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I noted the annual Claremont Review of Books Christmas round-up when it was published last month. Among the contributors are favorites of mine including Michael Barone, Chris Caldwell, Glenn Ellmers, Chris Flannery, Mark Helprin, Heather Mac Donald, Dan Mahoney, Sally Pipes, Andrew Roberts, Tevi Troy, Amy Wax, Jean Yarbrough, and more. I contributed as well and thought I would post my recommendations here.

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Washington Post reporter and editor David Finkel spent eight months embedded with soldiers of the Army’s 2-16 infantry battalion in Iraq during the surge. Finkel’s devastating and widely praised The Good Soldiers (2009) is based on the time he spent with the unit in Iraq. Thank You For Your Service (2013) is his sequel. He follows a few of the soldiers from his first book as they return home, all but effacing himself from the starkly intimate scenes to which he bears witness. Reading this utterly brilliant book, one sees in the person of Army Vice Chief of Staff Peter Chiarelli (now retired) how the Army itself has struggled to come to terms with the stress disorders that Finkel memorably brings to life. One leaves the book wanting to learn more and do right by those whom we formulaically thank for their service.

Adam Schumann, a 2-16 soldier Finkel met in Iraq, becomes one of Finkel’s protagonists in Thank You For Your Service. The Pathway Home (at the Veterans Home of California-Yountville in northern California) figures prominently as a locus of sorely needed treatment for the demons with which Schumann contends. His graduation from the program after four months toward the end of the book is full of pain and hope.

Thank You For Your Service was published in 2013. Five years later, in a tragic real-life postscript, a veteran and former Pathway Home patient took hostage and then murdered the program’s executive director, Christine Loeber, Clinical Director Dr. Jen Golick, and psychologist Dr. Jennifer Gonzales of the Department of Veterans Affairs in San Francisco. The Pathway Home lost two-thirds of its leadership team. The murderer was a recently expelled Pathway Home patient who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Everything David Garrow writes is worth reading. He is a dogged researcher and scrupulous historian. Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017) is a magnificently well-researched book. Among other things, Garrow conducted more than a thousand interviews over nine years for it. His compelling narrative runs to 1078 pages of text supported by 300 pages of footnotes (even though Garrow relegates his comments on Obama’s presidency to a 50-page epilogue). The interested reader will be surprised by Garrow’s discoveries as well as the level of detail that he has achieved. The historian David Greenberg suggests the riches on offer at Politico in “Why so many critics hate the new Obama biography.” Working on the book, Garrow secured a total of eight hours of off-the-record interviews with Obama. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall.

Edward Jay Epstein was my beau idéal of a journalist. As I communicated my admiration to him, we became (mostly distant) friends. He burrowed inside an improbably large number of mind-boggling stories over the course of his long career -— starting with Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth (1966), a best-seller he wrote as a thesis for his master’s degree from Cornell. For that book Epstein reviewed the records of the commission and interviewed every member with the exception of Earl Warren. His thesis adviser was Andrew Hacker. When Ed died [in early 2024] , Hacker told The New York Times: “It was the only master’s thesis I know of that sold 600,000 copies.”

At age 87, Epstein finally got around to telling the story of his own life in Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe (2023). As one might infer from the subtitle, Ed led an intriguing life. The book is by turns engrossing and hilarious. I have only one complaint about it: its 387 pages are not enough. It’s too damn short. Assume Nothing seems to me a classic American autobiography. Ed’s death this past January leaves a vacuum that will not be filled.