A little more than a decade ago, I would roll my eyes at my mom and dad’s collection of biographies and nonfiction deep dives ... Nonetheless, here I am on the wrong side of my mid-30s, ready to bestow the honourable title of ‘my favourite book of the yea

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HOOVER: AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE IN EXTRAORDINARY TIMES

With a businessman in the Oval Office, time to curl up with a dazzling new biography of the last U.S. president who could rightly be called a businessman: Herbert Hoover. For most Canadians, one suspects, the reaction would be: Herbert Whoover? We know of FDR and Harry Truman, General Eisenhower, Reagan and Kennedy, Clinton, the Bushes, Obama, and the incumbent. But who’s Hoover?

Herbert Clark Hoover was America’s Republican president through the Great Depression from 1929 to 1933, and there likely is no better guidebook to the life of this complicated man than Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, by former National Post editor Kenneth Whyte.

Hoover was intimately immersed in many of the great historical events of the 20th century. He made his fortune as a young man in global mining operations in China, Burma and Australia, becoming (in Whyte’s words) “one of the great miners of his age.” During the First World War, from his base in London, he spent part of his fortune on a relief effort aimed — literally — at feeding the entire population of Belgium.

Through Whyte’s lively prose and fine research Hoover emerges as a complicated man, a larger-than-life human machine with many moving parts and idiosyncrasies that he carried into elected office.

But it’s a messy presidency. Whyte and others see Hoover as something of a founding father of later 20th century Republican conservatism. His policy record, however, reflects a brand of conservatism — major interventions in the economy, central planning, anti- immigrant, wage-rate fixer — that offers a dubious model for a free- market America. He would never make it to the Oval Office today. — Terence Corcoran, National Post columnist

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SWORD

With Middle East turmoil and debates over the status of Jerusalem, I thought it was time to understand the historical roots of this conflict during this holiday. No doubt one of the best is Tom Holland’s In the Shadow of Sword, which chronicles the death of ancient faiths replaced by monotheistic religions up to 760 A. D. It’s full of interesting stories, beginning with the last Jewish king, Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar of Himyar in southern Arabia, who drowned under the weight of his armour as Ethiopians conquered his land in 525. And then there was the 541 plague from Egypt that sapped the strength of Justinian’s Constantinople, eventually leading to the decline of the Eastern Roman empire.

If you really want to understand the claims over Jerusalem, Holland’s book is superb. Going beyond military conquest of the Christian empire, the fourth Muslim Caliph, Abd al- Malik, made Jerusalem the place where God ( later interpreted as Mohammed) rose to the heavens. Beginning in 689, Malik constructed the famous Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount that was, up to then, purposely left in tatters by the Christians to demonstrate their superiority over the Jews. Much more can be found in this delightful book — it is well worth the time. — Jack Mintz, Financial Post columnist

BITTER BREW: THE RISE AND FALL OF ANHEUSER- BUSCH AND AMERICA’S KINGS OF BEERS

It’s always fun readi ng a bout hugely privileged f amilies that spend lifetimes building a business empire, only to see some latter- generation schmuck fumble it away. And boy, did the Busch family, of An- heuser-Busch fame, ever do that.

Beginning with Adolphus Busch in the 1860s, a string of Busches ( mostly named either Adolphus or August) built one of the world’s great brewing powers, dominating the U. S. market and pouring billions into family coffers, making its members part of America’s moneybased aristocracy. And then they blew it. Specifically, August Busch IV (known as “The Fourth” for reasons of brevity) blew it. The Fourth became chief executive in December 2006. Within two years the family had lost control to the giant international InBev conglomerate.

Signs that The Fourth was a disaster in waiting were there from early on. His main interest in consisted of getting himself and obnoxious hangers- on as drunk as possible. In college he crashed his car, leaving a local 21-year-old waitress dead, then fled the scene amid a litter of Bud Light cans. His father pushed him up the company ranks anyway, until the day in 2008 when he appeared before a ballroom full of Anheuser-Busch distributors too stoned to deliver his speech.

Still, decades of growth saw dizzying successes, accompanied by scandals, divorce and excess. Eventually, inevitably, the gene pool just couldn’t keep up. As with so many other family empires, the Busches didn’t have to worry theirs being taken from them. They threw it away on their own. — Kelly McParland, National Post columnist and former Opinion section editor Atop my dusty reading pile is El Senor de los Anillos, because Tol ki en’ s masterpiece contains more personal and even political wisdom than a delivery drone full of trendy new tomes.

