Each week, our editors and critics recommend the most captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Now, as 2024 comes to an end, we’ve chosen a dozen essential reads in nonfiction and a dozen, too, in fiction and poetry. The Essentials Nonfiction Fiction & Poetry The Essential Reads The Achilles Trap by Steve Coll ( Penguin Press ) Nonfiction It has been tempting to view the C.
I.A. as omniscient.
Yet Coll’s chastening new book about the events leading up to the Iraq War, in 2003, shows just how often the agency was flying blind. Washington’s failure to foresee Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, in 1990, was just one of what Coll calls a “cascade of errors” that would start several wars and end many lives. Saddam saw spies around every corner.
This was reasonable, given the C.I.A.
’s history, but Coll indicates that it was exactly the wrong fear. U.S.
intelligence had missed Saddam’s Kuwait-invasion preparations, his nuclear program, and his subsequent disarmament. His real problem was not what the C.I.
A. knew but what it didn’t. Buy on Amazon Bookshop Read more : “ When the C.
I.A. Messes Up, ” by Daniel Immerwahr When you make a purchase using a link on this page, we may receive a commission.
Thank you for supporting The New Yorker . All Fours by Miranda July ( Riverhead ) Fiction July’s second novel is a study of crisis—the crisis being how middle age changes sex, marriage, and ambition. The unnamed narrator is a fort.
