Friends & Colleagues
A few readers have reacted to the disparaging reference that I made to The New York Times list of the "100 Best Books of the 21st Century" in my post FORBIDDEN TRUTHS. Their remarks fell into three categories: "Surely, all of those books cannot be valueless;"
or "thank goodness that we still have 76 years to redeem the century's reputation" or “It’s actually a list of the best books to buy at an airport before boarding a long-haul flight.” Here, in mitigation, are a select number of volumes that indeed are consequential,
yet somehow eluded the attention of the 503 worthies who compiled the NYT list. As for the New York Review of Books, they have reviewed or cited only 3 of the 14 that I have noted – Ellsberg, Snowden, Solzhensitsyn.
Cheers
Michael Brenner
Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson
In the tradition of grand sweeping histories such as From Dawn To Decadence,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and A History of God, Hecht champions doubt and questioning as one of the great and noble, if unheralded, intellectual traditions that distinguish the Western mind especially-from Socrates to Galileo and
Darwin to Wittgenstein and Hawking. This is an account of the world's greatest ‘intellectual virtuosos,' who are also humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers, from the ancient Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the Eastern religions, to modern secular equivalents
Marx, Freud and Darwin—and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe with the human need for meaning,
This remarkable book ranges from the early Greeks, Hebrew figures such as Job and Ecclesiastes, Eastern critical wisdom, Roman stoicism, Jesus as a man of doubt, Gnosticism and Christian mystics, medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian skeptics, secularism,
the rise of science, modern and contemporary critical thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, the existentialists.
For the first time, a bourgeois Catholic family tells their extraordinary story of working for the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris during WW2.
“ . . . a mix of history, biography and memoir which reads like a nerve-racking thriller.” —Guardian
In the autumn of 1943, André Boulloche became de Gaulle’s military delegate in Paris, coordinating all the Resistance movements in the 9 northern regions of France—only to be betrayed by one of his associates, arrested, wounded by the Gestapo, and taken prisoner.
His sisters carried on the fight without him until the end of the war. André survived 3 concentration camps and later became a prominent French politician who devoted the rest of his life to reconciliation of France and Germany. His parents and oldest brother
were arrested and shipped off on the last train from Paris to Germany before the liberation, and died in the camps. Since then, silence has been the Boulloches’s answer to dealing with the unbearable.
This is the first time the family has cooperated with an author to recount their extraordinary ordeal.
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner
Shortlisted for the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
From the legendary Pentagon Papers whistle-blower, an eyewitness exposé of America's Top Secret, seventy-year nuclear policy that continues to this day.
Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand account of America's nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate
use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of
civilization--and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration--threatens our very survival. No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally
changed since that era.
Framed as a memoir--a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participating--this gripping exposé reads like a thriller and offers feasible steps we can take to dismantle the existing "doomsday machine" and avoid nuclear catastrophe, returning Ellsberg
to his role as whistle-blower. The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story and an ultimately hopeful--and powerfully important--book about not just our country, but the future of the world.
Permanent Record
Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down.
In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email.
The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose
it.
Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood,
Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online―a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor,
Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.
“Blending intellectual memoir, history, and economic and technological history, Varoufakis creates an intimate atmosphere that is a genuine pleasure to read ... It’s hard to read this book and deny its power ... illuminating.”
- The Washington Post
In a revelatory and pathbreaking work, the #1 international bestselling economist opens our eyes to the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world . . .
“The Thucydides of our time.” —Jeffrey Sachs
Big tech has replaced capitalism's twin pillars—markets and profit—with its platforms and rents. With every click and scroll, we labor like serfs to increase its power.
Welcome to technofeudalism . . .
Perhaps we were too distracted by the pandemic, or the endless financial crises, or the rise of TikTok. But under cover of them all, a new and more exploitative system has been taking hold. Insane sums of money that were supposed to re-float our economies after
the crash of 2008 went to big tech instead. With it they funded the construction of their private cloud fiefdoms and privatized the internet.