Whenever some pundit or politician urges us to come to terms with China’s rise to world dominance and forget the fading United States I immediately hear Saruman’s corrupt, catastrophic advice to Gandalf that “A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all ,,. Elves or dying Numenor. We may join with that Power .... Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it.” And one could hardly do better, regardless of personal or political circumstances, than to try to live like such heroes as Eomer, Sam or Gimli on the many occasions where Gandalf, Frodo or Aragorn are out of reach.

As for reading it in Spanish, one of several languages I speak remarkably poorly, what better way to improve than a translation of a book well worth rereading, whose story you know too well to become lost because you misunderstand a particular passage or don’t know what a “cornejo” would look like even in English. — John Robson, National Post columnist Sticky Fingers, the recent biography of Rolling Stone’s founder-editor, Jann Wenner, serves equally well as a biography of t he magazine. It illustrates in copious detail that Rolling Stone, standard bearer of counter-culture — the New Yorker of hippies and rock fans — was a shoddy thing from its inception, as was its founder, the statushungry, drug-dependent, manipulative and confused Jann Wenner.

Wenner was yuppie in hipster threads, as avaricious for fame and fortune as any money-sucking stockbroker. In the pursuit of both he displayed impressive moral agility, flipping from sycophant to serpent as the moment demanded. Beyond serving Wenner’s personal ambitions — his gluttony for cultural status — the magazine was a sly marketing tool for the music industry, more courtier than critic of the stars it gave its famous covers too.

Wenner’s life has a parable function, and Sticky Fingers thereby works as a kind inverted, 20th century Pilgrim’s Progress, a bleak journey across a desert landscape of hucksterism and hype which produced our current and decadent celebrity anti- culture. Rolling Stone manufactured the spike that eventually ended its spurious standing as a chronicle of worth. The famously false “A Rape on Campus” story, and the blazingly corrupt and incompetent reporting of it by RS’s Sabrina Erdely, shredded the last few wisps of its credibility and status.

Sticky Fingers is a grim read for the most part, but fortuitously, an instructive one as well. — Rex Murphy, National Post columnist

GROCERY: THE BUYING AND SELLING OF FOOD IN AMERICA

Death and t axes have nothing on the inevitability of one’s bookshelf eventually resembling their parents’. A little more than a decade ago, I would roll my eyes at my mom and dad’s collection of biographies and nonfiction deep dives into seemingly innocuous subjects. Nonetheless, here I am on the wrong side of my mid-30s, ready to bestow the honourable title of “my favourite book of the year” upon a book about grocery stores, Michael Ruhlman’s Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America.

How we choose to nourish ourselves and the ways in which we procure our sustenance are fascinating. Try to remember the last social gathering you partook in that didn’t at one point broach the subject of food. Yet, for all our discussions on the topic, there remain countless questions we haven’t considered. Ruhlman’s examination of the grocery store answers all the curiosities we didn’t know we had about the place where we buy most of our sustenance. In doing so, he presents the grocery store as uniquely unifying: nothing else in retail can lay claim to not only stocking 40,000 to 50,000 items, but also being a destination for nearly everyone regardless of social class or cultural background. It turns out that even the negative attributes we assign it — how its design forces us to walk by impulse buys to reach staples — are justifiable: spoilage is a grocery store’s most significant concern, and so produce and dairy are displayed on the outer and rear walls because that’s the most energy-efficient place to do so.

Your parents may still return from Loblaws with too much frozen food, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know what’s what when it comes to the contents of their library. — Dustin Parkes, executive producer of National Post’s Arts section

