WG's Observations: Book List

WG’s Provocative Book List

Have you questioned an assumption today?

(Updated as of January 31, 2022)

A list of non-fiction books of general interest which I have found thought-provoking and topical, providing new insights or unexpected propositions about how the world operates. This list is sorted by date of publication, newest first, and then randomly within year of publication.

Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution

Carlo Rovelli, 2021, ISBN 978-0593328880

Rovelli is an Italian physicist who works primarily in the field of quantum gravity, and is author of several abstruse books in that field, but has also written several wonderful, books accessible to non-physicists, including Seven Brief Lessons in Physics (2016), Reality is Not What it Seems (2017), and The Order of Time (2018).

Helgoland is his latest book for the non-physicist audience. In it he deals with some of the contradictions in quantum theory, and suggest a different way of looking at the quantum world, in terms of relationships rather than discrete objects. It occurred to me in reading this that the same shift in thinking might be usefully applied outside of the quantum world.

On Corruption in America: And What is at Stake

Sarah Chayes, 2021, ISBN ‎ 978-0525563938

Journalist Sarah Chayes has studied the corruption and kleptocracy of authoritarian regimes around the world. In this book she makes the point, well-documented, that corruption in the United States approaches that of some of the worst regimes in the world. And it is not individual corruption – just a few bad apples - but a whole integrated business model involving politicians of both parties, business, and even organized crime, all working together. This is not a comfortable book to read, but she makes a persuasive case, backed by a good deal of public evidence, that the ongoing corruption of the US nation threatens its very existence.

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

Bill Gates, 2021, ISBN 978-0385546133

Bill Gates’ first book, How To Avoid A Climate Disaster is a good book. The beginning of the book explains the basis of the climate problem, and probably won’t provide much new information to anyone who has been attending even peripherally to this debate. But the remainder of the book makes two good points that seem to be missed by many activists: (1) useful as they are, currently fashionable “green” technologies – primarily solar and wind, and electric cars – are not enough to make a significant difference, and (2) to make the changes that would be required to make a significant difference will be far, far more difficult and painful than most people realize.

Gates’ pragmatic approach is certainly refreshing, devoid as it is of ideological mythology. He is, however, a technologist, and sees the problem primarily as a technological problem, rather than a political or cultural challenge.

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Become Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

Joseph Henrich, 2020, ISBN ‎ 978-1250800077

Joseph Henrich is a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard. His 2020 book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Become Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous is a massive 680-page study explaining why most of our studies of psychology and sociology and economics are seriously biased, since our samples typically consist only of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic people (and most of them students at that). His point is not only that such people (that’s us) are different, even at a neurological level, from other people, but that they are an outlier in many respects, thoroughly untypical of the human race as a whole.

This is a strong claim, but he backs it up with many studies and much data. And it is important, because the WEIRD world (that’s us again) has the power and wealth these days, and is trying to shape the rest of the world without understanding how different the rest of the world really is, how differently they see things, how different are their values and expectations and cultural norms. This is not a light read, but it is well worth the effort.

Angrynomics

Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth, 2020, ISBN ‎ 978-1788212786

Mark Blyth is good at explaining exactly why over the past half century we have reached our current state of public unrest and anger. For a short version, see his lectures on YouTube listed in the YouTube lectures sidebar. In this book, a series of five dialogues with economist and philosopher Eric Lonergan, they explore not only that issue but the whole issue of public and private anger. This is a complex subject, and it will take some concentration to follow the whole argument, but it is worth the effort.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence is Over-rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect

David GoodHart, 2020, ISBN 978-1-9821-2844-9

Goodhart, a British journalist, deals in depth with the stratification of USA and UK society into over-paid knowledge workers, disrespected manual workers, and underpaid caregivers, and the social consequences of this. He argues that we have come to over-value raw intelligence relative to character, wisdom, and emotional intelligence, with serious consequences. The book is detailed, with lots of data to back up his arguments, some of it surprising. This is a very important book, because it deals with one of the central sources of the current unrest in the country, an unrest which the secular liberal ruling establishment has cultural difficulties in understanding (because they are head-focused), and is therefore incapable of responding to it effectively. He is also author of the excellent 2017 book The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics.

Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

Peter Zeihan, 2020, ISBN 978-0062913685

Peter Zeihan's third, book Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an ungoverned world, is a graduate-level course on geopolitics crammed into 429 pages. Zeihan examines the major nations of the world in terms of their geography, history, culture, economies, resources, trading patterns, demographics, politics, and the constraints that shape their likely futures. The conclusions he draws from these factors about who will do well and who will do poorly in the coming decades is often at odds with the "conventional wisdom" of the media pundits, but are more convincing because he backs up his predictions with a wealth of facts.

Written with his characteristic humor, this is quite a readable book, but exceedingly important for those trying to understand the underlying forces driving world affairs today.

The Storm Before The Calm: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond

George Friedman, 2020, ISBN 978-0385540490

George Friedman’s latest book, The Storm Before The Calm, is well worth reading. Friedman has looked at America’s history and identified two cycles. One cycle is America’s periodic rethinking of the government’s role, and that seems to occur about every 80 years (World War II’s massive expansion of government power was the last one). And then there is a 50-year economic cycle, in which we disrupt the economic model. Both are coming to the end of their cycle together in the 2020-2030 era, which he predicts will produce substantial unrest (the Storm), but then, as we always have in the past, we will accommodate to the new reality (the Calm).

This is fundamentally an optimistic book, but Friedman does think we will go through turbulent times in the next decade, for which Trump’s election and Sander’s rise is not the cause but simply a symptom of the growing problems that will drive the cycles.

Why We’re Polarized

Ezra Klein, 2020, ISBN 978-1476700328

Ezra Klein’s 2020 book Why We’re Polarized is a very, very good but very, very unsettling book. If, like me, you have always believed (a) that rational discussion can bring people together, (b) that more information makes people reason better, and (c) that smarter people (like us) are harder to fool than dumber people, this book is going to be very upsetting. Packed with statistics and provocative psychological and sociological studies, Klein argues that when our self-identity is threatened, facts and logic take a distant second place to defending our identity and the group we identify with. And smarter people are not immune from this, they are just better at building rationalizations for what they feel they need to believe to preserve their identity. The problem we have today is that for many people, both liberals and conservatives, both Democrats and Republicans, politics has gotten wound up with our self-identity.

Klein discusses the positive feedback loop that is driving polarization – people are polarized, so the media polarizes to gain readership (what outrages, leads), which polarizes politicians and political institutions as they try to win votes, which in turn polarizes people more. This summary, though, hardly does the book justice; there is a wealth of history (eg. how did the parties get so polarized in the first place) and interesting side issues as well. This book is well worth reading if you want to understand what is driving politics today.

