I tend to read books in themed batches. Unfortunately the topic for the last six months was politics. I’m usually pretty arms length from politics, but the twisting narratives had me hooked and wanting to understand a field I’d normally write off as uninteresting. So I apologize in advance to those who’d rather forget 2024 for how politically heavy the content here is. However, if you’re trying to make sense of the past year, the top two books are must reads.

Three Stars

The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story – by Sam Wasson

Last year, the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now released what may be his last film, Megalopolis, his dream project he had been trying to get made for decades.

Path to Paradise covers two parallel stories in Coppola’s life: the day-to-day production of Apocalypse Now (which was an infamously brutal experience for everyone involved trying to shoot a war movie in Southeast Asian jungles in the 1970s) and Coppola’s later attempts to start his own film production company American Zoetrope.

The format of alternating chapters between the two stories doesn’t quite work as well it did for Wasson in The Big Goodbye (a book by the same author I gave a ⅘ in 2021). The gist in both cases is that Coppola is always living his own vision of auteurism, an iconoclast whose ambitions and visions either produce legendary works of art or destroy the lives of the people around him. I’m not sure this book gave me much more understanding of the man, but it earns its rating for the wealth of stories and source material about a living legend.

The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Speaker of the House – by Nancy Pelosi

Well, I think this one was planned to be published at a different time with a different 2024 election outcome. In this new memoir, the former Speaker of the House states that she intended to retire in the mid-2010s and only stuck around longer to reduce Donald Trump’s impact. Despite her best efforts, the jury is still out on determining how effective she has been in that goal.

What is good about this book (which feels ghostwritten due to bland writing) is that it does convey Pelosi’s admirable strengths. She’s a smart woman who knows how to effectively navigate games of power. 

Most memorable for me is an early chapter where she explains how she got the “ban on gays in the military” repealed in the mid-2000s. She admits this was accomplished by inserting it as a requirement into an additional military spending bill, likely meaning that more federal money would be spent in Red states where defense contractors are located. For this reason, she faced resistance from other Democrats who did not want to sign a bill supporting more war spending. 

She simply had to remind her party members that what their constituents would care about is the win on gay rights and not what it cost to accomplish. It is this type of arguably cynical, but ultimately correct, understanding of deal making which was part of what made her so effective and is a savviness which Democrats will miss when she is gone.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness – by Jonathan Haidt

Haidt has been making the media rounds promoting and discussing this analysis on why the kids don’t seem alright, pinning most of the blame on helicopter parenting and cell phones used for social media and mindless entertainment. Paradoxically, this book is probably both his weakest and most mainstream. Upon release, there have been numerous reports questioning the analytical rigor and broad applicability of the claims made in the book. At the same time, his suggestions for improving kids mental health with reasonable restrictions on the frequency of their social media consumption seem completely reasonable and intuitively correct. The moderate recommendations are in balance with the possible weaknesses in the supporting evidence.

Apprentice in Wonderland: How Donald Trump and Mark Burnett Took America Through the Looking Glass – by Ramin Setoodeh

Could Donald Trump have become President if he hadn’t hosted a reality TV show on a major broadcast network?

Probably not. And so author Setoodeh, who is the co-Editor in Chief of Variety magazine, embarked on the worthwhile journey to chronicle The Apprentice. This is a (conveniently quick) biography of arguably the most important TV show of all time.

Setoodeh’s interviews with former cast and crew remind the reader of why Donald Trump was more universally popular before running for the Republican party. With most people one on one, he’s charming and complementary. He takes the TV show seriously but himself less so.

Most importantly, his numerous interviews with Donald Trump emphasize the traits that helped Donald win. He’s a rare billionaire who has a lot of time on his hands and a willingness to talk to anyone. For decades, he made his money solely by being accessible and marketing himself to the public. It was the perfect training ground for politics.

A Very Punchable Face: A Memoir – by Colin Jost (Audiobook)

Ordered this one as his Weekend Update with Michael Che is the only Saturday Night Live segment I watch. A great audiobook for listening to funny stories on your commute.

The Canceling of the American Mind – by Rikki Schlott and George Lukianoff

Do not let the title of this book deter you, even though “Cancel Culture” is a phrase that’s been repeated ad nauseum. It took until 2023 for a good definitive book on the subject to be published. Schlott, who dropped out of college partly to pursue this book writing independently and partly because she disagreed with the culture she was on NYU’s campus, partnered with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s Lukianoff to critically document what “cancel culture” really was. They’ve written a great history on how anti-free speech became intellectualized inside academia, and make a strong case for why we need to fight against mob mentalities on both sides of the political spectrum.

Trump in Exile – by Meredith McGraw

What was Trump up to in the aftermath of the January 6th riots? That’s where this book picks up the Trump story, starting with Biden’s inauguration day and running through the 2024 Republican primaries. The window of 2021 through 2022 could have been the moment when the Republican party moved on from Trump while he was living a reclusive life at his Florida Mar-a-Lago estate, slightly distracted by business opportunities such as Truth Social and LIV Golf.