THE ILIAD AND THE ODYSSEY

For the last while I’ve been awakening from sleep to the “rosy- fingered Dawn.” That’s anyway what I prefer to call it, in honour of Homer, who uses phrases like that in the Iliad and the Odyssey. I’ve known about those two great epic poems for many decades but never read them. At age 85, I realized that it was time do it or give up the idea entirely. And they turned out to be the two best books I read in 2017. They’re full of clever and profound thoughts when they’re not crammed with battles scenes or grotesque creatures who may have come from another planet. The language is vivid, the narratives engrossing. They began, apparently, as a series of songs and tall tales improvised by Greek bards in ancient times. One critic has spoken of the author as “the platoon we call Homer.” It seemed to me that the Iliad and the Odyssey were written or sung or edited by two different people or at least two different platoons. I had the fun of reading the books over six weeks in a small class at the University of Toronto school of continuing studies, guided by a smart, lively and amiable scholar, Jonathan Ullyot. — Robert Fulford, National Post columnist

THE LIFE OF JOHN MARSHALL

The book I enjoyed most in 2017 was Sen. Albert J. Beveridge’s f our- volume biography of the U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall, published during the First World War. I enjoy weird, old doorstop books about history: reading a book like this involves learning on two tracks at once.

For density of detail this is probably still the definitive Marshall book ( there are endless pages about Marshall’s spending on booze and clothes, with specific amounts). But at the same time you get to see how an earlier generation perceived the American founders.

Beveridge’s picture of the revolutionary era is idiosyncratic. As a worshipper of Marshall, he necessarily makes Jefferson something of a villain, and this elicits aspects of the third president’s political character that are half- hidden in Jefferson biographies. There is plenty of fine, almost journalistic detail about events in U. S. history ( such as the XYZ Affair) that get glossed over even in good textbooks. Old doorstops: you can’t beat ‘em. — Colby Cosh, National Post columnist

EXIT WEST

Nothing else I read this year felt nearly as vital, or as urgent, as Exit West, t he fourth novel by Mohsin Hamid, a former management consultant who was born and raised in Pakistan, educated at Princeton and Harvard, and now, after a decade in London, mostly lives in Lahore. The book operates with such moral force — it insists on the humanity of its characters — without ever being anything less than fully realized as a story too.

The story begins in an unnamed city descending into civil war. There, young professionals Nadia and Saeed meet and fall in love. Eventually, they flee the violence through a magic door into the wealthy West. These doors, the novel’s central conceit, have popped up all over the developing world, we learn. Migrants have flooded into refugee camps and squats throughout Europe and the United States.

I read Exit West as a tonic against the worst of what I’ve seen as a reporter in recent years. It just out and out refuses to treat people as anything less than people, no matter who they pray to or what they wear or what their immigration status might be. Hamid is a beautiful, restrained writer. His sentences have a lovely, gentle flow. But there’s an anger underneath, I think, a quiet rage against a persistent, terrible blindness, to humanity and decency, that now afflicts far too much of the world. — Richard Warnica, National Post feature writer

CLEMENTINE: THE LIFE OF MRS. WINSTON CHURCHILL

If you enjoy biographies, you are sure to like Sonia Purcell’s 2 01 5 Cl e mentine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill, the first formal account of this extraordinary woman by a non-family member.

Whenever some pundit or politician urges us to come to terms with China’s rise to world dominance and forget the fading United States I immediately hear Saruman’s corrupt, catastrophic advice to Gandalf that ‘A new Power is rising.’ — John Robson A little more than a decade ago, I would roll my eyes at my mom and dad’s collection of biographies and nonfiction deep dives... Nonetheless, here I am on the wrong side of my mid-30s, ready to bestow the honourable title of ‘my favourite book of the year’ upon a book about grocery stores. — Dustin Parkes Though this year marked my 18th year of marriage to a gentile woman, I’m still not comfortable with Christmas. As a Jew, I’m used to holidays that celebrate averted massacres. But Christmas has nothing to do with massacres. So it feels weird to make a big deal about it. That said, mark 2017 as the year Jonathan Kay got inspired by Christian scripture. — Jonathan Kay

“Clemmie,” as she was called, has received scant attention in Churchill histories, most notably in Churchill’s own memoirs, even though he adored her wholeheartedly.

Of aristocratic lineage, Clementine Hozier grew up in a permanent state of emotional and financial crisis following the divorce of her two feckless parents. Endowed with a fine intellect, she was deflected from the studies she craved, and launched onto London’s upper- crust marriage market. Winston and Clementine met at a dinner party; both were smitten, and one of the greatest marital political alliances in history was forged.

