One of the most frustrating tasks each December, for both journalists and message-board participants, involves racking one's brain trying to think of the best books, movies, TV shows of the month, year or decade. I don't know how most people do it.
For the most part, I'm almost totally incapable of telling you when something was released or published. I expend more effort figuring out when things happened than I do explaining why they were good at all. Making things worse is the fact that I don't read things on time. For instance, I bought Will Self's The Book of Dave the month it came out. I may not read it for five years. But even if it's the best book I read in the "teens" decade, it'll still be an "oughts" book, making its inclusion in next decade's list impossible.
Because it would literally take weeks (and several thousands of words) to come up with something like an authoritative "top five" or "top ten" list of this decade's history books, I decided to walk by my bookshelves and pick a few books at random that exemplified academically rigorous reappraisals of familiar themes or topics. Some of these books are not "the authority" on their given subject, but they should be interesting enough to inspire a search for those that are. Besides, figuring out who to take most seriously is half the fun.
The Pity of War
Niall Ferguson, 1999
Technically this came out last decade (but not in paperback!), but it's still 2009, so I get to claim it. More than anything else, this book launched famous contrarian Niall Ferguson on the international historiographical stage. His principle thesis is—well, his principle thesis might as well be, "Everything you know about the First World War is wrong." His strongest material comes in explicating what he believes to be Britain's pre-war folly, allying against its own economic and geopolitical interests, picking a Russia and France it had clashed with recently over a Germany whose manufacturing machine Britain could have invested in and allied with by distributing worldwide, marrying both industry and means of transport as well as capital development. Equally interesting is his assertion that, in terms of the economics of war, Germany was the winner, killing more with less. I could mention more ideas, but I hate to spoil the surprise.
Hitler and Hitler: 1936-1954 Nemesis (2001) - Ian Kershaw
If you're like me, you're probably a little Hitler weary. There's the Hitler and Reality TV Channel (formerly known as The Hitler Channel, formerly known as The History Channel), The Hitler and Reality TV Channel Junior (formerly known as A&E), and it seems like every third book cover in sci-fi, detective fiction, general fiction and non-fiction was assembled with the conception: "Everyone is startled by swastikas. People will buy this book for the swastikas." Still, Kershaw's books are both well worth it. The post-war western historiography of Hitler sought both to exculpate our German allies and to deal with the irrationality of WWII by assigning to Hitler an implausible degree of omniscient and omnipotent villainy. Later, revisionists introduced the "functionalist" school of thought, which posited that many of the horrors of the Third Reich were created by others or arose via circumstance that couldn't have been predicted by an overarching "evil" narrative. Kershaw not only offers a synthesis of these schools of thought, based on his wrestling with them for nearly 30 years, but he also shows how these coeval elements worked with each other reflexively, intensifying the effects of both. Also, for those daunted by two volumes, Kershaw himself abridged the paperback version.
The Rise and Fall of Communism - Archie Brown (2009)
Archie Brown's survey of communism as an "ism" and as a governmental and military force makes for a great start across the timeline from Marx to Kim Jong-Il. His reviews of Marx and Engels go on a bit long considering the space the book has to cover, but he nimbly explains the push-pull of national communist groups between the wars (damning Stalin and vindicating the German Communists) and after as well as the division in the international communist order, creating Maoism and Tito's Yugoslavia. His best material comes at the end of the book, as he repudiates American/conservative self-congratulation over the end of the cold war, making use of new source material and placing most of the momentum for the Iron Curtain's dismantling with Gorbachev. Don't ascribe Brown's dismissal of the Pax Americana narrative as ideologically driven. He's not some nostalgic anti-Reaganite leftist or an old Wobbly: he was actually Margaret Thatcher's Communism advisor and considered something of an old anti-communist hardliner. Before the book was published, socialist critics dreaded that this book would represent little more than an update on red-baiting and hoary cliché. Instead, his criticism is even-handed and sometimes surprising.
Alexander Hamilton - Ron Chernow (2005)
No annual or decennial book list would be complete without at least one Founding Fathers mention, and this book certainly does a more than capable job of upending expectations. Alexander Hamilton might be the greatest American and most influential public servant to never be President of the United States, yet it's not hard to find him reviled by his contemporaries or ours. Famously hot-tempered and ill-mannered, part of the reason Chernow feels an obligation to rescue Hamilton is that he did so much to inspire those who knew him to vilify him and diminish his accomplishments. Similarly, groups like the Federalist Society and his worship by laissez-faire proponents make him objectionable to liberals — just as his strong central government, rapid increase in the number of federal employees, alignment with British interests and the fact that Jefferson's accomplishments as President can often be read as Hamiltonian co-optations make him undesirable by agrarian states-rights conservative types. Critics of the book have balked at depictions of Washington as more figurehead than executive and of Jefferson as occasionally viciously hypocritical, but each has its basis in reality. Chernow's book takes his rescue too far, bordering at times on outright veneration, but his is a subject worth rehabilitation, and the hagiography of the other founding fathers worth the challenge.
