With 2023 nearly upon us, we asked AEI’s research fellows to tell us about their favorite books they read in 2022. From wonkish policy analysis to popular history to engrossing fiction, our recommendations include something for just about everybody.
Samuel J. Abrams—Nonresident Senior Fellow, Domestic Policy Studies
This year, I taught a course about geography and wanted to showcase New York City as a laboratory for my students. The city and its history can be overwhelmingly complex, so I ended up adding two books to my reading list for my students that I absolutely loved. Both showcased the import of the past impacting the city’s present culture and politics. They were so much fun to read that I wanted to share them here. The first is Russell Shorto’s epic telling of the power struggles to set up institutions and a legal regime in the pre-English colonial era when the Dutch established a colony in the city. The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America is a quick read and helps explain so much about the city’s attitudes toward creativity, tolerance, and commerce centuries later. The second is Christiane Bird’s wonderful history A Block in Time: A New York City History at the Corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street. Bird unravels New York City’s complex history of socio-economic and demographic change, mobility, and power by looking at one particular block in the city which remains a focal point of commerce, culture, and the city’s cosmopolitanism today and has morphed remarkably over the past three centuries.
Unrelated to my teaching, I also really enjoyed Hugh Eakin’s Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America. The book is not really about Picasso himself but the art world ranging from the dealers, curators, collectors, politicians, and critics and told stories of how artistic movements and taste move through societies. In particular, it was thrilling to learn more about Alfred H. Barr and his work as director of New York’s MOMA almost a century ago to save so much of Picasso’s and many others’ work from the Nazis in World War II, changing the way America looks at the creation of culture. A single, Barr-led exhibition in New York—Picasso: Forty Years of His Art—launched Picasso in America, defined MoMA as we know it today, and was instrumental in shifting the focus of the art world from Paris to New York.
Kirsten Axelsen—Nonresident Fellow, Economic Policy Studies
On a Night of a Thousand Stars is Andrea Yaryura Clark’s debut fiction novel. It tells the story of Argentina’s “Dirty War” where the oppressive dictatorship made thousands of people disappear. Clark’s novel is based on real people and their experiences, including the authors. She is from Argentina and grew up in the political turmoil of the 1970s. She returned after college and spent time interviewing and documenting the life of the children of people who disappeared in order to capture some of the regime’s effect on their lives and what their parents’ legacy has meant for them. The book reads as a love story, a thriller with intensity, and a commentary on repression and the inability of any regime, no matter how powerful, to really make anyone, or their ideology, actually disappear from record.
Bird Uncaged: An Abolitionist’s Freedom Song is Marlon Peterson’s memoir about his young life and the course of events, experiences, and decisions where his life took a course from being a religious and studious young person to a man who lived his 20s in prison for his involvement in a tragic and serious crime. Peterson’s memoir is one of the most honest depictions of a person’s life and experience I have read. Peterson shares both intense ugliness and kindness in himself and others. Sharing what he did and observed in his time in prison helps to demonstrate that incarceration is a mechanism unsuited for reform and rehabilitation. Peterson has dedicated his career to helping young people avoid incarceration and also to sharing truth about the experience.
Claude Barfield—Senior Fellow, Economic Policy Studies
Much has been written in praise of Chris Miller’s Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, but as another scribe on technology and the semiconductor industry, here are some brief added reflections.
In assessing the reasons behind this outstanding achievement, my first point relates not to substance but to the book’s structure. Given the complexity of the semiconductor decade’s long story, the decision to break up the narrative into chunk-sized “chiplets” was a stroke of genius. It allowed Miller—and the readers who followed—to bite off manageable bits of the history and analysis without interrupting the cumulative depth of the unfolding narrative. Second, and linked to the point above, the interweaving of fascinating (and, on occasion, repulsive) personal biographies of the engineering giants who led the industry, gives the reader a human link to the technological ingenuity chronicled in the book.
Finally, from someone who has wrestled with succinctly defining and explaining complex technical phenomena without “dumbing down” the analysis, Miller’s clarity and economy in describing the complicated links in the semiconductor supply chain—from software to equipment to manufacturing techniques—is a rare gift (though, no doubt born from endless hours of research) that goes far to explain why this work is commanding such a wide audience and acclaim.
Karlyn Bowman—Distinguished Senior Fellow Emeritus, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
Twenty-twenty-two marked the 60th anniversary of the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s great work, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The slim volume follows an ordinary prisoner, a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, from reveille at 5 a.m. to lights out in one of Joseph Stalin’s network of Soviet prison work camps. While not autobiographical, the novel surely drew on Solzhenitsyn’s own experiences in the Gulag from 1945 to 1953. The book was Solzhenitsyn’s first appearance in print, and it was published in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir (New World) after it had been submitted for publication to Nikita Khrushchev, who authorized its publication. The magazine’s editor, Alexander Tvardovsky described the novel as “vivid and original in its unpretentiousness and down to earth simplicity.” For those of us who live in the comfort of the West, it is almost impossible to imagine the privation of those camps—the freezing temperatures (it is 16 below when the book opens), the rations of stale bread and gruel, the thin felt boots, the interminable line ups to account for all the prisoners—that the men in the camps endured. Yet millions of nameless ordinary people experienced this fate. Shukhov’s trumped-up sentence was for 10 years. It seemed somehow appropriate to read the book when Vladimir Putin announced the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Elisabeth Braw—Senior Fellow, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
Many people have read Vaclav Havel’s essays, but far fewer have read his dramas. That ought to be remedied, because not only are they superb works in the genre of absurd drama: like other masterpieces in this genre, they have also stood the test of time and can, in fact, tell us a great deal about our own time.