For most readers, this book will open a fascinating new window into the Churchills’ domestic and family life (both were pretty dismal parents and paid a huge price for it), but it also casts a bright light on the staggering political workload Clemmie uncomplainingly took on, committing all her innate intelligence, charm, resolve and diplomatic acumen in service to her husband’s career (she saved him from innumerable gaffes and outright mistakes) and, ultimately, to Britain’s survival. An entertaining, informative read. — Barbara Kay, National Post columnist

MERCIES IN DISGUISE: A STORY OF HOPE, A FAMILY’S GENETIC DESTINY, AND THE SCIENCE THAT RESCUED THEM

Published earlier this year, but overlooked by Best Books of 2017 lists, Mercies in Disguise: A Story of Hope, a Family’s Genetic Destiny, and the Science that Rescued Them, is the haunting true tale of the Baxley clan — and the rare disease that stalked them for generations.

In 1998, chemical engineer Bill Baxley died after an excruciating battle with a mysterious illness that robbed him of his memory and his ability to control his body. Baxley left behind a bereft and confused family. But his adult sons ( two of whom were doctors) eventually reached an eerie lucidity. They realized that what killed their father wasn’t a fluke sickness, but a grim inheritance that they and their children might share. Clearly and powerfully written, this book by Gina Kolata illuminates the role suffering and science play in shaping the Baxleys’ lives and futures.

We sit with Bill Baxley’s granddaughter Amanda as she awaits the test results that will tell her whether she has the fatal genetic disorder. And we follow the researchers who discover the defective brain protein behind the brutal degeneration that those who are afflicted suffer. It’s an astonishing story that has as much to say about the universal heartache of facing death as it does about the Baxleys’ particular odyssey. — Marni Soupcoff, National Post columnist and former deputy editor of the Comment section

A WORLD ABLAZE: THE RISE OF MARTIN LUTHER AND THE BIRTH OF THE REFORMATION

Though t his year marked my 18th year of marriage to a gentile woman, I’m still not comfortable with Christmas. As a Jew, I’m used to holidays that celebrate averted massacres. But Christmas has nothing to do with massacres. So it feels weird to make a big deal about it.

That said, mark 2017 as the year Jonathan Kay got inspired by Christian scripture. I’m not a convert or anything. But thanks to Craig Harline’s outstanding new book from Oxford University Press, “A World Ablaze: The Rise of Martin Luther and the Birth of the Reformation,” I now count the father of Protestant Christianity as one of my personal heroes.

I can’t do a good job Jewsplaining Luther’s doctrinal critique of Roman Catholicism in the space of a four-paragraph book review. But that doesn’t matter — because what made Luther special wasn’t the substance of ideas (which other reformers had championed before him), but his writerly wit and verve. He was a great communicator who de- tested the pretentions of the priestly class, and often spoke to audiences in lay German instead of Latin.

These are qualities I have tried to exhibit in my own career. Even if the travails of Wordpress and Twitter hardly match the life-and-death stakes at the Diet of Worms, the qualities demanded of a great writer, Harline shows us, really haven’t changed much in the last 500 years. — Jonathan Kay, National Post columnist and former editor of the Comment section Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre hardly requires my recommendation. Obviously it’s excellent —it’ s an English classic. But it is one of the best books that I read this year, so I figured it deserved my endorsement even if thousands of others have praised it before.

Jane Eyre is an engrossing read, in part because it defies expectations. I’d expected it to be a densely written, heavily moralistic, formulaically structured read. In fact, it is a cleverly written, imaginative page- turner that successfully combines the feminist romance of an Austen novel with the gothic intrigue of a Poe story with the hard- knock elements of a Dickens tale. This is no small feat. As one commentator noted in The Guardian, the book “eludes definition. It does one thing with its right hand while doing quite another with its left.”

Of course, in saying t his, I would not want to suggest the book is not loaded down with the moral themes so common to novels of the Victorian era. It is. But as almost all good books do, Jane Eyre challenges how we understand morality. As Brontë herself puts it in the book’s preface ( addressed to her “timorous or carping” critics), “conventionality is not morality,” and it is generally wrong to confuse the two. — Lauren Heuser, National Post columnist and former Comment section editor America is weird. This is true today as it was in 1840 when Alexis de Tocqueville’s seminal classic Democracy in America was published. A Frenchman touring America’s prison system, de Tocqueville was a keen observer of the country’s sometimes chaotic and novel polity, making observations and predictions that remain prescient tot his day.

