Claremont's Best Books of 2024

Including Amy Wax on my "Noticing."

From the Claremont Review of Books:

Dec 16, 2024

The Christmas Review of Books

It wouldn’t be Christmas without a few books under the tree. But how to choose? The authors, editors, and friends of the Claremont Review of Books are here once again to help. With warmest wishes from our fireside to yours, we’re pleased to present—for the third year in a row, so now it’s really a tradition—this selection of reading highlights. May your days be merry and bright!

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David Azerrad

Assistant Professor

Hillsdale College, Van Andel Graduate School of Government

This past year, I have derived great pleasure and learned much from reading transcripts of some classes Leo Strauss taught at the University of Chicago, Claremont Men’s College, and St. John’s College between 1954 and 1973. The opening lectures for each course usually present a grand overview of the history of political philosophy; they are marvelously clear and insightful. There are also courses on philosophers and works he never wrote about systematically (like Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Cicero, Vico, Kant, and Hegel’s Philosophy of History). I even found a session on Tocqueville in the 1954 course on “Natural Right and History.”

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Erika Bachiochi

Fellow

Ethics & Public Policy Center

The re-election of Donald Trump represents the end of a political era and the beginning of something new. …

Intercollegiate Studies Institute President Johnny Burtka’s Gateway to Statesmanship (2024) is a welcome contribution for this moment, collecting selections from Xenophon to Churchill. …

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Michael Barone

Senior Fellow

American Enterprise Institute

We know how the great mass of immigrants were admitted into this country in the Ellis Island years 1892-1924, thanks to Vincent Cannato’s American Passage (2009). But we know little about how these second-caste residents of the multiethnic Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires got to New York Harbor. Now Steven Ujifusa fills in the blanks with The Last Ships from Hamburg: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I (2023). Like Ujifusa’s two earlier books, on the S.S. United States and the clipper ships, this is a story of ships—and of the larger societies that launched them. I’m glad that the author’s father Grant Ujifusa, originator of The Almanac of American Politics of which I was principal co-author for forty years, lived to see the completion of this excellent book, which explains the arrival on these shores—not by accident, but as an intended result brought about by the work of specific individuals—of men, women, and children who, with their descendants, have done so much to make the country what it is today.

I first got to know Walter Isaacson during the 1988 Republican National Convention when, as Time magazine’s lead political writer, he was a kind of guide for press corps colleagues navigating the bayous and backwaters of his hometown of New Orleans. Since then, Isaacson has brought his skills as a writer, his sensitivity to different historical and cultural backgrounds, and his skills as an explicator of scientific technicalities to write first-rate biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and—now even more timely—Elon Musk (2023). Obviously essential reading about the person who has done more than anyone else, except the candidate himself and perhaps New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg, to make Donald Trump the 47th as well as the 45th president of the United States.

Despite Trump’s victory, antidotes are still needed for the dire effects of Wokery. To answer those who depict settler colonialism as the crowning evil in human history, consult the New Zealand-born James Belich’s 2011 Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld. And as an antidote to those who insist that the United States Constitution was enacted to perpetuate slavery, read Sean Wilentz’s 2018 book No Property in Man. Wilentz, a voluble Hillary Clinton supporter whose father and brother owned Greenwich Village’s Eighth Street Bookshop, meticulously examines James Madison’s notes and the Constitution’s text to show how the framers, while recognizing slavery as a creation of state law, were careful not to authorize it as an institution of the federal government.

Finally, if you want to trace some of the more remote origins of our civilization, take a look at the explorations chronicled in Michael Pye’s The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (2014). Turns out that we owe more than I ever thought to the Frisians.

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Mark Blitz

Fletcher Jones Professor of Political Philosophy

Claremont McKenna College

Human Life in Motion: Heidegger’s Unpublished Seminars on Aristotle as Preserved by Helene Weiss (2024) is a work of impressive reconstruction by the University of Ottawa philosopher Francisco Gonzalez. …

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Christopher Caldwell

Contributing Editor

The Claremont Review of Books

Working on an article about Israel last spring, I picked up a copy of Joshua Cohen’s 2022 novel The Netanyahus, expecting it to be of interest only as a benchmark of literary idées reçues—low expectations that were, if anything, reinforced by the Pulitzer the book had won. My skepticism was misplaced. The plot concerns a historian at an upstate liberal arts college tasked with hosting the Israeli historian Benzion Netanyahu when he arrives, family in tow, to interview for a faculty position. It’s poignant about Jewish assimilation in the United States, profound about the nature and destiny of Zionism, and funny about everything it touches.

