Seeing as how it is impossible to get unbiased and informed information about politics online anymore, I can totally understand why someone would want to turn to books to educate themselves. Having said that, I do have some bad news for you. Politics is such a shifting, changing thing that if you go further back than say a year or two, then the books are probably not going to help you understand what's going on as much as you might think. They can still give you some insights into the core elements, but you are almost assuredly going to encounter some outdated elements. Other people have already mentioned it too, but your geographical location is also going to determine your understanding of politics. Even countries with the same political beliefs are not going to totally agree with each other about certain things and then there are those countries who claim to belong to a certain political movement, but in reality practice something completely different. I don't want to be completely unhelpful, so these are the books that I have personally read and think can offer you some broad insights about important political topics:

Fascism: A Warning by Madeleine Albright - Madeleine Albright is the first woman to ever serve as U.S. secretary of state, so she isn't just someone who studied history, but also had an active role in shaping it. She was born in Czechoslovakia just before the second World War and in her lifetime she not only had to flee from Hitler, but also from Stalin at the start of the Cold War. She lost loved ones in the Holocaust, so we are talking her about a woman who has personal experiences with the horrors that politics can cause. This is not her first book, but it deals with fascism, which is a topic I see cropping up more and more in political discussions. Albright does a great job explaining what fascism really is, how it got started and also what the warning signs are for the rise of it in our current political climate. I feel like the word is lately being used by everyone to simply describe anyone who disagrees with their political views, which is a dangerous precedent.

Frank Herbert never managed to complete his Dune series, but I believe that his son and another another eventually managed to do so. Whether or not the quality is the same as what Frank would have delivered is up for debate. The Wheel of Time series is another good example of someone else stepping in to complete a beloved series after the untimely death of the original author.

I'm not going to go into too much detail here because I'm tired and it's late, but it continually irks me how many people completely misunderstood The Prince by Machiavelli. The author was trolling people long before the word even existed and everyone still falls for it to this very day.

Roger Zelazny did this a lot in his books as did Anne McCaffrey with her Dragonriders series.

Honestly, there are just way too many to mention here. If I had to listen to every review by critics, then I would never even have touched some books or discovered a lot of my favorite authors. I mean the Harry Potter series of all books were panned by critics when it was first released and many of them were convinced that it would amount to nothing. I'm guessing that a lot of these critics are feeling pretty stupid after it became such a worldwide success. The same could be said about even older classics like The Great Gatsby and Catcher in The Rye. I could go on and on, but the point is that critics are only human and like they rest of us they have their own tastes when it comes to books. I'm sure there are a lot of people who agree with the assessment by critics, but at the end of the day, it is YOU who will be reading the books and only YOU can decide whether or not they are worth your time.

I feel like I should add that I have discovered quite a few critics who I wholeheartedly agree with, so it is probably a case of finding a critic with taste that aligns to your own.