RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewKai Bird’s landmark presidential biography of our 39th president, The Outlier, begins, almost lyrically, by recreating the world in which Jimmy Carter grew up ... Bird is able to build a persuasive case that the Carter presidency deserves this new look ... Curiously, Bird’s story [...] does not create an overwhelming sense of Carter as a tragic, misunderstood president. Instead, his narrative engenders as much impatience with Carter as respect ... Kai Bird’s important book intentionally, and inadvertently, explains why American presidents continue to learn as much from President Carter’s mistakes as from his many achievements.
Tim Weiner
RaveThe Washington PostA veteran tiller in the field of national security, Weiner offers a well-written and provocative journey to this era’s perilous fight ... A gifted storyteller, he creates memorable portraits of the players ... The Folly and the Glory is brilliant. Weiner puts us inside a revanchist Kremlin, angry at its lost empire and happy to make Americans pay for it.
David Shimer
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewShimer provides a subtle and evenhanded portrait of a White House in an unprecedented crisis ... With the pacing of a thriller and the insight of a superb work of history, the book paints an understandable yet dismaying picture of a missed opportunity ... To contextualize the mind-sets of Obama and Putin and their secret warriors in the fall of 2016, Shimer skillfully reconstructs the history of how both Washington and Moscow got into the business of election interference in the first place. While not breaking much new archival ground, he provides a powerful primer, at the same time avoiding the reflexive \'whataboutism\' that mars so much analysis ... On the eve of our national referendum on Trump and Trumpism, this book is nothing less than essential reading.
Benn Steil
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"The Marshall Plan was successful, though, as Steil, the senior fellow and director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations, demonstrates, American intervention in postwar Europe did not quite work out as expected. While the Marshall Plan helped restart Europe’s economy, it did not provide a glide path for the United States to avoid a long-term security entanglement ... Steil’s focus on the debate over the future of Europe’s economy provides a fresh perspective on the coming Cold War. Although he sidesteps the arguably sterile question of which national policymaker bears the greatest blame for starting the Cold War, he shows both that Truman and Marshall understood that the plan would challenge the Soviet approach to postwar Europe and that Stalin would never tolerate a powerful German economy unless the Soviet Union were the primary beneficiary ... Steil has written an ambitious, deeply researched narrative that not only delineates the interlocking gears of international politics and economics in early postwar Europe but also introduces a large cast of statesmen, spies and economists that perhaps only Dickens could have corralled with ease. Slow going at first, the book builds intellectual excitement as the characters act and react to one another.\