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

David Epstein, 2019, ISBN 978-0735214484

George Friedman argues in his latest book that one of the forces underlying the nation’s current unsettled political situation is the growing disenchantment with experts. And indeed one can see that playing out in the tensions created by the COVID pandemic. The medical “experts” are advising us to close down schools and businesses – no doubt the correct strategy from a narrow medical point of view – but seem not to have thought much about the equally serious economic or educational consequences of their advice. So of course it is producing increasingly strong pushback from those put out of work, and from parents who are increasingly worried about the educational progress of their children.

In that context, David Epsteins’s 2019 book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, is particularly relevant. Very readable, with some fascinating stories and history (who knew that Vivaldi’s music was so influenced by the orphan girls of Venice, for example?), it makes a well-documented case for encouraging a true generalist education rather than the sort of specialization that is now so embedded in our culture. I highly recommend this book, and find it interesting that Amazon has paired it in their recommendations with Bill Gates’ new book on climate change – a good book from another generalist

Fear Your Future: How The Deck Is Stacked Against Millennials and Why Socialism Would Make It Worse

Philip Klein, 2019, ISBN 978-1599475738

This little data-filled book is essential, if unsettling, reading. Our nation faces a fiscal catastrophe. We Americans want lots of stuff from our government but don’t want to pay the taxes to support that stuff, so we have built a mountain of debt and future obligations which we are dumping onto the next generation – the millennials. And current proposals, especially from the more socialist Democratic candidates, will simply make the problem much worse.

His arguments are essentially the same as those I made in a series of nine posts back in in April of 2017 (they start here), but he has added a lot of good supporting data.

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

Sarah Smarsh, 2019, ISBN 978-1501133091

Sarah Smarsh's 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth is a book everyone ought to read. The author grew up poor on a wheat farm in Kansas, but managed to become a tenured professor. Her insights into the lives of the underclass in America, and how the system - created by people who have no concept of the needs of the people they think they are helping, and who often, frankly, don't care about them - are searing.

The Return of Marko Polo’s World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century

Robert Kaplan, 2018, ISBN 978-0812996791

This is a collection of sixteen good, thoughtful essays by Kaplan, who also wrote The Revenge of Geography (2013) and The Coming Anarchy (2001), both good, hard-headed, realistic appraisals of where the international order is heading, whether we like it or not.

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities

John Mearsheimer, 2018, ISBN 978-0300234190

The past few administrations, of both political parties, have pursued a policy of "liberal hegemony", which aimed to use America's dominate power in the world to spread liberal democracy - American style - to all sorts of nations, often at the point of a gun. This has been the guiding philosophy of the Washington foreign policy establishment up until the current administration, and it has generally been a disaster, leaving us locked in endless Middle Eastern wars. Professor John Mearsheimer has undertaken to examine the fallacious philosophical underpinnings of this ideology in his new book The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities.

The short version of his argument is that liberals don't understand that nationalism and realism are far more powerful in the real world than the liberal dream, and so "liberal hegemony" as a policy (or perhaps, ideology) not only was bound to fail, as it has, but in fact has actively impeded the spread of liberal societies in the world. This book is well worth reading and thinking about.

Work in the Age of Robots

Mark Mills, 2018, ISBN 978-1641770279

I have written a number of times about the risk that automation will put a lot of people out of work, and especially that we might develop an underclass of technologically-challenged people who would find it hard to earn a living in a more technological world. And I have by no means been the only one to worry about this issue, though it seems not yet to have reached the political class.

Mark Mills has written a short book, Work in the Age of Robots, which argues against this worry. As he points out, the history of disruptive technologies (the car replacing the horse, the power loom, mechanized agriculture, the steam engines, etc) shows that thus far such productivity enhancers produce more jobs than they destroy. The problem for forecasters at the time is that while it is clear what jobs might be lost, it is very hard to predict in advance what new jobs, and whole new fields, might emerge as a result of the technological advance.

China’s Great Wall of Debt

Dinny McMahon, 2018, ISBN 978-1328846013

There is much media fuss about China these days and whether it will emerge to be a serious competitor to the US. And of course Chinese media and officials try to put the best face on their situation and project a confidence in China’s growing economic and military power – propaganda which is especially effective applied to America’s fairly gullible press and public, always looking for a sensational story.

For those who might want a more balanced view of the reality, let me suggest Dinny McMahoin’s 2018 book China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle. McMahoin is a journalist and scholar fluent in Mandarin who has spent more than a decade covering China’s economic and financial systems for the Wall Street Journal and for the Dow Jones News service, and he knows what he is talking about.

The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of American Primacy

Stephen Walt, 2018, ISBN 978-0374280031

Along the same lines as the Mearsheimer book above, let me recommend Stephen Walt's 2018 book The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of American Primacy. As with Mearsheimer's book, Walt deals with the mess that our Washington foreign policy elites have made of things, blinded by their well-intentioned but fatally misguided ideology of "liberal hegemony", the attempt to spread American-style democracy and capitalism throughout the world and into cultures which are neither prepared for such a transformation nor want it. I continue to be amazed at how naïve our supposedly well-educated ruling elites have proven to be about the real world and other cultures. The Ivy league schools who trained most of them so poorly have much to answer for.

Walt suggests a much better, more realistic, and more workable approach is the old realpolitic balance of power approach which worked so well for the British for hundreds of years, and so well for us in the Cold War. The Washington foreign policy elite won't like this book, because it doesn't make them look very good (but then, neither do our endless unwinnable wars in the Middle East make them look very good).

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2018, ISBN 978-0425284629

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's previous books, Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, and more recently Antifragile, all dealt one way or another with how humans, including economists and bankers and stock brokers, don't understand randomness and risk very well. His most recent book, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life, deals with a new subject - the morality of giving advice or creating policy if one has no "skin in the game", if one sufferers no consequences if the policy is a disaster for others. As he points out, the very politicians and policy makers who disrupted the Middle East in the name of "spreading democracy", resulting in the death or displacement of millions of people, still retain their high-paying jobs, and may even be unaware of the chaos their policies have produced.

Taleb is arrogant and very sarcastic about some of the academic and political fields and people whom he thinks mislead the public while suffering no consequences themselves. If you are a government policy wonk or an economist or a politician you probably won't like this book. I find his sarcasm acceptable, because I think he is right on most of the issues he raises.

On Grand Strategy

John Gaddis, 2018, ISBN 978-1594203510

Back in February 2018 I recommend Paul Kennedy’s 2013 book Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War, and I pointed out that besides introducing us to the engineers who helped win World War II, it also taught the reader a great deal about grand strategy, and about the issues strategists need to deal with. Kennedy co-teaches a course on Grand Strategy at Yale with several other people, one of whom is John Lewis Gaddis, Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale.