My recommendation this Christmas is The Memorandum (published in its English translation in 1965 and in a new translation, as The Memo, in 2006). It focuses on Josef Gross, a senior bureaucrat who finds himself constantly battling new and baffling problems for which nobody seems responsible and which everyone still seems to have signed off on. Gross discovers to his surprise that a new office language, Ptydepe, has been introduced. He then discovers that everyone has been ordered to attend new Ptydepe classes and that a Ptydepe Translation Center has been created, which will be replaced by a Ptydepe Reference Center when everyone has mastered Ptydepe. “We knew you’d create obstacles and therefore we arranged it so you wouldn’t see what we were after until we were strong enough to surmount your obstacles,” Gross’s deputy tells him.
The urge to create new-speak, to which everyone has to submit themselves, is not confined to The Memorandum or indeed to the fictional world. It’s real, and regrettably it’s having another resurgence.
Timothy P. Carney—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
The sexual revolution and 21st century feminism have created a twisted sexual ethic. Young women have sex on first dates because they think they ought to, and they put up with degradations because they are afraid of sounding judgy or prudish.
Christine Emba is a millennial woman, and no conservative, which makes her the perfect person to chronicle the state of sex, love, and self-image among today’s 20- and 30-somethings.
Emba’s audience is exactly these millennial and Gen Z men and women caught up in this depressing scene. In her book, Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, she tries to make a case for some basic truths—men and women are different, sex isn’t simple, liberation is not an end in itself—on terms that secular young progressives can accept.
Her argumentation is gentle and persuasive, and her interviews are eye-opening and heartbreaking.
Matthew Continetti—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
My reading in 2022 was filled with biographies and memoirs. Here are some of my favorites.
Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words delivers on its title. Read it to learn, directly from the source, about the life and thought of an American hero.
I started James Patterson by James Patterson: The Stories of My Life hoping to unlock the secrets of the bestselling novelist’s success. By the time I finished, I still hadn’t grasped the mystery. I think it may have to do with time management, strategic collaboration, and writing extremely short chapters. In any case, I had a lot of fun living vicariously through Patterson’s account of his career.
Alec Nevala-Lee’s Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction is a group biography that illustrates how a coterie of motivated and determined eccentrics can change the world in profound and unpredictable ways.
Darryl Pinckney’s Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan evokes the New York intellectual scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It’s a gripping and elegiac introduction to the world of literary journalism, and to the personality and prose of the inimitable Elizabeth Hardwick.
Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation is a series of essays about movies that formed the famed director’s worldview and aesthetic. Reading it is the closest many of us will ever come to having a conversation with the man behind Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino is as intense on the page as he is on screen. This was probably the most enjoyable book I read in the past 12 months.
Finally, over Thanksgiving weekend, I revisited Tom Bethell’s The Electric Windmill: An Inadvertent Autobiography. Bethell, who died in 2021, was a conservative journalist whose column appeared monthly in The American Spectator for decades. Making my way through this unjustly neglected collection, first published in 1988, I found that Bethell’s profiles of “longshoreman philosopher” Eric Hoffer and anti-Communist icon Sidney Hook still hold up. Bethell’s curiosity and dry wit enlivened his reporting on politics, economics, philosophy, and science. A note for young writers: Find a copy of The Electric Windmill and study how Bethell approached our complex world with skepticism, pathos, and humanity. His work will inspire you just as it inspired me.
Robert Doar—President, American Enterprise Institute
I have three favorite books in 2022.
Of course, the first is by an AEI scholar. The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism by Matthew Continetti (Basic Books, 2022) is a tremendous history of the individuals, institutions, and ideas that have shaped conservatism in America. Continetti shows how nationalism and populism have always been legitimate parts of the conservative movement that we can’t ignore or dismiss. In the book’s last chapter especially, Continetti outlines a balanced path forward for conservatives to reunite our movement and our country.
In a year of important political memoirs, Vice President Mike Pence’s So Help Me God (Simon & Schuster, 2022) was the most important one I read. Vice President Pence tells how his faith and family guided him through a long career in public life—and ultimately, inspired his commitment to our country and the Constitution, despite astonishing disloyalty from the president he had served so faithfully.
The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams by Stacy Schiff (Little, Brown & Company 2022) is a beautifully-written depiction of a master political operator who never gave up in his quest for freedom and independence. Most Americans know the name “Sam Adams,” but they should really learn the story of this famous Boston patriot. Schiff’s biography is a great place to start.
Nicholas Eberstadt—Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy
Yes: America is in a bad patch nowadays. Public confidence in almost all institutions is slumping down to new measured lows; nearly two-thirds of the country say we are “on the wrong track”; and close to three-quarters of Americans think US children will be less well off financially than their parents.
Yet there is every reason to believe our current woes are temporary—not some permanent new dismal. Evidence for the case that a future of almost unlimited plenty can await our descendants—all human descendants, in fact—is marshalled elegantly and compellingly in Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.
In this commanding, learned, and highly readable study, Cato’s Marian Tupy and BYU’s Gale Pooley systematically demonstrate the “deeply counterintuitive” (p.2) statistical truth that “the abundance of resources grows at a faster rate than population” (p.2) in our modern era. It can continue to do so for the generations ahead, they argue, so long as we permit human ingenuity (what the late economist Julian Simon, a hero in Tupy and Pooley’s account, termed “the ultimate resource”) to work its wonders. Those wonders include the escape from absolute poverty for the overwhelming majority of humanity over the past two centuries, and remarkable improvements in material living standards in every part of the world over that same timeframe.