Having last read Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay collection The Frontier in American History (1920) in college, I didn’t know what to expect when I returned to it last summer. Something shallow, probably. But what a subtle, paradoxical perspective Jackson has! His frontier is the border between civilization and barbarism—with the United States doomed to be in the vanguard of both. He notes that when American merchants traveled into the wilderness with their firearms, the Indians had to trade for them, lest they be overpowered by their enemies. Who was the barbarian in that transaction?

Merry Christmas! Happy new year!

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John J. DiIulio, Jr.

Frederick Fox Leadership Professor

University of Pennsylvania

… The first book is Richard E. Neustadt’s Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (1960). From 1950 to 1952, “Dick” Neustadt worked as a special assistant to President Harry Truman. The Harvard-trained politics and public administration scholar knew that the U.S. Constitution vested most federal government powers, including the most important ones (like spending money, declaring war, and deciding on the federal court’s appellate jurisdiction) in Congress, not the presidency.

… The other book is Jeffrey K. Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency. …

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Glenn Ellmers

Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding

Claremont Institute

Whenever I visit a new country, I like to read a novel that gives some texture to the place. In preparation for my first trip to Greece this year, I enjoyed the splendid roman à clef Last of the Wine (1956) by Mary Renault. The book traces the coming of age in 5th-century Athens of a young man from a good family that has fallen on hard times. Socrates, Alcibiades, Pericles, Xenophon, the Olympic Games, and the Peloponnesian War are all brought to life colorfully and sympathetically in Renault’s effervescent prose.

While Athens is glorious, Delphi is magical. If you arrive in the off-season just as the gate opens at 8:00 a.m., you might (as I did) have the whole site to yourself for the first hour. Strolling alone through the ruins on the side of Mount Parnassus, with a majestic view of the Gulf of Corinth, one understands why the Greeks felt the presence of the gods here. At the gift shop, I picked up Delphi: The Oracle and Its Role in the Political and Social Life of the Ancient Greeks (1999), edited by Ioanna K. Konstantinou, which tells the story in rich and fascinating detail with abundant color photographs.

Following this theme, a collection of Leo Strauss’s lectures and writings on the Euthyphro—Plato’s dialogue on piety—was released this year by Penn State University Press, ably edited by Hannes Kerber and Svetozar Y. Minkov. …

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Chris Flannery

Contributing Editor

The Claremont Review of Books

P.G. Wodehouse wrote a hundred or so wonderful books. Once you’ve got a complete set for each story of your home, and have read and re-read them all, you might want to acquaint yourself with another dimension of this great and multi-faceted man. Wodehouse said of all his books that they were “musical comedies without the music.” He knew what he was talking about. As you can learn in The Complete Lyrics of P.G. Wodehouse (2004), edited by Barry Day—a Big Beautiful Book, as our president-elect might say—Wodehouse

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Mary Harrington

Contributing Editor

Unherd

The Dragons and the Snakes (2020) explores the transformation of warfare between “the West and the rest” since the End of History. The author, Australian veteran and military strategist David Kilkullen, draws his metaphor from a 1993 description by incoming CIA director James Woolsey of America’s erstwhile great-power antagonist—the USSR—as a slain “dragon” that has, subsequently, been replaced by a host of smaller, more evasive enemy “snakes.” …

Women Against The Vote (2007) is a woefully underrated (it is already out of print) academic history of the distaff side of Britain’s anti-suffrage campaign, over the half-century leading up to the 1918 Representation of the People Act. …

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Mark Helprin

Senior Fellow

Claremont Institute

Wikipedia is a blowzy, fat, careless, often inaccurate, and often biased thing that reflects the lowered standards of the age. And, it is badly written. I know this, inter alia, because of its high inaccuracy in regard to its treatment of my life. Nonetheless, like so much that we tolerate despite great faults, for the sake of convenience, it has triumphed—poisonously.

Seeking an antidote, I frequently turn to what may be the most interesting, authoritative, and comprehensive book in the world. That is the compact version of The Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Edition, wonderfully squozen (to quote Samuel Goldwyn) into 29 paperback-sized, 1,000-page volumes. ….

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Scott W. Johnson

Co-Founder

Power Line Blog

Washington Post reporter and editor David Finkel spent eight months embedded with soldiers of the Army’s 2-16 infantry battalion in Iraq during the surge. Finkel’s devastating and widely praised The Good Soldiers (2009) is based on the time he spent with the unit in Iraq. Thank You For Your Service (2013) is his sequel. …

Everything David Garrow writes is worth reading. He is a dogged researcher and scrupulous historian. Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017) is a magnificently well-researched book. Among other things, Garrow conducted more than a thousand interviews over nine years for it. His compelling narrative runs to 1078 pages of text supported by 300 pages of footnotes (even though Garrow relegates his comments on Obama’s presidency to a 50-page epilogue). The interested reader will be surprised by Garrow’s discoveries as well as the level of detail that he has achieved. The historian David Greenberg suggests the riches on offer at Politico in “Why so many critics hate the new Obama biography.” Working on the book, Garrow secured a total of eight hours of off-the-record interviews with Obama. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall.