Gaddis has just published a new book On Grand Strategy, which is a distillation of his work in the course over many years, and it is well worth reading. It deals with grand strategy by examining historical conflicts, beginning with the Persian wars with the Greek city states, and with the conflicts between Athens and Sparta, and moving on to the maneuvering between England’s Elizabeth I and Philip II of Spain (she provides examples of good strategy and he provides examples of flawed strategy), and the American Civil war. The lessons about strategy from these historical events are as applicable today as they were back then.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class is Leaving Everyone in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to Do About It.

Richard Reeves, 2018, ISBN ‎ 978-0815734482

In the popular imagination, it is the filthy rich who are distorting America with their greed. Reeves argues for a different perspective, that it is the meritocratic upper middle class – the lawyers and doctors and professors and scientists and engineers and computer professionals and small business owners (including probably those of us reading this) - who are distorting the American dream, and for the best of motives, to give our own kids the best possible chances. It is we who are locking up the places in good schools, the prize internships, the best first jobs, and making it hard for people in lower economic classes to even get their foot in the door. A persuasive, if uncomfortable, argument worth thinking about.

Energy: A Human History

Richard Rhodes, 2018, ISBN 978-1501105357

Richard Rhodes, who wrote the wonderful 1987 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, has written a new book on Energy, entitled Energy: A Human History. It is well worth reading just for general interest and to appreciate the degree to which energy use throughout the ages has shaped civilizations and cultures. But of more immediate application is his last chapter, in which he deals with the mythology and facts of renewable energy. Basically, the glowing promises of some that we will transition to carbon-free renewable energy within the next 20 years or so are a fantasy being sold to the public with little or no factual or scientific or economic basis. Moreover, if we really want to get to mostly carbon-free energy, we will have to overcome the American public's irrational fear of nuclear energy, because nuclear energy is the only way we can provide enough carbon-free energy to manage our growing electrical base load throughout the world. This book will give the reader a factual basis with which to judge the (often unrealistic) claims of the renewable-energy proponents.

The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

Victor Davis Hanson, 2017, ISBN 978-0465066988

There are lots of histories of World War II. This is not yet another. Hanson discusses the war from the point of view of strategy, industrial capacity, effectiveness of arms and tactics, and the personalities of the leaders, to try to understand why the war went the way it did. His views, informed as they are by his understanding of history (most mistakes have been made before in history, often many times) give new insights into World War II, and offer some sobering thoughts about future conflicts.

The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

Daniel Ellsberg, 2017, ISBN 978-1608196708

Daniel Ellsberg is remembered by many simply as the man who leaked the classified Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, to the mighty embarrassment of the administration, which was revealed to have lied extensively to the Americana public. The government tried to prosecute him for this, but prosecutors engaged in so many illegal acts in trying to discredit him that the charges were eventually dismissed.

The book is very, very important, because it details the thinking of American military planners as they thought about nuclear war and about nuclear strategy during the Cold War. His discussion of the Cuban Crisis, and what we now know that neither the Soviets nor we knew then, will alarm you, and it should. The impracticality and inflexibility of our early nuclear strategy will alarm you. True, Ellsberg is reporting on what things were like half a century ago – they might be different today, but then, they might well not be any better, any more practical, or any safer. Bureaucracies, military or civilian, are relatively inflexible and change little over decades.

Don’t read this book if you want to protect comfortable illusions about government control of nuclear weapons.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

Peter Frankopan, 2017, ISBN 978-1101912379

Europeans and Americans are taught a world history (to the extent that they are taught history at all) that largely ignores the East, beyond a footnote about China and perhaps a lurid tale or two about the Mongolian hordes. Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford University, Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and Director of the Oxford Center for Byzantine Research, sets out to correct that oversight with his 2015 book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. In truth until the Spanish began importing vast wealth from the Americas, Europe was a backwater and the real action and progress in the world was all in the Middle East and Far East.

The reader will learn two things from this eminently readable history. First, that a very great deal of significance was going on in the Middle East and Far East during what Europeans think of as primitive times or the dark ages. Second, that the history of European and then later American involvement in the East, right up to the present day, is a sordid tale of greed, arrogance, incompetence and betrayal on both sides. It is not a pretty picture.

Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter

Scott Adams, 2017, ISBN 978-0735219717

Scott Adams, who is the author of the Dilbert cartoons among other things, won fame or notoriety (depending on your outlook) for predicting, beginning 18 or so months before the election, contrary to almost all other pollsters and political experts, that Donald Trump would win the Republican nomination and that he would win the election. Adams was not a Trump supporter (nor was he a Clinton supporter), but he did perceive that Trump had extraordinary persuasion skills. Persuasion skills are a field Adams has studied for years, and coincidentally that he uses to make his Dilbert cartoons seem so universal.

This is a book in which Adams seeks to explain the persuasion techniques that Trump, and eventually Clinton as well, used in the campaign, and why Hillary’s mostly didn’t work and Trump’s mostly did. If you are emotionally committed to believing that humans are mostly rational, you won’t like this book. If you are emotionally committed to believing Trump is an idiot (and turned his father’s million dollar loan into 3.8 billion dollars just by luck, and beat both the Republican and the Democratic establishment to win the election just by luck), you won’t like this book. If, on the other hand, you would like to learn about the persuasion techniques that are being used on all of us every day by astute politicians, marketers, advertisers and salespeople, and that probably won Trump the election; this is a great place to start.

A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order

Richard Haas, 2017, ISBN 978-0399562365

Richard Haas is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a onetime Director of Policy Planning for the State Department, among other high profile assignments. His new book A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order is very, very good. He reviews the emergence of the world order - World Order 1.0 - that has prevailed roughly since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and which is now beginning to break down, and he speculates, in the latter part of this book, on what a new world order - World Order 2.0 - might look like, and what American foreign policy ought to be to help arrive at a workable new world order.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism

Edward Luce, 2017, ISBN 978-0802127396

For those not seduced by the day-to-day fascination in the media and twittervers of the various Washington scandals, and interested instead in the deep underlying forces that are reshaping America’s cultural and political landscape, and for that matter Europe’s as well, Luce’s new book is worth reading. Luce wrote a 2012 book Time to Start Thinking which accurately predicted the politics of resentment that led to the Brexit vote and Trumps election. He is worth listening to.

The Once and Future Liberal

Mark Lilla, 2017, ISBN 978-0062697431

This book is indeed worth reading. It will, of course, draw lots of criticism from those whose self-identities and careers are built on identity politics, but Lille makes a good case for why liberals need to abandon the destructive (and ineffectual) identity politics, pitting groups against each other, and return to a vision of a common good and common responsibilities across all American citizens and all groups.

