Holiday Book Guide - 7 Must-Reads

Whether you're looking for last-minute holiday gifts, or looking for gifts for yourself, I got you. Here are the 7 books I read (or re-read) in 2024 that I recommend for any pro-democracy folks.

This has been an odd year or so for my reading list. I went from devouring everything I could about Trump’s legal travails as I wrote, edited, and released my own book, to reading a lot of philosophy, to finally reading Anna Karenina over the summer,¹ to finishing the year with a furious sprint through a series of works that help explain the moment we now inhabit and how we might be able to escape it.

If any picture of giant heaps of books makes you happy, let’s be friends.

From that much longer list, I’ve culled the seven books that I recommend for anyone who cares about democracy and its survival in this perilous time, in alphabetical order by author’s last name:

1 - Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum

Following up on The Twilight of Democracy, Applebaum goes one step deeper to look into the kleptocratic elements that are powering autocracy worldwide, and why they’re inextricably intertwined. This is exactly what I’ve been meaning to say when I’ve referred to the “Kremlinization” of America. Our wannabe oligarchs don’t want to kill the federal government — they want to carve it up and own it. That is what we’re up against, as you’ll see from one of the experts in this space.

2 - Win Every Argument by Mehdi Hasan

Long before creating the new digital media platform Zeteo and hosting a show on MSNBC, Hasan cut his teeth as a debater at Oxford — and here he pulls together an impressive and accessible guide to rhetoric and the art of arguing. He’s read all the Aristotle and Cicero so you don’t have to. But even if you have, the book still delivers mightily, as he ties those ancient tomes to contemporary politics and the latest revelations from cognitive neuroscience. If you have any relatives you dread debating during the holidays, this may be the book to binge first, right now!

3 - Prequel by Rachel Maddow

This is history that reads like a true crime thriller — and it answers the critical question of how we’ve seen fascism before in this country and we were able to defeat it, during the 1930s, when Nazi-funded operatives successfully infiltrated the upper reaches of American politics and government, all the way up to the Senate. Although now we need to confront one terrible gut-wrenching difference between then and now — back then, they failed to reach the White House.

4 - Medgar & Myrlie by Joy Reid

This was an absolute gem to read, about two of the often overlooked giants of the Civil Rights Movement and about their romance and a true partnership — even though I guarantee it will bring tears to your eyes even as you’re marveling at Reid’s writing and her ability to bring these people and stories to life. And as sad as this story is, it’s also a deeply inspiring one, for anyone who chooses to raise their voices to help everyone else around them.

5 - On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

Unfortunately, it is now time to re-read this book, first published in 2017, and both fortunately and unfortunately, it has aged well. If you’ve been seeing all the references online to “not obeying in advance,” this is the source — it’s Snyder’s first rule for fighting tyranny, followed by 19 others, in a compact volume that you might just read in a single sitting.

6 - Bismarck: A Life by Jonathan Steinberg

I am a giant history nerd, and I’m especially a nerd about giant history books that can double as doorstops. This one isn’t even that long, only 608 pages, but it carries a lot more substantive heft than that. It’s not only a book about Otto von Bismarck and his career — it’s a book about the entire Prussian culture of the 1800s, its Junker ruling class, and the metastasizing of what became its state religion, anti-Semitism. And if you’re like me, it’ll prompt you to read or re-read Edmund Burke and realize that there is a straight line of reactionary politics and opposition to modernity from Burke to Bismarck to the Nazis to the new Nazis of today.

7 - Vote with Your Phone by Bradley Tusk

I also happen to be a nerd about political science and especially about voting, so this was one of the most thought-provoking books that’s crossed my desk in a while — a serious and well-reasoned proposal for a critical but achievable reform to our voting technology that would lower barriers to casting ballots and likely result in a substantial increase in America’s chronically abysmal voting turnout (only 63.9% in 2024, compared with around 75% in France and Germany, and 87% in Sweden). Part of the key of this proposal: it’s not an overhaul of our current system of paper ballots but an additional option; a ballot can be cast via phone as well as by mail, and all the phone ballots are still printed and counted and kept as paper ballots. I also just had Tusk on my podcast to discuss this — very much worth a listen, and we should all be looking for ways to enact this change in our local elections.

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I’m taking the rest of this week off — but I’ll be back next week to look at what the hell happened in 2024 and what we can learn from it. Happy Holidays to all of you!

1. Worth every minute, though not really relevant to our focus on the fights for democracy.