How did these men get where they are today? Credit: Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images
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Every summer, bookshops lay out stacks of blockbusters designed to be devoured in an afternoon and forgotten in a week. But at UnHerd we prefer books that leave a lasting impression. In this series of Summer Reads, our contributors recommend overlooked books that will engage and enrich you, not just distract you.
One of the frustrating aspects about my job as an academic is that I have little time to read. It’s a funny thing to say, but between teaching, administration and writing research articles for obscure journals, there are not many hours left in the day to actually sit down with a book.
This is especially problematic in my area of research, which includes populism, Brexit, Europe and anything that can be lumped under the header ‘political volatility’. There is simply too much to read. Trump, the 2016 referendum, the rise of national populism in Europe and the looming 2020 election in the US not only triggered a tsunami of public interest but also a rapidly growing pile of books.
This is one reason why non-fiction sales have been surging in recent years, easily eclipsing fiction: non-fiction audiobook sales are also growing. It is also why we have seen a parallel explosion in research monographs and articles on the same topics. Plug ‘populism’ into Google Scholar and since 2016 alone there are more than 37,000 entries. Stick ‘Trump’ in and there are already more than 100,000. All of this is why I find myself trying to relax on holiday while reading books that are way too serious, dark and close to ‘work’.
Before getting to my picks, I wanted to say that I have both enjoyed and learned a lot from several books that tell us much about the current era of volatility. Many were well ahead of the curve.
Justin Gest’s The New Minority (2016), through meticulous research and interviews with hundreds of voters, tells us much about the appeal of populism among the white working-class in both the UK and the US. In some ways, it is a reboot of Christopher Husbands’ Racial Exclusionism and the City (1983), a classic on why people were drawn to the earlier National Front, especially in the East End of London.
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