Anatomy of Failure: Why America Loses Every War It Starts

Harlan Ullman, 2017, ISBN 978-1682472255

From the preface to Harlam Ullman's new book Anatomy of Failure: Why America Loses Every War It Starts:

“Since the official end of the Cold War in 1991, remarkably, the United States has been at war or engaged in significant military conflicts and interventions for over two-thirds of the intervening years. . . . .Wars and conflicts in Iraq in 1991; Somalia, 1992-93; the global war of terror, and Afghanistan, 2001-present; Iraq, 2003-present; and Syria and Yemen since 2006 represent a total of nineteen of the past twenty-six years in which the nation's armed forces have been engaged in combat! . . . The only outright victory in the past six decades was the first Iraq War in 1991.”

Ulman sets out to examine why we have failed so consistently in our military adventures. This is an important book, not only to understand why we have failed so consistently in the past, but to understand what must be done to prepare the nation for the uncertain and highly dangerous future we face. Certainly the inexperience of our recent presidents in both parties (with the possible exception of the first President Bush) is a factor, as is the outdated Washington groupthink of the advisors they had and still have to draw on. But Ullman argues for a more comprehensive approach to building national strategy, based on a better understanding of our opponents and a more aggressive use of red teams to question and test the assumptions underlying our decisions to go to use military force.

White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America

Joan Williams, 2017, ISBN 978-1633693784

Those who can’t understand why Trump won, or why the working class resents the Washington elites so much, need to read this book. Written by a competent liberal academic who studies class issues, she makes some very important points, such as “when you leave the two-thirds of Americans without college degrees out of your vision of the good life, they notice.”, and “If we’re not going to provide elite lives for the broad mass of people, neither can we expect them to embrace elite truths.”

White Trash: the 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

Nancy Isenberg, 2017, ISBN 978-0143129677

One of the reasons so many government plans and programs to help the poor are ineffective and largely a waste of money is that most of the (mostly wealthy urban elite) politicians and the experts who advise them have little or no understanding of the cultures they are trying to help. I am well aware of this in my own understanding of these cultures, and have been trying to remedy that failing. One extremely useful book I have recently read is White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg.

Yes, America has classes, despite what we were taught in school. And class matters, as anyone who is not of "the right class" already knows. But the nature of class in America is a complicated history, tracing right back to the attitudes of the English toward class in the colonial period, and coming right up to today's successful "white trash" TV programs like Duck Dynasty. This book is long and detailed, and requires persistence to get through, but it is worth the effort.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

Matthew Crawford, 2016, ISBN 978-0374292980

All of us who have been distracted – indeed, intensely annoyed – by the ubiquitous television screen dominating waiting rooms, restaurants and airport lounges will resonate with this book. Crawford deals with how to structure our lives to avoid the constant distracting claims on our attention to which the modern capitalist world subjects us. Like his excellent 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Crawford leads us into a philosophical meditation on how to make our lives more meaningful – on how to become an individual in an age of distraction.

Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

Arlie Russell Hochschild, 2016, ISBN 978-1620972250

Arlie Russell Hochschild is a leading sociologist, author of a number of books about class and social structure, and her latest book is Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. A liberal academic who teaches at Berkeley, she set out to cross what she calls the "empathy wall" and try to understand how the world looks to the political right, to the conservative people who support groups like the Tea Party. And she did it by going to Louisiana and meeting and befriending and listening to (as opposed to lecturing) working people there, and really trying to understand how they got their views, and how the world looks to them. And in fact she succeeds, and the view she uncovers - she calls it the "deep story", the emotionally powerful world view that shapes everyone's thinking - makes it clear why the right doesn't trust government and is in revolt. And frankly, seen from their point of view, I don't blame them.

This is a terribly important book that a lot more liberals ought to be reading if they would like to better understand why Democrats have been losing elections at the local, state and federal level for the past decade - and may continue to lose - and why Trump could win the presidency.

Pre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

Robert Cialdini, 2016, ISBN 978-1501109799

I listed Dr. Cialdini’s 2009 book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion as the book to read after Scott Adam’s 2017 book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter. This then is the 2016 book to read after reading Influence. It deals with “setting the table”, or preparing people psychologically to accept an influential message to follow. This whole field of persuasion is terribly important, because these methods are being used on us all the time, with increasing sophistication, to sell us products and policies and ideas that we ought to know better than to accept.

Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

Thomas Friedman, 2016, ISBN 978-0374273538

This book is a wide-ranging discussion of how the world is changing, of how human cultures adapt in a linear fashion, but suddenly the world is changing in an exponential fashion, and cultures - including our own American culture - are having trouble adapting fast enough. It is highly relevant as today’s workplace is moving toward automation, with severe disruptions in the traditional workforce and the political and social instability that is a consequence.

The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower

Michael Pillsbury, 2016, ISBN 978-1250081346

Dr Michael Pillsbury is currently the American Director of the Center on Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute. Over his career he has served in the Pentagon under two administrations, at the RAND Corporation, and on the staffs of four Senate committees, and he is without doubt one of America’s foremost China experts. His 2015 book The Hundred-year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America As the Global Superpower draws on a great deal of material, public and classified, to argue that China is pursuing a long-term grand strategy to replace America as the global superpower within another 40 years while keeping America not only complacent and unaware of the threat, but in fact using American technology and education and finance to do so.

The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America

Peter Zeihan, 2016, ISBN 978-0998505206

Peter Zeihan's 2014 book The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder pretty accurately predicted the current global disorder. His new 2016 book The Absent Superpower: The Shale Revolution and a World Without America carries on the same theme, but updated to account for the unexpected success of fracking, and its profound effects on the world order.

The beginning of the book is a tutorial on fracking, and how it has become unexpectedly successful, making North America essentially hydrocarbon (oil and gas) independent of the rest of the world. The rest of the book explores the implication of that independence - the breakdown of the 1944 Bretten Woods agreements now that America doesn't have to bribe nations to ally with us against the Soviet Union (essentially the deal was open access to American markets and American-funded protection of maritime trade routes in return for alliance against the communists). The short version is that North America and a few of our allies (Great Britain, Australia, etc) will do fine, but without the umbrella of American protection the rest of the world will be in a world of hurt.

Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

George Friedman, 2016, ISBN 978-0307951137

The current problems in the European Union have their roots far, far back in European history. George Friedman, author of other good books on geopolitics (see, for example, the 2009 book The Next 100 years in my booklist) has written a book the first third of which sets the context of today’s Europe by examining its past since Henry the Navigator set Portugal first on the path to empire. Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe argues that the EU papered over, but didn’t eliminate, the longstanding tension in Europe, especially in the borderlands that separate, for example, Russia from Western Europe, or France from Germany.

