"The Federalist's" Notable Books of 2024

Joy Pullmann gives a nice notice to "Noticing."

The New York Times’ list of 100 Notable Books of 2024 was mostly useful for demographic analysis of which groups are up and which are down in the identity politics sweepstakes. The Federalist’s works better as a shopping list of book that you and yours might actually enjoy.

Read it there for links to where to buy the books:

The Federalist Notable Books Of 2024

By: Mark Hemingway

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator

December 11, 2024

Looking for last minute book recommendations either as gifts or to read during some holiday downtime? The Federalist has recommendations.

Shawn Fleetwood

If you want to learn more about how neo-Marxist ideology is crippling America’s military, then Saving Our Service Academies: My Battle with, and for, the US Naval Academy to Make Thinking Officers is a great place to start. Authored by Naval Academy professor Bruce Fleming…

Arabella: The Dark Money Network of Leftist Billionaires Secretly Transforming America by Scott Walter is a terrific book for anybody interested in delving into the complexities of U.S. elections. …

For my fellow sports fans, Head On: A Memoir by Larry Csonka is worth checking out. …

Jordan Boyd

Books penned by politicians (or their ghostwriters) have always struck me as underwhelming and lackluster. Yet I, like many other Americans, mustered up the courage to pick up a copy of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis this fall and was not disappointed.

Madeline Orr Osburn

It’s rare to see one specific book, let alone a single idea or general consensus, be shared across demographics and political leanings. But that’s what I saw this year with Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

Economist Catherine Pakaluk published her wonky but also spiritually-minded findings this year in her book, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. As someone who spent the first eight months of this year pregnant, reading her interviews with women who were on their eighth, ninth, and in some cases, tenth child and understanding the difficulty of such a calling felt very real to me. Her work is not just for women of childbearing age but for anyone trying to unpack our country’s fertility crisis and how we value children.

Rich Cromwell

… Steve Silberman, who passed away this year, published his treatise on the subject, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, in 2015 and his conclusion was that individuals with autism have indeed been hiding amongst us throughout history. …

Joy Pullmann

Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic tunes readers’ expectations for Donald Trump’s second presidency. …

Eli the Eagle is a lovely picture book out this year from Minnesota’s Barb Anderson. …

In February, Steve Sailer’s anthology Noticing came out. Perhaps the most shocking thing in this compendium of essays from the last 50 years of the samizdat blogger’s writing is that it’s not very shocking. Sailer is not a bomb-thrower but a wry data guy whose humor is often almost undetectable. He was written out of public life two decades ago for noticing data showing transgenderism is a sexual fetish for most of its adult male adherents. The Southern Poverty Law Center organized a hit on him, as well as anyone else who engaged with the research in Northwestern University professor J. Michael Bailey’s 2003 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen, which shatters myths that being transgender is normal or healthy.

Along with Charles Murray, Sailer also regularly applies the decades of solid data showing racial group differences in IQ. Neither man is a racist — they affirm that human dignity has nothing to do with IQ — but calling them such has closed many people’s ears to their data-driven arguments. Smear tactics have jumped the shark, however, allowing Sailer and others greater visibility that is much deserved. Noticing is even available on Amazon. I, for one, welcome more of his essays about the architecture of golf courses.

For domestic shipping of the $29.95 paperback, see Passage Press. For $9.95 Kindle download and overseas shipping of the $29.95 paperback, see Amazon.

… Sumantra Maitra

This year’s theme has been all about the death of a very specific form of “liberal democracy” and post-1945 world order, so I have greatly enjoyed Emily Finley taking a sledgehammer to our cherished myths, from Rousseau to Jefferson to The Ideology of Democratism.

John Zubryzcki’s Dethroned: The Downfall of India’s Princely States is another powerful and tragic story of an episode from history rarely studied in the West: the betrayal of the various small feudal states and protectorates of the British empire, which the empire failed to protect from the nascent Soviet-backed republic of India. …

William D. James’ excellent first foray into the debate of grand strategy comes with the aptly named British Grand Strategy in the Age of American Hegemony, which demonstrates with three cases (World War II, Suez, and Iraq), how Britain, from a relatively weaker position of power, attempted to navigate and in some ways influence a much bigger beast in the U.S. …

Finally, I had a chance to read Allen Guelzo’s phenomenal biography Robert E. Lee: A Life. …

Lastly, my book The Sources of Russian Aggression took a considerable amount of my time this year. …

Ilya Shapiro

The first is The Godfather, Mario Puzo’s classic Italian-American epic.