“Superabundance” write Tupy and Pooley, “depends on two main components: population and freedom” (p. 401). We can throw away the magic lamp that generates superabundance, they warn: by discarding the liberal institutions (including property rights) that reward creativity, or by embracing destructive ideologies—including the radical anti-human variant of environmentalism that operates, in their words, as an unfalsifiable “secular religion” (p.391). The opportunity for ever more superabundance is ours to lose—but it is already in our grasp.
Jim Harper—Nonresident Senior Fellow, Technology Policy Studies
In a blog post seeking to debunk “artificial intelligence” this past year, I defined intelligence conveniently as existing “when an agent (typically human, possibly machine) draws information and ideas from diverse fields to enlighten another field.” Why is that a convenient definition? Because it allows me to feel intelligent—or at least lay the groundwork for it—in my reading.
The literary cross-pollination winner for me this year was How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch by Sushma Subramanian (Columbia University Press 2021). Our neglected sense of touch is quite cobbled together by the body. It’s fascinating to learn about it and imagine how we’ll soon have devices that depict touch the way TV depicts moving images. But the highlight for me was how the book reveals that information and communication are one and the same thing inside the body—a good mind-bender for one who works on information policy.
To China: 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows: A Memoir (Crown 2021)—a 2021 recommendation of my colleague Kori Schake—is the autobiography of Ai Weiwei, Chinese dissident and artist. The history he writes of his family and himself is a way of gaining comprehension about a perplexing nation and culture. As an artist’s book should, there are inserts. Will China see more raised middle fingers and skirts, or fewer?
Before Hong Kong was China, a pivotal meeting of the early Bitcoin community was held there—a follow-on to an earlier “Scaling Bitcoin” meeting in Montreal. Both were pivotal to what would become the “blocksize debate,” or something harsher. In The Blocksize War: The Battle for Control over Bitcoin’s Protocol Rules, Jonathan Bier ably documents a turning point in the history of the leading cryptocurrency. For some, a technical choice about Bitcoin’s throughput secured it once and for all against the depredations time was sure to bring. For others, that choice smashed the cryptocurrency world, creating the Babel of coins and tokens in which charlatans and incompetents currently thrive.
Mark Jamison—Nonresident Senior Fellow, Technology Policy Studies
Most years I spend time with narratives about people or companies so that I can learn through others’ experiences. Three such books stood out to me in 2022. Two are Thomas Sowell’s A Personal Odyssey and Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell by Jason Riley. I had found Sowell’s books Knowledge and Decisions, The Vision of the Anointed, and A Conflict of Visions so insightful that I jumped at these chances to understand his intellectual journey. The books explain how economic evidence took him from being an avowed Marxist to an economic conservative, but they offer so much more. His competitive spirit, intellectual honesty, and adherence to evidence and logic show up at an early age. His unwillingness to succumb to racism or to abuse from authority figures provide lessons that persons of any age and in any context should find useful and inspiring. If you read these books about his life and some of the many books he has written, you will be left wondering why he has not received a Nobel Prize in economics.
Another worthwhile read is The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley. PayPal’s founders and earliest employees have made outsized impacts on information technology industries. They’ve founded or been instrumental in the formation of Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, LinkedIn, and many others. The book pulls no punches in describing the ambition, creativeness, mistakes, and egos that shaped Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and others, and how their mixes of talents shaped their company. Lessons to watch for include how to know when you have held onto an idea for too long, recognize your own flaws, escape financial disaster, learn from customers, and bury hatchets for the greater good.
Joshua T. Katz—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
I recently reread Rose Macaulay’s delicious novel The Towers of Trebizond, in part because its famous opening—“‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass”— earned a cameo in an article I published on first words. As it happens, a much earlier novel of hers, What Not, hitherto unknown to me, has now been reissued by MIT Press in its “Radium Age” series. Its first sentence weighs in at 137 words, but don’t let that deter you. The work, which influenced Brave New World, is a love story filled with witty aperçus about topics that still occupy us a century later: government surveillance, “training” courses, propaganda, and the questions “Did brains matter so greatly after all? Were the clever happier than the fools?”
But who reads anything anymore? Fourteen years ago, when Mark Bauerlein published The Dumbest Generation, I and many others were skeptical of his doom-laden predictions. Just how wrong we were, and his sequel, The Dumbest Generation Grows up, tells a sorry tale. Bauerlein has a remarkable ability to produce long, lyrical sentences about cultural illiteracy in the age of the sound bite—a jarring combination. “Everyone deserves to be happy” is the mantra of the day, and yet so many people are neither happy nor, it seems, willing to use their brains.
Kevin R. Kosar—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
Good books can help one better see why things are as they are. For the person who wonders “What is WRONG with the media?!” there is Chris Stirewalt’s Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back. He explains that outraging readers is the media’s business model in the 21st century. While this might help MSNBC and the like keep the lights on, it comes at the cost of gratuitously inflaming our politics.
A second eye-opener is Camper English’s Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails. Until a century ago, medicine, food, and alcohol often were commingled into singular products. The ancient beer of the Middle East was thick like gruel and packed nutrients. From the Dark Ages through the early 20th century, drinks laced with herbs were prescribed for myriad maladies. The reader of Doctors and Distillers who visits a bar will notice that some of these health tonics continue to be sold, such as Fernet Branca and Dubonnet, as mere hooch, thanks to the medical experts and the pill industry. But take it from Dr. Kosar, if you suffer phlegm, make a toddy (hot water, honey, & whiskey).