With the current crisis in the EU, and with the rise of Germany once again as the pre-eminent power in Europe, these old tensions are coming to the surface again. Russia, much weaker now than when the Soviet Union existed, is doing what it thinks it must to rebuild its influence in the buffer states to protect itself from the future possibility of yet another French or German invasion. Britain is doing what it has always done – keep itself separate from the continent while trying to influence the balance of power there. This is a good book, and an important contribution to trying to understand the dynamics of Europe these days

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

Peter Frankopan, 2015, ISBN 978-1101912379

Failure: Why Science is so Successful

Stuart Firestein, 2015, ISBN ‎ 978-0199828074

Dr. Stuart Firestein is chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University and professor of neuroscience. He has written two very short but brilliant books, Ignorance: How it Drives Science (2012), and Failure: Why Science Is So Successful (2015). We humans tend to focus on what we (think) we know, but Firestein argues in these books that it is the unknown that is what is really interesting and important, and what really drives progress in science. Highly recommended.

Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century

Alistair Horne, 2015, ISBN 978-0-06-239780-5

Hubris, that arrogance mixed with stupidity that in mythology offends the gods and inevitably brings disaster, is the centerpiece of Sir Alistair Horne’s 25 book Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century. Ranging from the 1905 annihilation of the Russian Fleet by the Japanese at Tsushima though to the French debacle at Dien Bien Phu and McArthur’s unwise push to the Chinese boarder in Korea, Horne explores the role of hubris – of unrealistic exuberance and historical ignorance among generals and political leaders – in producing the bloodiest century in human history.

The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Wars

Dominic Tierney, 2015, ISBN 978-0-316-25488-5

Up through World War II America had gained decisive victories in almost all its wars. Since World War II America has essentially failed to win all but one of the wars it entered (the first Gulf War is the exception). This is in part because these were all different kinds of wars from the traditional big army meets big army wars at which the American military excels – these were/are guerrilla wars or insurrections, far from home. And we haven’t learned yet how to extricate ourselves from these when we unwisely get ourselves trapped in them.

Dominic Tierney, who also wrote the excellent book How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War (2010), proposes a rational way to approach the problem of disengagement from a war we have no realistic chance of winning (or at least are not willing to commit the lives, time and money needed to win), summarized by “Surge, talk and leave”. This is a book I wish our political leaders would “read, learn and inwardly digest”, and soon, before they waste more lives in a fruitless effort!

The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder

Peter Zeihan, 2014, ISBN 978-1-4555-8366-9

Peter Zeihan was for 12 years STRATFOR’s vice president for analysis. His new book The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder is a blockbuster, well worth reading and thinking about. In essence he argues that the past 70 years of worldwide growth and (relative) stability was due to the Bretton Wood agreements of 1944, and as America withdraws from these agreements (largely as a result of our unexpected new energy independence from fracking) much of the world will face a grim future while America and a few of its close allies will ride out the storm relatively unscathed. Moreover, the predicted American success will not come from any brilliance among our politicians, but from the simple dumb luck of favorable demographics and geography.

His arguments are buttressed with an overwhelming amount of supporting material about geography and demographics and trade figures (I’ve had to reread the book several times to absorb it all). But his conclusions are heavily based on highly predictable things, since geography doesn’t change, nor do demographics change very quickly. This is an important book, particularly as it counters the current Washington hysteria about threats from Russia and China, neither of whom currently has the military or economic potential to be more than annoying, and shortly will be in dire straits themselves.

Russians: The People Behind the Power

Gregory Feifer, 2014, ISBN 978-1455509645

Gregory Feifer is a former NPR Moscow correspondent, of Russian extraction (his mother was a Russian, his father an American). He has written Russians: The People behind the Power as an attempt to explain the Russian world view and psyche to Americans. Not surprisingly, given their history and geography, the average Russian (who hasn't been thoroughly Westernized) sees the world with an entirely different perspective than most Americans do.

Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Putin

Ben Judah, 2014, ISBN 978-0300181210

To understand what is going on in the Ukraine these days, one has to understand Putin - what motivates him, what his world view is, what his objectives are, and what political constraints he has to work under. One has to also understand what the ordinary Russian thinks, hopes for, and expects, and why Putin had such a wide appeal in Russia for so long (and still does, though it is diminishing).

Ben Judah's 2013 book Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Live with Vladimir Putin is a good starting point. Judah, a journalist whose work has appeared such places as The Economist, The Financial Times, and Foreign Policy, spent five years crisscrossing Russia and talking to government officials, ordinary Russians, and oligarchs, and has assembled a fascinating portrait of Vladimir Putin's rise to power, and the cultural shifts occurring in Russia that first elevated Putin and now hinder him.

The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life

Uri Gneezy & John List, 2013, ISBN 978-1610393119

The field of economics has been dominated for decades by academic theorists pumping out clever equations to explain economic activity and shape public policy. Gneezy and List represent a new, and probably much more promising approach – going out and doing real-world experiments to see how people actually behave, as opposed to how some theorist in an office thinks they behave. Ever wonder just why people are prejudiced – is it really animus or just economic self-interest? Ever wonder what really would motivate ghetto kids to apply themselves in school? Ever wonder how to get people to give more generously to charitable causes? This book begins to give the answers, based on real data, not abstract theory. This is a great book, and a welcome breath of fresh (data-driven) air in a field too often informed by ideology rather than reality.

Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned The Tide in the Second World War

Paul Kennedy, 2013, ISBN 978-1400067619

Paul Kennedy's 2013 book Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War is a fascinating book to read for those interesting in the history of World War II. But in fact it is much more than that; it is an exploration of issues of military organization and strategic thinking that ought to concern us today as well. Kennedy has organized this book around five strategic problems to be solved, such as how to get convoys safely across the Atlantic, or how to defeat the "tyranny of distance". He certainly talks about the innovators who helped solve these problems, but he does so in the larger context of the entire chessboard of the war, and in doing so he educates us on basic principles of grand strategy that are as applicable today as they were in World War II. For example, both Germany and Japan overreached themselves, trying to do too much in too many places rather than focusing on the few key objectives that really mattered, a mistake America may well be repeating today.

Kennedy, a British historian, co-teaches a class in "grand strategy" at Yale, where he is Director of International Security Studies. His previous book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is also worth reading.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

Lee Billings, 2013, ISBN 978-1617230066

Not many years ago, no one knew if planets were common or rare. Now we know they are common, much more common than early estimates had predicted. That increase the odds that there is alien life out there among the stars, though it may mostly be very simple life. Billings surveys the newly-exploding field of planet-hunting, describing in ways accessible to everyone – technical and nontechnical alike – the problems encountered in detecting distant planets and the emerging solutions. He also gives wonderful sketches of some of the main personalities involved. This book is both technically fascinating and spiritually inspiring. It brings back some of the excitement of the early space age, and it reminds one that life on our little planet is precarious, and we ought to pay more attention to preserving it. A great book!