And yet, he marched along with his planning for another run, empowered by his team’s polling numbers that showed he was still the most popular politician in the GOP, even if his handpicked midterm candidates couldn’t win.

The insights into Trump’s team, particularly campaign manager and soon-to-be White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, showed that Trump took his revenge tour far more seriously than he had his 2016 campaign by surrounding himself with real experienced political operatives. And it will frustrate Democrats to realize how much momentum the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago and lawsuits in 2023 gave his campaign.

Ultimately, it’s Trump’s ability to unilaterally make decisions for himself, especially about when to announce he was running again and how to crush Ron DeSantis before primaries had started, that make him such a distinct and effective politician separated from all other run-by-committee campaigners.

Cultish: The Language of Fanatacism – by Amanda Montell

Maybe my most “fun” read of 2024, Amanda Montell makes a great case for the importance of language to the ability for cults to exist. She writes quick chapters on a range of cult concepts, such as the classic religious groups, through fitness, pyramid schemes, and conspiracy theories. A mix of academic research and anecdotal interviews with former cult members blend together well.

Four Stars

The Handmaid’s Tale – by Margaret Atwood

This was required reading for some English classes back when I was in high school in the mid-2000s. Sadly, it was not on my curriculum. Having come around to it now (due to its potential prescience) I was pleasantly (maybe not the vibe Atwood was going for?) surprised by how breezy a read the book is despite the heaviness of its content. This is a compliment to her writing style, which manages to build an alternative future world that’s detailed without getting bogged down in details. Without opining on its contents, I can see why it’s a book that would be taught in English classes; it invites discussion.

Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP – by Patrick Ruffini

For anyone surprised by Trump’s electoral victory, they shouldn’t have been. A lot of the evidence was already present in the 2020 election. Ruffini, a Republican pollster and Bush administration member, dove into the 2020 data and wrote this book largely to help explain to himself how Donald Trump had taken over his party. What he found after the 2020 election became extremely relevant in 2024: minorities and lower income voters were drifting Republican in most elections since 2016. Anyone on the left who wants to stereotype the GOP as less intelligent really has to contend with Ruffini, who packed this 2023 book with stats and charts that really exemplifies how Republicans have an understanding of electoral trends that counters the Democrats “ground game” approach.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure – by Jonathan Haidt and George Lukianoff

Is every new generation of kids “softer” than their parents were? While adults have been saying this since time immemorial, professors Haidt and Lukianoff started seeing a particular spike in softness amongst their university students in the mid-2010s, and by 2018 compiled their analysis of the causes and solutions into this book.

Without overly spoiling the book’s contents, they exposed what they call “Three Great Untruths” that millennial and Gen Z kids were taught, making them unprepared for adulthood and setting back society:

• “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker” – Kids are taught to shrivel or run to adults when faced with challenges, directly contradicting older wisdom we used to teach like “confronting your fears” and “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me”.
• “Always trust your feelings” – When there’s a big body of research and old philosophy about how we should use our rational capacities to manage our emotions, not feed into them.
• “Life is a battle between good and evil” – Teaching kids that anyone who disagrees with you is evil eliminates the ideas of debate, nuance, and perspective, all of which are much more necessary for a functioning society than a tribal “us versus them” mentality.

In general, it seems like society has forgotten that kids are stupid and need raising by adults, not coddled to.

Five Stars

The Revolt of the Public: And the Crisis of Authority in the New Millenium – by Martin Gurri

If anyone best understood the rise of Donald Trump before it happened, it was Martin Gurri publishing this book in 2014, one year before Trump announced his candidacy. This book is not explicitly about Trump, though his specter looms large when reading it today.

What it is about is the downfall of authority figures, and the implications that would have for politics. Gurri didn’t come up with this insight out of thin air. He was a CIA analyst who saw how social media was used by the public during the 2011 Arab Spring to revolt (hence the title) against half a dozen Middle Eastern governments. His big predictive leap was expecting that trend to hit Western nations given the internet technology would only continue to spread.

This also greatly explains the recent losses of the Democratic party since 2014. They positioned themselves as the defender of the old authority order, not realizing that no existing government could control its policy narratives in the new social media age and any weaknesses would be exposed and attacked mercilessly by the public.

Like many profound ideas, all one had to do was look in the right spot and extrapolate to the future. For its prescience in 2014 and ability to make sense of the past decade, this is a five star book.

The Best Book Read in the Second Half of 2024

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion – by Jonathan Haidt

This book tackles a question, critical and universal to humanity, suggested by its subtitle: How is it that there are so many various opinions among people, and yet everyone seems so certain their one opinion is correct?

Haidt’s answers this question gradually and methodically, bridging the fields of biology, psychology, and political science into the cohesive new theory of Moral Foundations. 

It belongs in my short list of “books I wish I had written”, where I’ve discovered that ideas loosely floating around my mind have already been rigorously considered, tested, and communicated better than I would have. The world would be a more peaceful, understanding place if every high school senior had to read this book.