Books by Richard Rhodes

4. Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb , by Richard Rhodes.  This favorite book of Jason Kottke is first-rate non-fiction, it is also one of the best books on the Cold War.

That is from Richard Rhodes’s interesting Arsenals of Folly: the Making of the Nuclear Arms Race .  I’ve never seen a good quantitative study of how leadership biography matters for policy outcomes, and I expect that solid results are as hard to find as in birth order studies.  Does anyone know of a good, concrete stylized fact here?