I've never slept that soundly, but I've always been a compulsive reader. A couple of years ago my husband got me a Kindle. With an office stuffed full of books, I hadn't thought much about getting one. Turns out, it was one of the best gifts ever. So I sleep with my Kindle – I can grab it from my nighstand, and read a few pages without turning on the light.
This reading list was compiled with the help of various Resistance members. Let the downloads begin.
Biographies:
• A Higher Loyalty by James Comey – This former Director of the FBI discusses his career, ethics and leadership, and his relationship with Donald Trump, who fired him in May 2017.
• American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power by Andrea Bernstein – A multigenerational saga of two families, who rose from immigrant roots to the pinnacle of wealth and power, that tracks the unraveling of American democracy.
• Becoming by Michele Obama – An intimate, power and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady.
• Born Trump: Inside America’s First Family by Emily Jane Fox. A dishy, deeply reported and richly detailed look at Trump’s five children (and equally powerful son-in-law Jared Kushner), exploring their lives, their roles in the campaign and administration, and their dramatic and often fraught relationships with their father and with one another.
• Dear Leader: My Escape From North Korea by Jang Jin-sung. In this international bestseller, a high-ranking counterintelligence agent describes his life as a former poet laureate to Kim Jong-il and his breathtaking escape to freedom.
• Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover. One of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year, Educated is a memoir of a young girl who leaves her survivalist family in Idaho and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, and she wondered if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.
• Leadership: in Turbulent Times by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Renowned historian Goodwin draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely – Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR and LBJ – to show how they recognized leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by others.
• What Happened by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Clinton reveals what she was thinking and feeling during one of the most controversial and unpredictable presidential elections in history in her most personal memoir yet.
Our History, Watergate, racism and polarization:
• All The President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The most devastating political detective story of the century: two Washington Post reporters, whose brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation smashed the Watergate scandal wide open, tell the behind-the-scenes drama the way it really happened.• Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country by Steve Almond – This is Almond’s effort to make sense of our historical moment and the roots of our moral erosion as a people, using literary voices from Melville to Orwell, Bradbury to Baldwin.
• Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean. – An explosive exposé of the right’s relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, stop action on climate change, and alter the Constitution.
• Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance – From a former Marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.
• Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder – From the beet fields of North Dakota to the campgrounds of California to Amazon’s CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool made of largely of transient older adults. These invisible casualties of the Great Recession have take to the road by the tens of thousands in RVs and modified vans, forming a growing community of nomads.
• The Stranger Among You: How the Faith-based Refugee Resettlement Movement is Shattering Our Red and Blue Silos by Kate Rice – Rice explores a grassroots movement of secular liberals and religious conservatives that are leaving their political comfort zones to work in solidarity to support refugees here in the U.S. in a grassroots movement flying beneath the radar of professional prognosticators and armchair political junkies.
• The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels by Jon Meacham – Pulitzer Prize-winning author Meacham helps us understand the present movement in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear.
• The Final Days by Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein – This is a classic, behind-the-scenes account of
Richard Nixon’s dramatic last months as president, reported and researched by
the Pulitzer Prize-winning co-authors of All the President’s Men.
• Tightrope: Americans
Reaching for Hope by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn – Tightrope draws us
deep into an "other America." The authors tell this story, in part,
through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up, in rural
Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but
has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared.
• Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump by Allen Frances – The world’s leading expert on psychiatric diagnosis draws upon his fast experience to deliver a powerful critique of modern American society’s collective slide away from sanity, and offers an urgently needed prescription for reclaiming our bearings.
• The View From Flyover Country: Essays by Sarah Kendzior by Sarah Kendzior – In this collection of essays, St. Louis journalist Sarah Kendzior tackles issues including labor exploitation, racism, gentrification, media bias and other aspects of the post-employment economy.
