Books read in 2024

  Not much blogging going on here still, but here's my annual list of books read for 2024.

• James Bamford, Spy Fail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America's Counterintelligence (2023)
• Benjamin Breen, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, The Cold War and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science
• Jennifer Burns, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (2023)
• Bryan Burrough, Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Edmond Safra (1992)
• Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (1990, 2010 foreword)
• Rich Cohen, The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King (2012)
• Daniel C. Dennett, I've Been Thinking (2023)
• Cory Doctorow, The Bezzle (fiction)
• Edward Dolnick, Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon (2002)
• Jon Friedman & John Meehan, House of Cards: Inside the Troubled Empire of American Express (1992)
• Beverly Gage, G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century (2022)
• John Ganz, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s
• Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017)
• Martin Kihn, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time (2005)
• Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (2020)
• Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire (2017)
• Talia Lavin, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America
• Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45 (1955)
• Michael Warren Lucas, git commit murder (2017, fiction)
• Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the Difference
• Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (2006)
• Ryan J. Reilly, Sedition Hunters: How January 6th Broke the Justice System (2023)
• Chris Rodda, Liars for Jesus: The Religious Right's Alternate Version of American History, Volume 2 (2016)
• Zoë Schiffer, Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter
• Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi, The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism

Top for 2024 published in 2024: Doctorow, Breen, Ganz; other top reads for the year: Gage, Dennett, Kinzer (2020), Cohen, Gessen, Rodda

A few non-books of relevance for 2025:

What the Southern Baptists used to believe, but no longer do: https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions/resolution-on-moral-character-of-public-officials/

Umberto Eco, "Ur-Fascism," New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995

Dorothy Thompson, "Who Goes Nazi," Harper's Magazine, August 1941 (but contrast with Mayer 1955 and Gessen 2017 above)

A few planned or already (or still) in-progress reads for 2024:

G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995)

John Ferris, Behind the Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ, Britain's Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency (2020)

Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe's History (2017)

Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006)

Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (2014)

Mark S. Weiner, The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient form of Social Organization Reveals About the Future of Individual Freedom (2013)

(Previously: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005.)