Earlier this year, I read Pier Paolo Pasolini’s newly translated first novel, Boys Alive. It follows a cast of young boys who steal manhole covers for scrap metal to sell, rob beggars, and blow what little money they have on sex workers and gambling. These kids, who fall out with one another, die, and grow up, aren’t really the novel’s protagonists. Rome, and the lawlessness of the years immediately preceding and following the close of World War II, is.

The boys respond to the city’s squalor, nastiness, and cruelty by becoming a band of rogues, connected to one another through a mix of cynicism and affection. When a fire injures and then kills a member of the gang early in the novel, he lies in the hospital, his lung punctured by a broken rib, certain of death:

“So I really have to go, do I!”

Nobody answered. “So then,” Marcello repeated, staring at the people around his bed, “I really have to die…”

Agnolo and the other boy scowled, tight-lipped. After a few minutes’ silence Agnolo plucked up courage, went to the bed and put a hand on Marcello’s shoulder: “We’ll say goodbye Marcè,” he said, “we have to be off now, we arranged to see friends.”

Another favorite this year was Gabriel Kolko’s The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945. Although it came out in 1968, Kolko’s book still provides an unsurpassed account of America’s geostrategic aims in the postwar era, refuting the self-serving nonsense about the moral aims of the Allies. As the Biden administration seems willing to lose an election in order to maintain America’s presence in the Middle East, Kolko’s book provides invaluable lessons about the centrality of grand strategy in the minds of America’s political elites.

—John-Baptiste Oduor

If you only read the reviews in German media, you might think Katja Hoyer had written the communist book of the year — a full-throated apologia for East Germany’s model of socialism. Not so: but you should read it anyway.

Beyond the Wall is, in fact, a critical and scholarly history of life in East Germany, bringing together insights from recent historical works and the British-German historian’s own archival research and interviews. These come together in an eminently readable narrative colored by biographical sketches and anecdotes from people who lived and worked in the state, including some well-known public figures alongside dozens of ordinary citizens.

What Hoyer above all shows is that their experiences were no monolith. They talk about the repression, drudgery, and surveillance that were part of life behind the Iron Curtain. Yet — troublingly for some reviewers — most resist narratives that insist their lives as East Germans were reducible to these features. Many found real satisfaction in work and leisure, and benefited from the welfare measures and social mobility offered to the children of workers and farmers. Many women enjoyed greater freedom in career choices and family formation.

Hoyer takes their accounts of their experiences and feelings seriously. She also takes seriously the intentions of those who earnestly supported or at least participated willingly in various aspects of East German society. She avoids dismissing them as mindless followers or “sympathizers” (Mitläufer) — a somewhat derogatory term also widely applied to those who only indirectly supported Nazism. For some critics, this is unacceptably lenient, more so because toward the conclusion Hoyer includes her own family’s history: her father was an officer in the East German military. She is “the daughter of a system-supporting couple”! She had coffee with Egon Krenz (so did we)! How could such a person be “objective”? You’ll have to read the book to see for yourself.

Debate around the legacy of East Germany is hotter than ever. Beyond the Wall is certain to remain the most comprehensive popular introduction to its history for years to come.

—Julia Damphouse

Revolution isn’t what it used to be. Mark Beissinger’s The Revolutionary City: Urbanization and the Global Transformation of Rebellion is the single best book I have read on the nature of revolutionary contention today. Using a variety of methods, Beissinger demonstrates why “urban civic revolutions” have become the characteristic form of revolution in our time, and why the era of social revolutions led by Leninist-style vanguard parties is over.

Modern revolutions began as an urban phenomenon in the nineteenth century, migrated to the countryside to escape repressive state power in the twentieth century, and returned to the city as urbanization advanced and landed aristocracies faded. But these aren’t cities teeming with industrial workers and the unions and parties they organized in the twentieth century. These are neoliberal cities where the popular classes have been pushed to the spatial and social margins.

The revolutionary episodes today’s cities incubate focus on bringing down corrupt and repressive governments, rather than a positive program for a new social order. They are very broad, and can bring hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people into the streets. But they are very thin, and tend not to bring lasting change in their wake.