• The Least Among Us: Waging the Battle for the Vulnerable by Rosa L. DeLauro – The outspoken Connecticut congresswoman’s impassioned defense of America’s safety net in the time of Trump. She laments the fact that the bipartisan efforts that created many of the programs have now disintegrated.
• The Palace Guard by Dan Rather and Gary Paul Gates (1975 – only available by third-party sellers) – A fascinating behind-the-scenes account of the Nixon Administration and the men who ran it and the country before Watergate brought them down.
• The Man Who Sold America by Joy-Ann Reid – What is the hidden impact of Trump, beyond the headlines? Through interviews with American and international thought leaders and in-depth analysis, Reid situates the Trump era within the context of modern history, examining the profound social changes that led us to this point.
• The Watergate Girl: My Fight for Truth and Justice Against a Criminal President by Jill Wine-Banks – The MSNBC commentator takes us inside her trial by fire as a Watergate prosecutor.
Russia and Russian influence:
• Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth by Rachel Maddow – A deep dive into the worldwide affect of the oil and gas industry on politics.• Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and how Russia Helped Donald Trump Win by Luke Harding – Former Moscow bureau chief and Guardian reporter Harding draws on new material and his expert understanding of Moscow and its players to take the reader through every bizarre and disquieting detail of the “Trump-Russia” story.
• From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia by Michael McFaul – As Obama’s adviser on Russian affairs, McFaul helped craft the U.S. policy known as “reset” that fostered new and unprecedented collaboration between the two countries. As Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 he had a front-row seat when this fleeting, hopeful moment crumbled with Putin’s return to the Presidency.
• House of Trump, House of Putin by Craig Unger – A chilling story that begins in the 1970s when Trump made his first splash into the money-drenched world of New York real estate, and ends with Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States.
• Messing With the Enemy by Clint Watts – Former FBI Special Agent and leading cyber-security expert Watts offers a devastating and essential look at the misinformation campaigns, fake news and electronic espionage operations that have become the cutting edge of modern warfare.
• Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia by Peter Pomerantsev Professional killers with the souls of artists, would-be theater directors turned Kremlin puppet-masters, suicidal supermodels, Hell’s Angels who hallucinate themselves as holy warriors, and oligarch revolutionaries: welcome to the wild and bizarre heart of twenty-first-century Russia.
• Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice by Bill Browder – A real-life political thriller about an American financier in the Wild East of Russia, the murder of his principled young tax attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the Kremlin’s corruption.
• Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump by Michael Isikoff and David Corn – Russian Roulette is a story of political skullduggery unprecedented in American history. It weaves together tales of international intrigue, cyber espionage and superpower rivalry. As Vladimir Putin moved to reassert Russian strength on the global stage, Moscow trained its best hackers and trolls on U.S. political targets and exploited Wikileaks to disseminate information that could affect the 2016 election.
• The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies are Undermining America and Dismantling the West by Malcolm Nance and Rob Reiner – Bestselling author and career U.S. Intelligence Officer Malcolm Nance examines how Russia has used cyberwarfare, political propaganda and manipulation of our perception of reality to weaponize American news, traditional media, social media and the Internet to break apart democratic institutions from within. With a foreword by Rob Reiner.
• The Plot to Hack America:
How Putin’s Cyberspies and Wikileaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election by
Malcolm Nance – Published a full month prior to the Trump/Clinton 2016 presidential
election, this book exposed Russian hacking while the CIA was drafting their
own report. A thrilling true story of how Putin’s spy agency, run by the
Russian billionaire class, used the promise of power and influence to cultivate
Trump and his closest aides, the Kremlin Crew, to become unwitting assets of
the Russian government.
• The Plot to Betray America: How Team Trump Embraced Our Enemies, Compromised Our Security, and How We Can Fix It by Malcolm Nance – Shows how the Russian campaign to infiltrate the Trump campaign was staged and was so willingly accepted, with key agents taking roles in the Miss Universe contest, swaying the National Rifle Association, and conning Donald Trump Jr.
