Booked Up: the 10 Best Books of 2023

Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence
James Bamford
(Twelve)

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
Ned Blackhawk
(Yale)

Doing Harm: How the World’s Largest Psychological Association Lost Its Way in the War on Terror
Roy J. Edelson
(McGill-Queen’s University Press)

Crossings How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of the Planet
Ben Goldfarb
(Norton)

Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom
Rebecca Ruth Gould
(Verso)

Kick Out the Jams: Jibes, Barbs, Tributes, and Rallying Cries from 35 Years of Music Writing
Dave Marsh
(Simon & Schuster)

Bodies Under Siege: How the Far Right’s Attack on Reproductive Rights Went Global
Sian Norris
(Verso)

Fire Weather: a True Story From a Hotter World
John Vailiant
(Knopf)

The Last Heroes: Foot Soldiers of Indian Freedom
P. Sainath
(Penguin)

Weaponizing Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn
Asa Winstanley
(OR Books)

Ten other books whose pages I habitually dog-eared: Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country by Patricia Evangelista; Free Them All: a Feminist Call to Abolish the Prison System by Gwenola Ricordeau; The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals and Real Estate in the California Redwoods by Greg King; Wild Air: In Search of Birdsong by James MacDonald Lockhart; Pisces Moon: the Dark Arts of Empire by Douglas Valentine; Class War: a Literary History by Mark Steven; Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism and the Golden Age of Fraud by Jacob Silverman; The Secret Hours by Mick Heron; Injustice, Inc.: How America’s Justice System Commodifies Children and the Poor by Daniel L. Hatcher; The Last Cold Place: a Field Season Studying Penguins in Antarctica by Naira de Gracia; You Might Go to Prison Even Though You’re Innocent by Justin Brooks.

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