But speaking of magic, there’s no better conjurer of civil society and constitutional governance than Yuval Levin, whose American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation ― and Could Again is the cure for what ails the body politic.

Brianna Lyman

… Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections by Edward B. Foley dives into the nation’s most controversial elections, rigged elections, and even deadly elections. …

Elle Purnell

I remember my dad being gifted David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon a few years before the October 2023 movie exploded its popularity, …

Nathanael Blake

The most interesting book I’ve read this year isn’t finished yet. Ross Douthat, the sole conservative columnist atThe New York Times, has written The Falcon’s Children, a fantasy novel that he is releasing as a serial on Substack, with the first 12 chapters available for free. …

John Davidson

Spencer Klavan’s Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of scientific discovery and development across the millennia, with a particular focus on developments in the West since the scientific revolution. …

Another new book that comes at this subject from a different angle is Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, which takes a more direct aim at the reenchantment of the West and engages with its dark side. …

David Harsanyi

One of my favorite books of the year was historian Jacob Wright’s Why the Bible Began, which explores the origins and context of the world’s most influential book. Wright tries to answer the central question of why the Jews, rather than other more powerful ancient people, ended up producing mankind’s most enduring text. Wright contends that after the devastation of Jerusalem by Babylonians, Jews reinvented themselves, not merely as adherents of a monotheistic faith, but also as the first “political community” and nationality.

In his book 1177 B.C., Eric Cline told the story of the Bronze Age collapse of society and the mysterious Sea People. In After 1177 B.C., as the title suggests, Cline details the reconstruction of the Mediterranean world and the emergence of new powers and people, ending his story at the first Olympics.

In his provocative The Case for Colonialism, Bruce Gilley not only contends that colonialism was often a positive force, but that it can be again. As a critic of nation building, I went into the book a skeptic, but Gilley’s case is quite strong and probably not what you imagine.

In anticipation of speaking to Gad Saad about my new book, I decided to read The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense.

… Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative by Jennifer Burns is an exhaustive and worthwhile biography of the legendary economist. Kubrick: An Odyssey is, I contend, the best biography written about one of my favorite filmmakers….

On the fiction front, every novel by Neal Stephenson is worth reading, and Polostan, his twist on a Cold War spy novel and the first book in the Bomb Light series, is no exception.

Finally, numerous people have suggested through the years that I read the novels of Charles Portis. Though he’s best known for True Grit, I plowed through The Dog of the South and the exceptionally funny Masters of Atlantis. I’m sorry I waited this long….

Hayden Daniel

… Napoleon Chagnon’s Yanomamö: The Fierce People. The chronicles Chagnon’s effort in the early 1960s to study the cultural and religious practices of the Yanomamö, an Amazonian tribe that had only recently started to make sustained contact with the outside world after centuries of isolation in the jungle.

… Vincent Bevins’ book The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World.

Matt Kittle

… My father-in-law, a baseball nut like me, gifted me The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told By the Men Who Played It. …

Helen Raleigh

One book that touched me deeply this year was Rob Henderson’s Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. It’s a book about Henderson’s short (Henderson is in his early 30s) but already remarkable life, from living as a foster care kid to being adopted by a working-class family to joining the Air Force and then majoring in psychology at elite universities….

Mark Hemingway

In preparation for Trump 2.0, I’m in the middle of reading two books that should help explain his policy agenda. First, a friend foisted on me No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers by Trump’s former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer. … The second book is Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff.

Earlier this year, I read David Talbot’s very readable The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. …

On the literary front, I’m grateful I managed to read Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These earlier this year before the hype train left the station.

… if you’re looking for a good mystery thriller that won’t tax your brain, I can see why Everybody Knows by the Edgar-award-winning Jordan Harper attracted a lot of buzz when it was released last year.

… Speaking of L.A. noirs, my friend Michael Walsh — one heck of a writer in his own right — told me a while back that he thought James Ellroy was maybe the best American writer working today. … It’s as if Raymond Chandler had the scope and worldbuilding of Dickens….

Finally, I recently finished Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove … But let me tell you, hang in there because, boy, does Lonesome Dove pay off spectacularly.