• The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy by Greg Miller – Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post national security reporter Miller investigates the truth about the Kremlin’s covert attempt to destroy Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump win the presidency.
• The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen – National Book Award winner Masha Gessen’s biography of a ruthless man’s ascent to near-absolute power. It is the chilling account of how a low-level, small-minded KGB operative ascended to the Russian presidency and, in an astonishingly short time, destroyed years of progress and made his country once more a threat to her own people and to the world.
• The Future in History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen – Gessen follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy. Each of them came of age with unprecedented expectations, some as the children and grandchildren of the very architects of the new Russia, each with newfound aspirations of their own--as entrepreneurs, activists, thinkers, and writers, sexual and social beings.
• Winter is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must be Stopped by Garry Kasparov – Vocal Putin critic and leader of a pro-democracy opposition to him in the Russian 2008 election, seeing his prophecies about Putin’s intentions fulfilled have left Kasparov with a darker truth: Putin’s Russia, like ISIS or al-Qaeda, defines itself in opposition to the free countries of the world.
• The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder. From the author of On Tyranny comes a new chronicle of the rise of authoritarianism from Russia to Europe and America.
American oligarchs and the influence of money:
• Dark Money: The Hidden
History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer –
This powerful, meticulously reported history of a network of exceedingly
wealthy people with extreme libertarian views details how they bankrolled a
systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political
system.
• Let Me Finish: the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics by Chris Christie – The former New Jersey governor was a presidential contender, a friend of Trump’s for many years, was named to the transition team, then booted out. While he freely criticizes Trump’s entourage, according to media interviews, he’s more restrained in his view of Trump himself.
The Trump campaign and presidency:
• Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch – All about the investigations that led up to the Steele dossiers, and subsequent investigations and repercussions.• Dear F*cking Lunatic: An Open Letter to Donald Trump by Aldous J. Pennyfarthing – This is accessible by googling the title, it appears on the Daily Kos page. Funny and scathing.
• Dear F*cking Moron: 101 More Rude Letters to Donald Trump by Aldous J. Pennyfarthing – More of the above.
• Dear Pr*sident A**clown: 101 More Rude Letters to Donald Trump by Aldous J. Pennyfarthing – Yep, more of the same. Note that he does comment on direct actions/tweets by tRump.
• Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worse President Ever by Rick Wilson – Political campaign strategist and conservative commentator Rick Wilson brings his darkly funny humor and biting analysis to the absurdity of American politics in the age of Trump.
• Fear: tRump in the White House by Bob Woodward – With authoritative reporting honed through eight presidencies, Woodward reveals in unprecedented detail the harrowing life inside Donald Trump’s White House.
• Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff – One of the first tell-alls, the book highlights descriptions of Trump’s behavior, chaotic interactions among senior White House staff, and leads Wolff to state “100% of the people around him” believe Trump is unfit for office.
• It’s Even Worse Than You Think by David Cay Johnston – Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of The Making of Donald Trump shines a light on the political termites who have infested our government under the Trump administration, destroying it from within and compromising our jobs, safety, finances and more.
• Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior – Kendzior channels her rage and scholarly background into a detailed examination of the administration and the history leading up to it.
• Proof of Collusion: How Trump Betrayed America by Seth Abramson – Abramson gives us a record of the unthinkable – a president compromising American foreign policy in exchange for the promise of future business and covert election assistance. His conclusion is clear: the case for collusion is staring us in the face.
• Proof of Conspiracy: How tRump’s International Collusion is Threatening America Democracy by Seth Abramson – Abramson exposes a story that U.S. media has largely missed: a pre-election geopolitical conspiracy involving Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and Russia that sought to put Trump in the White House―and succeeded.
• Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves by Rick Wilson – A guidebook for beating Trump’s tricks, traps, and Twitter feed in 2020.
• Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House by Chris Sims – Yet another tell-all from one of the White House insiders who had unfettered access to Trump – and took notes.
