Our Annual Christmas Book Recommendations

Our apologies - We are a little late with our annual list, but hopefully you will find our recommendations both interesting and fun!

• Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn by Christopher Cox (Simon & Schuster, 640 pages, 2024)

  Growing up, Woodrow Wilson was lionized in the classroom, held up as a paradigm of enlightened leadership and vision. As the former President of Princeton University and New Jersey Governor, he was the man who helped negotiate the Armistice of World War I, pushed for the League of Nations (which, while failing in that form, led to the establishment of the United Nations decades later), and established the Federal Reserve. What we were never taught was that he was also a determined southern racist who advanced Jim Crow laws while doing all he could to deny women the right to vote - but who then flipped at the last moment to support women’s right to vote in return for further advancing Jim Crow laws. Cox, a former Member of Congress and Chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, has done an extraordinary amount of research in writing this book. I found it hard to put down. 

• Private Finance, Public Power: A History of Bank Supervision in America by Peter Conti-Brown and Sean Vanatta. (Princeton University Press, 424 pages, 2025)

  On first blush, you may think this is not going to be the most scintillating of topics. But the authors bring to life the critical importance and historical impact of what keeps America’s finance machine running - or, at times, plays a role in crashing. Banks in America are private institutions with private shareholders, boards of directors, profit motives, customers, and competitors. And yet the public, Washington, and state policymakers play a key role in deciding which risks are taken, as well as how, when, and to what end. Conti-Brown and Vanatta examine how the US has managed financial risk and how it has evolved to become engaged in more social policy issues, such as monitoring racial discrimination, managing financial concentration, and, more recently and controversially, climate change. The book weaves in a large cast of historical characters who have played outsized roles in all of this, through the best of times, financial panics, and scandals. 

• I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan, translated by Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 336 pages, 2025)

  A best-seller in China in 2023, Hu Anyan recounts his brutal, low-paying work as a parcel delivery worker with very little hope for a better life ahead. Straightforward and candid, Hu’s writing conveys the cultural shift in China where young people question the traditional work-for-success model and reflecting a society grappling with rapid economic change - more than hinting at the intense struggles inside China today as it grapples with internal political and economic challenges the West normally cannot see. 

• Mexico: A 500 Year History by Paul Gillingham (Atlantic Monthly Press, 752 pages, 2025)

  Mexico has always been of special interest to me, and I have enjoyed reading about its history. When Gillingham came out with this mammoth new history - 752 pages - I was a bit intimidated and wondered if I would learn anything new. Happily, this is a brilliant, elegantly written book, and the author has done tremendous research. In short, I learned a lot. As the US begins a slow and likely arduous new round of trade negotiations with Mexico, it’s an essential contribution to understanding the enormous changes and upheaval Mexico has experienced over the last 500 years and why a lot of the changes still to come are going to be incredibly important not just there but to the US and the rest of the Western Hemisphere.

• The French Revolution: A Political History by John Harman (Yale University Press, 384 pages, 2025)

  We all know the basics of the French Revolution: Let them eat cake, uprisings in the streets, and off with their heads. But it was much more than that as this excellent history by John Hartman makes clear - and its ramifications are still being felt today in various ways. How and why did the ancien régime blow apart so fast and so violently? A great read. 

• 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History and How it Shattered a Nation  by Andrew Ross Sorkin (Viking Press, 592 pages, 2025)
  Sorkin’s history of the fateful stock market crash in 1929 is a fascinating and vivid read of how what was thought to be an unstoppable stock market spectacularly crashed, sending the US into a depression and forever changing the nation. Sorkin has done some fabulous research here, and in an age when we are debating crypto and AI bubbles, there are many lessons to be gleaned.

• King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson (Doubleday Press, 512 pages, 2025)
  Scott Anderson (Doubleday, 512 pp., $35, Aug. 5)
  President Trump’s recent bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities reminds us that the relationship between modern-day Iran and the US is a long and brutal one. Anderson takes readers back to when the troubles began in 1979, when the Shah of Iran was toppled. A great history and reminder of just how complicated and deadly the relationship has become and likely to remain for the foreseeable future.

• Eclipsing the West: China, India and the Forging of a New World by Vince Cable (Manchester University Press, 352 pages, 2025)
  Cable has an extensive and highly impressive career: Beginning as a development economist, chief economist at Royal Dutch Shell, member of the UK Parliament, Leader of the Liberal Democrat Party, and UK Minister for Business, Innovation, and Skills under Prime Minister David Cameron, and a minister in the UK coalition government under David Cameron. He writes a fascinating analysis of the increasingly tense relationship between the West and Asia, specifically China and India. Cable sees three possible future scenarios playing out: A democratic “Global West” confronting autocratic adversaries, led by a failing China, with India joining the democracies; or a multi-polar world, with a rising China and a rising India and no hegemon; or a multilateral world, with a reformed, but functional, postwar order and, again, no hegemon. Smartly written, it leaves the reader plenty to ponder about how all this will play out.

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.