The Best of Books 2021

In this deft, textured work of intellectual history, Mitter opens a window into the legacy of China’s experience during World War II, showing how historical memory lives on in the present and contributes to the constant evolution of Chinese nationalism. 

Demick’s reporting is resourceful and inspired, but her message is a dispiriting one: there is little the outside world can do to halt Beijing’s deliberate and systematic erosion of the distinctive cultures and traditions of Buddhist Tibetans and other minority groups within China.

Friedman examines the resilience of apartheid in South Africa, demonstrating how the old order has repeatedly prevented the new one from delivering on its promises of racial justice.

In his most impressive work to date, Ikenberry presents liberal internationalism as a pragmatic political project, defending it against realists who dismiss it as utopianism and radicals who deride it as window-dressing for capitalist imperialism.

Müller argues in this important book that the forms of popular authoritarianism seen recently in Brazil, Hungary, India, Poland, and the United States constitute a threat to democracy but do not herald a return to the fascism of the 1930s.

In this superb work of intellectual history, Bell explores the ideas of some of the most intriguing figures of the late nineteenth century in the United Kingdom and the United States, delving into their dreams of a world-dominating Anglo-American political community united by race and empire.

In this groundbreaking study, Foot shows how China has worked behind the scenes at the UN to promote a vision of security that emphasizes economic development, a strong state, and social stability.

In this thought-provoking book, Goodhart and Pradhan describe how the integration of China and other emerging markets into the world economy led to rising inequality, stagnant wages, and low inflation—and what will change as those countries’ populations age.

Aghion, Antonin, and Bunel explain how innovation can generate economic growth and help governments navigate the supply chain disruptions created by COVID-19. They argue that fostering such innovation requires striking a balance between too much competition and too little.

Nordhaus emphasizes the indispensability of public policy interventions in the quest for a greener world, building on a lifetime of work incorporating the concept of externalities into the measuring of national income and the understanding of economic growth.

Becker delivers an enthralling biography of three female correspondents who reported on the Vietnam War, blending an account of the wider history with her protagonists’ growing doubts about the logic and legitimacy of the war.

Zelikow addresses the question of whether U.S. President Woodrow Wilson could have mediated a peace deal in 1916 or 1917 to end World War I before the United States joined the fray—perhaps sparing the world the rise of Bolshevism in Russia and Nazism in Germany.

Combining meticulous scholarship with a practitioner’s eye, Malkasian provides a full and authoritative account of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan over the past four decades, leading up to President Joe Biden’s decision earlier this year to withdraw U.S. troops.

Wertheim explores when and why the United States embraced the global military supremacy that Americans have taken for granted for decades—and argues that this dominance has outlived its original purpose.

With an impeccably sourced, highly readable volume based on hundreds of interviews and access to previously undisclosed documents from inside the company, Frenkel and Kang have produced an important addition to the literature on Facebook.

Wood, seen by many historians as the greatest living scholar of the American Revolution, distills the core insights of his long career, covering power, liberty, concepts of representation and rights, slavery, and the emergence of a formidable judicial branch.

Sarotte weaves together the most engaging and carefully documented account currently available of East-West diplomacy in the decade after the Cold War—a period that set the tone for U.S. and European relations with Russia today.

Cooper, a British diplomat who for many years was the European Union’s unofficial foreign policy guru, presents a sweeping reflection on 500 years of transatlantic statecraft.

Trudgill, a linguist, offers a pleasurable and humorous voyage of discovery into the chaos of the English language as it is spoken today by well over a billion people across the world.

In this gripping page-turner, Broad and Cavanagh narrate the story of how a global coalition of environmental activists, labor unions, and religious leaders blocked a Canadian firm from opening a gold mine that threatened fragile watersheds in rural El Salvador.

Salgado, a famed Paris-based Brazilian documentary photographer, takes his camera deep into the Amazon rainforest, capturing both the startling beauty of nature and intimate, sensitive portraits of the everyday life of indigenous peoples.

Binet playfully imagines a world in which the Aztecs and the Incas conquer western Europe, offering a redemptive fantasy that rescues history from the tragedy of the European destruction of the precolonial Americas.

Zubovich’s fascinating history of skyscrapers in Moscow—the city Joseph Stalin hoped to make “the capital of all capitals”—goes far beyond architectural design and looks at the social and political ramifications of monument building in the postwar Soviet Union.

In their rigorous academic study based on a vast collection of archival documents and memoirs, Gorlizki and Khlevniuk trace the evolution of Soviet regional party leaders from the late 1940s to the 1970s.

In this enthralling historical narrative, Fitzpatrick, one of the most prominent historians of the Soviet Union, traces the travails of the waves of Russian and Soviet refugees who arrived in Australia in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Gordon brilliantly illustrates how repeated U.S. attempts at regime change in the Middle East have produced “no case of clear success, some catastrophic failures, and universally high costs and unintended consequences.”

In this remarkably comprehensive account of the evolution of political jihad, Robinson provides an accessible history and a provocative analysis of one of the most important political movements in the world over the last half century.

Bsheer precisely and elegantly describes the Saudi regime’s attempts, across the reigns of several kings, to both collect and suppress documentation about the country’s past in an effort to construct a narrative that will legitimize its rule.

Placing individual stories against the backdrop of economic, social, political, business, and cultural trends, Yoo brings both clarity and nuance to the complex, interwoven histories of the two Koreas since 1945.

Roberts reports that the frighteningly effective Chinese campaign to eliminate Uyghur culture that started with mass internments in 2017 has now reached such an intense pitch that it has become a “cultural genocide.”

Bose traces episodes of violence and resistance in the contested territory of Kashmir over three-quarters of a century. His analysis suggests that peace is more remote than ever.

In this innovative and informative study of authoritarian regimes, Meng shows that regimes in which the ruler’s power is constrained by institutions last longer. The regimes of less constrained dictators, meanwhile, rarely survive.

This disturbing narrative relates the 2016 deaths of two Black laborers at the hands of several dozen white farmers and the flawed, three-year trial that followed. Harding’s account grows inexorably into a searing indictment of contemporary South Africa.

In a sweeping history extending from the classical world to the twentieth century, Otele masterfully analyzes the changing relationship between Africa and Europe, particularly the hardening of racist European views about Africans.