• The List: A Week-by-Week Reckoning of Trump’s First Year by Amy Siskind – Siskind, a former Wall Street executive and the founder of The New Agenda, began compiling a list of actions taken by the Trump regime that pose a threat to our democratic norms. What we’ve forgotten, she has documented (and continues to document events through theweeklylist.org).
• Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History by Katy Tur – Called “disgraceful,” “third-rate,” and “not nice” by Donald Trump, NBC News correspondent Katy Tur reported on – and took flak from – the most captivating and volatile presidential candidate in American history.
• Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House by Omarosa Manigault Newman – Former Assistant to the President and Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison Newman provides an eye-opening look into the corruption and controversy of the current administration.
• A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig – This peerless and gripping narrative reveals President Trump at his most unvarnished and exposes how decision making in his administration has been driven by a reflexive logic of self-preservation and self-aggrandizement – but a logic nonetheless.
Our Democracy and Institutions:
• Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment and the Rule of Law by Preet Bharara – An important overview of the way our justice system works, and why the rule of law is essential to our society. Using case histories and personal experiences, this one-time prosecutor for the Southern District of New York shows the thought process we need to best achieve truth and justice within our society.• Democracy in Crisis: Why, Where, How to Respond by Roland Rich – Democracies around the world are beleaguered with threats from multiple sources. Roland Rich interprets the danger signs that abound in the U.S., Europe, Asia, the Arab World, Africa and Latin America, and offers innovative strategies for turning the tide.
• Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright – A personal and urgent examination of the twentieth century and how its legacy shapes today’s world, written by the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State.
• How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt – Is our democracy in danger? Harvard professors Levitsky and Ziblatt have spent more than 20 years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, and they believe the answer is yes.
• It’s Even Worse Than it Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein – Congressional scholars Mann and Ornstein present a grim picture of how party polarization and tribal politics have led Congress – and the United States – to the brink of institutional failure.
• The Imposters by Steve Benen – The producer of the Rachel Maddow show looks at how the Republican party abandoned policy in favor of power.
• On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder – The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, and we are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.
• Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy by David Daley – The explosive account of how Republican legislators and political operatives fundamentally rigged our American democracy through redistricting.
• The Empty Throne: America’s Abdication of Global Leadership by James M. Lindsay and Ivo H. Daalder – The three pillars of the postwar foreign policy that America created – strong alliances, open markets and commitment to democracy and human rights – are under threat from a president who sees little value in them, according to the authors. “Trump didn’t see global leadership as the solution to what ailed America. To the contrary. He saw it as the problem.”
• The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy by Michael Lewis – Lewis takes us into the engine rooms of a government under attack by its own leaders, where willful ignorance plays a role in looming disasters. There are dangerous fools in this book, but also unsung heroes, public servants whose knowledge, dedication and proactivity keep the machinery running.
• The News: A User’s Manual by Alain de Botton – De Botton takes 25 archetypal news stories – from an aircrash to a murder, a celebrity interview to a political scandal – and submits them to intense analysis. The ultimate manual for our news-addicted age.
• The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror by Andrew McCabe – On March 16, 2018, 26 hours before his scheduled retirement as deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe was fired by Donald Trump. McCabe offers a dramatic and candid account of his career, and an impassioned defense of the FBI’s agents and of the institution’s integrity and independence.
• The Hill to Die On: The Battle for Congress and the Future of Trump’s America by Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer – Taking readers into secret strategy calls and closed-door meetings from the House to the White House, the authors trace the gamesmanship and the impulsiveness, the dealmaking and the backstabbing, in a blow-by-blow account of the power struggle that roiled Congress.
• The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story by Joy Reid – Reid argues that President Trump's administration is characterized by grift and venality that demeans the office and diminishes America.
