The Ezra Klein Show

And then the other book is more recent. It's Angela Garbus' Essential Labor.

Her argument is essentially that taking care of children is the work of a society. This is straightforward, but I think we've forgotten it. It's an incredibly readable book as well.

You've written a sort of autobiography before, a memoir called Joseph Anton, you did in the third person; this book is a selfportrait.

The Gatekeepers by Chris Whipple is kind of the definitive book on White House chiefs of staff and what things are good advice and bad advice.

What I took from it is that it's very important to build a team.

I'm a very team-oriented chief of staff and very focused on the idea that I'm an advisor, but also my more important job is to kind of gather advice and present it to the president, even when that advice is advice I don't necessarily agree with.

I also really am very focused on making sure that he hears lots of different voices and that when I come in to see him, usually there are other people around or oftentimes other people come in to see him without me being around.

And that's, I think, the most important book in this field, as far as I'm concerned at least.

Say Nothing by Patrick Rat and Keef.

then The Sixth Extinction in 2014, which is about this humanled mass extinction

A story you tell in your book, The New Map, is that there's been a real dramatic shift in the energy production markets from it being OPEC, the oil production cartel basically, and non-OPEC to what you now call the big three.

Well you heard me talk about When Affirmative Action Was White by Ira Katznelson. I mean that is foundational for me. It's foundational for me because it demonstrates what government can do in order to promote the human rights of all of us, to promote a great society for all of us.

Another book is my friend Indra Nooyi's book. And it's all about her life kind of growing up in India as a girl and then kind of came and ran one of America's largest corporations and was the CEO of that corporation for many years.

She's the author of the books Mr. Putin, Operative in the Kremlin, and There Is Nothing For You Here.

I always tell people to start with WORKING, one of the just great books about work ever written in America.

I would start Breakfast of Champions with Vonnegut or maybe Player Piano.

Cat's Cradle. You can't go wrong.

Slaughterhouse-Five.

God bless you, Mr. Rosewater.

George Packer's biography of the diplomat Richard Holbrook. The book is written in the style of a novel.

The Constitution of Liberty by F.A. Hayek is a good statement of the evolutionary basis of liberty and why checks and balances are necessary in order to preserve that liberty.

But she has all these other beautiful books, Housekeeping, Lila, Jack, many, many more.

Another book I've really loved recently is Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner. It's this memoir of grief and loss about losing your mother and also about her relationship with her husband who she married when her mother was ill because she wanted her mother to be there at the wedding. It helped shape my thinking about grief and loss.

And one of the books that I think is a powerful book in this new bookshelf that we're going to call group help is Donya Rutenberg's On Repair and Repentance.

And so I think so much of what has happened structurally is like we don't have tools to help people who used to have power... to kind of integrate, to have a new way of being a man in the world, to have a new way to be a white person in the world in a multiracial, multicultural context.

I read Imani Perry's new book, South to America. Man, it is something I've just been waiting for.

There are two phases to Paine. There's the American Paine, where you could read Common Sense, I'd say start from the American Crisis, which is much more of a general reader, sort of popular piece, series of essays written really to, as pep talks to soldiers, more or less in the course of the Revolutionary War.

The one I like the best is Love in the Time of Cholera. It's all about the culture and the almost witchcraft of the region.

It was a big novel, which was published in 1957. He actually wrote that novel in 1951. ... That's the big novel, which is On the Road.