APLG Book Club titles.

APLG Book Club titles.  All blurbs are New York Times unless otherwise noted.

WORLD ISSUES/POLITICS

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (2009) by Jacqueline Novogratz, 304pp.

The Blue Sweater is the inspiring story of a woman who left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it. It all started back home in Virginia, with the blue sweater, a gift that quickly became her prized possession—until the day she outgrew it and gave it away to Goodwill. Eleven years later in Africa, she spotted a young boy wearing that very sweater, with her name still on the tag inside. That the sweater had made its trek all the way to Rwanda was ample evidence, she thought, of how we are all connected, how our actions—and inaction—touch people every day across the globe, people we may never know or meet.   From her first stumbling efforts as a young idealist venturing forth in Africa to the creation of the trailblazing organization she runs today, Novogratz tells gripping stories with unforgettable characters—women dancing in a Nairobi slum, unwed mothers starting a bakery, courageous survivors of the Rwandan genocide, entrepreneurs building services for the poor against impossible odds.  She shows, in ways both hilarious and heartbreaking, how traditional charity often fails, but how a new form of philanthropic investing called "patient capital" can help make people self-sufficient and can change millions of lives. More than just an autobiography or a how-to guide to addressing poverty, The Blue Sweater is a call to action that challenges us to grant dignity to the poor and to rethink our engagement with the world.

The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell: An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq (2005) by John Crawford, 219pp.

As a deluge of memoirs begin to address the war in Iraq, certain constants emerge. First of all, these could wind up being the most readily chronicled military experiences in history: no other war has made blogging or photography so accessible. Never before has it been so feasible for soldiers to phone home after a tough day in-country. It's also new for them to get stuck leaving voice-mail messages for loved ones who aren't around to take their calls.

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (2009) by Jon Krakauer, 440 pp.

There may be no better example of the tragic aftermath of 9/11 than the story of pro-football-player-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman, whose death in the wilds of Afghanistan in 2004 created a scandal of government cover-up. In this masterful work, bestselling adventure writer Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild) renders an intimate portrait of Tillman and brilliantly captures the sadness, madness and heroism of the post-9/11 world. After the attacks, Tillman, a rising football star, eschewed a $3.6 million NFL deal with the Arizona Cardinals to join the military with his brother. From the outset, Pat was elevated by politicians and pundits as a symbol of America’s resolve, a role he detested and shunned, believing his football career afforded him no special status. After a grueling three-year training with the elite Army Rangers, however, instead of fighting terrorists, he found himself first deployed to Iraq--a war he called "an imperial whim." Tillman was later redeployed to Afghanistan, where he was killed in an almost unfathomable incident of friendly fire, which the Army obfuscated for weeks while the government hailed Tillman as a hero. Drawing on interviews with family, fellow soldiers and correspondence, Krakauer’s page-turning account captures every detail--Tillman’s extraordinary character, including the “tragic virtues” that led him to give up a comfortable life and athletic stardom for the army; the harshness of military training and life; the rugged terrain of remote Afghanistan--and, of course, the ravages of war. Most critically, Krakauer, by telling Tillman's personal story and blowing apart the "cynical cover-up" that followed his killing, Krakauer lays bare the best--and worst--of America's War on Terror. (Publisher’s Weekly)

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, (August 2012) by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, 529 pp. Power, prosperity, and poverty vary greatly around the world. Norway, the world’s richest country, is 496 times richer than Burundi, the world’s poorest country (average per capita incomes $84,290 and $170 respectively, according to the World Bank). Why? That’s a central question of economics.  Different economists have different views about the relative importance of the conditions and factors that make countries richer or poorer. The factors they most discuss are so-called “good institutions,” which may be defined as laws and practices that motivate people to work hard, become economically productive, and thereby enrich both themselves and their countries. They are the basis of the Nogales anecdote, and the focus of Why Nations Fail.

ENEMIES: A History of the FBI (February 2012) by Tim Weiner,  560pp.

The problem with some F.B.I. histories is that they come off as a list of unrelated cases — case after case after very old case. Where Mr. Weiner excels is in connecting the dots. He identifies his themes, almost all involving the conflicting demands of civil liberties and civil order — “the saga of our struggle to be both safe and free,” as he puts it — and rigorously pursues them. As far back as 1941, for example, he finds echoes of the contemporary debate over military tribunals in the F.B.I. case against a group of Nazi saboteurs who, after a peremptory trial before a secret court approved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, were executed within weeks of their arrests.

THE END OF MEN: And the Rise of Women (September 2012) by Hanna Rosin, 310pp.

