Booked Up: the 25 Best Books of 2018

1.  Reporter by Seymour Hersh (Random House).

2. Loaded: a Disarming History of the Second Amendment by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (City Lights).

3. Surveillance Valley: the Secret Military History of the Internet by Yasha Levine (Public Affairs).

4. Heartland: a Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh (Scribner).

5. The Tangled Tree: a Radical New History of Life by David Quammen (Simon & Schuster).

6. Iran: A Modern History by Abbas Amanat (Yale).

7. Rise and Kill First: the Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by Ronen Bergman, translated by Ronnie Hope (Random House).

8.  Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books).

9. The Overstory by Richard Powers (Norton).

10. Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson (Simon & Schuster).

11. The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington (Public Affairs).

12. The Wisdom of Wolves: Lessons from the Sawtooth Pack by Jim and Jamie Dutcher (National Geographic).

13. Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are by John Kaag (FSG).

14. Bullshit Jobs: a Theory by David Graeber (Simon & Schuster).

15. Behold, America: the Entangled History of “America First” and the “American Dream” by Sarah Churchwell (Basic Books).

16. The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War by Andrew Delbanco (Penguin Press).

17.  The Undocumented Every Day: Migrant Lives and the Politics of Visibility by Rebecca Shreiber (Un. of Minnesota Press).

18. Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War by H. Bruce Franklin (Rutgers).

19. A Radical History of the World by Neil Faulkner (Pluto).

20. Palestine: a Four Thousand Year History by Nur Masalha. (Zed).

21. The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species by Carlos Magdalena. (Doubleday).

22. The Darkening Age: the Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

23. Chesapeake Requiem: a Year With the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island by Earl Swift. (Harper/Collins).

24. Brave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North by Mark C. Serreze. (Princeton).

25. Astral Weeks: a Secret History of 1968 by Ryan Walsh (Penguin).

 

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3