I try my best not to furiously underline the books I read — I have a strange aversion to “defacing” books that I might want to talk to a professional about — but I couldn’t help doing this while reading Beissinger’s book. It’s not light reading, and he relies extensively on statistical analysis across a wide range of cases. But it’s not dry, and he leavens his quantitative data with narrative sketches of revolutionary episodes from Egypt to Ukraine to Myanmar.

The Revolutionary City clarified a bunch of scattered thoughts and hunches I had about the state of revolutionary politics and gave me a framework for making sense of it all. If you want to know why, where, and how revolutions happen today — and just as importantly, why they don’t happen nearly as often as we might expect them to — this is your book.

—Chris Maisano

I have a tendency to go down rabbit holes. Recently, the subject of my obsession has been Adam Clayton Powell Jr, Harlem’s congressional representative from 1945 to 1971. But describing Powell simply as a politician would miss the essence of this unique personality.

Powell was a political entrepreneur who leveraged his work in the 1930s as pastor at the iconic Abyssinian Baptist Church and rabble rouser for economic rights into a lengthy congressional career during a critically important period of black political history. He branded himself as an outsider who besieged the political system in service of black civil rights, and in many ways, he lived up to this.

Delve into the literature on Powell, and you’re bound to run into King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. by Wil Haygood. Of everything I’ve read on Powell, this book most fully brings his colorful personality to life and most completely depicts his long career. Haygood paints a vivid picture of the vibrant political environment in which Powell emerged; one where black communists, trade unionists, and social democrats rubbed shoulders and competed for the hearts and minds of the black working class.

As a consummate political animal, Powell was able to embody and express the many different black political tendencies in a way no other politician could. At his best, he channeled these tendencies into meaningful legislation that changed lives.

But he wasn’t always at his best. Crucially, Haygood captures the cynicism that made Powell such a fun, complex, and fascinating character. This is bound to be one of the most enjoyable political biographies you read.

—Paul Prescod

In Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, as you may know, the eponymous heroine, a married woman, takes a lover, with fatal results. But the book is weirder and more radical than this slut-shaming outcome would suggest. Nineteenth-century novels in a bourgeois milieu often feature fox-hunting scenes, but I don’t know of any others that narrate the hunt from the point of view of the dog!

Almost as unusual in a novel about aristocrats, a major character flirts with socialism. Levin, a landowner, struggles to reconcile an intellectual and ethical commitment to socialist ideas with his status as a landowner, and his sense of responsibility to keep that land for his present and future family. Levin agonizes about his class position and finds satisfaction in toiling alongside the peasants on his land. Levin also suffers from depression and thoughts of suicide, ultimately saving his own life through religious faith, dedication to his family, and hard work. But what if he could have found that lifesaving meaning and contentment as a class traitor or revolutionary? Many of the greatest leaders and thinkers of the socialist tradition have come from wealthy or upper-middle-class backgrounds, including Alexandra Kollontai, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin. Maybe Levin missed his calling.

Tolstoy’s own beliefs prevented him from developing the character along these lines. An aristocrat and landowner himself, with moral commitments and spiritual vulnerabilities like Levin’s, Tolstoy was a Christian anarchist, and he held revolutionary violence in contempt. Despite that, Leon Trotsky wrote, on Tolstoy’s eightieth birthday in 1908, “We shall not condemn him. And we shall always value in him not only his great genius, which shall never die as long as human art lives on, but also his unbending moral courage.” Anna Karenina is the best introduction to that genius and moral courage.

—Liza Featherstone

George Eliot’s Middlemarch stayed by my side through 2023. Indeed, I recall a friend referring to it as a “companion novel” — the kind of book one can always dip into in search of words to inspire or soothe. In my case, it was a constant thanks to a suggestion from my edition’s introduction: to punctuate the novel’s eight “Books” with sustained breaks, thus emulating the experience of the original readers receiving each serialized section over the course of 1871 and 1872.