“The End of Men”? This is not a title; it is a sound bite. But Hanna Rosin means it. The revolution feminists have been waiting for, she says, is happening now, before our very eyes. Men are losing their grip, patriarchy is crumbling and we are reaching “the end of 200,000 years of human history and the beginning of a new era” in which women — and womanly skills and traits — are on the rise. Women around the world, she reports, are increasingly dominant in work, education, households; even in love and marriage. The stubborn fact that in most countries women remain underrepresented in the higher precincts of power and still don’t get equal pay for equal work seems to her a quaint holdover, “the last artifacts of a vanishing age rather than a permanent configuration.”

AMERICA’S UNWRITTEN CONSTITUTION: The Precedents and Principles We Live (October 2012  ) by Akhil Reed Amar, 640pp.  In “America’s Unwritten Constitution,” Akhil Reed Amar aims high and has produced a masterful, readable book that constitutes one of the best, most creative treatments of the U.S. Constitution in decades. A professor of law and political science at Yale, Amar is no stranger to this territory. His past writing credits include “America’s Constitution: A Biography,” which illuminates the text of the nation’s most revered document. Now he tackles a more daunting assignment: mapping out the unwritten aspects of our nation’s fundamental charter — a task akin to catching the reflection of a mirror. Perhaps better than other any modern-day writer, though, he succeeds in showing how other, less conspicuous sources combine with the written text to hold the Constitution together like a woven fabric.

The Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy SEAL (May 2011) by Eric Greitens 309pp. Growing up in Missouri, his big fears were that he’d “been born at the wrong time” — that “the time for heroes” might have passed — and that he might miss his “ticket to a meaningful life.” He attended Duke University, won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and earned a Ph.D., writing a dissertation on humanitarian movements and relief work.  Over the years Mr. Greitens would work in refugee camps in Croatia, visit aid projects in Rwanda and meet Mother Teresa in India. He became an “advocate for using power, where necessary, to protect the weak, to end ethnic cleansing, to end genocide” but wondered how he could “ask others to put themselves in harm’s way” when he hadn’t done so himself. At 26 he signed up with the Navy, turning down offers to stay on at Oxford and a lucrative consulting job.  Although Mr. Greitens does an evocative job of describing the hell of training and the valor of the comrades he served with in Iraq, much of his book is concerned with the evolution of his larger vision of public service.

SOCIAL PHYSCHOLOGY

Outliers  (2008) by Malcolm Gladwell, 309pp.

Gladwell’s latest book, “Outliers,” is a passionate argument for taking the second version of the story more seriously than we now do. “It is not the brightest who succeed,” Gladwell writes. “Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”  He doesn’t actually tell his own life story in the book. (But he lurks offstage, since he does describe the arc of his mother’s Jamaican family.) Instead, he tells other success stories, often using the device of back-to-back narratives. He starts with a tale of individual greatness, about the Beatles or the titans of Silicon Valley or the enormously successful generation of New York Jews born in the early 20th century. Then he adds details that undercut that tale.

Superfreakonomics by (Oct 2009) by Levitt and Stephen Dubner, 288 pp.

A book with mind-blowing ideas, innovative research and quality investigative journalism, it’s also a story about creativity and what it takes to get the mindset to turn conventional concepts upside down. The authors have found their stride with “SuperFreakonomics.” As good as the first “Freakonomics” was, I found this read much more enjoyable and interesting” (Wall Street Journal), and “A reasonably quick reader could finish it on a coast-to-coast flight, with time left to watch a movie. But the feeling at the end is about the same as the one after reading a Dan Brown novel or eating a bag of Cheetos. You finished the whole thing but didn't walk away feeling particularly proud of yourself.  Levitt and Dubner take Gladwellism to its logical extreme: "Superfreakonomics" doesn't really have a broader argument. The authors acknowledge in the opening pages that their book has no unifying theme, beyond the banality that "people respond to incentives." So instead of offering up a bunch of quirky stories of questionable reliability to make an argument that feels coherent, they offer up contrarianism for its own sake. (Washington Post).

Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2007)by Carol Dweck, 288 pp.

Mindset is "an established set of attitudes held by someone," says the Oxford American Dictionary. It turns out, however, that a set of attitudes needn't be so set, according to Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford. Dweck proposes that everyone has either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is one in which you view your talents and abilities as... well, fixed. In other words, you are who you are, your intelligence and talents are fixed, and your fate is to go through life avoiding challenge and failure. A growth mindset, on the other hand, is one in which you see yourself as fluid, a work in progress. Your fate is one of growth and opportunity. Which mindset do you possess? Dweck provides a checklist to assess yourself and shows how a particular mindset can affect all areas of your life, from business to sports and love. The good news, says Dweck, is that mindsets are not set: at any time, you can learn to use a growth mindset to achieve success and happiness. This is a serious, practical book. Dweck's overall assertion that rigid thinking benefits no one, least of all yourself, and that a change of mind is always possible, is welcome.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2008) by Oliver Sacks, 425 pp.  Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does–humans are a musical species.  Oliver Sacks’s compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people–from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome who are hypermusical from birth; from people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds–for everything but music.

