Books can open a startling window on history; they can give us an all-access pass to knowledge both old and new. As the former defense secretary James Mattis, who assembled a seven-thousand-volume library, said of his years in the military, “Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.”
