The Ezra Klein Show

I have two books on how to do successful Middle East diplomacy. Since that's kind of what we're talking about. Martin Indig's Master of the Game, Henry Kissinger in the Art of Middle East Diplomacy, and Peter Baker in Sudden Glasser's Masterful, The Man Who Ran Washington, The Life and Times of James Baker. Those are two books I would recommend about--there are real lessons there-- about how to do successful diplomacy.

I have a third book, one that isn't out yet, that argues that the U.S., including many who worked on this process for a very long time, has gotten it profoundly and utterly wrong when it comes to peacemaking. It's called Tomorrow Is Yesterday, Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel, Palestine by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley.

And then, of course, Mike Wolf's story, All or Nothing, about the last year before the last elections in America about President Trump, which is interesting, very exciting.

She is the author of the forthcoming book First Among Equals.

Well on the Nixon point actually I've been reading A Superpower Transformed by Dan Sargent which basically looks at all of those overlapping changes that happened in the 1970s through Nixon Ford Carter so if that's a good model for this moment and maybe it is it's a really good read.

It's a really good read I think if you want to understand US defense policy it's worth picking up A Strategy of Denial by Elbridge Colby who's now at the Pentagon this is his book on US involvement in Asia how he thinks about Taiwan and its importance.

And then finally I would say A World Safe for Commerce by Dale Copeland which is this lengthy historical treatment of how the US and its foreign policy have been impacted by our trade with other countries which again seems very relevant for the current moment.

I ran into this unusually beautiful book that's all about this experience. It's called Lost and Found. It's by Katherine Schultz, a writer at The New Yorker.

For a while after my father died, I could not stop seeing the world as it really is, marked everywhere by the evidence of past losses and the imminence of future ones. This was not because his death was a tragedy. My father died peacefully at 74, tended throughout his final weeks by those he loved most.

Number two is a book that just is out this week, I believe, which is this wonderful graphic novel Spent by Alison Bechdel with beautiful color artwork by her partner, Holly Ray Taylor. It's about the experience of growing up in a relatively hardscrabble family and living this kind of marginal artistic existence and then suddenly finding yourself reasonably well-off.

So one book I've been reading recently that I really love is called A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman.

Then a novel I really liked recently is called Gretel and the Great War, it's by Adam Sachs.

My third recommendation is going to be Shy, which is the musical composer Mary Rodgers' memoir, published posthumously with Jesse Green, who is the theater critic here at the Times. ... It's like very diShy. There's a lot in it about, you know, mid-20th century gossip from Broadway and how she dated Stephen Sondheim, who recently passed away ... It's just a delightful, delightful, gossipy memoir.

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's new book Original Sin President Biden's decline Its cover-up And his disastrous choice to run again Is a reconstruction of what Democrats should have known And when they should have known it

There is a book called Hitler's People, I think it's called, by Richard Evans, which is about how it came to be that the Holocaust happened in Germany

There is a graphic novel that is written by Andy Samberg and some others with him called The Holy Roller, which is about a Jewish bowling Ohio superhero that I have started and is enjoyable and weird

His book, The Reactionary Spirit, looks at the way this has been happening worldwide.

my political lodestar is John Rawls in his book Political Liberalism.

I just picked this up a couple of days ago. It's called Melting Point, and it's all primary sources.