In 2024, Foreign Policy contributors read books that pushed them to reflect on their career experiences, reconsider the legacies of global icons, and rethink long-held beliefs about their areas of expertise. Read on for some of our favorite reviews of this year’s most thought-provoking books.
1. What the World Got Wrong About Frantz Fanon
by Kevin Ochieng Okoth, Feb. 10
In 2024, Foreign Policy contributors read books that pushed them to reflect on their career experiences, reconsider the legacies of global icons, and rethink long-held beliefs about their areas of expertise. Read on for some of our favorite reviews of this year’s most thought-provoking books.
1. What the World Got Wrong About Frantz Fanon
by Kevin Ochieng Okoth, Feb. 10
For more than half a century, generations of activists—from the U.S. civil rights movement to today’s Palestinian solidarity movement—have looked to revolutionary Frantz Fanon as a global anti-colonial icon. But the “canonization of Fanon,” Kevin Ochieng Okoth writes, has flattened his life and work.
The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, a biography by Adam Shatz, the U.S. editor for the London Review of Books, pushes back against hagiographic accounts of the psychiatrist-turned-political philosopher. As Okoth writes in his review, “Although Fanon was a remarkable thinker, he could be conflicted and even contradictory, and simplifying him only simplifies the difficult and often fraught work that must go into anti-colonial movements.”
2. What It’s Actually Like Being a Woman in the CIA
by Valerie Plame, Jan. 6
In 2003, officials in the George W. Bush administration outed Valerie Plame as a covert CIA agent after her then-husband published an op-ed in the New York Times challenging Bush’s justification for invading Iraq.
Since then, Plame has spent plenty of time coming to terms with the leak, which upended her life and her CIA career. “Yet when I read journalist Liza Mundy’s new book, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of the Women at the CIA, uncomfortable memories came up that I had not grappled with since my time as a spy,” Plame writes.
In her review, Plame weaves Mundy’s account of the history of women in the agency with her personal experience of joining the CIA at the height of the Cold War, when it still resembled an old boys’ club. Much has changed since those days, but, Plame writes, “years of fighting for scraps” has “extracted a price,” both for female spies and for U.S. national security.
3. What Produced the China Miracle?
by Howard W. French, May 22
It’s rare that a new book fundamentally changes how Foreign Policy columnist Howard W. French, formerly the New York Times’ Shanghai bureau chief, thinks about China. But China’s Age of Abundance: Origins, Ascendance, and Aftermath, by sociologist Wang Feng, did just that.
Wang’s book “astounded me,” French writes, not least for one of its key arguments: “China’s economic takeoff since Mao Zedong died in 1976 is an event of human importance that deserves consideration alongside the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution as one of the most impactful phenomena of the past millennium.”
Wang goes beyond the traditional explanations of China’s astonishing rise, pointing to a number of factors—including rural industrialization, a highly literate workforce, and relative intellectual freedom—that French finds highly convincing. In China’s Age of Abundance, Wang also considers more recent political changes that have left the country at risk of continued stagnation.
4. The 1960s Novella That Got AI (Mostly) Right
by Paul Scharre, Aug. 4
Italian author Dino Buzzati wrote The Singularity in the early years of the field of artificial intelligence. Yet while the story is “delightfully retro,” it is also “buzzing with many issues that society still grapples with today,” Paul Scharre writes, reviewing a new English translation by Anne Milano Appel.
Scharre, a leading AI expert, considers the aspects of the novella that will resonate with today’s readers, from the characters’ tendencies to anthropomorphize technology to the book’s questioning of the true meaning of intelligence. Yet Buzzati’s book also serves as a reminder that this moment requires new stories. Scharre writes: “For all of its resonances with today’s technology, The Singularity—and many other works of AI fiction written in the decades since—could only articulate, not answer, the profound questions that AI poses.”
5. Hungary’s Descent Into Dictatorship
by Paul Hockenos, Dec. 6
When Hungary acceded to the European Union in 2004, few observers thought that it would descend into dictatorship six years later. Other EU countries have experienced temporary periods of democratic backsliding, but Budapest is the only state that has remained firmly under the grip of an “electoral autocracy” since strongman Prime Minister Viktor Orban came to power in 2010.
How did Orban accomplish this in a democratic system? Why hasn’t the EU succeeded in pushing back? And is Hungary unique? Journalist Paul Hockenos considers these questions in his review of two new books that peel back the curtain on the regime: Andras Bozoki and Zoltan Fleck’s Embedded Autocracy: Hungary in the European Union and David Jancsics’s Sociology of Corruption: Patterns of Illegal Association in Hungary.
Together, Hockenos writes, these works “uncover the mechanisms that made the regime’s rise possible.”
The post The Books FP’s Contributors Loved This Year appeared first on Foreign Policy.