Technofeudalism says Yanis Varoufakis, is the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world, and is the greatest current threat to the liberal individual, to our efforts to avert climate catastrophe—and to democracy itself. It also lies behind the new
geopolitical tensions, especially the New Cold War between the United States and China.
Drawing on stories from Greek myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power, and, ultimately, what it will take overthrow it
The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market by
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
"A carefully researched work of intellectual history, and an urgently needed political analysis." --Jane Mayer
“[A] scorching indictment of free market fundamentalism … and how we can change, before it's too late.”-Esquire, Best Books of Winter 2023
The bestselling authors of Merchants of Doubt offer a profound, startling history of one of America's most tenacious--and destructive--false ideas: the myth of the "free market."
In their bestselling book Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway revealed the origins of climate change denial. Now, they unfold the truth about another disastrous dogma: the “magic of the marketplace.”
In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with “big government” and up with unfettered markets. With startling archival evidence, Oreskes and Conway
document campaigns to rewrite textbooks, combat unions, and defend child labor. They detail the ploys that turned hardline economists Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman into household names; recount the libertarian roots of the Little House on the Prairie
books; and tune into the General Electric-sponsored TV show that beamed free-market doctrine to millions and launched Ronald Reagan's political career.
By the 1970s, this propaganda was succeeding. Free market ideology would define the next half-century across Republican
and Democratic administrations, giving us a housing crisis, the opioid scourge, climate destruction, and a baleful response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only by understanding this history can we imagine a future where markets will serve, not stifle, democracy.
Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
A “monumental” account of the rise and fall of languages, with “many fresh insights, useful historical anecdotes, and charming linguistic oddities” (Chicago Tribune).
Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is the first history of the world’s great tongues, gloriously celebrating the wonder of words that bind communities together and make possible both the living of a common history and the telling of it. From the uncanny
resilience of Chinese through twenty centuries of invasions to the engaging self-regard of Greek to the struggles that gave birth to the languages of modern Europe, these epic achievements and more are brilliantly explored, as are the fascinating failures
of once “universal” languages. A splendid, authoritative, and remarkable work, it demonstrates how the language history of the world eloquently reveals the real character of our planet’s diverse peoples and prepares us for a linguistic future full of surprises.
“Readers learn how languages ancient and modern spread and how they dwindle. . . . Few books bring more intellectual excitement to the study of language.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Sparkles with arcane knowledge, shrewd perceptions, and fresh ideas…The sheer sweep of his analysis is breathtaking.” —Times Literary Supplement
“Ambitious and accessible . . . Ostler stresses the role of culture, commerce and conquest in the rise and fall of languages, whether Spanish, Portuguese and French in the Americas or Dutch in Asia and Africa.” —Publishers Weekly
“A marvelous book.” —National Review
Passwords to Paradise: How Languages Have Re-invented World
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
So opens the Gospel of John, an ancient text translated into almost every language, at once a compelling and beguiling metaphor for the Christian story of the Beginning. To further complicate matters, the words we read now are in any number of languages that
would have been unknown or unrecognizable at the time of their composition. The gospel may have been originally dictated or written in Aramaic, but our only written source for the story is in Greek. Today, as your average American reader of the New Testament
picks up his or her Bible off the shelf, the phrase as it appears has been translated from various linguistic intermediaries before its current manifestation in modern English. How to understand these words then, when so many other translators, languages,
and cultures have exercised some level of influence on them?
Christian tradition is not unique in facing this problem. All religions--if they have global aspirations--have to change in order to spread their influence, and often language has been the most powerful agent thereof.
Passwords to Paradise explores the effects that language difference and language conversion have wrought on the world's great faiths, spanning more than two thousand years. It is an original and intriguing perspective on the history of religion by a
master linguistic historian.
Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978-1994 Alexander Solzhenitsyn
(The Center for Ethics and Culture Solzhenitsyn Series)
“Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delineates his idyllic time in rural Vermont, where he had the freedom to work, spend time with his family, and wage a war of ideas against the Soviet Union and other detractors from afar. At his quiet retreat . . . the Nobel laureate
found . . . ‘a happiness in free and uninterrupted work.’” ―Kirkus Reviews
This compelling account concludes Nobel Prize–winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s literary memoirs of his years in the West after his forced exile from the USSR following the publication of
The Gulag Archipelago. The book reflects both the pain of separation from his Russian homeland and the chasm of miscomprehension between him and Western opinion makers. In
Between Two Millstones, Solzhenitsyn likens his position to that of a grain that becomes lodged between two massive stones, each grinding away―the Soviet Communist power with its propaganda machine on the one hand and the Western establishment with its
mainstream media on the other.
Book 2 picks up the story of Solzhenitsyn’s remarkable life after the raucous publicity over his 1978 Harvard Address has died down. The author parries attacks from the Soviet state (and its many fellow-travelers in the Western press) as well as from
recent émigrés who, according to Solzhenitsyn, defame Russian culture, history, and religion. He shares his unvarnished view of several infamous episodes, such as a sabotaged meeting with Ronald Reagan, aborted Senate hearings regarding Radio Liberty, and
Gorbachev’s protracted refusal to allow The Gulag Archipelago to be published back home. There is also a captivating chapter detailing his trips to Japan, Taiwan, and Great Britain, including meetings with Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles and Princess
Diana. Meanwhile, the central themes of Book 1 course through this volume, too―the immense artistic quandary of fashioning
The Red Wheel, staunch Western hostility to the historical and future Russia (and how much can, or should, the author do about it), and the challenges of raising his three sons in the language and spirit of Russia while cut off from the homeland in a
remote corner of rural New England. The book concludes in 1994, as Solzhenitsyn bids farewell to the West in a valedictory series of speeches and meetings with world leaders, including John Paul II, and prepares at last to return home with his beloved wife
Natalia, full of misgivings about what use he can be in the first chaotic years of post-Communist Russia, but never wavering in his conviction that, in the long run, his books would speak, influence, and convince. This vibrant, faithful, and long-awaited first
English translation of Between Two Millstones, Book 2, will fascinate Solzhenitsyn's many admirers, as well as those interested in twentieth-century history, Russian history, and literature in general.
The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies by
Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington
A vital and timely investigation into the opaque and powerful consulting industry—and what to do about it
There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and the way business and government are managed today that must change. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington show that our economies’ reliance on companies such as McKinsey & Company, Boston
Consulting Group, Bain & Company, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability, and impedes our collective mission of halting climate breakdown.
The “Big Con” describes the confidence trick the consulting industry performs in contracts with hollowed-out and risk-averse governments and shareholder value-maximizing firms. It grew from the 1980s and 1990s in the wake of reforms by the neoliberal right
and Third Way progressives, and it thrives on the ills of modern capitalism, from financialization and privatization to the climate crisis. It is possible because of the unique power that big consultancies wield through extensive contracts and networks—as
advisors, legitimators, and outsourcers—and the illusion that they are objective sources of expertise and capacity. In the end, the Big Con weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments, and warps our economies.
In The Big Con, Mazzucato and Collington throw back the curtain on the consulting industry. They dive deep into important case studies of consultants taking the reins with disastrous results, such as the debacle of the roll out of HealthCare.gov and the tragic
failures of governments to respond adequately to the COVID-19 pandemic. The result is an important and exhilarating intellectual journey into the modern economy’s beating heart. With peerless scholarship, and a wealth of original research, Mazzucato and Collington
argue brilliantly for building a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good.
Crusade and Jihad: The Thousand-Year War Between the Muslim World and the Global North (The Henry L. Stimson Lectures Series)
What really happened in the centuries of conflict between Europe, Russia, China, America, and the peoples of the Muslim world
Crusade and Jihad is the first book to encompass, in one volume, the entire history of the catastrophic encounter between the Global North—China, Russia, Europe, Britain, and America—and Muslim societies from Central Asia to West Africa. William R. Polk
draws on more than half a century of experience as a historian, policy planner, diplomat, peace negotiator, and businessman to explain the deep hostilities between the Muslim world and the Global North and show how they grew over the centuries.
