In this season of reflection and community, we are keen to return to one of our favorite Just Security traditions: our end-of-year book recommendations. As always, we invited our extraordinary team of editors to recommend books they read in 2024 that especially spoke to them this year, including both books that help illuminate visions for just futures and books that may help relax, unwind, and recharge for the year ahead.
Whether you’re looking for a last-minute gift for the book lover in your life, or for something to curl up with yourself – perhaps in front of a fireplace or on a beach, depending on your hemisphere! – we hope that the suggestions here will enrich your reading life.
As we reach the end of 2024, we would like to warmly thank our Just Security readers for being central to our community. We hope that you will continue to turn to us for legal and policy analysis and information in the year ahead. As we are a non-profit organization, if you have found our work meaningful this year, please consider making a tax-deductible end-of-year donation (link).
And now, for your reading enrichment …
Monica C. Bell
Some excellent books I read this year that have, to varying degrees, shattered and reconstructed my views on important world issues:
The Miracle of the Black Leg by Patricia J. Williams. A sweeping text that is at once an explication of contract law and a critical dissection of the demise of commitment to collective well-being in our nation. A meditation on ancient paintings, vintage photographs, pandemics, and technology, Williams reminds us of why she is one of the most important scholars for multiple generations.
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe. An innovative and beautiful text, Ordinary Notes is comprised of 248 notes that range from a single line to several pages, including explication of images, personal stories, letters to friends, and more. Across these diverse manifestations, the notes offer sharp and poignant analyses of contemporary issues of racial and social justice. This book expanded my conception of what scholarship could be.
The Constitution of the War on Drugs by David Pozen. Pozen offers an important, original story about how constitutional law, and the strategic decisions of relatively few high-powered constitutional lawyers, created and sustained America’s catastrophic war on drugs. Much scholarship about the war on drugs focuses on its racial politics with less discussion of the interstices of constitutional law practice. This book fills in those gaps and invites the reader to imagine new, alternative directions.
The Minneapolis Reckoning by Michelle S. Phelps. A deep examination of the historical and structural conditions that led to the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 as well as the movement for police reform that swelled in response. The book is full of complex stories and ethnographic details that situate both the past and the future of organizing for the transformation of public safety.
The Danger Imperative by Michael Sierra-Arévalo. This book unsettles multiple central myths about the institutional dynamics and culture of policing in America. Sierra-Arévalo’s detailed exploration of the concrete strategies police departments use to sustain the idea among police officers that they are constantly in exceptional danger and must thus react violently to any perceived threat. There were new, sometimes jarring insights in every chapter.
David D. Cole
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs by Kerry Howley. A beautifully written, carefully reported, and sympathetic and nuanced account of the intriguing and sad case of Reality Winner.
Megan Corrarino
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. Allende’s characters grapple with national ghosts in a lush and deeply human world. Thinking about parallels between Chilean and U.S. history, I picked it up for a re-read this year, which in turn prompted a deep dive into Allende’s history and philosophy as a writer, and a read of two of her later novels, Ripper and Zorro. Whether writing about pulp heroes or history, one of the author’s great strengths is the humanity of her writing, exploring social and political issues in ways that feel universal, never letting them overtake the centrality of a good story. Allende writes as someone who understands the power of drama to move the human heart.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s National Book Foundation Medal speech. Compiling this wonderful community’s thoughtful entries – always a highlight of the season – prompted me to think about how law, policy, and imagination intersect, bringing to mind a passage from Le Guin’s 2014 speech, relevant then and only more so with each passing year. She calls on “the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope,” and who serve as “realists of a larger reality.”
Viola Gienger
Ukraine Remember Also Me: Testimonies From The War by George Butler is a remarkable collection of personal stories told by the author and illustrated by his spare, poignant drawings. It’s a kind of year-in-the-life of the Ukrainian people under Russia’s bombardment: an English lit major-turned combat medic and drone pilot; a 99-year-old matriarch and grandmother too frail to make it to the bomb shelter; a 70-year-old locksmith and gatherer of books, which he calls “spiritual food.”
American Mother by Colum McCann and Diane Foley is the moving story of Foley’s encounter with the man convicted in the 2014 killing of her son, freelance journalist James “Jim” Foley, by the so-called “Beatles” trio (for their British accents) in a gruesome videotaped beheading in the Syrian desert. It’s told through the simple, powerful prose of National Book Award-winner McCann. (Readers also might be interested in her article for Just Security and a segment of the Just Security Podcast with her reflections 10 years on.)
