Choose your book by Tuesday, December 10th.
APLG Book Club
titles. All blurbs are New York Times unless otherwise noted.
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 (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.
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.
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.
THE SIGNAL AND
THE NOISE (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.
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.
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)
Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness
Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of Seal Team 10
(2007) by Marcus Luttrell, 390 pp. The immediate success of “Lone Survivor,”
which Mr. Luttrell wrote with the novelist and ghostwriter Patrick Robinson,
can be traced to a combination of factors. Mr. Luttrell’s story, involving a
failed mission to capture or kill a Taliban leader in the mountains of
Afghanistan, is unusually dramatic: Mr. Luttrell was the only one of four men
on the mission to survive after a violent clash with dozens of Taliban
fighters. Eight members of the Seals and eight Army special operations soldiers
who came by helicopter to rescue the original four were shot down, and all
aboard were killed.
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.
America the Beautiful (2013) by
Ben Carson, 224 pp.
What is America
becoming? Or, more importantly, what can she be if we reclaim a vision for the
things that made her great in the first place? In America the Beautiful, Dr.
Ben Carson helps us learn from our past in order to chart a better course for
our future. From his personal ascent from inner-city poverty to international
medical and humanitarian acclaim, Carson shares experiential insights that help
us understand ... what is good about America ... where we have gone astray ...
which fundamental beliefs have guided America from her founding into
preeminence among nations Written by a man who has experienced America's best
and worst firsthand, America the Beautiful is at once alarming, convicting, and
inspiring. You'll gain new perspectives on our nation's origins, our
Judeo-Christian heritage, our educational system, capitalism versus socialism,
our moral fabric, healthcare, and much more. An incisive manifesto of the
values that shaped America's past and must shape her future, America the
Beautiful calls us all to use our God-given talents to improve our lives, our
communities, our nation, and our world. (Amazon blurb)
Wild a Hiking Memoir (2013) by
Cheryl Strayed, 315pp. Perhaps
her adventure is so gripping because Strayed relates its gritty, visceral
details not out of a desire to milk its obviously dramatic circumstances but
out of a powerful, yet understated, imperative to understand its meaning. We
come to feel how her actions and her internal struggles intertwine, and
appreciate the lessons she finds embedded in the natural world. In a brief
meditation on mountains, for example, she writes: “They were, I now realized,
layered and complex, inexplicable and analogous to nothing. Each time I reached
the place that I thought was the top . . . there was still more up to
go. . . . I was entirely in new terrain.” “Wild” isn’t a concept-generated
book, that is, one of those projects that began as a good, salable idea.
Rather, it started out as an experience that was lived, digested and deeply
understood. Only then was it fashioned into a book — one that is both a
literary and human triumph.
How Children Succeed (2012) by
Paul Tough, 321 pp.
“Psychologists and
neuroscientists have learned a lot in the past few decades about where these
skills come from and how they are developed,” Tough writes, and what they’ve
discovered can be summed up in a sentence: Character is created by encountering
and overcoming failure. In this absorbing and important book, Tough explains
why American children from both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum are missing
out on these essential experiences. The offspring of affluent parents are
insulated from adversity, beginning with their baby-proofed nurseries and
continuing well into their parentally financed young adulthoods. And while poor
children face no end of challenges — from inadequate nutrition and medical care
to dysfunctional schools and neighborhoods — there is often little support to
help them turn these omnipresent obstacles into character-enhancing triumphs.
The book illuminates the extremes of American childhood: for rich kids, a
safety net drawn so tight it’s a harness; for poor kids, almost nothing to
break their fall.
Thinking Fast and Slow (2013) by
Daniel Kahneman, 499pp. In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in economic
science. What made this unusual is that Kahneman is a psychologist.
Specifically, he is one-half of a pair of psychologists who, beginning in the
early 1970s, set out to dismantle an entity long dear to economic theorists:
that arch-rational decision maker known as Homo economicus. The other half of
the dismantling duo, Amos Tversky, died in 1996 at the age of 59. Had Tversky
lived, he would certainly have shared the Nobel with Kahneman, his longtime
collaborator and dear friend. Human irrationality is Kahneman’s great theme.
I Am Malala: The Girl
Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban (2013), by Malala Yousafzai, 352 pp. Malala
tells of her life-shattering moment with Pashtun Taliban in a riveting memoir, “I
Am Malala,” published this past week even as she was being cited as a
possible candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. Co-written with Christina Lamb, a
veteran British journalist who has an evident passion for Pakistan and can
render its complicated history with pristine clarity, this is a book that
should be read not only for its vivid drama but for its urgent message about
the untapped power of girls.
DOUBLE DOWN: Game Change 2012 (2013), by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, 499 pp. Details of the 2012 Presidential
campaign. Halperin and Heilemann had a
huge success with their previous book, “Game Change,” a seemingly
minute-by-minute account of the 2008 presidential campaign. Now they want the
franchise, the way Theodore H. White had it with his “Making of the President”
series in the 1960s. Their new book is chock-full of anecdotes, secret
meetings, indiscreet remarks. They gathered string in 500 interviews. All the
usual Washingtonians talked to them not for the sake of history, or even to
make sure their side of the story got told, but because they wanted to be
included. People buy the book for similar reasons. No one can compete. That’s
what it means to own the franchise. It’s a small club: these two guys and Bob
Woodward. And with this book, they’ve earned their admission.
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to
Lead (2013) by Sheryl Sanderg, 229pp. Her point, in a nutshell, is that
notwithstanding the many gender biases that still operate all over the
workplace, excuses and justifications won’t get women anywhere. Instead,
believe in yourself, give it your all, “lean in” and “don’t leave before you
leave” — which is to say, don’t doubt your ability to combine work and family
and thus edge yourself out of plum assignments before you even have a baby.
Leaning in can promote a virtuous circle: you assume you can juggle work and
family, you step forward, you succeed professionally, and then you’re in a
better position to ask for what you need and to make changes that could benefit
others.
