The Best Books About Politics (According to You)

Without further ado, I bring you the On Politics unofficial literary canon, as recommended by you. Let me know if you read one, and if you want to join the Robert Penn Warren book club that I will totally start after the election.

“All the King’s Men,” Robert Penn Warren (1946): OK. You guys love this book, which is a fictional tale of a populist governor in the Deep South inspired by Huey Long. You love it more than “All the President’s Men.” You might even love it more than “What It Takes” and the works of Hunter S. Thompson. I’ll leave it to one reader, John Armstrong of Raleigh, N.C., to explain why:

It captures the entire dynamic of politics in America. The messianic leader who comes to see himself as the embodiment of the people and then its higher self. Those who seek his favor, always jockeying for position, always ready to turn against him when they see a new vehicle for their ambition. The masses who follow anything that moves, and, among them, those few idealists. All that, and beautifully written.

“The Last Hurrah,” Edwin O’Connor (1956): This book about the political machine, as told through a fictional mayor of a city that seems a little like Boston, is “a reminder that everything old is new again,” wrote Tim Shea. And it taught Sean Sweeney, a SoHo political activist, how upstarts can beat incumbents. “We had to teach ourselves to do the campaigning that the book details,” he wrote me.

“The Making of the President 1960,” Theodore H. White (1961): This account of the 1960 presidential campaign shaped political coverage for decades to come. To explain why he loves it, Edward Lindsey of Atlanta sent me a line from the book that has long stuck with him:

Heroes and philosophers, brave men and vile, have since Rome and Athens tried to make this particular manner of transfer of power work effectively; no people has succeeded at it better, or over a longer period of time, than the Americans.

“The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” Robert Caro (1974): One thing I learned this week is that the On Politics mailing list doubles as a Caro fan club. Fun! Tom Lombard wrote that he cut class in college to read Caro’s sweeping biography of the urban planner Robert Moses, and thought of it when he served 10 years on the City Council in North Richland Hills, Texas:

I always tried to keep in mind one of Mr. Caro’s main themes: that the actions taken by government have a long-term impact on all sorts of people. I liked the book so much, I gifted it to our Parks & Recreation director. Don’t know if she ever read it!

“And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic,” Randy Shilts (1987): Evan Moss of Fayetteville, Ark., described this story of the cascading failures to deal with the AIDS epidemic this way:

While Reagan’s indifference to the epidemic is famous, the book also dives into local politics in gay enclaves like New York and San Francisco, where the politics of gay activists often failed gay people themselves. It’s a book about what happens when power is faced with a problem it doesn’t care to solve.

“The Hunger Games” trilogy, Suzanne Collins (2008-2010): Look, if this is not a series about politics, I don’t know what is — though it’s not one that will make you feel good about them. “The books show that those who seek power are often the worst people for the job, whether they know it or not,” wrote Hailey Carr. John Quinn pointed specifically to the third book, “Mockingjay,” and its sobering ending:

It captures so well one of the dangers inherent in revolutions: that the effort to overthrow oppressors can corrupt the revolutionaries to the point where they are no longer distinguishable from the tyrants they seek to dethrone.

“Wolf Hall,” Hilary Mantel (2009): It’s the first novel in a trilogy about the rise and fall of Oliver Cromwell. Here’s how Shannon Chamberlain of Santa Fe, N.M., wrote about the experience of watching Cromwell change in front of your eyes:

The fascinating thing for me, and the political lesson, is that you as the reader become complicit in this moral decline. You’re rooting for him. Politics have distorted your sense of moral direction, too. People often compare the “Wolf Hall” trilogy to Shakespeare, and especially “Macbeth,” but the difference is this: You’re never really rooting for Macbeth. But you are for Cromwell, until the ax falls. It’s a lesson for our political age. It’s amazing how fast we become politically loyal, and politically complicit.

“The Sympathizer,” Viet Thanh Nguyen (2015): Several of you wrote in to say this book, about a nameless mole spying on South Vietnam’s secret police, made you rethink your understanding of the Vietnam War. That included Jeneva Stone of Bethesda, Md.:

Everything I absorbed about the conflict came from the U.S. military perspective. I graduated from high school in 1982, and during my high school years, the war’s end was so fresh and painful that only basic facts about it were taught in our history class. “The Sympathizer” gave me an entirely different historical perspective on the war that was rich and poignant and informative.

“Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” Jane Mayer (2016): Is it too soon to call an eight-year-old book a classic? Mayer’s searing look at the billionaires who have reshaped American politics shows how the influence of big money “is always for big money’s gain,” as Mel McAdams put it. “It all sounds like something from a political thriller,” wrote Ellen Warner, “but it’s all true.”

“Caste,” Isabel Wilkerson (2020): “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance,” Wilkerson writes. Many of you read this book and considered how it shapes politics, too.

“A Fever in the Heartland,” Timothy Egan (2023): A story of the expansion of the Ku Klux Klan across the country in the 1920s haunted many of you reading it today. “The story is fascinating, particularly the manner in which the Klan won the public over with patriotism and religion,” Angela Gehm wrote to me. “Similarities to our political climate today were striking.”