EDITORS’ PICKS
In this deft, textured work of intellectual history, Mitter opens a window into the legacy of China’s experience during World War II, showing how historical memory lives on in the present and contributes to the constant evolution of Chinese nationalism.
Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town
by Barbara Demick
Demick’s reporting is resourceful and inspired, but her message is a dispiriting one: there is little the outside world can do to halt Beijing’s deliberate and systematic erosion of the distinctive cultures and traditions of Buddhist Tibetans and other minority groups within China.
Friedman examines the resilience of apartheid in South Africa, demonstrating how the old order has repeatedly prevented the new one from delivering on its promises of racial justice.
A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order
by G. John Ikenberry
In his most impressive work to date, Ikenberry presents liberal internationalism as a pragmatic political project, defending it against realists who dismiss it as utopianism and radicals who deride it as window-dressing for capitalist imperialism.
POLITICAL AND LEGAL
Democracy Rules
by Jan-Werner Müller
Müller argues in this important book that the forms of popular authoritarianism seen recently in Brazil, Hungary, India, Poland, and the United States constitute a threat to democracy but do not herald a return to the fascism of the 1930s.
In this superb work of intellectual history, Bell explores the ideas of some of the most intriguing figures of the late nineteenth century in the United Kingdom and the United States, delving into their dreams of a world-dominating Anglo-American political community united by race and empire.
China, the UN, and Human Protection: Beliefs, Power, Image
by Rosemary Foot
In this groundbreaking study, Foot shows how China has worked behind the scenes at the UN to promote a vision of security that emphasizes economic development, a strong state, and social stability.
ECONOMIC | SOCIAL | ENVIRONMENTAL
The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival
by Charles Goodhart and Manoj Pradhan
In this thought-provoking book, Goodhart and Pradhan describe how the integration of China and other emerging markets into the world economy led to rising inequality, stagnant wages, and low inflation—and what will change as those countries’ populations age.
The Power of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations
by Philippe Aghion, Céline Antonin, and Simon Bunel
Aghion, Antonin, and Bunel explain how innovation can generate economic growth and help governments navigate the supply chain disruptions created by COVID-19. They argue that fostering such innovation requires striking a balance between too much competition and too little.
The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World
by William D. Nordhaus
Nordhaus emphasizes the indispensability of public policy interventions in the quest for a greener world, building on a lifetime of work incorporating the concept of externalities into the measuring of national income and the understanding of economic growth.
MILITARY | SCIENTIFIC | TECHNOLOGICAL
You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War
by Elizabeth Becker
Becker delivers an enthralling biography of three female correspondents who reported on the Vietnam War, blending an account of the wider history with her protagonists’ growing doubts about the logic and legitimacy of the war.
The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916–1917
by Philip Zelikow
Zelikow addresses the question of whether U.S. President Woodrow Wilson could have mediated a peace deal in 1916 or 1917 to end World War I before the United States joined the fray—perhaps sparing the world the rise of Bolshevism in Russia and Nazism in Germany.
The American War in Afghanistan: A History
by Carter Malkasian
Combining meticulous scholarship with a practitioner’s eye, Malkasian provides a full and authoritative account of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan over the past four decades, leading up to President Joe Biden’s decision earlier this year to withdraw U.S. troops.
THE UNITED STATES
Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy
by Stephen Wertheim
Wertheim explores when and why the United States embraced the global military supremacy that Americans have taken for granted for decades—and argues that this dominance has outlived its original purpose.
An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination
by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
With an impeccably sourced, highly readable volume based on hundreds of interviews and access to previously undisclosed documents from inside the company, Frenkel and Kang have produced an important addition to the literature on Facebook.
Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution
by Gordon S. Wood
Wood, seen by many historians as the greatest living scholar of the American Revolution, distills the core insights of his long career, covering power, liberty, concepts of representation and rights, slavery, and the emergence of a formidable judicial branch.
WESTERN EUROPE
Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate
by M. E. Sarotte
Sarotte weaves together the most engaging and carefully documented account currently available of East-West diplomacy in the decade after the Cold War—a period that set the tone for U.S. and European relations with Russia today.
The Ambassadors: Thinking About Diplomacy From Machiavelli to Modern Times
by Robert Cooper
Cooper, a British diplomat who for many years was the European Union’s unofficial foreign policy guru, presents a sweeping reflection on 500 years of transatlantic statecraft.