“In the Name of God” by Sari Horwitz, Dana Hedgpeth, Emmanuel Martinez, Scott Higham and Salwan Georges, published in May in the Washington Post was one of the best news investigations I read this year – and I read a lot of them. The culmination of a year-long investigation of how Catholic priests, brothers and sisters abused Native American children taken from their homes by the U.S. government to live at remote boarding schools. Followed up now with a new installment in the series: More than 3,100 students died at schools built to crush Native American cultures by Dana Hedgpeth, Sari Horwitz, Joyce Sohyun Lee, Andrew Ba Tran, Nilo Tabrizy and Jahi Chikwendiu. Just jaw-dropping.
Rebecca Hamilton
This year, I have a trio of recommendations for those wanting to pay attention to the climate emergency, while also immersing themselves in stunningly beautiful writing:
No Country for 8-Spot Butterflies by Julian Aguon, founder of Blue Ocean Law.
More Than Human Rights: An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing by César Rodríguez-Garavito, one of the early innovators of integrative thinking about human rights and the climate emergency.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. It is hard to believe that this extraordinary work of speculative fiction, set in the year 2024, was written over two decades ago.
Adil Ahmad Haque
The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra. Writes the publisher: “From one of our foremost public intellectuals, an essential reckoning with the war in Gaza that reframes our understanding of the ongoing conflict, its historical roots, and the fractured global response.”
Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha. “‘A powerful, capacious, and profound’ (Ocean Vuong) new collection of poems about life in Gaza by an award-winning Palestinian poet.”
Rachel Kleinfeld
Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum. Simply the best analysis of how autocracies are working together, regardless of professed ideology, to strengthen each others’ regimes and enrich each others’ oligarchies. Fundamental to understanding what democracies are up against today.
Invisible Rulers by Renee diResta. What has happened to information, shared knowledge, and the truth? A guide to the new media landscape by someone who has been through the ringer and understands what the rest of us are just starting to perceive.
Circe by Madeleine Miller. Beautiful, brilliant, and the sort of novel that makes one feel in one’s bones what is unique about the human condition, and why we fragile people are deserving of care. Never has an immortal Greek witch been given such an interior voice – and as a fellow fierce woman, it’s one I love.
Barbara McQuade
Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America by Kurt Anderson. Journalist Anderson explains how economic policy beginning in the “greed-is-good” 1980s has driven huge inequality in the United States. Through deregulation, tax cuts, and dark money in political campaigns, big business and wealthy individuals have created today’s new gilded age. Anderson calls for systemic change to restore a larger piece of the pie for workers and ordinary Americans.
The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz. This book is the follow-up to Korelitz’s earlier psychological thriller, The Plot. Hence the name. The plot of the sequel (sorry) is too good to divulge, but it’s full of twists and sly observations of contemporary society. Delicious.
Fionnuala Ní Aoláin
Homeland Insecurity: The Rise and Rise of Global Anti-Terrorism Law by Conor Gearty. Gearty’s book delves into the long history of counter-terrorism and gives rightful place to its colonial roots. He lucidly demonstrates how “promiscuous and insidious” counterterrorism has conquered and maimed the rule of law across the globe over recent decades. We are all less safe and less secure as a result.
Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine by Lisa Bhungalia is a tour de force. It is a forensic examination of how foreign aid, shaped and distorted by counterterrorism priorities has securitized aid, impoverished civil society, and enabled unrelenting surveillance and policing of Palestine lives. Extraordinarily insightful.
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín. After avoiding this book for many years (too much hype and a fear of being disappointed) I finally read it and enjoyed every page. The perfect capture of life in Ireland in the 1950’s and lives of Irish women in this time, it was word-perfect.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. A gripping tale of a Sri Lankan war photographer, gambler, and closet queen—who wakes up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. The story feels like a fast-paced dive in a world that combines magical realism with grim war reality, colliding head on. I could not put it down.
Laura Rozen
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (audiobook narrated by Juliet Stevenson). Young, independent Isabel Archer goes to Europe, inherits a fortune, and gets deceived into a bad marriage. Was on the edge of my seat.
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (audiobook narrated by Arian Moayed). Iranian American writer on experiences in recovery, with a holy smokes moment deep in it.
The Cazalet Chronicles, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s five volume WWII era family chronicle.
Long Island by Colm Tóibín, and when you want another one by him, Nora Webster.
Joyce Vance
Attack from Within by Barbara McQuade. McQuade’s excellent book is a highly readable look at the problem of disinformation that is as much about solutions as it is about diagnosing the problem.