Edward Jay Epstein was my beau ideal of a journalist. As I communicated my admiration to him, we became (mostly distant) friends. He burrowed inside an improbably large number of mind-boggling stories over the course of his long career—starting with Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth (1966), a best-seller he wrote as a thesis for his master’s degree from Cornell. For that book Epstein reviewed the records of the commission and interviewed every member with the exception of Earl Warren. His thesis adviser was Andrew Hacker. When Ed died earlier this year, Hacker told The New York Times: “It was the only master’s thesis I know of that sold 600,000 copies.”

At age 87, Epstein finally got around to telling the story of his own life in Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe (2023). As one might infer from the subtitle, Ed led an intriguing life. The book is by turns engrossing and hilarious. I have only one complaint about it: its 387 pages are not enough. It’s too damn short. Assume Nothing seems to me a classic American autobiography. Ed’s death this past January leaves a vacuum that will not be filled.

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A.M. Juster

Poet

Translator

… Dana Gioia’s superb new book of essays, Poetry as Enchantment (2024).

… Camille Ralph’s debut book of poetry, After You Were, I Am (2024) rehabilitates the genre of the “after poem” in which, as with classical Chinese poetry, a poet expresses admiration for an accomplished poet by writing in the style of that poet. …

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John B. Kienker

Managing Editor

The Claremont Review of Books

James Wilson of Pennsylvania is our greatest forgotten founder. An émigré from Scotland who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, he was named by President Washington to the first Supreme Court but died a few years later of sudden illness, in poverty, before his 56th birthday. He is remembered, if at all, not alongside Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison for his keen mind and argumentation but as the pathetically doughy butt of jokes in the otherwise delightful stage musical 1776. Mark David Hall’s The Political and Legal Philosophy of James Wilson (1997) is the best introduction available, providing a brief sketch of his life before giving a nice overview of his writings. Alas, the best one can do for a full-scale biography is Page Smith’s prosaic, nearly 70-year-old account, which cries out for some enterprising historian to replace.

To the making of books about Abraham Lincoln, however, there is no end. I recommended three in my reading list for 2022, and have three more to recommend this year. Which is altogether fitting and proper. As Diana Schaub noted earlier this year in the CRB, “When democracy is in trouble, the thoughts of the nation turn to Abraham Lincoln.” And to that end, the book Schaub was reviewing, Allen Guelzo’s new meditation on Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment is well worth reflecting upon.

Don Fehrenbacher’s Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (1962) tracks the Springfield lawyer’s return to politics, giving a lively sense of the precarious maneuvering and coalition-building involved in seeking office and shaping public opinion—and the way partisan media of the day worked to manipulate that opinion. …

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s monumental, deeply researched Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) opens on the moment where Prelude to Greatness ends, with Lincoln’s successful run for the presidency in 1860. …

T.R. Fehrenbach’s standard one-volume history, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (1968). It’s peculiarly organized and at least 20% too long, but it does feature stirring stretches on the failure of the Spanish mission system that framed California to take hold in Texas; the region’s settlement by Kentucky frontiersmen; the defining siege of the Alamo and the battle of San Jacinto; Sam Houston’s desperate efforts to keep Texas in the Union on the eve of the Civil War; the invention and refinement of the Colt revolver; the Indian wars and formation of the Texas Rangers; and the culture of the western hero who was “gracious to ladies, reserved toward strangers, generous to friends, brutal to enemies.”

Finally, more than a decade ago, in 2010, Ignatius Press first released its Catholic Study Bible edition of the New Testament. Now, after years of waiting and eager anticipation, the time is fulfilled and the project complete with the publication of the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: Old and New Testament, the finest single volume for encountering Scripture from the heart of the Church, densely packed with introductions and outlines for every book, faithful theological essays, explanatory footnotes, word studies, cross-references, a timeline and doctrinal index, as well as dozens of maps, all of which brilliantly show how the new is concealed in the old and the old revealed and fulfilled in the new. ….

