Christmas Book Recommendations
We're a bit late but here are a few books we have read recently we recommend for your or a friend's Christmas stocking.
On Xi Jinping: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism Is Shaping China and the World by Kevin Rudd (Oxford University Press, 2024 - 604 pages).
Yes, it is more than 600 pages long and scholarly. But it is also very much worth the time and effort to read it. Rudd has written not only a monumental biography of China's President Xi Jinping but also a rich historical analysis of Xi's efforts to build a modern China capable of reshaping the world. You may remember Rudd as the former Prime Minister of Australia (and current Australian Ambassador to the U.S.). He is also a top-tier China scholar (he has a PhD from Oxford in China studies), and he has written a great book.
Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order by Saleha Mohsin (Portfolio Press, 2024 - 304 pages)
Mohsin drills into how the U.S. dollar ushered in historic prosperity and cheap foreign goods to the U.S. However, it also severely damaged American manufacturing, encouraging manufacturing to move overseas for cheaper labor. But the dollar also, in the last 50 years, became the all-powerful weapon of the U.S. Treasury Department. Mohsin drills into the intended and unintended consequences of the strong dollar, including the rise of populist sentiment and trade war with China—culminating in an unprecedented attack on the dollar's pristine status during the Trump presidency—and connects the dollar's weaponization from 9/11 to the deployment of crippling financial sanctions against Russia.
Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff (Scribner, 2024 - 336 pages)
Technology is radically changing the way we fight wars—we see it daily in the Ukraine War as drones rule the skies and the trenches. Cutting-edge weapons technology now comes from Silicon Valley, not the Midwestern factory lines that manufacture tanks, armored personnel carriers, and rifles. This is a riveting account of how the Pentagon is slowly and painfully transitioning to meet the challenges.
Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz (W.W. Norton & Company, 2024 - 448 pages)
I've always been fascinated by horses and have had horses for 30 years. But I'm also deeply interested in the horse's role in world history - which has been extraordinary and largely ignored. Every major empire of history - India, Russia, Iran, China, Austro-Hungarian, etc. - only became empires because of the power of the horse—a great read.
Freedom: Memoirs 1954 - 2021 by Angela Merkel (St. Martin’s Press, 2024 - 720 pages)
The reviews of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel's memoirs are mixed, with many critics arguing she lacks genuine self-reflection when looking at her policy victories and failures - especially with regard to her dealings with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Having met Merkel several times in my career, I owed her the benefit of the doubt and tried the book. I was more than pleasantly surprised: Crisply written (and translated), it reveals an enormous amount of fascinating historical details and context to her years as Chancellor as well as her early life behind the Iron Wall. No matter what you think of her, Merkel was a towering figure of her time who did a nearly miraculous work reunifying Germany after almost 30 years.
America’s Cold Warrior: Paul Nitze and National Security from Roosevelt to Reagan by James Graham Wilson (Cornell University Press, 2024 - 336 pages)
Paul Nitze is now, sadly, a largely forgotten hero of the Cold War who served in every Administration going back to Franklin Roosevelt - 8 presidencies. Along the way, he was also a brilliant investor and businessman. A brilliant man with a rapacious intellectual appetite - he spent two hours a day starting at 5 a.m. reading books just to learn - he had an outsized impact on winning the Cold War, particularly in pushing the U.S. and Soviet Union toward a more rational nuclear policy.
The Seventh Floor by David McCloskey (W.W. Norton & Company, 2024 - 393 pages).
This is David McCloskey’s third novel, and it’s brilliant. Bringing back his rough and ready CIA operative Artemis Procter (who we met in his last novel, “Damascus Station”), now fighting for her career survival in the halls of the CIA, it is a rip-roaring, brain-teasing tale of counter-espionage. Lots of fun. I’m a big McCloskey fan.
One the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything by Nate Silver (Penguin Press, 2024 - 576 pages)
I never saw the movie "Bull Durham," but I recall a friend describing it this way: If you love baseball, there was too much sex. And if you are watching it for the sex, there is too much baseball. There is something to this in Nate Silver's new book. If you are reading it for tips on professional poker playing, then there is too much about risk analysis, and if you are reading it to learn more about risk analysis, there is too much poker. But it is still a great read, offering a brilliant explanation of how, in the age of "Big Data," professional risk takers (hedge fund managers, crypto true believers, high-end art collectors) navigate uncertainty and make decisions..
This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South by Alan Pell Crawshaw (Knopf, 2024 - 400 pages)
The historical narrative of the American Revolutionary War focuses heavily on the battles and campaigns that took place in the north - the Battles of Bunker Hill, Saratoga, Cowpens, Trenton, and the Crossing of the Delaware River. But this riveting book looks at how the final three years of the war were mostly fought in the South. And those engagements were particularly fierce, bloody, and brutal, taking place in long-forgotten battlefields in North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. It was because of the geographic shift of the war to the South that the British were bottled up and ultimately surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, just across the North Carolina border.
To Run the World: The Kremlin's Cold War Bid for Global Power by Sergey Radchenko (Cambridge University Press, 2024 - 768 pages)
This is an extraordinary historic review of the Soviet Union’s blinding ambition to spread the Marxist revolution around the world while gaining legitimacy and power. But, as Radchenko details brilliantly, Soviet leaders blinded by their hubris and historical ignorance, ultimately driving the USSR into crisis and collapse. Considering what is happening in Putin’s Russia and even Xi’s China and a sense of history repeating itself, this is timely and important read.