Desmond Lachman—Senior Fellow, Economic Policy Studies
At a time when the world is drowning in debt and the world’s major central banks are slamming on the monetary policy brakes to contain multi-decade-high inflation, there is surprising complacency in academic and policymaking circles about the risk of another global financial market crisis on the scale of the 2008 Lehman crisis. Three timely books should dispel such complacency.
Nouriel Roubini’s MegaThreats lays out well the many interrelated short-term and long-term risks to the global economy. However, he falls short of offering constructive solutions as to how these plausible challenges might be addressed. Ray Dalio, the founder of the world’s largest hedge fund, highlights a confluence of unprecedented political and economic challenges in his The Changing World Order. He also offers helpful insights as to how an investor should think about these challenges in making investment decisions. In Crashed, Adam Tooze underlines how the 2008 Great Economic Recession spawned fundamental changes in the world political landscape that in turn complicated economic policy management.
With these three well-argued and easily accessible books, policymakers will not be able to claim that they were not forewarned if today’s all-too-visible economic policy challenges give rise to another major world economic and political crisis next year.
Yuval Levin—Director, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
The best book I read this year was our colleague Matthew Continetti’s The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. A gripping survey of a century of thinkers, politicians, activists, and coalition-builders, it is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand our country. By beginning in the 1920s (rather than after World War II, where histories of modern conservatism often start), by combining intellectual with political history, and by tracing a number of key themes through his complex narrative, Matt clarifies what is distinct about the time we’re living in and what is best understood as continuous with long-standing trends. He shows how the tensions between populists and conservatives, and between libertarians and social traditionalists have shaped the evolution of the right, and where they may be headed now. If past is prologue, then history is essential preparation for facing the future, and this is a superb and engaging work of history.
Thomas P. Miller—Senior Fellow, Economic Policy Studies
This is a tough assignment. With brick-and-mortar book shops in shorter supply, one can no longer rely on the Washington practice of skimming through the indexes until you find your name included to determine a winning entry. And there are so many words to read in some of these tomes—the equivalent of tens of thousands of tweets, all strung together.
I can’t even own up to most of my discretionary reading these days, aimed at escaping the regular tasks of thumbing through lengthy journal articles, policy studies, and court cases. But two older works I’ve reread this year can provide, respectively, some historical perspective and some practical work skills.
From the classics bin, The True Believer by Eric Hoffer is always worth dusting off again. The longshoreman philosopher’s crisp analysis of the kindling material that sparks mass movements may seem so mid-20th century to some, but it provides valuable cautions for think tankers and academics aspiring to become masters of the political universe, if not their domain. Hoffer managed to be a favorite of both Ike and LBJ (let’s not mention that HRC also recommended the book to her staff in the wake of the 2016 campaign . . .). But if you only have time for aphorisms, try Hoffer’s The Passionate State of Mind.
On the practical skills/continuing education side, those of us charged with writing captions and titles for our forums and articles always should consult the gold standard source: Headless Body in Topless Bar: The Best Headlines From America’s Favorite Newspaper. From the killing of Osama (“Gotcha: Warm up the Virgins”) to the Tyson-Holyfield heavyweight fight (“Bite of the Century”) to political reversals by Bush 41 (“Read My Lips … I Lied”), no one does it better than the New York Post.
Charles Murray—F. A. Hayek Chair Emeritus in Cultural Studies
Stephen Fry, a man of amazing erudition on things literary, has written three volumes under the heading, “The Greek Myths Reimagined.” It begins with Mythos, moves on to Heroes, and concludes with Troy. I can’t recommend them too highly. Put aside everything and read them or, better yet, listen to Fry read them on Audible.
There’s been a fair amount of American history on my list this year, with American Spring by Walter Borneman being my favorite—a granular narrative of the first half of 1775, concluding with the battle of Bunker Hill. I also devoured Borneman’s The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King—The Five-Star Admirals Who Won the War at Sea.
And I loved Matthew Continetti’s The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. He’s a colleague, but that hasn’t influenced my recommendation. He’s thorough, even-handed, judicious, and writes beautifully. I learned a lot, including about the years when I thought I was in the midst of things.
Brent Orrell—Senior Fellow, Domestic Policy Studies
How democracy is or isn’t built and sustained was at the heart of my reading profile this year. My favorite book on the subject was AEI scholar Diana Schaub’s treatment of the political thought and rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln, His Greatest Speeches: How Lincoln Moved the Nation. This book is an indispensable contribution to thinking about the rule of law as a stabilizer of human passions and why “reverence for the law” and the democratic processes that create them is the essence of our security as a free people.
Schaub’s book was an important contrast to several other books I read on the collapse of democracy in Germany between 1918 and 1932. Peter Fritzsche’s Germans Into Nazis, traces the rise of Nazism not to Germany’s defeat in 1918 but to the outbreak of war in 1914. The pro-war, populist-nationalist surge of 1914 was the forge for a German identity that transcended social and political divisions. When this new identity met with defeat on the battlefield in 1918, the resulting disillusionment helped to radicalize both the right and the left.
