Ben Rhodes Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Ben Rhodes
Ben Rhodes is a political commentator, writer, and national security analyst. He was born November 14, 1977 in the Upper East Side neighborhood of Manhattan. He is the son of a Jewish mom from New York and an Episcopal dad from Texas. Ben’s brother, David Rhodes, is a former President of CBS News.

He went to the Collegiate School, graduating in the year 1996. Then he went to Rice University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in the year 2000 with majors in political science and English. Then he moved back to New York, going to New York University, graduating with an MFA in creative writing in the year 2002.

During the summer of 1997, Ben volunteered with the Rudy Giuliani mayoral campaign. During the summer of 2001, he worked on the New York City Council campaign of Diana Reyna.

From 2009 until 2017, he served as deputy national security advisor to President Barack Obama, where he oversaw the administration’s national security communications, speechwriting, global engagement programming, and public diplomacy. Before joining the Obama administration, he was a senior speechwriter and foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign from 2007 until 2008. During this time, he wrote Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech called “A New Beginning”, and was the adviser that counseled Obama in pulling support from Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian leader.

Ben worked for Lee Hamilton, a former congressman, from 2002 until 2007 where he worked as a speechwriter, before he joined the then Senator Obama’s campaign.

After he left the Obama administration, he started working as a commentator. He started contributing to MSNBC, Crooked Media, and NBC News. Ben has written opinion articles for magazines and newspapers including The Atlantic and the New York Times.

In the year 2011, he was on Time Magazine’s “40 Under 40” list of prominent and powerful young professionals. In 2014, Ben came in thirteenth on Fortune magazine’s “40 Under 40” list of the most influential young people in business. He was named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top 100 global thinkers.

“The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2018. This is a book about two people that make the most important choices in the world. One is Barack Obama, while the other is Ben Rhodes. This tells the full story about what it means to work alongside a radical leader, about how idealism can confront reality and actually survive, how the White House actually functions. And what it means to have a partnership, and ultimately a friendship, with a historic president.

Ben Rhodes, a young writer and Washington outsider, got plucked out of obscurity at the age of 29. Chosen for his gift with language and his original perspective, his role was to help shape the nation’s sense of itself and hopes. For almost ten years, he was at the heart of the Obama Administration, first as a speechwriter, then as a policy maker, and lastly as a multi-purpose aide and a close collaborator.

Ben puts the reader in the room during the most poignant and tense moments in recent history: beginning each morning with Obama in the Daily Briefing, reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran waiting out the bin Laden raid in the Situation Room. Leading the secret negotiations with the Cuban government, and facing the resurgence of nationalism which led to Donald Trump’s election.

This is the most vivid depiction of Obama’s presidency to date. It is an essential record of the previous decade. However it also shows us what it actually means to hold the pen, and to write down the words which will change our world.

The book provides insights into situations that no ordinary citizen will likely ever bear witness to, and readers were impressed, feeling more informed than they were before. This is an extremely well written and well researched book and is easy to read.

“After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2021. Why is democracy so threatened in America and all over the world? What can we even do about it? An ex-White House aide and one of President Barack Obama’s close confidantes travels all around the world in a deeply observed quest for answers.

In the year 2017, while Ben was helping Obama start his next chapter, the legacy they had worked to build for eight years was getting taken apart. In order to better understand what’s happening in America, Rhodes chose to look outward. Over the course of three years, he traveled around to dozens of countries, where he met with activists, politicians, and dissidents that all faced the same authoritarianism and nationalism that had been tearing America apart. Hong Kong protesters he comes to know see their movement snuffed out, a Russian opposition leader that he spends time with gets poisoned, and America hits the precipice of losing its democracy before it can get its own second chance.

Rhodes comes to realize just how much America’s fingerprints are on a world that we helped shape: through the post-9/11 nationalism and militarism, the excesses of our post-Cold War embrace of unbridled capitalism, mania for social media and tech, and the racism which helped shaped the backlash to Obama’s presidency. At the same time, he learns from a diverse group of characters. From rebels to Obama to a rising generation of leaders. How looking directly at where America has gone wrong just makes it that much more essential to fight for what America was supposed to be at home, for our country and for the rest of the world.

Readers found this to be an excellent, albeit sober, analysis of the state of the current world. It is a fascinating look into America in context with the rest of this world. Ben offers an intellectual insight and helps the reader understand that even after the fall has happened, there is still hope that America is going to get back up again. Readers of the book found themselves feeling like a smarter, better, more mindful and worldly person than when they began reading it.