The Terrorist Trap: America's Experience with Terrorism Book

Concise and elegant, this will hopefully become a mainstay of the national security and peace-studies cannon.

Despite his evidence being necessarily a bit thin on sample size, Krueger builds a strong case for his unorthodox, and extremely relevant and powerful conclusions.

Fair warning, this book is based on an academic lecture, so the author pulls no punches with integrating college-level statistics concepts, but lacking a strong background should only marginally detract from his message.

Including many of his full charts and data values was a really critical component of the book to me, it's nice to see a mainstream book giving the actual data upon which it's based inline, as opposed to shoved in an appendix.

I personally consider the book a must read for anyone interested in the politics of terrorism, security, or individual rights. If I was only able to read one book this year on terrorism or national security, this would be it.