American politics and presidents

The Power Broker

“Caro's biography of Robert Moses is on this list because it shows how infrastructure, regulation, and institutional power actually accumulate and calcify over decades. Andreessen has cited it as essential context for understanding why American cities stopped being able to build things — and why the regulatory environment startups face is the product of deliberate political choices.”Marc Andreessen

Master of the Senate

“Caro's LBJ series is the companion to The Power Broker: it dissects how legislative power is built, traded, and wielded. Andreessen has recommended Caro's work broadly as the best available study of how large institutions actually function versus how they claim to function.”Marc Andreessen

Team of Rivals

“Among the best historical books I've ever read" — Lincoln's cabinet as a master class in leadership through disagreement.”Stewart Butterfield

Just Mercy

“On Obama's 2019 year-end list. Stevenson, a lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, uses Walter McMillian's wrongful death-row conviction as the spine of a broader argument about the failures of the American criminal legal system. Obama called it a book that should be required reading.”Barack Obama

The Path to Power

“The first volume of Caro's Lyndon Johnson series, tracing Johnson's origins in the Texas Hill Country to his first Senate race. Collison has spoken about Caro repeatedly — this volume is the foundation, establishing how ruthless ambition and genuine policy conviction can coexist in a single person.”Patrick Collison

The New Jim Crow

“On his list among books on social justice and incarceration.”Sahil Lavingia

Evicted

“Obama recommended Desmond's Pulitzer-winning ethnography of eviction in Milwaukee on his 2017 reading list. Desmond embedded with landlords and tenants for years; the result makes the mechanics of housing poverty legible in a way that policy papers rarely can.”Barack Obama

A Promised Land

“Barack Obama's presidential memoir is on this list not as a partner piece but because Michelle features in it as a full character — her doubts about the political life, her protectiveness of their daughters, her own ambitions. Reading it alongside Becoming gives you two perspectives on the same years from inside the same household.”Michelle Obama