How did the US come to this? James Shapiro’s The Playbook doesn’t contain all the answers—but, in its telling of the struggle over a New Deal theatre programme in the 1930s, it does have some. Here, decades before the phrase became familiar, is a full-blown “culture war” whose battleplans were copied by future politicians looking to stir up future discontent.
If you want a more immediate explanation for Trump’s second term, then Meridith McGraw’s Trump in Exile is essential reading. It begins as the 45th president leaves the White House to make way for Joe Biden in 2020, seemingly finished in politics and polite society. The Capitol attacks had his fake tan smears all over them; the indictments were stacking up; and he’d even been kicked off Twitter. With unimpeachable access, McGraw reveals how Trump rebuilt from his lair in Florida—and beat the odds, again.
Meanwhile, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, by Jonathan Blitzer, feels as though it is both the book of the Trump era and somehow invalidated by it. Its account of America’s immigration crisis is multilayered—from the death squads of El Salvador to the corridors of Washington—but it’s also something more, a full reckoning of how those layers connect with each other, of the causes and correlations. It’s a humane book that ought to inform US immigration policy, although now, sadly, it probably won’t.
Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s The Lasting Harm is another book that concerns America’s recent past and present—its specific subject is the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell for her criminal association with Jeffrey Epstein. Osborne-Crowley, who has endured rape and sexual abuse herself, is an extraordinarily empathetic reporter who makes close friends of all the women who fought, for years, to bring Maxwell and Epstein to justice. But she is not scared to make foes, either: The Lasting Harm’s revelations about the American justice system explode like bombs.
Outside of the US, Sarah Rainsford’s Goodbye to Russia is one of the best explanations of how Europe experienced a ground war in the 21st century—though its story begins decades before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Rainsford is a long-time BBC correspondent who had close access to Vladimir Putin and his cronies in Moscow for years, until she was thrown out of Russia for the crime of journalism. Autocracy, Inc, by Anne Applebaum, is written in the same spirit, as it charts the network of madmen—the Putins, Orbáns and Modis—who have subverted the arc of the moral universe.
What will it all come to? Hopefully not the conflagration described in Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War, which begins with a hypothetical missile launch by North Korea and continues with the figurative and literal fallout. This is a nonfiction book that actually does read like a thriller—as ideologies clash and missiles fly—though it is all based on remarkable investigative journalism. Jacobsen has spoken to so many people with insider knowledge of nuclear strategy that you’ll be left wondering: am I allowed to read this?
Set against the threat of nuclear annihilation, ruminations about England may seem parochial—but, for those living in and around the UK’s most populous and politically powerful nation, they are anything but. Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears’s England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country is, as its title suggests, a concerted act of myth-busting—about Magna Carta, about immigration and more—that seeks to build something better from the wreckage. Read it, perhaps, in conjunction with Alan Johnson’s Harold Wilson: Twentieth Century Man, a terrific short biography of a prime minister who, more than most, looked beyond England’s borders.
And, okay, Lionel Barber, a former editor of the FT, is co-host of Prospect’s Media Confidential podcast, but there’s no denying good reportage—and Gambling Man is certainly that. This is his biography of Masayoshi Son, one of the most significant figures in 21st-century technology and also, previously, one of the most mysterious. But now, at last, Masa can be known to all of us.
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Books of the year 2024: Ideas
Books of the year 2024: Lives
Books of the year 2024: History
