Politics Bucket List

From Detroit Red to Mecca, told to Alex Haley in the year before his assassination.

Hochschild on the Congo Free State and the ten million who died for rubber.

John Lewis's civil rights years, from Nashville lunch counters to Selma, in three books.

James Baldwin's two essays of 1963 on race and religion in America.

Lawrence Wright on al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11; the Pulitzer.

Mandela's autobiography from the Transkei to Robben Island to the presidency.

Jane Jacobs against the planners; eyes on the street and short blocks.

Anne Applebaum's Pulitzer history of the Soviet camps from the archives.

Europe from 1945 to 2005 in one volume; Tony Judt's masterpiece.

Edward Said on how the West invented the East to rule it.

The fall of the Iranian monarchy in 1979 through photographs and fragments; Kapuscinski.

Choice architecture and how a default option changes what people do; Thaler's Nobel idea.

Machiavelli's advice to a ruler: better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

American history from the losers' side, Columbus to Clinton; Zinn's two million copies.

Socrates on justice, the philosopher-king and the cave; the book Western philosophy replies to.

Haile Selassie's court told by its servants; Kapuscinski on power anywhere.

Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation of the camps from 227 witnesses; the abridged edition is enough.

The last day of Trujillo, the Dominican dictator, and a woman who returns; Vargas Llosa.

A physicist between an anarchist moon and its capitalist planet; Le Guin's ambiguous utopia.

A Muslim party wins the French presidency in 2022; Houellebecq published it the day of Charlie Hebdo.

Russians remember the end of the Soviet Union and the 1990s; Alexievich's chorus.

A poet returns to Kars in a blizzard as girls kill themselves over headscarves; Pamuk's political novel.

The pigs take over the farm; all animals are equal, but some more than others.

Read Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa's great novel of power, corruption and Lima