This Week Those Books newsletter is chock-full of crucial context — from fiction and non-fiction — to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.
Go to this link for a quick read.
The Big Story:
The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a politician in the Americas — Venezuela’s opposition leader, not Donald Trump.
Has the world’s most prestigious award really put “politics over peace”, in the irate words of a spokesman for Trump, who has run a loud and proud campaign for the Nobel?
The Nobel Peace Prize is always political because politics sets the conditions that either create or destroy peace.
Our first book pick explicitly notes the award’s inherent politics:
“Presumably as a result of its political nature, the Peace Prize has been withheld more often than the others (the four Nobel Prizes), a total of 19 times, but only six times in the 60 years after 1948, and never after 1972”.