Polk shows how Islam arose and spread across North Africa into Europe, climaxed in the vibrant and sophisticated caliphate of al-Andalus in medieval Spain, and was the bright light in a European Dark Age. Simultaneously, Islam spread from the Middle East into
Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. But following the Mongol invasions, Islamic civilization entered a decline while Europe began its overseas expansion. Portuguese buccaneers dominated the Indian Ocean; the Dutch and the English established powerful corporations
that turned India and Indonesia into colonies; Russian armies pushed down the Volga into Central Asia, destroying its city-states; and the Chinese Qing dynasty slaughtered an entire Central Asian people. Britain crushed local industry and drained off wealth
throughout its vast colonies. Defeated at every turn, Muslims tried adopting Western dress, organizing Western style armies, and embracing Western ideas.
None of these efforts stopped the conquests. For Europe and Russia, the nineteenth century was an age of colonial expansion, but for the Muslim world it was an age of brutal and humiliating defeat. Millions were driven from their homes, starved, or killed,
and their culture and religion came under a century-long assault.
In the twentieth century, brutalized and and disorganized native societies, even after winning independence, fell victim to “post-imperial malaise,” typified by native tyrannies, corruption, and massive poverty. The result was a furious blowback.
A sobering, scrupulous, and frank account of imperialism, colonialism, insurgency, and terrorism,
Crusade and Jihad is history for anyone who wishes to understand the civilizational conflicts of today’s world.
The Ape that Understood the Universe Revised Edition
The Ape that Understood the Universe is the story of the strangest animal in the world: the human animal. It opens with a question: How would an alien scientist view our species? What would it make of our sex differences, our sexual behavior, our altruistic
tendencies, and our culture? The book tackles these issues by drawing on two major schools of thought: evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory. The guiding assumption is that humans are animals, and that like all animals, we evolved to pass
on our genes. At some point, however, we also evolved the capacity for culture - and from that moment, culture began evolving in its own right. This transformed us from a mere ape into an ape capable of reshaping the planet, travelling to other worlds, and
understanding the vast universe of which we're but a tiny, fleeting fragment. Featuring a new foreword by Michael Shermer.
Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Genealogy
by David
Reich
A groundbreaking book about how ancient DNA has profoundly changed our understanding of human history.
Geneticists like David Reich have made astounding advances in the field of genomics, which is proving to be as important as archeology, linguistics, and written records as a means to understand our ancestry.
In Who We Are and How We Got Here, Reich allows readers to discover how the human genome provides not only all the information a human embryo needs to develop but also the hidden story of our species. Reich delves into how the genomic revolution is transforming
our understanding of modern humans and how DNA studies reveal deep inequalities among different populations, between the sexes, and among individuals. Provocatively, Reich’s book suggests that there might very well be biological differences among human populations
but that these differences are unlikely to conform to common stereotypes.
Drawing upon revolutionary findings and unparalleled scientific studies, Who We Are and How We Got Here is a captivating glimpse into humankind—where we came from and what that says about our lives today.
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
A New York Times Notable Book, winner of the Jerwood Award from the Royal Society of Literature, a
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and named a Book of the Year by the
Telegraph, Spectator, Observer, and BBC History Magazine, this bold new history of the rise of Christianity shows how its radical followers helped to annihilate Greek and Roman civilizations.
The Darkening Age is the largely unknown story of how a militant religion deliberately attacked and suppressed the teachings of the Classical world, ushering in centuries of unquestioning adherence to "one true faith."
Despite the long-held notion that the early Christians were meek and mild, going to their martyrs' deaths singing hymns of love and praise, the truth, as Catherine Nixey reveals, is very different. Far from being meek and mild, they were violent, ruthless,
and fundamentally intolerant. Unlike the polytheistic world, in which the addition of one new religion made no fundamental difference to the old ones, this new ideology stated not only that it was the way, the truth, and the light but that, by extension, every
single other way was wrong and had to be destroyed. From the first century to the sixth, those who didn't fall into step with its beliefs were pursued in every possible way: social, legal, financial, and physical. Their altars were upturned and their temples
demolished, their statues hacked to pieces, and their priests killed. It was an annihilation.