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Spencer A. Klavan

Associate Editor

The Claremont Review of Books

The FX streaming adaptation of James Clavell’s Shōgun was just good enough to get me interested in the 1975 novel, once an internationally renowned bestseller. And holy crow, this thing holds up. …

Readers of the CRB may not need me to tell them that David Hackett Fisher’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989) is a tour de force of scholarly insight. …

The best contemporary fiction I read this year was How I Won a Nobel Prize, by first-time novelist Julius Taranto. … But for sheer delight, nothing compared this year to Mark Forsyth’s Etymologicon (2011), a meandering ramble among the tangled roots of the English language. …

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Heather Mac Donald

Thomas W. Smith Fellow

Manhattan Institute

The World of Yesterday (Die Welt von Gestern, 1942), by Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), is an autobiographical chronicle of the Hapsburg Empire’s final days and the subsequent catastrophes of early 20th-century Europe. …

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Dan Mahoney

Senior Fellow

Claremont Institute

The articles, essays, and reviews collected in John O’Sullivan’s Sleepwalking Into Wokeness: How We Got Here (2024) display a rare and delightful combination of lucid prose, discerning historical insight, and firmly measured judgment. O’Sullivan is the kind of journalist, writer, and thinker who barely exists anymore: one learned and morally astute enough to take in the full sweep of human events with its interplay between politics and intellectual life. Whether writing on the “cultural revolution” that is wokeness, the transformation of liberal democracy into something neither liberal nor democratic, “the heroic age of conservatism,” or champions in the fight against totalitarianism such as Cardinal József Mindszenty, Robert Conquest, or Jeane Kirkpatrick, O’Sullivan instructs humanely and artfully. He is at home in Britain, America, and Mitteleuropa, and his commitment to the civilized inheritance of the West is apparent on every page of this welcome volume.

For the first time in 30 years or so, The War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle are back in print. Like Winston Churchill, whose speeches and histories won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, de Gaulle combined heroism with eloquence.

Jordan B. Peterson’s We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine (2024) is a masterpiece of rare interest and penetration. His brilliant (if sometimes idiosyncratic) readings of six crucial episodes from the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament are neither overly literal nor steeped in the scientistic scorn of the demi-educated whom Friedrich Schleiermacher called the “cultured despisers” of God and religious truth. ….

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Emmet Penney

Creator

Nuclear Barbarians

Leo Marx was one of the dons of the now-forgotten Symbol and Myth school of American history, which lost out to post-colonial and hard-line empirical competitors in the academy after the 1960s. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964) was his masterwork, a broad survey of the American relationship with technology that will re-jigger anyone’s assumptions about how we have reckoned with the dawn of the machine age as a nation. …

It’s a wonder that Chester Himes isn’t better known in the American noir and crime fiction pantheon. As hard-boiled and well-plotted as any Hammett novel, Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) follows the exploits of Harlem detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones as they attempt to solve a mass shooting case that played out during a fraudulent Back to Africa organization’s fundraising event. …

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Sally Pipes

President and C.E.O.

Pacific Research Institute

Though it’s not a policy book, my favorite this year is Doctor Sally (1959) by my favorite author, P.G. Wodehouse. After a long and grueling election campaign, this book is a tonic and breath of fresh air for all who enjoy light, romantic books. ….

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Andrew Roberts

Biographer

Historian

Con Coughlin’s Assad: Triumph of Tyranny (2024) is a remarkable and truly gripping book by a veteran British war correspondent who has visited Syria many times, was nearly captured by Hezbollah in Lebanon, and has already written biographies of Assad’s fellow-tyrants Ayatollah Khomeini (2010) and Saddam Hussein (2005), with whom Assad clearly has a good deal of traits in common. Coughlin gets right deep inside the warped personality of one of the most evil men on the planet.

Alon Penzel is a 23-year-old Israeli journalist and social activist who, hours after October 7, visited the ravaged kibbutzim and villages to take down the testimonies of the survivors. Testimonies Without Boundaries (2024) is the result—raw and immediate, sickening and infuriating, it offers insight into the sheer ferocity and medieval sadism of the Hamas terrorists. Amazon banned sales of the book for weeks, but this is history unfettered.

A.N. Wilson reminds us why he is the greatest literary biographer writing in the English language today with his Goethe: His Faustian Life (2024). This is an unashamedly intellectual biography written by an intellectual about an intellectual, but not for intellectuals, as the general reader (like me) is wafted along effortlessly through the eddies of six decades of German literary history in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in the company of its greatest genius.

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Diana Schaub

Professor of Political Science

Loyola University Maryland

When I heard the news of Eva Brann’s death in October, the first thing I did was call to mind the few occasions, unforgettable, when I was in her presence—full on with her impish radiance. As she liked to say, “a teacher who can’t laugh can’t be serious.” The next thing I did was pull off my shelves the books I own by her: Paradoxes of Education in the Republic (1979); The Past-Present: Selected Writings by Eva Brann (1997); Homage to Americans (2010); and Is Equality an Absolute Good? (2022). …

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Tevi Troy

Director, Presidential Leadership Initiative

Bipartisan Policy Center

I read pollster Patrick Ruffini‘s Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Reshaping the GOP (2023) before the 2024 election and I’m glad that I did. ….

