries. Did Pakistan become too complacent
about its geopolitical strength after conducting its nuclear tests? Did that
tip the balance towards a focus on maintaining its military, rather than
economic strength? Has India done right by Jammu and Kashmir? How did Pakistan
achieve greater economic prosperity in the years immediately following the
Partition, and why does India appear to be doing better recently?

These questions need to
be asked repeatedly, because there is scope for peace and prosperity if the two
countries’ leaders heed the warnings of the past.

Brent Orrell — Resident Fellow, Domestic Policy

In our high-technology world, we continually encourage
our children to acquire degrees that enable them to “do something.” We
discourage them from wading into the liberal arts waters, because after all,
“what are you doing to do with that?”

David Epstein’s book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, makes the case that only focusing on narrow, technical credentials may be the fast-track to career obsolescence, personal frustration, and burnout. Epstein argues that what is most needed in a technology-dominated world is broad education and experience that prepares workers to remain flexible and creative as they navigate changing labor market demands.

Epstein analogizes career development to professional
sports by comparing Tiger Woods with Roger Federer. Woods started dragging a
golf club behind him as soon as he could walk, whereas Federer’s tennis-coach
mother encouraged him to develop diverse athletic talents. Federer didn’t
choose tennis until he was a teenager.

Epstein predicts the future belongs to the Federers
who have the interests and capacities to transition between domains of work in
a rapidly evolving economy. By all means, pursue understanding and competency
in the use of technology. If you are extremely gifted, make your mark in the
technological frontier. If you’re closer to the center of skill distribution,
try to balance your strengths and weaknesses through diverse education and
training that shapes and prepares the whole person.

Mark Perry — Scholar, Economic Policy

There is probably not a more dangerous and disturbing
trend today than the rise in the popularity of socialism, especially among
young people. Despite the miserable historical record of repeated failures that
result when a country embraces socialism, it’s being repackaged and promoted
today by modern socialists as “Democratic socialism.”

Given the rising popularity of democratic socialism and its intoxicating appeal, the 2019 book Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World couldn’t be more timely. Economists Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell travel internationally from Venezuela to Cuba to North Korea to Russia to China, reporting on the failures of modern-day socialism around the world with wit, humor, and a strong dose of economic insight and analysis.

Lawson and Powell supplement a wealth of economic data
with their firsthand global experience of socialism in eight different
countries to verify that socialism consistently fails to deliver on any of the
idealistic promises it makes. Instead, what is supposed to be a socialist
utopia ends up in catastrophe, misery, starvation, poverty, and sickness. Socialism Sucks is a book that every
American who values economic freedom and economic prosperity should read,
especially those young Americans currently enamored with democratic socialism.

James Pethokoukis — Editor, AEIdeas; DeWitt Wallace Fellow

The Industrial Revolution was a secular miracle, eventually boosting human living standards to levels unimaginable to those who lived in earlier times. And it was a collection of ideas and values known as liberalism that greatly helped generate that wondrous leap forward for humanity and remains essential for our continued advance. All of which is explained in economist Deirdre Nansen McCloskey’s lively Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All. Certainly a needed intellectual antidote for increasing prevalence today of illberal attitudes.

A second book I read and loved this year also describes a sort of miracle. In 2017’s Gorbachev: His Life and Times, William Taubman tries to explain the never-should-of happened rise of the last leader of the Soviet Union, someone a close aide described as a “genetic error in the system” due to his decency and liberalism. Of course, Russia never turned into the social democracy that Gorbachev eventually came to envision for the post-Soviet state and instead slid into oligarchic authoritarianism. A denouement that is both tragic and a tantalizing what-if bit of history.

Danielle Pletka — Senior Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies

Like many descendants of families that lived through the Holocaust, I read a lot about World War II. In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners was greeted with derision by Holocaust experts for stating bluntly that antisemitism infused German life and that average Germans knew about and endorsed the aims of the Final Solution. Fast forward 19 years, and Nicholas Stargardt’s The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945 makes an apt sequel to Goldhagen’s book. 

Stargardt doesn’t grind a particular ax or condemn a
nation; rather, he draws from diaries, letters home and contemporaneous
reporting to make clear that far from being the innocent dupes of a few evil
men, many (let us charitably not say “most”) Germans signed on to the brutal
execution of those labeled inferior humans. What stuck with me was the
horrifying fact that more disabled Germans were killed by the Nazis than German
Jews were killed in the Holocaust. In other words, even apart from the story we
know that shames Germany to this day, there is another tale of callous
indifference to the lives of others. Many of those disabled were in institutions
run by the church. Only two or three church leaders protested early in the days
of this euthanasia campaign. They were then silent.

