Stephen R. Platt’s fourth book, The Raider: The Untold Story of a Renegade Marine and the Birth of U.S. Special Forces in World War II was published in May 2025, and since then has received a steady stream of critical acclaim. The Raider is the first authoritative biography of enigmatic WWII marine icon Evans Carlson and his relationship to Chinese Communists
In addition to praise from scholars in Chinese history, foreign affairs, and military history, The Raider was met with positive reviews from local and national publications. Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kelly Hammond called Platt “[A] masterful storyteller . . . the depth and complexity of Platt’s book mirror the depth and complexity of the historical actors portrayed in its pages.”
Most recently, The Raider landed on History Today’s list of “Books of the Year 2025.” Writing for History Today, University of London historian Julia Lovell said, “I loved The Raider. . . . [Carlson’s] interactions with the rising Chinese Communist Party offer, in microcosm, a history of modern America’s fraught relationship with China.” Lovell described Platt as “one of his generation’s leading archival, narrative historians of modern China.” The Raider was also chosen as one of the best history books of 2025 by Library Journal, the foremost trade publication for public librarians in the U.S.
Platt has also authored Provincial Patriots: The Hunanese and Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2007), Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War (Knopf, 2012) and Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age (Knopf, 2018).