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Amy Wax

Robert R. Mundheim Professor of Law

University of Pennsylvania Law School

Years ago, as an attorney in the Reagan and Bush Justice Departments, I pledged to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution of the United States. My colleagues and I sometimes disagreed on the Constitution’s meaning, but never doubted our Constitution was worth preserving. In the “woke” world of legal academia I occupy today, disagreement about meaning has morphed into assaults on the Constitution itself. Yuval Levin, in this year’s American Covenant, effectively answers those attacks by expounding on the constitutional design’s response to man’s fallen nature. By pushing back against a progressive, utopian vision of mankind as “socially constructed,” malleable, and perfectible, he highlights the framers’ ever-present awareness of man’s flaws and defects in their search for a constitutional blueprint to check and constructively channel them.

In this election year, with the voting public more divided than ever, it helps to remind ourselves of how we got where we are and why we are here. There is no better guide than Charles Murray’s magisterial 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America. With a singularly gimlet eye, Murray ably describes the trends that define our social and economic landscape. Looking only at the American white population, he documents a growing divergence—in geography, mores, attitudes, and behavior—between a college-educated class with outsized political and cultural power, and the rest of society, which sees itself losing influence over society’s direction. These divides auger the political antagonisms that led to Trump’s election in 2016 and 2024 and continue to shape our country today.

The best self-help book I ever read was not a self-help book. It was Adaptation to Life (1977), by Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, which first impressed me when it was published in the late ’70s and which I recently had occasion to revisit. Vaillant summarized the results of the Harvard Grant Study of Adult Development, initiated in 1937, which examined the trajectories of 145 male Harvard graduates through detailed interviews and data collected from the men over decades.

The Grant Study, which continues to the present, contained many insights and life lessons that have lost none of their punch: Although the Grant Study men were among the best and the brightest—the “privileged,” as we say—their lives were far from untroubled. What mattered most for them was not the absence of adversity, but how they dealt with it. The “adaptive styles” that served them best were stoicism, sublimation, humor, and anticipation—that is, methodical thought and looking before leaping. Love and work were the anchors, and the most successful achieved both. Relationships, diligently cultivated, were paramount to their happiness.

Could a book about a bunch of mostly upper-class, mostly WASP men from the greatest generation speak to this middle-class female Jewish child of the 1950s? It could and it did. It told me what my parents tried to teach me and I eventually came to know: duty is not a prison, but an anchor and a salve. Conventions and traditions don’t stifle: they direct and steady. And don’t forget to laugh. George Valliant’s book is a worthy guide for conservatives.

Finally, no list of new books worth noting this year would be complete without Steve Sailer’s Noticing. This anthology of Sailer’s online columns, many previously published for the now defunct VDARE website and other politically incorrect outlets, is replete with fresh, heterodox, good-natured insights that refuse to truck with received wisdom. Ranging across timely subjects like immigration; citizenship; the cult of diversity; gender and race differences; the IQ bell curve; the sports prowess bell curve; racial hoaxes; black homicide and highway bedlam post George Floyd and Michael Brown; journalism’s solecisms; mass shootings; and characters ranging from Barack Obama to Edward Saïd, his essays have earned him a loyal online following. And who can forget his catchy apothegms: magic dirt; invade the world, invite the world; Sailer’s law of mass shootings; Sailer’s law of female journalism; the Ferguson effect; and more. Read the book and enter into Sailer’s clever, naughty world. Once you notice, you can never un-notice.

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Jean Yarbrough

Gary M. Pendy, Sr. Professor of Social Sciences

Bowdoin College

David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama, Rising Star, was largely ignored when it came out in 2017 because it concluded that Obama turned out as president to be a “hollow vessel.” Even if you don’t read all of this massive tome, the last chapter on his brief Senate stint and the epilogue on Obama’s presidency are not to be missed. I’d also recommend the insightful exchange in TABLET between David Garrow and David Samuels on the meaning of Obama.

I missed Robert T. Gannett, Jr.’s Tocqueville Unveiled (2003) when it came out, but I’m reading it now. …

As we near the demise of the tyrannical DEI regime, it’s worth recalling what we mean by culture and how we can distinguish it from both ideologically driven claptrap and pop culture. In his short book Modern Culture, first published 1998 and reprinted numerous times, Roger Scruton covers the waterfront.