This stayed with me in 2019 because, for yet another
year, America has stood by and watched as Syrians die in numbers that have
mounted beyond half a million. At what point, knowing that children, women, and
men are being murdered for no reason other than that their lives do not matter,
are we all complicit in their deaths?

Not too cheery, and I’m sorry for that. But worth a
read to remind us that “never again” doesn’t mean much anymore.

Angela Rachidi — Resident Scholar, Poverty Studies

This past year I read The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, largely because current events sparked my interest in the personal lives of past presidents. Author Annette Gordon-Reed masterfully describes the complicated and intertwined lives of multiple families who shared a connection to Thomas Jefferson through blood, slavery, and, perhaps most intriguingly, a combination of both.

Gordon-Reed focuses much of her attention
on the Heming women, including Elizabeth, the enslaved grandmother of
Jefferson’s mixed-race children, and Sally, their enslaved mother. The
historical record of these women largely comes from Jefferson himself, as well
as record-keeping by other white men in their lives. These scant accounts offer
a window into the tragic — yet seemingly normal, given the times — lives of the
Hemingses. It is difficult to comprehend what these women were forced to
endure, both physically and emotionally, enslaved at the hands of a great
American leader.

Even harder to understand is the
disconnect between Jefferson’s revolutionary work with his home life.
Gordon-Reed leaves it up to the reader to decipher how a man who advocated so
vigorously for personal liberty could enslave his own children. This book left
me with all sorts of questions and mixed emotions that endured long after I
finished the last page.

Dalibor Rohac — Resident Scholar, Foreign and Defense Policy

While I have not yet but scratched its surface, the 824-page tome From Peoples Into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe by Berkeley’s John Connelly promises to be an important and authoritative piece of scholarship on Central and Eastern European history. Connelly documents the emergence of nationalist movements in multiethnic political units in the 18th and 19th centuries, organized often around questions of language codification and language rights, and the gradual displacement of empires by ethno-nation-states. The nationalist movements are presented as responses to the Habsburgs’ earlier efforts to create a unitary state out of what had long been a covenantal and decentralized form of government.

The book then continues with a discussion
of the region’s 20th-century history when Central and Eastern European
nationalisms interacted, with varying results, with two totalitarian
ideologies: Nazism and communism. The variation in the countries’ paths to
communism, together with the specific shapes that the regimes took at their
various stages, is particularly instructive — from some of the most oppressive
forms of totalitarianism known to humankind to regimes that relied primarily on
the resignation and demoralization of their people and proved surprisingly
fragile in 1989. No end of history occurs in Connelly’s account, however, as
illustrated by the current forms of authoritarian populism.

Christina Hoff Sommers — Resident Scholar, Society and Culture

I nominate Leo Damrosch’s The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age. In the winter of 1763, Samuel Johnson was feeling bleak. To cheer him up, his friends organized a weekly get-together at London’s Turk’s Head Tavern. For the next twenty years, these friends would meet on Friday evenings to socialize, debate, and learn from one another in what became known as “the Club.” Its members included Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and of course, the redoubtable James Boswell.

Damrosch vividly conveys the brutalities, eccentricities, and sheer verve of 18th-century London, and he offers an intimate look into the lives (and foibles) of some of its greatest minds. (Burke may have been the leading orator of his day, but he mortified friends with his ridiculous puns.) Ideas we now take for granted and shape the way we live were hashed out over these Friday-night gabfests.

The Club was men-only, but Damrosch introduces readers to the “shadow-club” that included some of Johnson’s most valued and learned friends: Hannah More, Fanny Burney and Elizabeth Carter. Damrosch, much like his subjects, is erudite, insightful, and funny. I found myself wondering (praying) if we are still producing literary scholars of his caliber. Boswell described the Club as a “constellation of talent that has rarely if ever been equaled.” Damrosch, professor emeritus at Harvard, fits right in.

Katharine B. Stevens — Resident Scholar, Poverty Studies

It can be hard to remember these days that US history didn’t begin with the 2016 presidential election. One of the best books I read this year, The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, is a reminder of how unfortunate that is.

