World politics book series in reading order

by Allen Drury

Noam Chomsky

134 books• 4 series

Noam Chomsky (Avram Noam Chomsky, born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist and social critic, sometimes called the father of modern linguistics. Chomsky helped found cognitive science, is a major figure in analytic philosophy, and holds posts as laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona and institute professor emeritus at MIT. The catalogue lists 134 books, starting with Syntactic Structures (1957) and reaching The Myth of American Idealism (2024). Subjects range from generative grammar to world politics and terrorism.

Arundhati Roy

24 books

Arundhati Roy is an Indian writer whose 24 catalogued books divide between fiction and political essays. The God of Small Things (1997) took the Booker Prize for Fiction that year and became the biggest-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. The essays that follow, The Cost of Living (1999), Power Politics (2000), The Algebra of Infinite Justice (2002), War Talk (2003) and An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire (2004) among them, take up globalisation, militarism, nuclear weapons, dams and state power. Roy was born in 1961 and works as a political activist on human rights and environmental causes. Roy took the PEN Pinter Prize in 2024 and named the imprisoned British-Egyptian writer Alaa Abd El-Fattah as the Writer of Courage she shared it with. Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025) is the newest title.

Tariq Ali

62 books• 2 series

Tariq Ali, born 21 October 1943, is a Pakistani-British political activist, writer, journalist, filmmaker and public intellectual. Ali sits on the editorial committees of the New Left Review and Sin Permiso and writes for The Guardian, CounterPunch and the London Review of Books. Ali studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Exeter College, Oxford. The catalogue lists 62 books from The Thoughts of Chairman Harold (1967) to The Neck and the Sword (2026), including Class Struggle in Bangladesh (1971) and Leon Trotsky (1980), and the Islam Quintet series. Subjects include politics and government, socialism, communism, revolutionaries and drama.

Tom Clancy

72 books• 9 series

Tom Clancy, born Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. on April 12, 1947 and dead on October 1, 2013, was an American writer of techno-thrillers, a form that carries technical detail about espionage and military science. An insurance agent before publishing, Clancy debuted with The Hunt for Red October in 1984. The Ryanverse books follow Jack Ryan, an analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency. Subjects across the listing include terrorism, suspense and espionage. The catalogue carries 72 titles under the Clancy name dated 1984 to 2023, with Bill McCay, Grant Blackwood and Peter Telep credited on one or two each.

Allan Folsom was an American screenwriter and novelist who lived from 1941 to 2014. Five books are catalogued, all of them thrillers of unusual length, at a median of 678 pages. The Day After Tomorrow (1994) opens the run, and the John Barron and Nicholas Marten novels follow through The Exile (2004), The Machiavelli Covenant (2006) and The Hadrian Memorandum (2009). Conspiracies, world politics, spies and Catholic clergy recur as subjects.

Ken Follett is a Welsh writer of thrillers and historical novels, born on 5 June 1949. The catalogue holds 39 books running from The Big Black (1974) to Circle of Days (2025). The Pillars of the Earth (1989) opened the Kingsbridge series and moved Follett from spy fiction into historical fiction; the earlier commercial breakthrough was the spy thriller Eye of the Needle (1978). Other headings include Piers Roper, the Apples Carstairs books published as Simon Myles, and a non-fiction list. Ken Follett is still publishing.

Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934 - August 31, 2026) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, farmer, environmental activist and cultural critic closely tied to rural Kentucky. Berry set out agrarian themes in The Unsettling of America (1977) and The Gift of Good Land (1981). The Port William novels and stories, including A Place on Earth, Jayber Crow and That Distant Land, examine rural community life. Berry received the National Humanities Medal, delivered the 2012 Jefferson Lecture and belonged to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The catalogue lists 104 books from Nathan Coulter (1960) to Marce Catlett (2025).

Victor Davis Hanson

30 books• 3 series

Military history and classical Greece run through the 30 catalogued books of Victor Davis Hanson, an American classicist, military historian and conservative political commentator born September 5, 1953. The Western Way of War (1989) comes first, followed by Hoplites (1991), The Other Greeks (1995), Fields Without Dreams (1996), Who Killed Homer (1998) and Carnage and Culture (2001); The Counterrevolution (2026) is the newest. Hanson is professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a visiting professor at Hillsdale College. Hanson received the National Humanities Medal in 2007, and agriculture and family farms also appear among the subjects.

Niall Ferguson

26 books• 7 series

Sir Niall Ferguson, born 18 April 1964, is a British and American historian. Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and has held professorships at Harvard, the London School of Economics and New York University. Titles include Paper and Iron (1995), Virtual History (1997), The Pity of War (1998), The House of Rothschild (1998), The Cash Nexus (2001) and Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (2021). Series include Rothschild, Government and Niall Ferguson Biographies. Subjects include banking, imperialism, foreign relations and economic conditions.

Tim Marshall

8 books• 2 series

Geopolitics is Tim Marshall's subject. A British journalist and broadcaster specialising in foreign affairs and diplomacy, Marshall was diplomatic and foreign affairs editor at Sky News and now comments on world events for the BBC, Sky News and LBC. Prisoners of Geography (2015) became a New York Times bestseller and a number one Sunday Times bestseller, and a children's illustrated edition followed in 2019. The Power of Geography (2021), A Flag Worth Dying For (2016) and The Age of Walls (2018) extend the same argument. Eight titles end at Future of Geography (2023).

Ralph Peters writes military fiction and history, and publishes his American Civil War fiction as Owen Parry. The Abel Jones series belongs to the Owen Parry name and begins with Faded Coat of Blue (1999). Under Peters, the catalogue holds military thrillers such as Bravo Romeo (1981), Red Army (1989) and The War in 2020 (1991), and later Civil War novels including the Battle Hymn Cycle and Darkness at Chancellorsville (2020), the newest of 33 books. Soldiers, military policy and the war on terrorism supply the nonfiction subjects.

Michael Parenti

25 books

Michael Parenti (1933-2026) was an American political scientist, historian and cultural critic of the American Left, known for Marxist writing and lectures. Parenti taught at universities and stood for political office. The Anti-Communist Impulse (1969) begins a 25-book list that includes Democracy for the Few (1974), Inventing Reality (1986) and Against Empire (1995). Imperialism, capitalism, social class and power are the recurring subjects.

P.J. O’Rourke

23 books• 1 series

Patrick Jake O'Rourke, November 14, 1947 to February 15, 2022, was an American author, journalist and political satirist whose twenty-two books took up politics, cars, etiquette and economics. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance each reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list. O'Rourke began at the National Lampoon, served as foreign affairs desk chief at Rolling Stone, later wrote for the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, the Weekly Standard and the Daily Beast, and was a longtime panelist on NPR's Wait Wait. The catalogue lists 23 titles from Another Dirty Book (1979) to The Funny Stuff (2022), under subjects naming humour, politics and government, travel and conservatism.

John Pilger

12 books

John Pilger (9 October 1939 - 30 December 2023) was an Australian-born journalist and documentary filmmaker who also worked as a writer and scholar. From 1962 Pilger lived mainly in Britain. Pilger first gained international attention for reporting on the Cambodian genocide. American, Australian and British foreign policy drew Pilger's criticism as imperialist and colonialist, as did Australia's treatment of Indigenous Australians. Pilger was also a visiting professor at Cornell University. The catalogue lists 12 books from The Last Day (1976) to South Africa (2006), including A Secret Country: The Hidden Australia (1980), Hidden Agendas (1998) and Tell Me No Lies (2004).