From A Very Stable Genius to After Trump: 2020 in US politics books
A long time ago, in 1883, a future president (Woodrow Wilson, a subject of this year’s reckonings) studied political science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in a classroom in which was inscribed the slogan “History is Past Politics, Politics is Present History”, attributed to Sir John Seeley, a Cambridge professor.
That was before the era of the made-for-campaign book.
Politics books in this election year fell into three broad categories. The ordinary, ranging from “meeting-and-tells” to campaign biographies that outlived their relevance. The interesting, those which made tentative starts at history or contained some important revelations. And the significant, those few whose value should live past this year because they actually changed the narrative – or are simply good or important reads.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the books also fell in descending categories numerically. of the Washington Post on Donald Trump and the Trump era for his own. Virtually all readers, however, will be content with simply a “non-zero” number, to .
