Fareed Zakaria Popular Books

Fareed Zakaria Biography & Facts

Fareed Rafiq Zakaria (; born 20 January 1964) is an Indian-American journalist, political commentator, and author. He is the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS and writes a weekly paid column for The Washington Post. He has been a columnist for Newsweek, editor of Newsweek International, and an editor at large of Time. Early life and education Zakaria was born in Mumbai, India, to a Konkani Muslim family. His father, Rafiq Zakaria (1920–2005), was a politician associated with the Indian National Congress and an Islamic theologian. His mother, Fatima Zakaria (1936–2021), his father's second wife, was for a time the editor of the Sunday Times of India. She died during the COVID-19 pandemic.Zakaria attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Mumbai. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Yale University in 1986, where he was president of the Yale Political Union, editor in chief of the Yale Political Monthly, a member of the Scroll and Key society, and a member of the Party of the Right. As a student at Yale University in the mid-1980s, Zakaria opposed anti-apartheid divestment and argued that Yale should not divest from its holdings in South Africa. He later gained a PhD in government from Harvard University in 1993, where he studied under Samuel P. Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann, as well as international relations theorist Robert Keohane. Career After directing a research project on American foreign policy at Harvard, Zakaria became the managing editor of Foreign Affairs in 1992, at the age of 28. Under his guidance, the magazine was redesigned to be published once every two months, moving away from a quarterly schedule. He served as an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where he taught a seminar on international relations. In October 2000, he was named editor of Newsweek International, and became a weekly columnist for Newsweek. In August 2010, he moved to Time to serve as editor at-large and columnist. He writes a weekly column for The Washington Post and is a contributing editor for the Atlantic Media group, which includes The Atlantic Monthly. He has published on a variety of subjects for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic. For a brief period, he was a wine columnist for the web magazine Slate, with the pseudonym of George Saintsbury, after the English writer.Zakaria is the author of From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton, 1998), The Future of Freedom (Norton, 2003), The Post-American World (2008), and In Defense of a Liberal Education (Norton, 2015). He co-edited The American Encounter: The United States and the Making of the Modern World (Basic Books) with James F. Hoge Jr. His last three books have been New York Times bestsellers and The Future of Freedom and The Post American World have both been translated into more than 25 languages. In 2011 an updated and expanded edition of The Post-American World ("Release 2.0") was published. Zakaria was a news analyst with ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos (2002–2007) where he was a member of the Sunday morning roundtable. He hosted the weekly TV news show, Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria on PBS (2005–08). His weekly show, Fareed Zakaria GPS (Global Public Square), premiered on CNN in June 2008. It airs twice weekly in the United States and four times weekly on CNN International, reaching over 200 million homes. It celebrated its 10th anniversary on 5 June 2018, as announced on the weekly foreign affairs show on CNN. In 2013, he became one of the producers for the HBO series Vice, for which he serves as a consultant. Zakaria, a member of the Berggruen Institute, additionally features as an interlocutor for the annual Berggruen Prize. Political views Zakaria self-identifies as a "centrist", though he has been described variously as a political liberal, a conservative, a moderate, or a radical centrist. George Stephanopoulos said of him in 2003, "He's so well versed in politics, and he can't be pigeonholed. I can't be sure whenever I turn to him where he's going to be coming from or what he's going to say." In February 2008, Zakaria wrote that "Conservatism grew powerful in the 1970s and 1980s because it proposed solutions appropriate to the problems of the age", adding that "a new world requires new thinking". He supported Barack Obama during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign and also for president. In January 2009, Forbes referred to Zakaria as one of the 25 most influential liberals in the American media. Zakaria has stated that he tries not to be devoted to any type of ideology, saying "I feel that's part of my job... which is not to pick sides but to explain what I think is happening on the ground. I can't say, 'This is my team and I'm going to root for them no matter what they do.'" Zakaria "may have more intellectual range and insights than any other public thinker in the West," wrote David Shribman in The Boston Globe. In 2003, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told New York Magazine that Zakaria "has a first-class mind and likes to say things that run against conventional wisdom." However, in 2011, the editors of The New Republic included him in a list of "over-rated thinkers" and commented, "There's something suspicious about a thinker always so perfectly in tune with the moment."Zakaria's books include The Future of Freedom and The Post-American World. The Future of Freedom argues that what is defined as democracy in the Western world is actually "liberal democracy", a combination of constitutional liberalism and participatory politics. Zakaria points out that protection of liberty and the rule of law actually preceded popular elections by centuries in Western Europe, and that when countries only adopt elections without the protection of liberty, they create "illiberal democracy". The Post-American World, published in 2008 before the financial crisis, argued that the most important trend of modern times is the "rise of the rest," the economic emergence of China, India, Brazil, and other countries.From 2006, Zakaria has also criticized what he views as "fear-based" American policies employed not only in combating terrorism, but also in enforcing immigration and drug smuggling laws, and has argued in favor of decriminalization of drugs and citizenship for presently illegal immigrants to the United States of all backgrounds.Referring to his views on Iran, Leon Wieseltier described Zakaria in 2010 as a "consummate spokesman for the shibboleths of the [Obama] White House and for the smooth new worldliness, the at-the-highest-levels impatience with democracy and human rights as central objectives of our foreign policy, that now characterize advanced liberal thinking about America's role in the world."Before the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Zakaria endorsed Barack Obama on his CNN program. In May 2011 The New York Times reported that President Obama has "sounded out prominent journalists lik.... Discover the Fareed Zakaria popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Fareed Zakaria books.