Women’s Issues:
• Birth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women's Work by Jenny Brown – Feminists generally believe that a prudish religious bloc is responsible for the protracted fight over reproductive freedom in the U.S., and that politicians only attack abortion and birth control to appeal to those "values voters." But hidden behind this conventional explanation is a dramatic fight over women's reproductive labor. On one side, elite policymakers want an expanding workforce reared with a minimum of employer spending and a maximum of unpaid women's work. On the other side, women are refusing to produce children at levels desired by economic planners.• Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister – From the author of All the Single Ladies comes a vital, incisive exploration into the transformative power of female anger and its ability to transcend into a political movement.
• Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez – Perez investigates shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women, diving into women’s lives at home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor’s office, and more. Built on hundreds of studies in the US, the UK, and around the world, and written with energy, wit, and sparkling intelligence, this is a groundbreaking, unforgettable exposé that will change the way you look at the world.
• Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger by Soraya Chemaly – Chemaly argues that women’s anger is not only justified, it is also an active part of the solution. Approached with conscious intention, anger is a vital instrument, a radar for injustice and a catalyst for change. Societal and cultural belittlement of our anger is a cunning way of limiting and controlling the power of women, and is a tactic we can no longer abide.
• Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now (Jacobin) by Jenny Brown – Brown uncovers a century of legal abortion in the United States until 1873, recalls women’s experiences in the illegal days, and shows how the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s really won abortion rights.
Impeachment:
• Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems by Raoul Berger – The little understood yet volcanic power of impeachment lodged in the Congress is dissected through history by the nation’s leading legal scholar on the subject.• Impeachment: An American History by Jon Meacham, Timothy Naftali, Peter Baker and Jeffrey Engel – Four experts on the American presidency examine the three times impeachment has been evoked – against Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton – and explain what it means today.
• Impeachment: A Handbook by Charles L. Black – In the classic guide to presidential impeachment, Charles L. Black clarifies the issues and questions that surround this timely topic. With a foreword by constitutional expert Akhil Reed Amar, this authoritative book is essential reading for every concerned citizen.
• Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide by Cass R. Sunstein – Sunstein considers actual and imaginable arguments for a president’s removal, explaining why some cases are easy and others hard, why some arguments for impeachment are judicious and others not.
• Impeaching the President: Past, Present, and Future by Alan Hirsch – A lucid, balanced, and deeply informed guide to the unreason of our current situation. Constitutional scholar Alan Hirsch offers clear and to-the-point guidance for all matters relating to removing a sitting president.
• The Constitution Demands It: The Case for the Impeachment of Donald Trump by Ron Fein and Others – Three veteran constitutional attorneys say there’s no way around it. The Constitution demands that Donald Trump must be impeached. In clear language using compelling logic rooted in the Constitution, they details why the time to start is now.
• To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz – This book addresses one of today’s most urgent questions: when and whether to impeach a president. Tribe and Matz provide an authoritative guide to impeachment’s past and a bold argument about its proper role today.
Fiction:
• Christian Nation: A Novel by Frederic C. Rich – Rich reminds us that America’s Christian Fundamentalists have been consistently clear about their vision for a “Christian Nation,” and dead serious about acquiring the political power to achieve it. In Christian Nation, they achieved it.• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – Read the book, even if you’ve seen the TV series, which is a dystopian take on the world of women in the future. It’s Mike Pence’s dream fulfilled. Stay tuned for Atwood’s sequel, The Testaments, due out in September; the TV series continues as well.
• The Testaments by Margaret Atwood – A sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, set 15 years after Gilead, told from the perspective of three women, including Aunt Lydia.
• It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis – First published in 1935 when Americans were still largely oblivious to the rise of Hitler in Europe, this prescient novel tells a cautionary tale about the fragility of Democracy and offers and alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.
• The Plot Against America: A Novel by Philip Roth – Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. Now an HBO series with an informative podcast.
• Vox by Christina Dalcher.
A dystopian view of the world in which women and girls are limited to speaking
100 words a day, and the woman who fights back.
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