The most recent work of Pulitzer-Prize winning author David McCullough, The Pioneers is a gripping chronicle of a fascinating era in our nation’s history: the settlement of the “howling wilderness” west of the Ohio River under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, enacted that year by the Congress of the Confederation of the United States. Launched by a group of pioneers from New England, who established Marietta, Ohio in 1788 as the first permanent US settlement north and west of the Ohio River, expansion into the Northwest Territory was governed by three remarkable conditions: free universal education, freedom of religion, and most notably, prohibition of slavery.

Towards the end of the book, McCullough describes Harriet Beecher Stowe traveling up the Ohio River, passing by Marietta on her way home to New England to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His telling inspired me to finally read Stowe’s extraordinary novel (which I’d somehow never done); I was delighted to discover that Tolstoy described it as “one of the greatest productions of the human mind” for good reason.

Ryan Streeter — Director, Domestic Policy Studies

The best book I read this year was Peter Heather’s The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. Heather is one of the world’s foremost scholars of the barbarians, and his account of the economic and social trends among barbarian tribes in the late 4th century is riveting. Combining archaeological evidence and seemingly every written record in existence, he shows that Rome was doing just fine up through the late 300s, contrary to a number of popular narratives. Its biggest geopolitical threat was Persia, not the barbarians, who had always been unruly but never a big threat because of Rome’s years of negotiated settlements with them.

By the time the Huns invaded from the east and
ransacked Europe, the Goths, Vandals, Franks, Alans, and other tribes had
developed stable commerce with each other and Rome, utilizing technology and
goods they picked up from the Romans. Many of them were Christians and had
served in the Roman army. After the Huns were defeated, the barbarians had
grown strong enough to take advantage of Rome’s concentration of military
resources to counter Persia while leaving its resources thinner closer to home.
Heather’s book is a lengthy chronicle of how a globally dominant empire can
collapse when it gets too large and allows its enemies to use its tools against
itself.

Stan Veuger — Resident Scholar, Economic Policy

My book recommendation for this year is Masha Gessen’s The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. It is the depressing story of Russia’s descent back into authoritarian kleptocracy, organized largely around the experiences of four people between 1982 and 1985 — old millennials basically, think our colleague Mike Strain.

The titles of the book’s six parts (Born in the USSR;
Revolution; Unraveling; Resurrection; Protest; Crackdown) give you the basic
idea: glimmers of hope and change ultimately crushed by the Putin regime. While
the broad strokes are familiar, this more detailed rendering instills
additional feelings of frustration.

The book’s pacing fluctuates a little more than that
of most non-fiction books as it shifts back and forth between the macro and the
micro, the public and the personal. (The macro-level analysis relies heavily on
our colleague Nick Eberstadt’s work, pleasingly.) This works quite well, both
stylistically to maintain the reader’s interest and substantively because of
the — inevitably, given the USSR’s totalitarianism — tight relationship between
the personal and the political for our protagonists. The individual experiences
recounted show the wide variety of shapes this can take: from Zhanna’s direct
exposure to politics through her father, a senior politician, to Lyosha’s
persecution and eventual exile as the state cracks down on LGBT rights as a
part of and an excuse for a broader crackdown on political freedom and human
rights.

Adam J. White — Resident Scholar, Politics and Public Opinion

Today the Supreme Court faces a barrage of attacks on its legitimacy. But this is nothing new: In 1788, the Anti-Federalist “Brutus” predicted that giving politically unaccountable judges power to declare statutes unconstitutional would be ruinous. “[T]hey are independent of the people, of the legislature, and of every power under heaven,” he wrote. “Men placed in this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself.” Alexander Hamilton famously replied, in Federalist No. 78, that judges would be restrained, exercising “neither force nor will, but merely judgment.” Hamilton won the argument but raised a profound question: what kind of “judgment” does the American Constitution require?

Anyone interested in this timeless American question should turn to Greg Weiner’s fine new book, The Political Constitution: The Case Against Judicial Supremacy. Weiner explains what republican constitutionalism truly entails, drawing from the wisdom of James Madison and others. He offers an antidote to those who would commit American government to micromanagement by judges and to those who would commit it to micromanagement by technocrats — twin sides of the same anti-republican coin.

I’ve eagerly awaited this book. The fact that its arrival coincides with Greg’s own arrival at AEI provides still more cause for celebration.

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