Best Seller Fareed Zakaria Books of 2024

  • Reimagining India synopsis, comments

    Reimagining India

    McKinsey & Company Inc.

    Reimagining India brings together leading thinkers from around the world to explore the challenges and opportunities faced by one of the most important and least understood nations...

  • I Lost My Love in Baghdad synopsis, comments

    I Lost My Love in Baghdad

    Michael Hastings

    The “wrenching” (Rachel Maddow, The Rachel Maddow Show) first book by acclaimed journalist Michael Hastings (19802013), whose unflinching Rolling Stone article “Runaway General” en...

  • Power Rules synopsis, comments

    Power Rules

    Leslie H. Gelb, PhD

    “Fluent, welltimed, provocative. . . . Filled with gritty, shrewd, specific advice on foreign policy ends and means. . . . Gelb’s plea for greater strategic thinking is absolutely ...

  • World War C synopsis, comments

    World War C

    Sanjay Gupta

    CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, MD, offers an accessible, datapacked answer to our biggest questions about Covid19: What have we learned about this pandemic and how c...

  • Windfall synopsis, comments

    Windfall

    Meghan L. O’Sullivan

    Windfall is the boldest profile of the world’s energy resources since Daniel Yergin’s The Quest, asserting that the new energy abundancedue to oil and gas resources once deemed too...

  • Diez lecciones para el mundo de la postpandemia synopsis, comments

    Diez lecciones para el mundo de la postpandemia

    Fareed Zakaria

    Lenin dijo una vez: «Hay décadas en las que no pasa nada y semanas en las que pasan décadas». Este es uno de esos momentos en los que la historia se ha acelerado. En estos momentos...

  • A Duty of Care synopsis, comments

    A Duty of Care

    Peter Hennessy

    One of our most celebrated historians shows how we can use the lessons of the past to build a new postcovid society in BritainThe 'duty of care' which the state owes to its citizen...

  • Destined For War synopsis, comments

    Destined For War

    Graham Allison

    NATIONAL BESTSELLER | NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR. From an eminent international security scholar, an urgent examination of the conditions that could produce a catastro...

  • Mastering AI synopsis, comments

    Mastering AI

    Jeremy Kahn

    A Fortune magazine journalist draws on his expertise and extensive contacts among the companies and scientists at the forefront of artificial intelligence to offer dramatic predict...

  • How to Think synopsis, comments

    How to Think

    Alan Jacobs

    "Absolutely splendid . . . essential for understanding why there is so much bad thinking in political life right now." David Brooks, New York TimesHow to Think is a contrarian...

  • Unaccustomed Earth synopsis, comments

    Unaccustomed Earth

    Jhumpa Lahiri

    #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER From the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Interpreter of Maladies: These eight stories take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand...

  • The Four Tests synopsis, comments

    The Four Tests

    Daniel Baer

    An authoritative, illuminating, and ultimately optimistic look at America’s future and the “tests” the United States must meet to maintain leadership and power in the 21st centuryf...