“The Lives of the Twelve Caesars,” by Suetonius
The historian of ancient Rome’s early imperial era, who chronicled 12 successive Roman rulers from Julius Caesar to Domitian, would surely have been fascinated by our current crop of larger-than-life rulers — including Trump, Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu. Take away our technology and advances in medical science and we can read about our era in the most important work of Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus — his full, gloriously Latin name.
Here is caprice and malice, vanity and cruelty, whim and tyrannical ambition. The Victorians were so scandalized by the sex lives of the Roman emperors that editions of the collective biography were bowdlerized. Sad.
Of course, direct comparisons with our contemporary rulers would be untoward. Maybe. But what Suetonius does brilliantly is to plot the personal and political. That derives from his conviction, as English-language translator Tom Holland puts it, that “there is no foible so minor, so intimate that it cannot provide the measure of a man.”
— Jamie Dettmer, opinion editor and columnist
“1929,” by Andrew Ross Sorkin
Wildly overvalued companies, barely hidden economy weaknesses, great egos, buckets of hubris … if 2026 turns into the white-knuckle ride for global markets that some predict, we may as well understand what’s about to happen.
In “1929,” Andrew Ross Sorkin revisits the Wall Street crash that saw the collapse of overhyped stock values, just as ordinary folk pumped their savings into supposedly never-failing investments: A depressing tale of how quickly things can go wrong.
That catastrophe didn’t just destroy wealth; it reshaped politics. The Great Depression that followed saw the rise of populist politicians who went on to dominate Europe, leaving unspeakable scars all over the continent. Sorkin, New York Times journalist of “Too Big To Fail” fame, uses “1929” as a cautionary tale to warn against what happens when institutions and politicians fail the countries they are supposed to support.
He knows his onions, and his warning is clear: When markets wobble, democracies do too.