Books like Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

01

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Lawrence Wright · History

Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower is the most comprehensive account of how al-Qaeda came to attack the United States on September 11, 2001.

A kindred history read.

02

The Forever War

Dexter Filkins · History

Dexter Filkins spent more than a decade covering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the New York Times, and The Forever War is his attempt to render what he witnessed in a form that is closer to literature than journalism.

A kindred history read.

03

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Doris Kearns Goodwin · Biography

Doris Kearns Goodwin's account of Abraham Lincoln's formation of his cabinet — which included his three main rivals for the 1860 Republican nomination: William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates — is one of the most widely discussed leadership books of the twenty-first century and one of the most readable biographies of the Lincoln era.

A kindred history read.

04

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.

A kindred history read.

05

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

James M. McPherson · History

James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, published in 1988, is the standard one-volume history of the Civil War era and won the Pulitzer Prize in the year of its publication.

Both dig into military strategy.

06

Killers of the Flower Moon

David Grann · History

In the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation in northeastern Oklahoma were being murdered.

Both dig into institutional failure.

07

Strategy: The Indirect Approach

B. H. Liddell Hart · History

Strategy: The Indirect Approach, first published in 1929 and substantially revised and expanded through a definitive 1954 edition, is Basil Liddell Hart's argument that the most effective military strategies throughout history have been indirect — working around an opponent's strength rather than against it — and that direct confrontation, however courageous, tends to be costly and inconclusive.

Both dig into military strategy.

08

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam · History

David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, published in 1972, is both a history of American intervention in Vietnam and a study of institutional failure.

Both dig into political decision-making.

09

The Gray Lady Winked

Ashley Rindsberg · History

The Gray Lady Winked is a critical history of the New York Times, focused on cases where the paper's reporting was demonstrably wrong, selectively presented, or actively misleading.

Both dig into institutional failure.

10

The Guns of August

Barbara Tuchman · History

The Guns of August covers the first month of the First World War — from the funeral of King Edward VII in May 1910 to the stalled offensives of September 1914 — with a level of narrative authority and moral clarity that has made it the defining popular history of the war's opening disaster.

Both dig into military strategy.

11

Why Don't We Learn from History?

B.H. Liddell Hart · History

Why Don't We Learn from History?

Both dig into military strategy.

12

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

Robert Coram · Biography

Boyd is Robert Coram's biography of Colonel John Boyd, the Air Force fighter pilot who became one of the most influential military strategists of the twentieth century without ever having commanded a major unit, written a best-selling book, or achieved the rank that would have made him famous while alive.

Both dig into military strategy.