The Ezra Klein Show

There is translation of a Jewish Hebrew Israeli poet, Chaim Bialik, who died many years, you know, in the last century. He's considered the great Jewish national poet. He wrote this poem after the Kishinev pogrom in 1903 called On the Slaughter. ... There's a new translation ... called City of Slaughter that complicates that story and shows what a powerful poet who complicates any idea of vengeance in particular, vengeance.

A second book is Victor Navasky's Naming Names, which is about the McCarthy era. It really focuses on Hollywood. It really focuses on the individual and the role of individuals and the choices they make and what the ramifications are.

The last book is called Citizen Marx. It's an academic book. It's the study of Karl Marx by a young political theorist named Bruno Leopold, who's in Britain. And it's the Marx you never knew about. It's the Marx as a theorist of freedom who cared about things like freedom of the press passionately.

I believe there's a great book called Our Biggest Fight by Frank McCourt that I would recommend, where they make a really interesting argument that they're taking our agency from us and that our identity, really our personal freedom is bound up in that.

I'll go ahead and just mention Our Biggest Fight by Frank McCourt since I already mentioned it.

I wrote a book about polarization. I was on your show for a book about polarization that I published in early 2020. Easy to remember because the tour got bisected by COVID but look, like you got Lisa Murkowski, Republican senator saying we're in a time and place where I've not been here before.

Super Abundance by Marian Tupi is, I think, a really informative and useful read. I think it's a really important book because it's important that we be grateful for our civilization and be accurate about the great positive movement in economics over the last 40 years.

I was on vacation recently and read Gary Steingart's new novel, Vera or Faith, which is, you know, a fun kind of near future dystopia, but has a constitutional amendment storyline.

Radley Balco is a journalist who has written about policing and criminal justice for decades. He's the author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, The Militarization of America's Police Forces.

Jessica Pischko's book, Highest Law on the Land, which is a narration of sort of how the sheriff in the U.S. has become such an integral part of the Trump movement and MAGA and how they've lent a lot of sort of institutional support for it, including some, you know, pretty outrageous tactics and how they're kind of above the law in a lot of parts in much of the country.

David Mitchell, the British comedian, has a book called Unruly, which somehow manages to make a history of medieval age British royalty interesting and funny, a review of all the early English kings in his style, which I found very endearing and listened to on tape.

I actually read two books about American politics, maybe more. One is the biography of Thomas Jefferson, John Meacham, The Art of Power, an extraordinary life story of one of the greatest figures in American history.

And the other one, which is fascinating and it's a 2017 book by Alexander Watson called Ring of Steel, Germany and AustriaHungary in World War I.

And there's lots of background stuff on how John Kennedy won the Democratic nomination and how Richard Nixon won the Republican nomination.

I would like to encourage you and your listeners at some point to go read A Place of Greater Safety, which is the book Hilary Mantel wrote before turning to Thomas Cromwell and his compatriots. It is about the French Revolution, 800 pages long, incredibly undisciplined, and absolutely unruly and wildly great to read.

My second book would be James Elroy's American Tabloid, a novel about the Kennedy assassination.

His new book, Liberty Is Sweet, The Hidden History of the American Revolution, looks at the ways that often overlooked groups, from Native Americans on the western border of the British colonies to enslaved Africans within them, shaped the war, its outcome, and its aftermath.

So you have a new book out, Liberty Is Sweet, that is about the beginnings of the American Revolution that causes the events and pressures that lead up to at least one set of colonists breaking from Britain.

I was actually thinking of three of the best books about Ukraine. The Last Empire. It's a fairly short history of the dissolution of the Soviet Union from a postcolonial perspective.

And then I also wanted to recommend Kyle Harper's Plagues Upon the Earth, which is a history of disease and the way that it has shaped history and politics, social life, civilization for the whole of human history.

My second choice is a book by Bridget Reed it's a book called Little Bosses Everywhere and it's an argument that the American pyramid scheme is kind of the center of our current rot.

The third, N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season. I learned so much about oppression, colonialism, capitalism through her world building because you see it in the characters and she does a brilliant job of describing trauma in her female protagonists.