Eric D. Weitz’s Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy is a “what was and what might have been” examination of Germany’s torrid postwar experiment in liberal democracy. The flowering of expressive, individual freedom under Weimar provoked a backlash covered in Benjamin Carter Hett’s The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic. Of particular note is Hett’s recounting of how Germany’s Protestant churches, in their abhorrence of the Weimar Republic’s perceived decadence, were instrumental in bringing Nazism to power. The “People’s Church” movement, which brought rural and urban middle class into a single electoral coalition, overlapped and harmonized with the Nazi concept of Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”) that would obliterate the idea of the dignified, rights-bearing individual altogether. This is perhaps the preeminent case of “cutting a great road through the laws to get at the Devil” only to have no place to hide when the Devil turns around. When we pursue the good, we have to remember that free people, as image bearers of God, are in themselves the highest good.
James Pethokoukis—Editor, AEIdeas; Senior Fellow, Economic Policy Studies
I would urge policymakers who have at least some interest in science fiction to read, as I did this year, The Expanse, the nine-volume series by James S. A. Corey (the joint pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck). Given the advances we’re seeing in space technology—reusable rockets, new lunar missions—we might someday have to deal with the politics of a humanity that lives off-planet (the Moon, Mars, asteroid belt, and moons of Jupiter and Saturn), a major theme of the series. But what I like best about The Expanse is that it shows an imperfect, though hardly apocalyptic, future where humanity continues to progress by solving problems, causing new ones, and then solving those, too. Incremental progress that accumulates into a huge leap forward.
Danielle Pletka—Distinguished Senior Fellow, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
This is my year of audible. . . Truthfully, a recent discovery, and a bit of a revelation. Herewith, two favorites—one read to me, one read with my actual eyes. Our colleague Matt Continetti penned one of the best books of the year, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. My colleague Marc Thiessen and I had Matt twice on our podcast, once to talk about the Orban-ization of conservatism in America, once to talk his book. If you want to know why the GOP isn’t winning, why conservatism is riven as rarely before, or if you just miss William F. Buckley, read it; it’s fantastic. The second book for your shelves is Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. One little teaser: America’s relationship with Israel has very little to do with America’s Jews. But at a moment the haters are again hating on Jews, Zionists, and Israel, this is the book that reminds you why they’re wrong. Always wrong. Thank me later.
Kenneth M. Pollack—Senior Fellow, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
I’ve spent this year in strange company. I’m writing a book on the US-Iraq relationship, so for that I have been doing a lot of reading and rereading about Saddam Husayn. Not entirely coincidentally, for my “pleasure” reading, I have just about made it through the first two volumes of Steven Kotkin’s biography of Stalin (Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 and Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941). Clocking in at nearly 2,000 pages altogether, Kotkin’s work is nothing if not comprehensive. And his first two books only take Stalin’s story up to 1941. While he does have a habit of telling you more than you ever wanted to know about Stalin—and every Party plenum ever held in the Soviet Union—whenever Kotkin steps back from the day-to-day and interprets Stalin’s behavior, his insights are fascinating.
But it’s the pairing of the two that has stood out to me. While they were different in some ways, they had a great deal in common and none of it good. Both were homicidal sociopaths, paranoids, and arch manipulators. Both destroyed their countries and rebuilt them in warped forms that worked only for them, immiserating tens of millions. Stalin was responsible for more carnage in an absolute sense, but given the size of the two countries Saddam can give Stalin a run for his money in relative terms.
At this moment when so many Americans seem so blasé about the prospect of civil war or the end of our democracy—with some suggesting that it might even be positive—Saddam and Stalin should remind us of how appalling life in an autocracy can be. Not every dictator was Josef Stalin or Saddam Husayn, but painfully few are truly enlightened or benevolent. The descent into autocracy of any kind carries with it the danger of life under a Stalin or Saddam. It should make us fight ever harder to preserve our precious republic.
Robert Pondiscio—Senior Fellow, Education Policy Studies
Ian Rowe’s Agency filled me with hope. It’s an important book and with luck, one that will have legs.
I can’t pretend to be a neutral observer of Ian’s work. He’s an AEI colleague, a good friend, and someone with whom I share deep roots in education in New York City’s South Bronx—me as a 5th grade teacher; him running a network of charter schools in the same neighborhood.
Agency is importantly out of step with contemporary thought and practice in urban education. It’s fashionable to insist that structural barriers like race and poverty are decisive in determining educational and life outcomes. Ian’s unsparing critique of those who make assumptions about group identity and ability while ignoring differences in attitudes and behaviors, makes him not only an important thinker and writer, but a brave one.
The highlight of my year at AEI was the FREE Initiative conference Ian hosted in Birmingham, Alabama, which grew from the ideas in his book. It was refreshing to be in a room with people who took seriously the role of faith, family formation, and work in shaping children’s lives and character. Here’s hoping their numbers grow.
Angela Rachidi—Senior Fellow, Poverty Studies
In 2022, I spent whatever free time I had reading the beautiful and heart-wrenching story of a lifelong friendship between two women in Napoli that started in the 1950s. Author Elena Ferrante published the four-part series, The Neapolitan Novels, almost a decade ago, but I did not discover it until this year when a friend recommended the HBO TV series based on the novels. I still have not watched it on the small screen, but I am grateful that the existence of the TV series introduced me to Ms. Ferrante’s brilliance.
The Neapolitan Novels follow a childhood friendship between two poor Italian girls from a neighborhood in Napoli. Both girls excelled in school at a young age, but only Elena (Lenu) pursued an education, atypical at the time for poor young women from Napoli. Her childhood friend Raffaella (Lila) was the brighter of the two girls, physically beautiful and academically brilliant. But Lila chose the traditional route of being a teenage bride to a prestigious shop owner—a marriage that turned disastrous in the end. While the story of these two girls and their childhood experience is captivating, the true brilliance of the story is Ferrante’s ability to combine the external challenges created by Napoli from the 1950s–1980s with the internal struggles experienced by both women. It touches on politics, poverty, violence, influence, love, and devotion. Ferrante’s The Neapolitan Novels is one of the best fiction series I have read.