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divide by Politics and Religion

Jonathan Haidt, 2013, ISBN 978-0307455772

Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University. If you have never heard of "moral psychology" before it is because until recently it was a near-moribund field. Moral psychology is the study of how humans define and use morality. His 2013 book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divide by Politics and Religion is a profoundly important book in today's highly irrational, bitterly decisive political and religious atmosphere, not only to understand the current battles in America, such as the emotional fight over the recent Supreme Court nomination of Justice Kavanaugh, but also to understand larger issues such as the roots of the battles between the West and the Muslim world, or China, or Russia. To name just three important insights from the book (there are far more): (1) there are far more dimensions to morality than the justice/fairness dimension that is almost the only dimension American culture focuses on, (2) Americans, and especially the educated middle-class Americans that are the group that most psychologist study, are highly atypical in the world as a whole, which calls into question much of our psychological research, and (3) not only are humans driven more by their emotions/intuitions than by reason (others have said this too), but in fact reason itself simply cannot operate without emotional/intuitions input.

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

Michael Moss, 2013, ISBN 978-1400069804

Some people are upset that Trump apparently used persuasion techniques to win the election - never mind that all politicians, including Hillary Clinton, also tried to use the same techniques. They just weren't as good at it. The issue is far larger than just presidential politics. Corporations and special interest groups (political, religions, marketing, kooks, etc.) all do the same thing to us every day. Michal Moss, in his 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, details how these technique have been used to delude the public into eating poorly, with the result that we now face an epidemic of obesity. This book will (or at least, should) make you fighting mad, not only at the food industries and corporations, but at your own federal government as well. It's probably no news that too many government agencies are controlled and subverted by the very industries they are supposed to regulate, but this book will drive the point home and make you skeptical of any FDA food guideline.

Rumsfeld’s Rules

Donald Rumsfeld, 2013, ISBN 978-0062272850

Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense twice (1975-1977 under Gerald Ford and 2001-2006 under George W. Bush), as well as CEO of pharmaceutical giant Searle and later CEO of General Instrument. I certainly didn't agree with all of his decisions (especially the decision to use less manpower than his generals recommended in the Iraq war), but he is an unusually bright guy well worth learning from.

His 2013 book Rumsfeld's Rules is full of sound, hard-headed advice about running large organizations, whether they be the Defense Department or a large corporation. For all the bad press he got, largely from liberals who were against the Iraq war, he does in fact have quite a good sense of dry humor and a commendable level of humility, especially for a high-level Washington type. And as far as I can see his advice in this book is spot on. He emphasizes over and over that events are unpredictable, the source of his very perceptive statement about "unknown unknowns" that was so widely ridiculed by the press, who clearly weren't smart enough to understand it. Of course when Nassim Talib reframed the same statement in terms of "Black Swans" the same press thought it was brilliant.

And by the way, I have always admired his behavior on 9/11. When the plane hit the Pentagon his staff wanted to rush him off to a safe place, but he insisted on going out and helping with the rescue efforts. That, I thought, told a lot about who he really was.

I highly recommend this book

Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42

William Dalrymple, 2013, ISBN 978-0307958280

“A war begun for no wise purpose, carried on in a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, has been acquired by this war.” This indictment, which might well describe the America experience in the war in Afghanistan, was in fact written in 1843 by the Rev G. R. Gleig, the British Army chaplain who accompanied the ill-fated British attempt to subdue Afghanistan. William Dalrymple has written an excellent work, Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42, detailing the whole ill-fated British expedition which ended in such humiliation in 1842.

Return of a King is an interesting book to read, because there are so many parallels between the British experience and the American experience in Afghanistan. Both expeditions were launched by ideologically blinded people who drastically underestimated what would be required, both expeditions were hampered by inconsistent strategy and incompetent political and military leadership, both undertakings were distracted in the middle by other wars (Iraq for us, the Opium wars in China for the British), both undertakings suffered badly because the invaders did not understand the Afghan culture.

Anti-Access Warfare: Countering A2/AD Strategies

Sam Tangredi, 2013, ISBN 978-1612511863

People may resent the amount we spend on our military, but in fact it is American power that keeps free access to the seas around the world, and it is the sea that carries the vast majority of the trade that keeps our economy, and the economies of our trading partners going, so like it or not it is very much in our own self-interest to act as the policeman of the high seas. Retreat from that obligation would be very foolish and short-sighted indeed, much as it might please the pacifists among us.

There is no nation that currently threatens us on the high seas, but there are several that have spent a great deal on their military to deny us access to their local waters, the Peoples Republic of China being the most worrisome. Not only would the PRC like to deny us the ability to protect Taiwan if/when they decide to take it back (an eventuality for which they have been planning and arming for decades now), but they claim almost the entire South China Sea (the so-called nine dash line), an area that carries one-third of the entire world’s shipping. And of course Iran can always threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz, shutting off 20% of the world’s oil supply. Both have invested heavily in anti-access weapons. Clearly there are issues here we ought to be thinking about.

Sam Tangredi’s 2013 book Anti-Access Warfare: Countering A2/AD Strategies is worth reading for anyone who wants to be better informed about the challenges our military may face in the future, and the weapon developments and investments we ought to be making to meet that possible future. This is not a causal read – but it is worth it.

Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America

Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane, 2013, ISBN 978-1-4767-0025-0

To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, for every political or economic problem there is an answer which is simple, obvious, plausible, ideologically consistent, and wrong. In the hard sciences theories aren’t accepted until there is hard evidence to support them. Unfortunately the same rules apparently don’t apply in either political thought or economics, where people believe, often passionately, in all sorts of theories for which there is either no evidence at all, or worse yet, clear evidence that they are incorrect.

Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane address this issue in their new book Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America. Hubbard and Kane are both prominent economists bent on testing popular economic and political theories against real data from the real world. The results are often surprising. Several things I thought were true certainly aren’t supported by the evidence. This is a book well worth reading.

The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail But Some Don’t

Nate Silver, 2012, ISBN 978-1-59420-411-1

Nate Silver runs FiveThirtyEight.com, the polling site most accurate in the last election. His new book, The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail But Some Don't is a clear, well-reasoned, quite accessible book about the probabilistic nature of life. He discusses why weather forecasting predictions have gotten better over the decades, but earthquake forecasting hasn't, and why the majority of studies in medicine and in many other fields are probably fatally flawed in their statistical interpretation of data. Fundamentally the issue is one of separating signal from noise, of detecting the real signal (if there is one) and not being deluded by the meaningless noise that surrounds the signal.