De Tocqueville traces America’s unique national character to its Puritan founding; the early northern colonists who were fanatically devout, hard working and mostly reasonably well- off pilgrims who wished to found a society grounded in their unique spiritual ethic. ( de Tocqueville contrasts this lot with the largely opportunity- seeking reprobates who tried to recreate a landed gentry in the south and soon adopted widespread slavery. The conflict between these two competing moral orders precipitated the civil war, which de Tocqueville predicted.)

Much of the book, now, reads as idealistic and quaint — his despairing of the democratic arts scene proved unfounded — but de Tocqueville’s primary concerns for the democratic experiment remain well founded.

He correctly pointed to America’s materialism, its tendency toward individual isolation. He warned not of a new aristocracy, but rather an established oligarchy fuelled by the country’s vast industrial wealth. De Tocqueville feared America would produce a tyranny of the majority and eventually turn toward a soft despotism.

More than this, Democracy in America remains a classic because it puts the country in stark contrast to the arc of global history at the time. America suffers from a case of its own exceptionalism because it is exceptional. Its ideology conquered an enormous land mass ( and the native residents upon it) to create an entirely new vision of human society; one that is messy, imperfect, violent, and often hypocritical — but also a nation that has led the world in the advancement of personal freedom and material prosperity. — Jen Gerson, National Post Calgary correspondent

RAVEN ROCK: THE U. S. GOVERNMENT’S PLAN TO SAVE ITSELF — WHILE THE REST OF US DIE

An unlikely hero emerges a third of the way into this comprehensive history of the U. S. government’s evolving plans to survive a nuclear war. Earl Warren, chief justice of the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis, patiently sits through his latest briefing on an utterly impractical evacuation plan. The Supreme Court’s legal materials, their staffs and their families are not included. Oh, it only applies during normal business hours: 9- 5, Monday-Friday.

Warren functions here, in his bemused frustration, as a proxy for the reader. Dramatized nuclear wars usually show the President and other key officials being rushed out of town to a gleaming, well- stocked bunker. In reality, Graff recounts, building bunkers was ( relatively) easy. Getting officials to take the threat seriously was one problem. Another was keeping up with rapidly advancing threats — as ICBMs supplanted bombers and became ever more accurate, once-invulnerable redoubts became VIP tombs-in-waiting.

And then there were those VIPs who simply didn’t trust the system to work, or have any interest in surviving the unthinkable. Warren ended his Cuban crisis briefing by saying, “I suppose I should call my wife and say, ‘ Honey, there is an atomic bomb attack to be made on Washington, and I am flying to safety … it is nice to have met you’?” That ended the conversation, but the threat remains to this day. As do the plans to make sure at least someone in authority survives it to return the devastation in kind.  — Matt Gurney is host of The Morning Show on Global News Radio 640 Toronto and a columnist with Global News. He previously edited the National Post Comment section.

WOLF ON A STRING AND FOUNDER OF MODERN ECONOMICS: PAUL A. SAMUELSON

My favourite novel this year was Wolf on a String, about young German scholar Christian Stern, who on a snowy night in Prague in 1599 boozily stumbles on a beautiful young woman who’s had her throat raggedly slashed. It turns out she’s connected to the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II and so, as a result, becomes Stern. It’s the latest offering as “Benjamin Black” from 2005 Booker winner John Banville, possibly the most versatile living novelist. His 14 books since 2007 include four Banville novels, six Black mysteries about “Quirke,” an alcoholic 1950s Dublin widower- pathologist and, also as Black, a convincing Philip Marlowe mystery.

As for non- fiction, I recommend the first volume of Roger Backhouse’s new life of Paul Samuelson, third economics Nobelist ( 1970) and the man widely credited, if that’s the word, for mathematizing the discipline. What Samuelson read and wrote exactly when is less gripping than a Benjamin Black novel, and explanations of his economic theorems can be heavy going, but whether he ended up at MIT because of anti-Semitism at Harvard or simply a better offer is an interesting 1940s mystery, as are letters from potential employers worrying whether the person who eventually wrote the most successful intro text ever would be able to teach undergraduates. — William Watson, Financial Post columnist National Post