Recommendations for 2018 by Dan Drezner

By Daniel W. Drezner, Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University

The last two weeks of August are an odd time in the calendar. Many Americans go on vacation to enjoy the last bits of summer vacation, while school has already started for some. Regardless, brains set in neutral for much of this season have to be put back in gear. And, of course, for political scientists, the American Political Science Association annual meeting is just around the corner. This means that thousands upon thousands of academics are scrambling to finish their fall syllabi looking for any excuse to procrastinate putting the final touches on their super-polished conference papers.

For those of you looking for one, last interesting summer read to hot-wire your brain into thinking again, here are a few suggestions:

1) G. John Ikenberry, “Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order.”2018 has been the year of talking about the fragility of the liberal international order. But what the hell are we talking about when we talk about global orders? Ikenberry’s “Liberal Leviathan” offers a cogent answer or three. He wrote this book in 2011, during the Great Recession craziness rather than the populist nationalism craziness. It might seem optimistic compared to today, even compared to Ikenberry today. But it also suggests that everyone may be overreacting to the current trough in global governance.

2) Madeline Miller, “Circe.” This is not in my normal fiction wheelhouse, but Miller’s reimagining of Circe from her cameo appearances in Greek mythology is riveting. I can think of few book endings that cause me to suck in my breath in astonishment, but “Circe” did.

3) Sulmaan Khan, “Haunted By Chaos: China’s Grand Strategy From Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping.” Full disclosure: Khan is my colleague at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. A historian by training, Khan had the good timing to be able to do research in the Chinese Communist Party archives before China’s government reclassified everything again. With this book, his second, Khan joins a very promising trend of historians who are writing about contemporary issues (see also my other Fletcher colleague Christopher Miller’s “Putinomics” for another excellent example of this genre).

4) The Daily Show staff, “The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library.” The president and I have one thing in common: We both like Twitter. As we all shudder at what the actual Trump presidential library will look like, the hard-working staff at the Daily Show has performed the invaluable service of curating just how much of a blowhard Trump can be on social media. The book does an excellent job of locating some chestnuts among Trump’s tweets that I had forgotten.

5) Adam Tooze, “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.” Tooze is one of my must-follows on Twitter, and I am very eager to read his analysis of the last 10 years. Indeed, I am grateful that my take on the 2008 financial crisis came out four years ago, because I fear it will pale besides Tooze’s effort.

This piece was republished from The Washington Post.