THE SIGNAL AND THE NOISE (November 2012) by Nate Silver, 523pp.  Nate Silver has lived a preposterously interesting life. In 2002, while toiling away as a lowly consultant for the accounting firm KPMG, he hatched a revolutionary method for predicting the performance of baseball players, which the Web site Baseball Prospectus subsequently acquired. The following year, he took up poker in his spare time and quit his job after winning $15,000 in six months. (His annual poker winnings soon ran into the six-figures.) Then, in early 2008, Silver noticed that most political prognostication was bunk. Silver promptly reinvented that field, too. His predictive powers were such that at one point the Obama campaign turned to him for guidance. out how likely a particular hunch is right in light of the evidence we observe). These triumphs have built Silver a loyal following among fantasy-baseball aficionados and the political buffs who flock to his New York Times blog, FiveThirty­Eight. His signature approach is to concentrate enormous amounts of data on questions that lend themselves to pious blather. For example: television blowhards are fond of proclaiming that the winner of the Iowa caucuses enjoys a big bounce in the New Hampshire primary. Silver crunched numbers dating back to the 1970s and found that the bounce comes less from winning Iowa than from exceeding expectations there.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (February 2012) by Susan Cain, 333pp.  The introverts who are the subject of Susan Cain’s new book, “Quiet,” don’t experience their inwardness in quite so self-congratulatory a way.   They and others view their tendency toward solitary activity, quiet reflection and reserve as “a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology,” Cain writes. Too often denigrated and frequently overlooked in a society that’s held in thrall to an “Extrovert Ideal — the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is gregarious, alpha and comfortable in the spotlight,” Cain’s introverts are overwhelmed by the social demands thrust upon them. They’re also underwhelmed by the example set by the voluble, socially successful go-getters in their midst who “speak without thinking,” in the words of a Chinese software engineer whom Cain encounters in Cupertino, Calif., the majority Asian-American enclave that she suggests is the introversion capital of the United States.

FREEDOM AND THE ARTS: Essays on Music and Literature (May 2012) By Charles Rosen, 438pp.  Even those of us who admire Charles Rosen as the most remarkable critic writing today must be startled by the polymathy in his new collection, Freedom and the Arts. Most of the twenty-eight essays gathered here were published in these pages, but just to see the spectrum provided by their titles is to marvel: “Structural Dissonance and the Classical Sonata,” “Theodore Adorno: Criticism as Cultural Nostalgia,” “Lost Chords and the Golden Age of Pianism,” “La Fontaine: The Ethical Power of Style,” “Hofmannsthal and Radical Modernism.” To read them is to marvel further: Rosen’s communicative power is as prodigious as his versatility. Each essay includes so much more than its specific topic. Large-mindedness matters more here than scholarship; cleverness is simply incidental.

BIOGRAPHY

All Rise: The Remarkable Journey of Alan Page (2010) by Bill McGrane, 238 pp.

If life really is a journey, Alan Page has taken a memorable trip.He was a standout in football at Central Catholic. He was a star in the sport at Notre Dame. And he played at a Hall of Fame level as one of the members of the devastating "Purple People Eaters" defensive line for the Minnesota Vikings.  But, while the new book "All Rise," by Bill McGrane, tells of "The Remarkable Journey of Alan Page," as its subtitle indicates, it is not alone about the journey that Page took from football player to Minnesota Supreme Court justice. It is about many who made the most of their talents, and about providing the opportunity for all.  "I call the book 'All Rise,' the warning the bailiff shouts out to awaken the dozers when a judge enters a courtroom. I thought 'All Rise' would be a nice salute for Page's achievement-filled career," the author wrote in his introduction. "Alan frowned when I laid my cards out. 'I don't ....,' he hesitated, frowned, and then shrugged. 'I don't want a story that is just about me.'"  So, McGrane spreads throughout his text tributes to other "All Risers," individuals who have made something of themselves. Some are students financially supported by the Page Education Foundation. (The Review)

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, (2010) by Rebecca Skloot, 369 pp.

