CUSE summer reading and watch list
We asked our CUSE team to share what they’re reading and watching on holiday.
Aslı Aydıntaşbaş: I Regret Almost Everything (2025) by Keith McNally, the legendary NY restaurateur. McNally is the quintessential contrarian — speaking his mind on politics and ideological excesses and spilling the beans on celebrities. It is a fun summer read!
Mariana Budjeryn: Cat’s Cradle (1963) by Kurt Vonnegut. An essential piece of “bomb literature,” this is an absurd, satirical first-person account of an author researching a book about the day the bomb was dropped on on Hiroshima, complete with a mud-freezing secret weapon, a diminutive Ukrainian dancer, bug tormentors, and so much more.
Jim Goldgeier: Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church (2025) by Kevin Sack: an extraordinary history of Charleston dating from the 1500s and centered on the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the oldest African Methodist Episcopal church in the U.S., where Dylan Roof committed mass murder in 2015. It opens with the horrific events of that night.
Caroline Grassmuck: Mountainhead (2025). Written and directed by Jesse Armstrong (creator of Succession), this film follows four tech billionaires in a luxury ski chalet while the world below them erupts into chaos and violence due to a software update on one of the billionaires’ social media platforms. Warning: it might make you want to go off grid!
Samantha Gross: The Age of Fire is Over (2021) by Vincent Petit. I don’t agree with every word, but the fundamental premise of the book rings very true: Past energy transitions weren’t supply driven—and the coming transition won’t be either. Instead, they were shaped by changes in demand and often brought about radical changes in technology and society.
Anna Grzymała-Busse: Emperor of Gladness (2025), by Ocean Vuong. Checks all the boxes: post-industrial Connecticut, elderly East European, band of misfits at a fast-food restaurant, family legends and immigrant myths, howlingly funny and heartbreaking all at once. Could not put it down.
Daniel Hamilton: Babylon Berlin (TV series, 2017–): mystery, intrigue, crime, corruption, violence, fabulous music, and the death of democracy, all in a police procedural set in Weimar-era Berlin. And Indigenous Continent (2024) by Pekka Hämäläinen: 400 years of history on an American continent dominated by a mosaic of native American peoples and empires until well into the 19th century. Reveals which Europeans "smelled like alligators," and why kelp was the key to America!
Fiona Hill: Department Q (2025), an absorbing and brilliant show on Netflix. And it features a classmate of mine from St. Andrew’s! (But I have a mountain of books I want to read!)
Kemal Kirisçi: Two Roads Home (2023) by Daniel Finkelstein, a member of the House of Lords and son of a professor at the Department of Systems Science at City University in London when I was doing my PhD there. It tells the harrowing story of how Finkelstein’s grandparents survived World War II, escaped from Germany and the Soviet Union, and found a new home in England.
Manuel Muñiz: The Handover (2023) by David Runciman: delves into how corporations have managed to amass immense amounts of information on individuals, their lives and their preferences, and the implications this has for our freedom. Also The Future of Geography (2023) by Tim Marshall, on the growing economic, political and geopolitical importance of outer space as a new domain of cooperation and competition.
Cole Pan: Shōgun (2024). The main character is modeled after the legendary Japanese warlord Tokugawa Ieyasu. who navigates powerful rival generals, threats, and shifting alliances to eventually unify a fractured Japan. The series also depicts Europeans through Japanese eyes, the dynamics of foreign trade, and the competition between Catholicism and Protestantism in Asia!
Nalani Payson: The Catch Me If You Can: One Woman’s Journey to Every Country in the World (2022): a literally completist travelogue by the black Ugandan-American writer Jessica Nabongo’s about her trips to, yes, 195 countries. Includes many recommendations and unique personal stories!
Douglas Rediker: Chokepoints (2025) by Eddie Fishman (2025) is a great exploration of economic statecraft and related issues like sanctions; important but extremely approachable! Tom Lake (2023), by Ann Patchett. Loved it.
Ted Reinert: All That Breathes (2022) is an Indian documentary film about Mohammad Saud and Nadeem Shehzad, a pair of brothers in New Delhi who rescue and rehabilitate black kites, birds of prey struggling with the city’s pollution. Lyrical and gorgeously shot, it also captures rising anti-Muslim sentiment in Modi’s India. “Life itself is kinship,” it posits. “We’re all a community of air.”
Constanze Stelzenmüller: The Captive Mind (1953) by Polish Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz on how postwar Polish intellectuals succumbed to Stalinism; it remains a classic treatise on denial, accommodation, and collaboration. Lavinia (2008), by Ursula le Guin, an erudite and poetic reimagining of Virgil’s Aeneid from the viewpoint of Rome’s founding mother.
Angela Stent: The Illegals (2025), by Shaun Walker is a gripping history of the Soviet and Russian Illegals program and what it actually achieved. Included: the plots to assassinate Trotsky and Tito, and the story of the Cambridge-based family who were the models for the TV series The Americans.
Thomas Wright: Empire of AI (2025) by Karen Hao, a great overview of the characters and fissures in the tech world on the race for AI and AGI. Also Zbig, (2025), by Ed Luce: a magisterial life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Polish-born national security adviser to President Carter (and antipode to Henry Kissinger). And The Agency (2024), an American remake of the wonderful French show The Bureau.