Dalibor Rohac—Senior Fellow, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
I’ve been learning a lot from Paul Tucker’s Global Discord: Values and Power in Fractured World Order. The book walks through the history and the present challenges facing institutions of international cooperation—most importantly the question of values and legitimacy, sometimes subsumed under the rubric of “Rodrik’s Trilemma” in modern literature. Drawing on David Hume and mechanism design tools, Sir Paul shows that, for international order to be sustainable, like-minded, democratic nations must cooperate more with each other, while keeping other actors at bay.
I’ve been educated and moved in equal parts by my friend Linda Kinstler’s Come to This Court and Cry: This is How Holocaust Ends—part family history, part work of historic scholarship, and part argument for why post-conflict justice matters (but why we should not expect too much from it). The point is not primarily to punish perpetrators such as Latvia’s famous aviator and SS commander Herbert Cukurs, who escaped to Latin America before he could have been prosecuted for overseeing the mass murder of Riga’s Jews. Rather, the most important attribute of war crime tribunals is to set the historic record straight and prevent a subsequent rewriting of history, as in the case of Cukurs, who is now being whitewashed and rehabilitated by the Latvian far right—a lesson that we should keep in mind when Russia’s war against Ukraine ends.
Michael Rubin—Senior Fellow, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
As a father seeking quiet time to write this, it goes without saying that Adam Mansbach’s Go the F*ck to Sleep should be on everyone’s list, and Samuel L. Jackson’s online reading is a must-listen. My reading is eclectic, and a mix of fiction, non-fiction, and clever commentary.
P.J. O’Rourke’s death earlier this year had me return to his book of 30 years ago, Give War a Chance, a collection of articles about, in O’Rourke’s words, “the battle against evil.” From Russia to Nicaragua, and then Ukraine and Georgia, his essays really are a testament to how history repeats or, in the case of Jimmy Carter’s penchant for excusing evil, remains the same. Perhaps the arc of history doesn’t always bend to justice, at least when the United States sits passively and does not understand the ideologies which today again threaten the liberal order. Of course, if O’Rourke’s work is a shot, than Jonah Goldberg’s is the chaser. There is a lot to choose from.
As I set off in October on a research trip to the Ladakh, an Indian union territory high in the Himalayas, where Buddhism thrives and Tibetan dialects reign supreme, I reread Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. Easily one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, this fictionalized account of Jesus Christ’s early years not covered by the Bible is also incredibly religiously sensitive, as it relates a hypothetical trip by Christ to India and China where he absorbs Eastern philosophy (and eats Chinese food on his birthday, hence the Jewish tradition today, Moore speculates).
Of course, there were also serious reads on my list this year. During my PhD work, my Iranian advisor offered sage advice. “Theory is for people who don’t have libraries,” he told me. He was right. I appreciate arguments that demonstrate on-the-ground mastery and don’t try to fit square pegs into round holes. This is why I was so glad finally to get to Michael Pillsbury’s 2015 The Hundred-Year Marathon. There is no better book to understand China’s strategy. Pillsbury is also a rarity because he not only knows the history and language and is a great writer, but also because he admits where he previously went wrong, something Henry Kissinger never managed to do. American policy would be better off in 2023 if every American official got Pillsbury in his or her Christmas stocking, especially now that President Joe Biden’s team has declared war on coal.
Christopher J. Scalia—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
In Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock and Roll, Lenny Kaye explores the careers of some of the most popular performers of the 20th century, from Elvis Presley to Kurt Cobain. Kaye, who was the guitarist for Patti Smith and Her Band, packs the book with the kind of facts and trivia that will thrill any music nerd who considers liner notes required reading. What makes the book especially interesting, and which helps it overcome a number of errors in names and dates, is that it brings to life the cultural contexts of these artists and demonstrates how individual genius mixes with what producer Brian Eno calls collective scenius—the relationships, trends, and strokes of luck that can form artistic (not to mention intellectual) success.
One of the best novels I read this year is far from new, but recent events make it particularly timely. In Under Western Eyes (1911), Joseph Conrad tells the story of a young Russian student named Razumov who finds himself caught up in political intrigue, first as a would-be revolutionary conspirator and then as a double agent. No fan of the status quo but wary of radicals, Razumov is trapped between “the lawlessness of autocracy . . . and the lawlessness of revolution.” Meanwhile, the narrator struggles to understand Russian attitudes through the filter of Western liberalism. Not that the novel is all about political ideas: There’s plenty of betrayal, guilt, and love to go around, too.
Kori Schake—Director, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies
Both of my favorite books of the year are by veterans of America’s recent wars reflecting on the relationship between the military and society. We are living through such a renaissance of veteran writing, serious about moral culpability—theirs and ours—and policy choices, poignant about what they learned, eloquent and urgent in explaining it to the rest of us.
Phil Klay won the National Book Award for Redeployment, his collection of short stories, and has written an important novel about Colombia’s counter-insurgency. But he’s also an important commentator on the experience of war, and this year released a collection of his essays, Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War. He powerfully answers his own question: “how to speak meaningfully of a conflict that has lasted so long, and at such a low ebb that most Americans can pretend it isn’t happening?”