This is a great book to read just after reading Nassim Taleb's recent book Antifragile, since both deal with much the same topic, how we humans misunderstand randomness and frequently misinterpret noisy data.

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2012, ISBN 978-1-4000-6782-4

Starting with his first book, Fooled by Randomness (2001), and expanded by his second book, The Black Swan (2007), Talib has been exploring the way humans (and especially statisticians, economists, Wall Street traders, and policy makers) systematically underestimate the risks imposed by very rare events. In Antifragile, Talib takes this a step further, to explore a continuum from things and systems that are fragile (don’t react well to changes in the environment) through things that are robust (can ride safely through disorder) to things and systems that are antifragile (thrive and improve on disorder). The evolution of life is the classic case of an antifragile system. This is a profoundly important book. Much of our advanced civilization is inherently fragile (think of all that would fail if, say, the electric power grid went down!), but could be made antifragile if we only thought about it.

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor - and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car!

Tim Harford, 2012, ISBN 978-0199926510

This ISBN is for the new revised and expanded 2012 version. The original version was published in 2005. It is a wonderfully clear book, quite readable for those without a background in economics, and it makes clear why many things in the economy work as they do. Political economic policy is often based on a fantasy world divorced from the real world we all live in, which is why political solutions so often fail to achieve their stated objectives (not to mention that their stated objectives are often not the real objectives of those who propose them!). For anyone trying to figure out what the nation ought to be doing right now, and trying to evaluate the proposals of both parties, this book is a good starting point.

Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy is Wrong

Edward Conard, 2012, ISBN 978-0-59184-550-8

Edward Conard is not an academic economist; he is a highly successful capital manager, a onetime head of Bain Capital's New York office. (ie - he walks the talk and shows results). His new book Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy is Wrong is an important book because it questions the very foundations of today's popular political policy making. This is not an easy book to read, with simple, intuitively plausible ideas. It is not that it is too technical, too full of arcane economic terminology and impressive equations, as are some economics books. It is hard because it requires looking at the whole economic system from the top down, as a complex interacting system, which is not the way it is usually explained to us. Nor is it biased to the liberals or the conservatives - he gives short shrift to the popular delusions of both sides.

I have had to reread sections a number of times to get my head around some of his arguments, but once understood they make a good case for his views, which are basically that what has made the American economy forge ahead of the rest of the world (and he shows it has, despite the current recession) is our appetite for innovation and risk taking. Policies which inhibit that risk-taking will inevitably harm and slow the economy. A number of his ideas are contrarian - example: outsourcing low-skill low-wage manufacturing jobs to other nations is a GOOD thing for us (that frees capital and labor in this country for more productive, higher value-add work) and for them (labor wages may be low by our standards, but they are a substantial improvement over the agrarian work alternatives they have). It takes some work to absorb his arguments, but if he is right (and I am slowly coming around to his views on many of these points), then neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have viable plans to restore this nation's economy.

This book is well worth the (considerable) investment it will take to fully understand his ideas.

The Inexplicable Universe: Unsolved Mysteries

Prof Neal deGrasse Tyson, Columbia University, Hayden Planetarium, Teaching Co. course 1816

Teaching Company courses are always outstanding, and this one is no exception. (If you don’t already know about the Teaching Company, go to http://www.thegreatcourses.com) Those who have see Tyson lecture before, live or on TV, already know how good he is. This series of six 30-minute lectures spans most of the really interesting cosmological and physics mysteries of today. Great fun to watch.

The Skeptic’s Guide to American History

Prof. Mark Stoler, Univ of Wisconsin-Madison, Teaching Co. course 8588

Much of what we are taught in high school about American history is not true – it is either a partial truth or sometimes a complete fabrication. These myths about American history get embedded in the cultural consciousness, usually because they reinforce something we want to believe about ourselves, and take on a life of their own. Professor Stoler’s course works to correct this, and to root us back in the real historical truths. A very good and enlightening course.

Historical Jesus

Prof Bard Ehrman, Univ of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Teaching Co. course 643

Christianity, founded on the teachings of a first-century Jewish prophet named Jesus of Nazareth, has had a profound impact over the past two centuries on the civilizations of the world. And of course an enormous amount of theological material has been written about him, and in his name. But what really do we know about Jesus? No contemporary Roman or Jewish records of him have been found. The first written record mentioning him is the gospel of Mark, apparently written by an anonymous author in Greek some 30-40 years after his death based on oral traditions. And we know that the scriptures have been tinkered with extensively over the centuries, especially in medieval times, to make them conform to political or religious dogmas that were important at the time (like the divine right of kings). So what can a true historian (as opposed to a committed believer) tease out as likely to be accurate characteristics and sayings of Jesus? I found the historical approach he describes and uses to be fascinating, and the results to be interesting. Well worth listening to.

Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power

Zbigniew Brzezinski 2012, ISBN 978-0-465-02954-9

Zbigniew Brzezinski, onetime National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter and now a professor at John Hopkins University, has written 16 books thus far on geopolitics. In this his latest book he discusses the question of whether America can continue to be the world’s dominant superpower, given the internal problems it faces, and speculates on how geopolitics might change if we drifted into second-class status over the coming decades. In general, the picture is not comforting; American power and influence hold many of the world’s nationalistic tensions in check, and without that influence, he argues, those tensions will likely break out into open conflict. A thought-provoking book.

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

Charles Murray 2012, ISBN 978-0-307-45342-6

In 1994 Charles Murray, with the late Richard Herrnstein , wrote “the Bell Curve”, a book widely derided by the politically correct for a simple statement of fact about racial differences in intelligence scores (not surprising, since such tests are culture biased). That missed their essential point, which was that forces were already at work in America to vacuum “the best and brightest” out of all classes of society and isolate them as an intellectual elite. Murray’s latest book looks at how that process has progressed over the period 1960 to 2010, as America has increasingly split into a highly educated, highly paid class of “knowledge workers” on the one hand, and everyone else on the other hand (the 99% of recent protests). This split has had good effects and bad effects, and Murray explores these. This is not a question of something that social policy should fix – it probably can’t fix it. It is more a case of seeing where the nation is going, and thinking about the natural consequences of this shift. Well worth reading.

The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and The Battle Against Fate

Robert Kaplan, 2012, ISBN 978-1400069835

Robert Kaplan's 2012 book The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and The Battle Against Fate is a wonderful summary of all areas of the world in geopolitical terms, as shaped by their geography. In large measure it is a useful companion to George Friedman's recent books (The Next 100 Years, and Flashpoints), but Kaplan goes into far more detail about the history, both ancient and recent, that has shaped the culture and geopolitical outlook of the peoples who inhabit these areas.

