The best politically oriented book of the year that I know of is without doubt Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, by Rachel Maddow. It is a must read and you will love it. A quick description:

“One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1792. Neither

Jefferson nor the other Found­ers could ever have envisioned the modern national security state, with its tens of thousands of “privateers”; its bloated Department of Homeland Security; its rust­ing nuclear weapons, ill-maintained and difficult to dismantle; and its strange fascination with an unproven counterinsurgency doctrine.

Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow’s Drift argues that we’ve drifted away from America’s original ideals and become a nation weirdly at peace with perpetual war, with all the financial and human costs that entails. To understand how we’ve arrived at such a dangerous place, Maddow takes us from the Vietnam War to today’s war in Afghanistan, along the way exploring the disturbing rise of executive authority, the gradual outsourcing of our war-making capabilities to private companies, the plummeting percentage of American families whose children fight our constant wars for us, and even the changing fortunes of G.I. Joe. She offers up a fresh, unsparing appraisal of Reagan’s radical presidency. Ultimately, she shows us just how much we stand to lose by allowing the priorities of the national security state to overpower our political discourse.

Sensible yet provocative, dead serious yet seri­ously funny, Drift will reinvigorate a “loud and jangly” political debate about how, when, and where to apply America’s strength and power–and who gets to make those decisions.

A book that many of you will want to read, and will read, and it is good, is Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise. I’m sure it’s great, but I want you to look at this blog post by Climate Scientist Michael Mann if you do read The Signal and the Noise.

Sungudogo is not an explicitly political book, but it is political nonetheless. The core of the book challenges culturonormative colonial conceptions of “subequatorial” societies, and the conclusion provides a novel “Origin Myth” for the modern Skeptical Movement and explains such phenomena as The Amazing Meeting and Bigfoot.

Finally, I’ve heard that Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy is good, but I haven’t read it.

Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:

In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.