Top Ten Book Lists

1. The Good Society
2. Guns of August
3. No Ordinary Time
4. Master of the Senate
5. Embracing Defeat
6. The Glory and the Dream
7. The Age of Revolution
8. History of the American Frontier
9. The Making of the Atomic Bomb
10. Lindbergh

---

Runner Up List

1. Gotham: History of NYC, Burrows and Wallace
2. The Haunted Land, Tina Rosenberg
3. American Caesar, William Manchester
4. Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
5. My Search for History, Ted White
6. The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer
7. Lenin's Tomb, David Remnick
8. The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood
9. Modern Times, Paul Johnson
10. God: A Biography, Jack Miles
11. Summer For the Gods, Edward Larson

This turned out to be a harder exercise than I had imagined and probably will consider this draft #1 to be changed as favorites come and go. The list above marks a lot of watershed books for me - ideas I discovered that caused me to look different at how the world operates.

Here's a little flavor of each:

The Good Society, Bellah, et. al. - key theme of the book is "we live through institutions". This was required reading for a civic journalism program i went to at the Poynter Institute that really peeled back the disconnect between how American society works and how people gravitate and cling to myths about how they think things work. Robert Bellah has become my hero.

Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman - just simply an amazing book. Easy to read, easy to understand book about how World War I started. Tuchman is the standard by which all history books will be judged.

No Ordinary Time, Francis Kearns Goodwin - just loved this book for similar reasons that i liked Gun of August. I've read many Roosevelt books and the complexity of the guy is endless. Goodwin captures his spirit best of all and you get a much greater sense of the fragility of American leadership.

Master of the Senate, Robert Caro - fascinating subject and unbelievable historian. I've read all of his books on Lyndon Johnson but this one was the best although Means of Ascent was close. What put this one over the edge for me was the explanation of the way the Senate worked and as a Southerner, understanding how race and power intersected and still prevails today.

Embracing Defeat, John Dower - this one caught me by surprise and gave me my appreciation of the Pulitzer Prize system. All Pulitzers have some sort of zinger in the middle to late pages that takes all you've read and weaves them into a big insight that will leave you thinking. Embracing Defeat tells the story of Japan's humbling following WWII and the role MacArthur made to restoring the Japanese economy. Really extraordinary picture of American/MacArthur leadership, and the smothering effects of corporate capitalism that caused them to fall off their game. This is happening right now in the US.

The Glory and the Dream, William Manchester - picked this one up at a bargain bin of little used book store down the street in Atlanta as one of those "book of the month" club specials. Turned out to be quite an eye opener for me. Opening chapter is about Hoover opening fire on WWI vets who were squatting in DC demanding some sort of pension for service. We seem to have swept most of the 1920s and 1930s depression stories right out of consciousness. Through this door, i re-discovered a lot of the 1920s fiction and this little gem next on the list.

History of the American Frontier, William Paxon - this is a Pulitzer Prize winner from 1925 and gave me a much better insight into how you can read old books and get a two-fer: you get the subject plus you get a perspective of what the leading thinkers of the time were focused on. In this case, Paxon is looking at the Civil War and the settling of the West from perspective of events that took place within 50-70 years back. This is akin to our making sense of the 1940s and 1950s - many people around to explain the details and historians just starting to detect the patterns. I got such an amazing perspective from this book that i was able to see the Western US in a different light.

The Age of Revolution, Eric Hobsbawn - Hobsbawn is my favorite socialist/communist historian. He's a British intellectual who writes these sweeping history books that take a look at smoe period of time and then pulls the themes together so you can see the interconnectedness of thought, economics and political passions. I've read all of his books and they are really thought provoking no matter what your persuasion. The Age of Revolution was the first of the books i've read of his and it captures the essence of the French and American revolutions and their impact on thinking across all Western countries. I think about Hobsbawn when connecting the dots of the tea party, the middle east Spring, and the similarity of the elections that run between Europe, England and the US.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes - great book that dives into the assembling of scientific talent to build the atomic bomb during WWII. The book really shows how random the bomb project was, the brilliance of the scientist, the morality of the bomb itself plus little vignettes with Einstein. You can't read this book without looking at how unified and committed the world was to doing all possible to defeat Hitler. Just a great book.

Lindbergh, Scott Berg - Probably the best book i've ever read on celebrity and the impact of mass communications in how it produces larger than life characters. Scott Berg describes how Lindbergh was one of many flyers looking to make it across the Atlantic and as he is without communication over the ocean, millions are following his path. He becomes an instant icon that ultimately has a lot of tragic consequences. Lindbergh is buried in Hana, Maui in one of the most remote places in America. Berg masterfully ties this into the whole story.



Ben Eason
Tampa, FL