Best Books of 2024?
My world of books is shrinking. Most of what I read was not hot off the press.
When I look back at the books I read —or listened to — this past year, it is striking that many were not published in 2024. This is because the publishers of nonfiction books — which is what I mostly read — are bringing out books that don't interest me.
Today, there are fewer publishing houses than 20 or 30 years ago, which results in a certain homogenization — the volume of books being published may be the same, or more, but the subject matters seem to have narrowed to increase profits. Most publishing companies in the US and UK are owned by conglomerates or families: Penguin Random House (Bertelsmann), HarperCollins (Murdoch), Simon & Schuster (Paramount CBS), Hachette (Lagardère Group), and Macmillan (Holtzbrinck).
Also, I’ve become more discerning. It used to be that I was overwhelmed by the number of new books I felt I had to read. Nowadays, there are few books that I feel I simply must read.
The general-audience publications I once relied on to learn about the latest books are mostly failing me. The New York Times Book Review has gone purposely woke; its print version carries few book ads. I used to take The New York Review of Books, notwithstanding its virulent anti-Israelism, because it was loaded with book advertisements. Now, the ratio of anti-Israelism to book ads is too lopsided to justify a subscription. Thankfully, the Wall Street Journal runs a valuable book section. The British broadsheets still have substantial book pages, though they review lots of self-help and celebrity-oriented books about Cher, Miranda Hart, and Boris Johnson.
Most Jewish and English-language Israeli outlets no longer run sizable or must-read book review sections. They heavily rely on free reviewers. None, to my knowledge, have full-time book review section editors. Some reviews are tied to advertising. While a few outlets pay falafel money for reviews, many turn to emeriti professors or other contributors who review for free. This leads to a skewed picture of what’s worth reading.
Thank goodness for small niche publishers though these sometimes charge authors (by requiring outright payment or offering trifling royalties). However, their ability to publicize new books is constrained by a lack of resources.
All this is to excuse why some of my 2024 reading and listening (via Audible) has been of books published before January 1, 2024.
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The war influenced what I read. We are now some 454 days into the October 7 War. We’ve suffered 1,785 killed, and thousands wounded, many with life-changing injuries. Hamas is still holding 101 Israeli hostages, living and dead. “If only Israel had seized the opportunity to make peace when…” is a refrain I come across time and again.
Chances for Peace: Missed Opportunities in the Arab-Israeli Conflict (2015) by Elie Podeh tackles this proposition. I read it in conjunction with Gabriel Sheffer’s Moshe Sharett: Biography of a Political Moderate who figures in some of the “missed opportunities.”
Yes, arguably, Israeli decision-makers made mistakes. Yet, what I came away with, and as I blogged, opportunities for peace were missing more than Israel was missing them.
The renewal of Binyamin Netanyahu’s judicial putsch is back in the news, the war notwithstanding. Its aim is to transform Israel into a populist democracy with few checks and balances. The blame goes foremost to Netanyahu (who has abandoned the Jabotinsky values he once championed), the pro-draft-dodging Haredi parties, and the Hardal parties of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, and Avi Maoz. Netanyahu has facilitated the Hardal values of this threesome to become ascendant in the Likud Party.
This combination of religious and cultural radicalism with ethnic chauvinism and political maximalism is a toxic brew. I wanted to understand what happened to the old national-religious dati leumi world and to its Diaspora cousin, modern Orthodoxy. I am not sure I got all the answers from reading Yair Ettinger’s Frayed: The Disputes Unraveling Religious Zionists. But he is a keen observer of religious trends, as I blogged on this Substack platform.
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I am a huge fan of Brian Lamb and C-Span's Booknotes on American cable television. Lamb is my idea of the perfect interviewer: well prepared and focused on helping their guests make their points — not tripping them up. If you have not heard of him maybe it is intentional on his part. I have been watching or listening to him for, unbelievably, 35 years. I continue to listen to C-Span podcasts. Even if I don’t read the books that Lamb covers, he does such exhaustive interviews that I almost don’t need to.
Which brings me to his interview with Annie Jacobsen, author of Nuclear War: A Scenario. This is a must-read/listen book if for no other reason than it puts Israel’s conflict with global jihad into perspective. Looking at the Russia-Ukraine conflagration, our seven-front war, woke and Islamist upheaval on university campuses, the vitriolic mass marches against Israel every Saturday around the world, and antisemitic attacks against identifiable Jews in Western cities, it sometimes feels like Yahya Sinwar will be to WWIII what Gavrilo Princip was to WWI.
Nuclear war is a real danger. It is unwinnable. It probably won’t start in our region. Jacobsen shows how and why it would be cataclysmic to the point that there would be no one around to remember there had been an Arab-Israel conflict. Jacobsen’s scenario is realistic and terrifying. You won’t put this book down. Check out my blog: There is always Armageddon.