Reading Middlemarch every several weeks felt like a return to an increasingly familiar home, an anchor not just within other readings, but within my own jam-packed year. As my life progressed, so, it seems, did the lives of Eliot’s characters. These characters are myriad, encompassing the full sweep of social classes in an English country town from 1829 to 1832 (the book is academically subtitled A Study of Provincial Life): crusty landowners and their puttering offspring; self-consciously decorous bourgeoisie; clergy both pious and progressive; regular folk who, despite their less extensive characterization, offer some of the sharper insights into the ruling class. (Particularly interesting is the hardworking estate manager Caleb Garth, who suffers from an acutely English condition of extolling the “sublime labor” of “business” while dutifully serving a decaying, bloated aristocracy.) This sociological armature is inextricable from the wrenching romances, emotional portraits, and ethical deliberations that make up the novel’s interpersonal substance.

Eliot’s contemporary, Marx, wrote that people “make their own history” under “circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”; it appears the novelist articulated this insight in the psychological realm: “there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.” In Middlemarch, one finds history unfolded through dramatic personality — and vice versa.

—Alec Israeli

This summer, Italian premier Giorgia Meloni headed to Tunisia, flanked by European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. The delegation that the EU’s top bureaucrat christened “Team Europe” was formed to tighten migration controls, with the help of the authoritarian government in Tunis. Various liberal outlets applauded Meloni’s display of “European cooperation,” seemingly tempering her “nationalist” image. But the focus on building new walls around Fortress Europe, resisting what Meloni has called “ethnic substitution,” posed the question: What does “Europeanism” have to do with internationalism?

Hans Kundnani’s bracing essay aptly captures this political moment. But it is mainly valuable because it does not see these developments as a cloud suddenly darkening the blue skies of EU cosmopolitanism. Rather, it punctures this conceit. Kundnani reminds us how this project was first launched by declining imperial powers, and initially included French and Belgian colonies. Well-known for his work on the historical myths that animate contemporary German politics, Kundnani doubts that today’s EU “regionalist” identity is a break from past nationalisms. He shows how like other nationalisms, Europeanism intertwines “civic” and “ethnic” variants, supposed enlightened values and supremacist myths.

Kundnani roots this in a deeper discussion of the connection between the politics of identity and the narrowing of democratic choice and alternative economic models. In other words, the EU’s battle over identity is not only an imperial hangover, or a simple clash between the national and European levels, but a postmodern reality marked by the general hollowing out of popular sovereignty. This is, evidently, a book deeply shaped by Brexit, and beyond challenging the assumption that far-right parties are indeed headed toward Frexits and Nexits, Kundnani argues that Brexit offers a chance to question Britain’s global role in the way that a liberal-Europeanist perspective cannot. A must-read.

—David Broder

Published two years ago, James Oakes’s book makes a powerful contribution to the debate about Lincoln and his role in turning the Civil War into an antislavery social revolution. How is it that the former advocate of the (doomed and fundamentally racist) movement for “colonization” of freed slaves outside the borders of the United States could, by his Second Inaugural in early 1865, famously invoke the specter of Biblical justice against slaveowners to justify the immense violence of the North’s fight for emancipation?

Oakes argues that, while never an abolitionist who favored the immediate emancipation of slaves, Lincoln’s political outlook had always been underpinned by a fundamental commitment to human equality. The future president, Oakes notes, hated slavery “as much as any abolitionist” (in his own words). Even as he resisted antebellum abolitionist politics, Lincoln remained committed to the goal of limiting and containing slavery in view of its ultimate extinction.

For Lincoln and his allies, this aim was embedded in the founding documents of the American republic: the Declaration of Independence — with its famous preamble, proclaiming the principle of human equality as the bedrock of the new nation — and the Constitution. Lincoln’s reading of the Constitution treated it as a text that made freedom the norm and slavery the exception in the United States. That interpretation, Oakes says, was central to antislavery politics in the nineteenth century, and it became an ideological pillar of the left-wing, antislavery coalition that came together in the mid-1850s to form the Republican Party.

Oakes is a wonderful writer. In evocative, crystal-clear prose, he traces the political and legal maneuvering that surrounded this vision of the antislavery Constitution through the twists and turns of nineteenth century US politics, through the upheavals of secession, civil war, and emancipation.

In all this, there are important lessons not just about American history, but about how we advance the politics of fundamental human equality today.

—Jonah Birch