Chris Hayes's Reading List

The author of “A Colony in a Nation” says his ideal literary dinner would include Walt Whitman and Hannah Arendt. And “James Baldwin is a no-brainer. (I’d let him smoke inside.)”

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By the Book: Chris Hayes (2017)

NYT By the Book column (2017-03-16).

Source: www.nytimes.com

Ghettoside

Jill Leovy · Buy on Amazon

"at one level just the story of one homicide detective in L.A., but is more profoundly about violence and policing and the ways in which our criminal justice system exhibits its contempt and devaluation of black lives."

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

Karen Fields · 2012 · Buy on Amazon

"It's a book of essays that grapple with a pretty simple question: What is race? It's permanently altered the way I think about the concept and the language I use to describe it."

Fraud of the Century

Roy Morris Jr. · Buy on Amazon

"It's a chronicle of the 1876 election, and I turned to it for two reasons. One, 1876 was the last time that the candidate who won such a large margin of the popular vote lost the Electoral College."

The Sack of Rome

Alexander Stille · Buy on Amazon

"one that I've found incredibly useful is Alexander Stille's fantastic book 'The Sack of Rome,' about Silvio Berlusconi, who, in many ways, is the closest analogue you can really find among world leaders to Trump."

Black Reconstruction in America

W. E. B. Du Bois · Buy on Amazon

"Black Reconstruction, by DuBois."

Cadillac Desert

Marc Reisner · Buy on Amazon

"First, it's a masterpiece, an absolute tour de force of historical writing."

Smuggler Nation

Peter Andreas · Buy on Amazon

"I really loved 'Smuggler Nation,' by Peter Andreas, because it's about, fundamentally, the fact that America is a nation of hustlers and con men."

The Myth of Sisyphus

Albert Camus · Buy on Amazon

"I return to 'The Myth of Sisyphus' over and over as a kind of touchstone: Meaning is found in the struggle, not in victory; in the process, not in the outcomes. It's the closest I come to having a theology."

Philosophical Investigations

Ludwig Wittgenstein · Buy on Amazon

"Each paragraph of that book absolutely exploded my brain cells when I read it. No philosopher I've read has ever packed more profound insight into fewer words."

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace · Buy on Amazon

"That book is astoundingly good and vastly underappreciated, and I read it over and over that semester in Bologna."

The Chronicles of Narnia

C. S. Lewis · Buy on Amazon

"The first fiction I absolutely fell in love with was 'The Chronicles of Narnia,' which I tore through as a little kid."

Postwar

Tony Judt · 2005 · Buy on Amazon

"Tony Judt's 'Postwar,' which is, in its own way, about how the postwar international order was created, and why, for all its tremendous faults, it is worth preserving."

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