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On the bright side, if the world doesn’t blow up, the war of the Jews will continue. Reading Reform Responsa: Jewish Tradition, Reform Rabbis, and Today's Issues by Rabbi Mark Washofsky piqued my interest. As you can see from my Substack, I learned a lot about how Reform rabbis approach Halacha
For an unsettling read, try Sara Sherbill’s There Was Night and There Was Morning A Memoir of Trauma and Redemption. This is a story of a Jewish family’s distress. In my Substack, I describe the book as a quintessential woman’s memoir that took me out of my comfort zone. See what it does for you.
One of the more irritating books that came across my desk this year was Bob Woodward’s War. I have been reading, enjoying, and learning from Woodward for decades. This must be his rottenest book. I say that because it covers the October 7 War, and, as I blogged in my Substack, I could not believe how much he does not get about our conflict.
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I find it hard to let myself enter the world of fiction, especially during wartime. But I tried. Having loved Manhattan Beach, I read A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. It was OK. I tried to get through Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March but couldn't manage its disjointed modernist narrative. The only two books of Bellow's oeuvre that I previously finished and enjoyed were To Jerusalem and Back and, especially, Ravelstein.
My Best Novel of 2024: Thank goodness for Precipice by Robert Harris, which is based on the true story of the love affair between Venetia Stanley and British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith. Like most of his books, it is a compelling historical novel. Yes, there is a Jewish angle.
On Audible, I also listened to and enjoyed Sonny Boy: A Memoir by Al Pacino which the author reads — or maybe “presents” is more apt. If like me you are a Boomer with an affinity to The Godfather and Serpico, don’t miss this.
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One of my Trumpian acquaintances turned me on to Lex Fridman’s podcasts. They are an acquired taste that I can handle in occasional doses. His focus on the abstract is mostly way over my head. However, he sometimes talks to politicians or influencers like Ivanka Trump and Elon Musk. I was fascinated by his interview with Bobby Kennedy. Like many eccentrics and conspiratorialists, some of what Kennedy says rings true. Regardless, he will be President Donald Trump’s HHS cabinet secretary. The interview prompted me to listen to Kennedy’s best-selling book The Real Anthony Fauci. In Kennedy’s telling, Fauci is a mass murderer akin to Stalin, Mao, and… Bill Gates.
Afterward, I felt I needed brain chelation. So, I turned to Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America by Gerald Posner. This book is a critique of the pharmaceutical industry that is rooted in reality, deeply researched, and properly contextualized. The section on the Sackler family is worth the price of admission. I have been reading Posner’s books for years (including Case Closed on the JFK assassination), and I strongly recommend his Substack.
With the threat of civil war seeming to hang in the background before the US elections, I listened to a novel The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson. It covers the period between Lincoln’s election and the Confederacy’s shelling of Fort Sumter. Popular history at its best. That led me to begin reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, which I had on my Civil War shelf. Speaking of Goodwin, I immensely enjoyed listening to her reading her memoir An Unfinished Love Story. Poignant.
At one of the few 2024 meetings of my “Formerly Middle-Aged Men's Book Club of Jerusalem,” Death in Venice by Thomas Mann was referenced favorably. A 1912 novella about one man’s sexual obsession, it is relatively famous, having been made into movies and adapted for the stage. Definitely worth a listen if you want to bolster your literary credentials.
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Does the Marshall Plan (1948) ring a bell? I knew little about George Marshall, but thanks to David L. Roll (who I discovered via Brian Lamb) and his book George Marshall: Defender of the Republic, I now better appreciate that he was one of the most important figures of WWII and a towering post-WWII foreign policy influencer. He was Secretary of State when Israel won its independence. He opposed recognition. He also served as Secretary of Defense. He headed and branded the Red Cross. I was drawn to Marshall by one of Roll’s other books The Hopkins Touch, about Harry Hopkins who served as FDR's confidante, aide de camp, drinking buddy, and special diplomatic emissary. He was so close to FDR that he lived in the White House. Highly recommended.
As a Never Trumper, I felt I owed it to Liz Cheney to listen to her courageous Oath and Honor. She laid out the case against Trump. Unfortunately for Cheney, Trump was up against the uninspiring and unfortunate Biden-Harris duo, and then the no-less-lackluster and undeserving Harris-Walz pair. With all that, the election was no landslide as some Trumpians claim. Had America been given a viable alternative, they might have taken it. In the event, the popular vote for Trump, last I looked, was 76,516,791 and for Harris 73,886,652. That's 49.96% to 48.24%, which translates to 312 electoral votes for Trump and 226 for Harris — a difference of 86 votes. Landslide? Nah.
After seeing the atomic bomb movie Oppenheimer in the cinema, I read and listened to American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. It was fascinating and worthwhile. That, by the way, led me to read (on Kindle) Kai Bird's absorbing memoir Crossing Mandelbaum Gate about growing up in Jordanian-held Jerusalem as the son of a State Department Arabist. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in what life was like in Jerusalem in the early 1960s.
In Famous Father Girl, Jamie Bernstein does a great job presenting her memoir about being the self-absorbed daughter of Leonard Bernstein. By and by, we discover her parents raised her Jewishly illiterate. It’s a hoot to listen to. But see the movie Maestro by Bradley Cooper before listening to the daughter's book.
Drop me a line and let me know which books I should read or listen to in 2025.
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