Political books

John B. Judis, a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, offers up an essay in the magazine (free registration required) naming some of his favorite political books.

His recommendations are more contemporary (and not so contemporary) classics rather than 2006 books, and he's grouped them into categories. Like this one:

I once wrote a biography myself (of Bill Buckley) and fancy myself an expert on the medium. Those I recommend are Ronald Steel's Walter Lippmann and the American Century (which I used as my writing model), Roy Monk on Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Robert Skidelsky's three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, particularly the first volume. One of my favorites among presidential biographies is Stephen Ambrose's two-volume biography of Dwight Eisenhower, which changed many a liberal's view of the general. I also like Lou Cannon's biography of Ronald Reagan, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, which was unjustly ignored when it first appeared, but which, better any other biography, captures how Reagan governed.

Interesting reading.

--Marshal Zeringue