Max Boot is a historian, best-selling author and foreign-policy analyst. He is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a weekly columnist for The Washington Post.
Boot’s new biography of Ronald Reagan, Reagan: His Life and Legend (September 2024, Norton/Liveright), has been acclaimed as the "definitive biography" (The New Yorker), a “magisterial,” “vivid,” and “splendid” account (The Washington Post), and a book that "stands out for its deep research, lucid prose and command of its subject’s broad political and social context" (The New York Times). Boot’s previous biography, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in biography.
Boot is also the author of four other widely acclaimed books: The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right (2018); the New York Times bestseller Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present (2013); War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (2006); and The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002), which won the 2003 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation as the best nonfiction book pertaining to Marine Corps history and has been placed on military professional reading lists.
Boot has been a CNN global affairs analyst and a regular guest on MSNBC, NPR, BBC, and many other radio and television programs. He was named in 2018 one of America’s “Great Immigrants” by the Carnegie Corporation and one of the 50 most influential Jewish Americans by the Forward newspaper. Boot served as a foreign policy adviser to the presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Marco Rubio.
Before joining the Council on Foreign Relations in 2002, Boot was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal and, before that, an editor and writer at the Christian Science Monitor. He has also been a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Commentary, and many other publications.
Boot holds a bachelor’s degree in history, with high honors, from the University of California at Berkeley (1991) and a master’s degree in history from Yale University (1992). He was born in Moscow, grew up in Los Angeles, and now lives with his family in New York City.
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