I'm curious to learn which books over the course of 2009 that the MyDD readership has read, enjoyed and might recommend.

I generally read two to three books at a time, a habit left over my graduate school days. Currently, I am reading Walter McDougall's Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828, a social history of the American people and the first volume in as yet incomplete trilogy. The second volume is Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877 which I suspect will be next up. McDougall, a historian at Penn, attempts to identify the "uniqueness" of the American character. He argues that the creation of the United States is "the central event of the past 400 years." It's a bold thesis and his argument rests on that the United States was not just born of revolution but that it is one. Yet another theme that runs through the book is that while America is not a lie, it is a "disappointment" for though Americans are perhaps "freer" or at least freer to pursue happiness and yet all too often no happier than others and that we are but a restless nation of "hustlers" a group composed of "go-getters and rascals".

I am also reading The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism & the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 by Saul Cornell, a historian at Ohio State. I choose to read this book because I want to get at the roots of the Tea Party Movement. Suspicion of centralized authority has a long tradition in the US and the Anti-Federalists of the Founding Era were prolific writers and this volume looks at the various tenets upon which opposition to the Federal Government (and Hamiltonianism) rested. It's a good book for lawyers since increasingly legal scholars and the Supreme Court decisions quote Anti-Federalists like Richard Henry Lee and Elbridge Gerry, to whom we owe gerrymandering. Cornell argues that while the Federalists won the battle for the ratification of the US Constitution, it is the ideas of the Anti-Federalists that continue to define the soul of American politics.

The most recently completed book that I read was Gordon Wood's Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different. The book won a Pultizer Prize and explores the character of George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, James Madison, Thomas Paine and Aaron Burr. Wood, a historian at Brown, writes with clarity and the book is eminently enjoyable. He praises Washington especially for being conscious that he was setting precedents with almost every move. Wood, rightly I think, views Hamilton as having the deepest legacy of any the Founders. As Ron Chernow has noted, Alexander Hamilton is the "Father of the Federal Government" and his model of a fiscal-military state endures despite the deep aversion to central authority found in our politics. If the Founders were return to observe how we have evolved, Wood argues that only Hamilton would be largely pleased. The other aspect of this book that I enjoyed was Wood's take on the role of the Founders in creating what we today call publick opinion. The Revolution began as a rather aristocratic affair but over the course of 1780s and the 1790s a broader social revolution took place where the vox populi made its presence felt.

Earlier in the year, I had read Wood's newly published Empire of Liberty: The History of the Early Republic 1789-1815 that traced the development of the American institutions we now take for granted but were then nothing but uncertain. He details how Americans went from "subjects to citizens" and how quickly the spread of a political consciousness developed among Americans. Woods recounts the intensely partisan battles of the 1790s, the development of the Federalist program led by Alexander Hamilton and the counter-attack led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who believed that Hamilton's strong central government was a betrayal of the principles of the American Revolution.

The most frightening though enlightening work I looked at (I haven't finished it as it runs a hefty 600+ pages) this year is Leonard Zeskind's book Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream. Zeskind is a journalist and this book reflects his life's work tracking the multifaceted phenomenon that is the white nationalist movement. The book is encyclopedic in its coverage. It traces the movement to the two eternal rivals Willis Carto and William Pierce and looks at the differences between mainsteamers versus vanguardists. Published earlier this year, the book looks at the rather disturbing diversity of white nationalists who themselves as the true owners of this land and view themselves as victims who have been dispossessed. Here's a review by Art Winslow in the Los Angeles Times.

I began the year reading David Sanger's The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power. A good overview of the global challenges confronting the Administration covering Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan & Pakistan, North Korea and China. You can probably score a used copy at a local used bookstore.

The first half of the year was somewhat foreign policy focused reading the work of Gilles Dorronsoro, a French-born scholar now at the Carnegie Endowment, on Afghanistan entitled Unending Revolution: Afghanistan 1979 to the Present. This book was instrumental in helping to understand the rich and complex nature of Afghan society. Dorronsoro argues me that the West generally and the United States in particular fails to appreciate the deep divisions that continue to define the country.

David Kilcullen's The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One was an excellent primer on the counterinsurgency model of warfare. The Australian-born Kilcullen who developed his theory based on insurgencies he studied in Java finds that many insurgents (whom he calls "accidental guerrillas") have limited aims and legitimate grievances. Addressing these grievances is crucial in suppressing popular-based guerrilla movements. Kilcullen served as an adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq and was instrumental in the planning the "Surge." Combined these two books formed the basis of my decision that the war in Afghanistan is a bridge too far. The conditions required for a counterinsurgency simply do not exist in Afghanistan.

In May/June at the height of the Iranian election crisis, I read an outstanding history Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty by Ali Gheissari and Vali Nasr that covered Iran's century long struggle to build a modern liberal democratic state.

The summer saw me turn to more domestic concerns. Perhaps the most insightful book I read was The Next Progressive Era: A Blueprint for Broad Properity by Phillip Longman and Ray Boshara. I re-read Richard Hofstader's classic 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics first published in Harper's Magazine as we confronted the madness of the populist right.

The three more interesting economic-centered books that I enjoyed were Jon Jeter's Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People, Andrew Ross Sorkin's timely Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of how Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System - and Themselves and Michael J. Thompson's The Politics of Inequality: A Political History of the Idea of Economic Inequality in America. I also re-read Lester Thurow's 1980 classic The Zero Sum Society: Distribution and the Possibilities for Change. Thurow argued then the American economy will not solve its trenchant problems until certain members of society accept that they will have to bear the brunt of taxation and other government sanctions. It seems that we have yet to reach that point.

So which books have graced or grace your nightstand?