European Language Matters: English in Its European Context
by Peter Trudgill
Trudgill, a linguist, offers a pleasurable and humorous voyage of discovery into the chaos of the English language as it is spoken today by well over a billion people across the world.
WESTERN HEMISPHERE
The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country From Corporate Greed
by Robin Broad and John Cavanagh
In this gripping page-turner, Broad and Cavanagh narrate the story of how a global coalition of environmental activists, labor unions, and religious leaders blocked a Canadian firm from opening a gold mine that threatened fragile watersheds in rural El Salvador.
Amazônia
by Sebastião Salgado
Salgado, a famed Paris-based Brazilian documentary photographer, takes his camera deep into the Amazon rainforest, capturing both the startling beauty of nature and intimate, sensitive portraits of the everyday life of indigenous peoples.
Civilizations: A Novel
by Laurent Binet. Translated by Sam Taylor
Binet playfully imagines a world in which the Aztecs and the Incas conquer western Europe, offering a redemptive fantasy that rescues history from the tragedy of the European destruction of the precolonial Americas.
EASTERN EUROPE AND FORMER SOVIET REPUBLICS
Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital
by Katherine Zubovich
Zubovich’s fascinating history of skyscrapers in Moscow—the city Joseph Stalin hoped to make “the capital of all capitals”—goes far beyond architectural design and looks at the social and political ramifications of monument building in the postwar Soviet Union.
Substate Dictatorship: Networks, Loyalty, and Institutional Change in the Soviet Union
by Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk
In their rigorous academic study based on a vast collection of archival documents and memoirs, Gorlizki and Khlevniuk trace the evolution of Soviet regional party leaders from the late 1940s to the 1970s.
White Russians, Red Peril: A Cold War History of Migration to Australia
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
In this enthralling historical narrative, Fitzpatrick, one of the most prominent historians of the Soviet Union, traces the travails of the waves of Russian and Soviet refugees who arrived in Australia in the late 1940s and 1950s.
MIDDLE EAST
Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East
by Philip H. Gordon
Gordon brilliantly illustrates how repeated U.S. attempts at regime change in the Middle East have produced “no case of clear success, some catastrophic failures, and universally high costs and unintended consequences.”
Global Jihad: A Brief History
by Glenn E. Robinson
In this remarkably comprehensive account of the evolution of political jihad, Robinson provides an accessible history and a provocative analysis of one of the most important political movements in the world over the last half century.
Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia
by Rosie Bsheer
Bsheer precisely and elegantly describes the Saudi regime’s attempts, across the reigns of several kings, to both collect and suppress documentation about the country’s past in an effort to construct a narrative that will legitimize its rule.
ASIA AND PACIFIC
The Koreas: The Birth of Two Nations Divided
by Theodore Jun Yoo
Placing individual stories against the backdrop of economic, social, political, business, and cultural trends, Yoo brings both clarity and nuance to the complex, interwoven histories of the two Koreas since 1945.
The War on the Uyghurs: China’s Internal Campaign Against a Muslim Minority
by Sean R. Roberts
Roberts reports that the frighteningly effective Chinese campaign to eliminate Uyghur culture that started with mass internments in 2017 has now reached such an intense pitch that it has become a “cultural genocide.”
Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a Twenty-First-Century Conflict
by Sumantra Bose
Bose traces episodes of violence and resistance in the contested territory of Kashmir over three-quarters of a century. His analysis suggests that peace is more remote than ever.
AFRICA
Constraining Dictatorship: From Personalized Rule to Institutionalized Regimes
by Anne Meng
In this innovative and informative study of authoritarian regimes, Meng shows that regimes in which the ruler’s power is constrained by institutions last longer. The regimes of less constrained dictators, meanwhile, rarely survive.
These Are Not Gentle People: Two Dead Men. Forty Suspects. The Trial That Broke a Small South African Town
by Andrew Harding
This disturbing narrative relates the 2016 deaths of two Black laborers at the hands of several dozen white farmers and the flawed, three-year trial that followed. Harding’s account grows inexorably into a searing indictment of contemporary South Africa.
African Europeans: An Untold History
by Olivette Otele
In a sweeping history extending from the classical world to the twentieth century, Otele masterfully analyzes the changing relationship between Africa and Europe, particularly the hardening of racist European views about Africans.
