Best of Books 2019 by Foreign Policy

评语：Keefe’s fine, searching book shows that the political agreement formally resolving the conflict in Northern Ireland marked only the beginning of a long, agonizing, and fitful process of reconciliation.

评语：Verini spent months embedded with Iraqi forces and writes beautifully about the toll of war on Iraqi society. His book is a marvelously reported, first-person account of the recapture of Mosul from the Islamic State (or ISIS).

评语：Gopnik paints a sweeping portrait of modern liberalism’s founding principles and accomplishments. He eloquently makes the case for the theory’s continued relevance in today’s struggle to build decent and inclusive societies.

评语：In this massive, kaleidoscopic history, Reid-Henry finds the roots of the crisis of modern liberal democracy in the early 1970s, in the subtle changes that conspired to erode the consensus-oriented model of democracy that had emerged after World War II.

评语：As liberals grapple with rising populism and authoritarianism, Traub turns to history and theory to reclaim liberalism’s principles. His book mounts one of the best efforts of this kind yet.

评语：This frugal and charming autobiography is filled with illuminating stories from Volcker’s seven decades of public service, from abandoning the last vestiges of the gold standard to dealing with the 2008 financial crisis.

评语：This collaboration by the three officials who led the fight in the United States against the financial crisis of 2008 presents a mature and revealing assessment of the meltdown and the U.S. government’s efforts to halt it.

评语：Amid a growing backlash against international economic interdependence, Clausing makes a strong case in favor of foreign trade in goods and services, the cross-border movement of capital, and immigration.

评语：In this masterly and engrossing account, Hastings explores three decades of conflict in Vietnam from the bottom up as well as the top down, describing the chaos of battle in a war of ambushes and without obvious frontlines.

评语：More than 100 new maps illuminate many of the most important battles and campaigns of World War II. The stars of the book are the reproductions of maps first produced as part of the war effort.

评语：In this meticulously researched book, Cronin argues that governments must develop countermeasures to preempt militant groups from co-opting technological innovations to catastrophic effect.

评语：Guelzo offers a concise, clear, and temperate account of the failure of Reconstruction. Never losing sight of the cause of newly freed slaves, he underscores southern governments’ weakness and the collapse of political will in the North.

评语：Brands and Edel argue that U.S. foreign policy should be less about building utopia than about preventing disaster. Unless met with resolute American power, countries such as China, Iran, and Russia will return the world to an age of catastrophic war.

评语：The book is a fascinating glimpse into misconduct by every administration from George Washington’s through Barack Obama’s—and a look at the disappointing weaknesses of the remedies available to deter or punish presidential malfeasance.

评语：Part insider memoir and part commentary, van Middelaar’s is probably the best analysis yet to appear of how the European Union managed its recent crises over refugees, Ukraine, and the euro.

评语：Globalization affects an ever-widening range of regulatory matters. Farrell and Newman examine recent disputes between the United States and its European partners over transnational flows of information, showing how complex and fraught such negotiations tend to be.

评语：Townsend rejects the portrayal of the Aztecs as driven by blood lust, superstition, and fatalism. Her book is a landmark masterpiece, powerful in its precision and subtle in its weaving of tragedy and glory.

评语：In this novel, Luiselli combines literary brilliance, empathetic politics, and a dazzling imagination. She envisions the American Southwest as desolate and haunted by genocide, a xenophobic wasteland occupied by a brutal border patrol.

评语：The modern concept of war fought by multiple means, on and off the battlefield, originated with the U.S. military. The current, more expansive Russian version reflects what its Russian authors believe were the West’s own methods of waging the Cold War, which they now see being used against Russia once again.

评语：Pollock has produced a rarity: a work of solid scholarship that is also an elegant page-turner. It traces the history of the Russian steam bath all the way back to the Middle Ages, exploring how its image and function have shifted over time.

评语：Matthews’s book is a spy thriller that doubles as an enthralling history of revolutionary Germany in the 1920s, Tokyo during the country’s prewar militarization, and Moscow in the 1930s.

评语：Arab militaries have always performed poorly. Pollack, who has studied them for nearly two decades, exhaustively explores four explanations for their ineffectiveness: their reliance on Soviet military doctrine, the politicization of the officer corps, economic underdevelopment, and Arab culture.

评语：McCarthy travels to Tunisia’s heartland to understand the mindset of devotees of the country’s major Islamic movement, al Nahda, which abandoned its mission of religious transformation in 2016 to become an exclusively political party.