Elliot Ackerman has written several powerful books about war, including Green on Blue, a sympathetic portrait of an Afghan who kills American troops, and 2034, a thriller about a war between the US and China. But The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan is the riveting weaving together of three disparate storylines: the contradictions of a family vacation interrupted by desperate veterans trying to get Afghans who’d aided the war effort out of their country as the US abandons Afghanistan; searing analyses of US policy choices since 9/11, including deficit spending for the wars and civil-military relations; and recounting his own experiences fighting as a Marine infantryman in Afghanistan.
Sita Nataraj Slavov—Nonresident Senior Fellow, Economic Policy Studies
The past month may have had you pondering questions like these: What’s the optimal strategy for a soccer player in a penalty shootout? Is it truly in a country’s interest to host the World Cup? Paul Oyer’s An Economist Goes to the Game (2022) provides insights (and great material for introductory economics courses). Oyer uses sports to illustrate economic concepts. Penalty kicks—in which the player taking the kick and the goalkeeper simultaneously decide which direction to go—provide an illustration of mixed strategy equilibria. Player compensation is discussed in the context of labor market theory. And athletes’ decisions to take performance-enhancing drugs are viewed through the lens of the prisoner’s dilemma.
Capital—the 2013 novel by John Lanchester, not the tome by Karl Marx—was also an enjoyable read. Set in London against the backdrop of the financial crisis of 2007–08, Lanchester tells the loosely intertwined stories of characters who have some connection to Pepys Road—a street that has experienced both dramatic demographic change and dramatic appreciation of property values. The book’s highlights are its diverse and compelling cast of characters, and the way in which it captures the zeitgeist of a turbulent time.
Chris Stirewalt—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
I often find books to be companions for periods of my life; volumes that console or delight me in difficult seasons, inspire me to be a better version of myself, and, sometimes, point me in the right direction.
For the past year or so, that book has been William Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance: Portrait of an Age, 1992.
Manchester, a newspaperman turned author and professor, wrote two of the most popular and acclaimed military biographies of all time: American Caesar, about Douglas MacArthur, and The Last Lion, about Winston Churchill. Manchester’s writing in all his works benefits from the perspective of an enlisted Marine who was very nearly killed in the US assault on Okinawa. A biographer of great men, he kept a properly American perspective about power and its uses—which shines nowhere more effulgently than in Manchester’s book about the making of the modern world.
A World Lit Only by Fire was a New York Times bestseller, but not the kind of book that 5 million dads got dropped in the bottom of their Christmas stockings or stuck with a bow for Father’s Day. Here was the world’s most popular biographer of military men writing a cultural, philosophical history of life from the 1300s to the 1700s.
What Manchester achieved, though, was of lasting value—especially for a people like ourselves, living at the end of an age and looking dimly into the next one.
Benjamin Storey—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
Two of the best books I read in 2022 dealt with the university, and were a study in contrasts. My AEI Colleague Andrew Ferguson’s Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course on Getting His Kid into College has been my companion as I begin to look at colleges from the perspective of a father. Applying to college sucks families into a whirlwind of ambition, insecurity, prestige, and money. Ferguson recounts the many hours he spent reading brochures and college guides, talking with counselors, consulting with friends about schools and strategy, and touring campuses. None of these authorities, including the colleges themselves, have much to say about what is supposed to be the point of all this energy and anxiety: education.
To understand why anyone ever thought it a good idea for the young to go to college, it is useful to have recourse to a classic: John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University. Newman paints a portrait of the fruit of genuinely liberal education in a well-calibrated intellect, at once calm and dynamic. An education that cultivated such minds would be worth a significant investment—if not the heart-stopping sums of contemporary American tuition bills.
Reading Newman reminds us just how distorted our sense of the good and the value of higher education has become. Education reform must not only contend with the exploitative machinations of these institutions and their enablers. It should also promote education that would help the young develop the perceptive equanimity Newman describes, which would be of great use to their lives and America’s politics.
Unpacking boxes during our move this summer, I came across several tattered paperbacks of the poetry of Ogden Nash. We started reading them around the dinner table, and they reliably amused the whole family.
Nash’s style is a compound of self-consciously shambling off-rhymes and broken meters. It is the absence of pretense in verse. In “With My Own Eyes,” he offers a bumptious defense of all things American—from manners to learning to cuisine—against the sneers of foreign or pretentious observers. He deserves to be remembered as a great comic poet of American democracy.
Ryan Streeter—Director, Domestic Policy Studies
I most enjoyed Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World—new to me, but not new. Published in 2005, it retells the story of the founding of New Amsterdam, today’s Manhattan. Made possible by the discovery of thousands of 17th century Dutch documents deep within the New York State library, the book paints a much more vivid picture of New Amsterdam than was previously possible, from Henry Hudson’s exploits to England’s takeover.
Among the book’s many storylines is that New York City’s early freewheeling, commercially adventurous, and culturally diverse nature, an exception to the surrounding English colonial settlements, owes its origins to Amsterdam. Famously tolerant of dissidents and heretics from other countries, 16th century Amsterdam was the epicenter of the far-flung commercial Dutch republic that saw alien peoples as business partners rather than subjects to subdue.
New Amsterdam from the beginning was home to merchants, pirates, prostitutes, and all sorts of enterprising wealth seekers, most of whose business was legal, but not all. The book recounts a pervasive anything-goes culture when it came to business creativity and private lives, but a disciplined approach to the rules of exchange. The book recounts scores of entertaining stories, some comic and others tragic, to supply evidence that over 50-plus years, New Amsterdam wove a culture of tolerance, openness, and vitality into the fabric that would become New York.
