Books by Steve Coll
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq
by Steve Coll
🏆 Winner of the 2025 Arthur Ross Award for “an outstanding contribution to the understanding of foreign policy or international relations”
“The Achilles Trap is a rigorous, expertly controlled account of what Steve Coll calls the ‘march to disaster’—the US’s decades-long dealings with Saddam Hussein, characterized by fateful miscalculations and misunderstandings on both sides—a ‘cascade of errors’, as Coll puts it—and culminating in the catastrophically misjudged American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003″ Read more...
The Best Politics Books of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing
The Bin Ladens
by Steve Coll
Bin Laden had 53 siblings, none of whom went down the route that he went. This is a portrait of his family, many of whom took opposed approaches to life
Interviews where books by Steve Coll were recommended
The best books on Osama bin Laden, recommended by Peter Bergen
Many thought that 9/11 was the start of an Al-Qaeda assault on the West, but it turned out to be Bin Laden’s Pearl Harbor – a victory that led to strategic defeat – says Peter Bergen, one of the few reporters who met the Saudi-born militant.
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How to End a Story: Collected Diaries
by Helen Garner -
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The Burning Earth: An Environmental History of the Last 500 Years
by Sunil Amrith -
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Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin
by Sue Prideaux -
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The Story of a Heart
by Rachel Clarke -
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To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement
by Benjamin Nathans -
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The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip
by Stephen Witt
Award-Winning Nonfiction Books of 2025, recommended by Sophie Roell
Award-Winning Nonfiction Books of 2025, recommended by Sophie Roell
It’s a golden age for nonfiction, with books on a range of important topics written in an accessible way. As 2025 draws to a close, Five Books editor Sophie Roell takes us through some of the books that won important nonfiction book prizes this year, and what they can tell us about the world we live in.
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A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
by Nathan Thrall -
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Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
by Cat Bohannon -
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Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence
by Yaroslav Trofimov -
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The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq
by Steve Coll -
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The Picnic: A Dream of Freedom and the Collapse of the Iron Curtain
by Matthew Longo
The Best Politics Books of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing
The Best Politics Books of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Political Writing
The Orwell Prizes are the UK’s most prestigious prizes for writing about politics, awarded annually to books and articles that best meet George Orwell’s own ambition “to make political writing into an art.” The nonfiction books that made the 2024 shortlist ranged from evolution to political philosophy, from memoir to the Middle East.