From the very beginning there was something uncanny about the cancer cells on Henrietta Lacks’s cervix. Even before killing Lacks herself in 1951, they took on a life of their own. Removed during a biopsy and cultured without her permission, the HeLa cells (named from the first two letters of her first and last names) reproduced boisterously in a lab at Johns Hopkins — the first human cells ever to do so. HeLa became an instant biological celebrity, traveling to research labs all over the world. Meanwhile Lacks, a vivacious 31-year-old African-American who had once been a tobacco farmer, tended her five children and endured scarring radiation treatments in the hospital’s “colored” ward. After Henrietta Lacks’s death, HeLa went viral, so to speak, becoming the godmother of virology and then biotech, benefiting practically anyone who’s ever taken a pill stronger than aspirin. Scientists have grown some 50 million metric tons of her cells, and you can get some for yourself simply by calling an 800 number. HeLa has helped build thousands of careers, not to mention more than 60,000 scientific studies, with nearly 10 more being published every day, revealing the secrets of everything from aging and cancer to mosquito mating and the cellular effects of working in sewers.

THOMAS JEFFERSON, (November 2012) by Jon Meacham,759 pp.  The time does seem right to highlight Jefferson’s skills as a practicing politician, unafraid to wield “the art of power” or to put it to uses often at odds with his small-government ideology. So insistently does Meacham stress Jefferson’s pragmatism, which at times made him appear hypocritical to his followers no less than to his opponents, that in places the book has a curiously focus-grouped quality, as though Meacham has carefully balanced the consensus view of Jefferson the visionary “framer” and “founder” against the dissenting claims of assorted critics and skeptics, apportioning equal time to each. But to be fair, he also suggests that Jefferson himself was attuned to the medley of voices and competing interests. And what could be more reassuring in 2012 than a biography that explains how in turbulent, divided times a great president actually managed to govern?   “Jefferson understood a timeless truth,” Meacham writes, “that politics is kaleidoscopic, constantly shifting, and the morning’s foe may well be the afternoon’s friend.” One hears the ice cubes clinking in President Reagan’s highball as he and House Speaker Tip O’Neill shared drinks and jokes in the White House and hammered together a deal on Social Security. Jefferson too “believed in the politics of the personal relationship,” Meacham observes, and “saw himself as a political creature,” not only the philosophe and dreamer others supposed. In moves that Meacham clearly admires — and that he implies are instructive today — Jefferson repeatedly reached out to his enemies and showed ideological flexibility.

STEVE JOBS, (October 2011) by Walter Isaacson, 630 pp.  Mr. Isaacson treats “Steve Jobs” as the biography of record, which means that it is a strange book to read so soon after its subject’s death. Some of it is an essential Silicon Valley chronicle, compiling stories well known to tech aficionados but interesting to a broad audience. Some of it is already quaint. Mr. Jobs’s first job was at Atari, and it involved the game Pong. (“If you’re under 30, ask your parents,” Mr. Isaacson writes.) Some, like an account of the release of the iPad 2, is so recent that it is hard to appreciate yet, even if Mr. Isaacson says the device comes to life “like the face of a tickled baby.”   And some is definitely intended for future generations. “Indeed,” Mr. Isaacson writes, “its success came not just from the beauty of the hardware but from the applications, known as apps, that allowed you to indulge in all sorts of delightful activities.” One that he mentions, which will be as quaint as Pong some day, features the use of a slingshot to launch angry birds to destroy pigs and their fortresses.

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD ; an Eater’s Manifesto (2008) by Michael Pollan, 244 pp.

Goaded by “the silence of the yams,” Mr. Pollan wants to help old-fashioned edibles fight back. So he has written “In Defense of Food,” a tough, witty, cogent rebuttal to the proposition that food can be reduced to its nutritional components without the loss of something essential. “We know how to break down a kernel of corn or grain of wheat into its chemical parts, but we have no idea how to put it back together again,” he writes. In this lively, invaluable book — which grew out of an essay Mr. Pollan wrote for The New York Times Magazine, for which he is a contributing writer — he assails some of the most fundamental tenets of nutritionism: that food is simply the sum of its parts, that the effects of individual nutrients can be scientifically measured, that the primary purpose of eating is to maintain health, and that eating requires expert advice. Experts, he says, often do a better job of muddying these issues than of shedding light on them. And it serves their own purposes to create confusion. In his opinion the industry-financed branch of nutritional science is “remarkably reliable in its ability to find a health benefit in whatever food it has been commissioned to study.”

Teaching As Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher's Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap (2010) by Teach for America, 352 pp. For years, the secrets to great teaching have seemed more like alchemy than science, a mix of motivational mumbo jumbo and misty-eyed tales of inspiration and dedication. But for more than a decade, one organization has been tracking hundreds of thousands of kids, and looking at why some teachers can move them three grade levels ahead in a year and others can’t. Now, as the Obama administration offers states more than $4 billion to identify and cultivate effective teachers, Teach for America is ready to release its data. (Atlantic Monthly)