100 books like A Pope and a President

Pope John Paul died when I was just on the cusp of manhood. Sadly, I never really understood who he was until he was already gone. He and Mother Teresa were the faces of Catholicism to me growing up. This book taught me, not just about his life, but the proper perspective on the last several hundred years of human history. While expansive, it is also deeply personal. This is a book I regularly consult for inspiration on leadership, fatherhood, virtue, and all these in the face of overwhelming odds.  

This is the most authoritative, expansive, and beautiful of the biographies of Pope St. John Paul II. Here is the story of the priest from Krakow who brought down Soviet Communism. George Weigel was personally chosen by His Holiness for this task, and it was an excellent choice.      

Peggy Noonan's biography of Pope John Paul is as much a memoir of Noonan, herself, and how she was shaped by the pope. Her portrait of John Paul II recounts his struggles against Nazism and communism and his work for freedom. 

One part that has always stuck with me—Noonan also describes her love of the Rosary. Pope John Paul helped foster this love of the Rosary in her. Noonan said of the Rosary, that saying it puts her whole day on the right trajectory. If she would just start the day with the Rosary, all her thoughts, words, and deeds would subtly shift, come together, and follow the path laid out for her by God. Days without the Rosary were more chaotic and jumbled.    

St. John Paul II was a prolific author in his own right. I would be remiss if I didn't add one of JP2's books to the list... or two. JP2 wrote many encyclicals as pope, not to mention thousands of homilies. I poured over these to write my own book and collected his insights into Jesus Christ's life.

John Paul II witnessed firsthand the horrors of the 20th century. He barely survived the mechanized evil of Nazism and the work camps of Soviet Communism. Communism created in Pope John Paul the seeds of its own destruction. Crossing the Threshold of Hope is one of the more autobiographical of JP2's writings. He gives his own passionate witness about the existence of God, the dignity of man, and about the purpose of pain and suffering. He talks about evil, eternal life, salvation, and, perhaps most of all, hope. 

St. John Paul II was also a brilliant philosopher and theologian. Here is his answer to errors of our modern age. Here is his antidote to the deconstruction and disintegration of the family, marriage, manhood, womanhood, and even sex, itself. I would list it higher, but it's not precisely about his life—though it is his greatest life's work. Like the falling of small stones that start an avalanche, this book is slowly restoring the world.  

This is a painstaking investigation into corruption at the highest level in Putin's Kremlin. 

The book demonstrates in vivid detail how Putin installed a group of former KGB officers in power who then carved up Russia's strategic assets for themselves.

They targeted one company after another, probing weaknesses and exploiting the chequered past of every businessman who had made a fortune in the chaos of privatisation during the 1990s.

Better known as The Mitrokhin Archive, these are the first (and practically only) books, two great volumes, truly based on the secret KGB archives showing Soviet foreign intelligence operations in Europe, the USA, and the rest of the world. They cover the period from the founding of the Cheka (predecessor to the KGB) in 1917 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Again, both books are wonderfully written by Professor Andrew who had worked with Mitrokhin and his archive and represent an academic research of exceptional quality. All scholars, students and intelligence professionals must have these two books in their library. The same concerns all university libraries without any exception.

Roosevelt's Lost Alliances is perhaps the book that has had the most tangible influence on my own work. Seeing how Frank Costigliola highlighted and analysed the political consequences of personal preferences and relations was eye-opening.

When the book appeared, some reviewers claimed that Costigliola made leaders' personalities all-important and overlooked structural factors. Because I had read that criticism before I read the book, I was surprised to find a nuanced account of how personal and political factors intersected. I found those reviews blatantly unfair.

By carefully analysing their personal preferences and relations, Costigliola did not claim that a few powerful men determined history. Rather, he showed how emotional and cultural factors, which are surely structural, influenced them and their decision-making.

In Unwanted Visionaries Radchenko reveals the very different ways the Cold War ended in Asia, not with the jubilant breaching of the Berlin Wall and largely peaceful transitions of power, but with the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Vietnamese departure from Cambodia. 

Here is the ultimate insider’s story of what led up to the deal that Hitler made with Stalin in late August of 1939. At 34, a dashing Harvard graduate named Charles “Chip” Bohlen had just become the senior Russian-language officer in charge of political reporting at the American Embassy. Though his chief job was to find out if the Soviets were making a deal with Hitler, Bohlen couldn’t get a word out of the Russians. So he turned to a young German diplomat named “Johnny” Herwarth who was secretly in touch with the German resistance. This book is the fascinating story of their covert communications on the eve of the “Non-Aggression Agreement” between Hitler and Stalin—the deal that led directly to their joint invasion of Poland in September.

This book is the best proof that history can also be simply fun and insanely comical. The ten days that Khrushchev spent traveling through the U.S. in 1959, visiting both Hollywood and the farm of President Eisenhower, who gave him a calf, show, as if in a snow globe, all the comedy and tragedy of Soviet-American relations: the mutual fascination, the great similarities of wanting to please the world and dominate space, and the great mistrust that both sides could never quite put aside. And yet, these ten crazy days invite us to dream and speculate what would have been if the relations between the USA and the USSR had always been as good and cordial as in that September 1959. The US-Soviet story as a road movie with a happy ending!