Bret Swanson—Nonresident Senior Fellow, Technology Policy Studies
In Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley expand on the pathbreaking work of William Nordhaus and his famous “price of light” paper. They popularize the concept of “time prices” and extend it empirically to a wide range of commodities and basic products. The time price of a good is the amount of labor required to buy it. By using nominal prices and nominal incomes at every point, time prices might (1) better capture the full scope of productivity gains (both lower prices and higher wages) and (2) avoid arguments over traditional inflation measurements and methodologies, such as the consumer price index (CPI).
Tupy and Pooley conclude that, worldwide, “the effort required to buy one basket of commodities in 1980 bought 3.5 baskets in 2018.” The book’s forward by George Gilder is much more than a bonus chapter.
The material superabundance of the last few hundred years may, however, be masking current social pathologies and thus threats to future superabundance. No one has offered a more compelling hypothesis for our haywire politics than Mattias Desmet. In The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Desmet builds on philosopher Hannah Arendt and offers a framework for thinking about how authoritarian movements emerge. The key is “mass formation”—a kind of hypnosis which can grip vulnerable populations and lead even large groups of normal people to commit terrible acts. Why, over the last few years, did censorship, propaganda, and even forced medical experiments explode in the supposedly free West? You will find the roots of this dangerous reversal—and the one known antidote—in Desmet’s provocative book.
In The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State, Aaron Kheriaty, MD, plunges deeper into the particular failures of pandemic policy and just-around-the-corner bio-authoritarianism. Dr. Kheriaty was not only a medical professor at the University of California-Irvine, he was also its head of ethics. When he offered highly ethical (and, it turns out, correct medical) advice on the pandemic, UC fired him. Emerging bio-science can deliver amazing health benefits—but only if we recommit to unequivocal medical freedom for both individuals and physicians.
These threats of scientism against sanity and superabundance call us to review the fundamentals of social harmony and prosperity, suggesting we read Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950 by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger.
Shane Tews—Nonresident Senior Fellow, Technology Policy Studies
Chris Miller’s book Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology is a wonderful book that helps explain the semiconductor industry’s importance to everything we do in today’s world. Anything with an on button needs a semiconductor chip.
The book does a great job of walking us through how this all started, who was involved, and where we are now in today’s chip wars, which are taking place in Asia, Europe, and here in the United States, with the rest of the world dependent on the outcome.
Chris reminds us that China is reliant on the outside world for many of the supplies they need for high-end chips, and the trade sanctions that the US is imposing on specific materials and machinery needed to produce semiconductor chips has the capability to challenge China’s dominance in the chip race.
Stan Veuger—Senior Fellow, Economic Policy Studies
The three books I would like to highlight here—none of them published in 2022—are Arthur Melzer’s Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing, Laurent Binet’s Civilizations: A Novel, and Tara Watson and Kalee Thompson’s The Border Within: The Economics of Immigration in an Age of Fear.
The Border Within will give you a clear sense of what interior enforcement of immigration rules looks like, through a mix of personal stories, journalism, and academic work, while in passing providing you with a comprehensive review of research in the economics of immigration.
Civilizations is an alternative-history novel—but not one in which Nazis or Confederates won their war. Instead, the Inca lands in Lisbon. Will he meet Luther?
Finally, Philosophy Between the Lines makes a strong case for the historical importance of esoteric writing. (What is it? Why would authors not make the meaning of their writings clear? How do we know they didn’t? Do you, too, want to write only for the few?)
Matt Weidinger—Senior Fellow, Poverty Studies
My favorite book this year is neither new nor even new to me: Allan Bloom’s 1987 classic The Closing of the American Mind, which features the notable subtitle How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.
Two facts moved me to grab it off the shelf. First, our last child is applying to college; second, there’s a strong chance she enrolls where most students feel intimidated against expressing their real opinions—where minds and now mouths have literally closed.
None of this would surprise the late professor Bloom, who found widespread acceptance “that truth is relative” behind the paradoxical openness that came to reject democratic education on the Constitution, Declaration, and a nation conceived in liberty. As Bloom presciently noted, that openness
pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime, which are now thought to have been essentially flawed and regressive. . . . There is no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything. But when there are no shared goals or vision of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible?
A good question, with resounding echoes today. Pay attention to it next year and beyond, Clare, wherever you go.
Adam J. White—Senior Fellow, Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies
Roger Lowenstein’s Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War, is a double achievement. Its luminous portrait of Abraham Lincoln sheds new light on some of the Civil War’s most important yet least recognized aspects. And it teaches crucial lessons for our own time.
The book centers around President Lincoln and his Treasury Secretary, Salmon Chase. Without underselling the brutal facts of the battlefront, Lowenstein shows how the Union’s victory depended on the North’s economic strength—and the Lincoln administration’s ability to leverage it.
Lowenstein’s Chase is a fascinating mix of greatness and grudges. He mastered federal finances, convincing investors to keep lending. But the government ultimately did more than just rely on capital markets—it reinvented them, through the National Banking Act, the Legal Tender Act, and more. Lincoln, meanwhile, is the ideal statesman and political leader (of course), but Ways and Means shows us still more: By managing Chase and the government at large, he was the ideal constitutional administrator. Together, these stories offer two portentous lessons:
First, our national security depends on free enterprise and flourishing markets. The Union’s economic prosperity proved to among its greatest wartime advantages.
Second, “the true test of” of a constitution is indeed “its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.” That was Hamilton’s insight in The Federalist, and in Ways and Means we see how Lincoln embodied the best version of constitutional administration. How lucky America was for it then; how lucky we are to be reminded of it now, by Lowenstein’s wonderful book.
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