Over the weekend, I enjoyed reading my NR colleagues’ “favorite books of 2024” selections. Several of these titles have already joined what I like to call The Big Stack — i.e., the list of books that I have promised myself that I’ll get to . . . soon (someday).
As it happens, I have three books on my desk right now that I had meant to dive into over the Christmas holidays. But, after family, friends, good Scotch, and the college football playoffs all took their allotted time, these books are now a (pleasant) 2025 problem.
Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning, by Elliot Ackerman
I first encountered Ackerman’s writing in the pages of the New York Times in 2019 while at Quantico. His essay “A Battle in Fallujah, Revisited” had a profound and sobering effect on me, with its grim and gritty descriptions of the horrors of urban combat. Eighty-two Americans died in the fierce fighting of 2004’s Operation Phantom Fury, an operation that saw the most intense combat for Americans since the Battle of Hue City in Vietnam. Ackerman was right in the middle of all of it as a platoon commander in First Battalion, Eighth Marines.
Back at NR in 2023, I wrote to Ackerman, asking him to contribute an essay for NR magazine about the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and he graciously agreed. It’s well worth reading. Last fall, I stumbled upon Ackerman’s memoir, Places and Names, at a used book store. It was published in 2019, and it appears to be a much-expanded version of that original essay in the New York Times, or perhaps the essay was an excerpt from the memoir? (I can’t wait to find out.)
Ackerman’s writing is vivid and bracing and yet remarkably subtle. His is exactly the touch that a combat memoir requires.
The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, edited by Matt Pottinger
The most pressing geopolitical issue of the next decade is very likely to be China’s designs on Taiwan. Should the issue turn into a shooting war, the results may well be catastrophic for all of us and our way of life. But if we hope to avoid a war — or, should it come to that, win one — the United States and its allies must do so much more than what’s been on offer in the last decade’s much-ballyhooed Pivot to Asia.
That’s why The Boiling Moat is so timely. Matt Pottinger — a former deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration, who edited the volume for the Hoover Institution — and the contributors to this manageably sized book lay out the practical steps that must be taken as soon as possible. A perusal of the table of contents lays out sections helpfully titled “Taiwan’s Job Now,” “America’s Job Now,” “Japan’s Job Now,” and “Australia and Europe’s Job Now.”
It will be my next policy-focused read.
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, by Karl Marlantes
If there’s one work of fiction that individual Marines have recommended to me more than any other, it has to be Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn.
Marlantes is a graduate of Yale and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. But he left after one term at Oxford to join the Marine Corps as an infantry officer. In 1969, he won the Navy Cross while serving with First Battalion, Fourth Marines during the worst years of the Vietnam War.
Over the years, I have actively avoided learning almost anything of the plot of the novel, so I can’t speak to it. But my anticipation is sure to be rewarded: The back cover of the book — a gift from a dear friend — features praise from Mark Bowden and Sebastian Junger, two men who know a thing or two about high-quality, gripping prose.