Two new ranked reading orders went up on Skriuwer this week. Both fix problems that most existing book lists in their categories ignore.
The Cold War list is the bigger correction. Almost every "best Cold War books" list on the web treats Europe in depth and skims Korea, Vietnam, Africa and Latin America. Twenty million people died in the proxy wars, mostly in the global south, so any list that frames the conflict as a US-Soviet bilateral story is leaving out the bodies. The new guide leads with Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History for the global picture, then layers Leffler for the policy story, Applebaum for Eastern Europe, Macintyre for espionage, and Ellsberg for nuclear near-misses. Reading order matters: starting with Westad makes the others sit inside a frame that older bilateral histories cannot give you.
The secret societies list fixes a different problem. Most existing lists mix Dan Brown thrillers with serious historical scholarship as if they were the same thing. The new guide separates them cleanly: Goldwag's Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies as the encyclopedic starting point, then Jasper Ridley's Freemasons history, then Jones and Barber on the Templars. The fiction half (Eco, Tartt, Brown) is presented as fiction, after the history, with notes on which strands of real history each novel reflects.
Both posts are written for a general reader and ranked by what holds up to source criticism rather than by editorial preference. Skriuwer has a full ranked list here: best books about the Cold War and best books about secret societies.
Top comments (0)