Of particular interest, I thought, was his concluding section on America, in which he argues that while the East Coast ruling elites have been focused on adventures and political maneuvering in Russia, China and the Middle East, they have been ignoring the single most important area to America's future, our neighbor to the South, Mexico. Were we to invest as much as we have invested in the Middle East wars in Mexico instead, we would have a stable, economically powerful and friendly partner which would make North America the powerhouse of the world. If we continue to ignore Mexico we will end up sharing a 2000 mile long border with an immensely wealthy and violent narco-state that threatens the stability of our nation. I find his argument persuasive.

The Social Conquest of Earth

Edward Wilson, 2012, ISBN 978-0-87140-363-6

Wilson, a noted biologist, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and author of over 20 books, explains why social organization was the evolutionary step that led to human (and ant) dominance in the biosphere. It is a profound but quite readable discussion of the effects of evolution by natural selection not only on individuals but on cooperating groups to produce what we think of as “human civilization”, a delicate balance between individual competitiveness and altruism toward the “tribe”.

This book is important not only for a better understanding of the subtleties of evolution, but because it explores the role of tribalism in the evolution of human society. Those who hope somehow to end war and violence need to better understand how deeply tribalism is rooted in the human psyche, the same tribalism that has fueled ethnic, religious and political conflict throughout history.

The World America Made

Robert Kagan, 2012, ISBN 978-0307961310

Robert Kagan's new 2012 book The World America Made is well worth reading. He argues that the world is the way it is today (largely democratic, largely liberal, largely at peace) because of America, and that if America were to "disappear" as a world power, the world would be much different (and probably much worse) than it is today. He remarks on the unusual fact that the world as a whole generally accepts, and even welcomes, America's overwhelming military power as a stabilizing force in the world, whereas historically the rise of a superpower has generally instigated vigorous efforts by other nations to build a countervailing or balancing force opposing it (the "balance of power" tactic followed in Europe for much of its history).

Of course America makes mistakes, and Americans are generally uncomfortable with the position as "the world's policeman". And of course there is always a highly vocal minority that thinks everything America does is bad or evil. But on balance, Kagan argues, the world is far better off for the relative stability America provides. He makes a convincing case for this position, and it is well worth reading.

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future

Laurence C. Smith, 2011, ISBN 978-0452297470

Laurence Smith's book The New North: The World in 2050 is about the best, most accurate, and most concise exploration of the major forces likely to shape the world over the next 40-50 years that I have read. Smith deals with human population growth and migration; growing demand for resources such as energy and water; globalization; and climate change. He argues that these forces will shape a new world in which, for geological and climate change reasons, the nations in the higher latitudes of the north will gain at the expense of the rest of the world. Fascinating to read.

How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

David Goldman, 2011, ISBN 978-1596982734

The criteria for inclusion in this book list is that the book has provided me with some new and unexpected insight, or proposed a new way of looking at an issue. The problem with the commonly received wisdom in a society like ours is that it can suffer from “groupthink” – a belief is wrong, but since everyone believes it there is a self-reinforcing factor in play that maintains the belief, even in the face of evidence that it is wrong. That is why I am always looking for books that argue cogently for alternative positions.

David Goldman’s new book How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too), meets the criteria of proposing a new and different way of looking at the world. David Goldman is a polymath (economist, investment banker, harpsichordist, music critic and music teacher, and prolific author) who has authored the widely-read “Spengler” column in the Asian Times for some years. In his 2011 book How Civilizations Die he lays out the demographic evidence that many major nations will essentially disintegrate in the next 50-100 years, as their low reproductive rate leads to an ever aging population supported by every fewer young until eventually the existing social and political system is no longer supportable.

Goldman writes from a decidedly Judeo-Christian perspective. That doesn’t mean his arguments require religious faith to accept. Instead, he argues that current foreign policy and political science fail to understand the current world because they are thoroughly secular in outlook – they ignore the profound effect that a culture’s religious beliefs can have on the choices that culture makes. He explores just why some nations are suddenly depopulating themselves, and suggests it may have to do with their reaction to the realization that their comfortable and familiar culture is in danger of disappearing in the modern world.

On the Origin of Teepees: The Evolution of Ideas (and Ourselves)

Jonnie Hughes, 2011, ISBN 978-1-4391-1023-2

Why this book ended up on the remaindered shelves is a mystery to me. It is a very good book! Hughes explores the evolution, mutation and transmission of ideas (memes) as a parallel to the evolution, mutation and transmission of genes. There are similarities, and subtle differences. Why Teepees? Hughes is looking for a meme (idea) parallel to Darwin’s evolution of finch beaks in the Galapagos – a idea introduced at one point from a common ancestor and then evolving separately in isolated and separate communities, like the spread of the teepee design among Great Plains Indians. This reads a bit like the old classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair, a serious meditation embedded in a travelogue. Well worth reading.

Civilization: The West and the Rest

Niall Ferguson, 2011, ISBN 978-1-59420-305

Another great, insightful, provocative and readable book from Niall Ferguson. In 1500 “the West” was ignorant, backward, and fragmented. Anyone betting in those days about which civilizations would emerge 500 years later as the world’s leaders wouldn’t have bet on the West; they would have bet on the Islamic world or China, both of whom were far more advanced. Yet 500 years later, the West has been the driver in new advances, and the Islamic world and China have been left far behind. Why, Ferguson asks, did this happen? His answer is fascinating.

The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-vision of Capitalism

Howard Bloom, 2011, ISBN 978-1616144784

Among some on the left, capitalism gets a bad rap. They object to the inherent unfairness in which some get richer than others, and some lose their jobs in the incessant "creative destruction" that capitalism drives. But Howard Bloom argues – persuasively - that in fact capitalism ( The "Beast" in this book) is simply one more expression of a basic driving force in nature, and that the boom-and-bust cycle typical of capitalist economies are in fact a natural, if brutal, driving mechanism for evolution seen throughout nature – evolution of organisms, evolution of societies, and evolution of cultures. The boom and bust cycle, Bloom argues, is really nature's way of exploring all possibilities, a cycle of expansion followed by a cycle of retrenchment, digestion, and reshaping based on what was learned in the expansion. Yes, capitalism is unfair - nature is unfair. But, Bloom would argue, the very instruments that the dissenters use in their dissents - language, printing, cell phones, TV, airlines, etc, etc, are all the fruits of this brutal but effective system.

Bloom is a wonderful out-of-the-box thinker (see his first book, The Lucifer Principle, 1995), and this book is well worth reading.

SEAL Target Geronimo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama bin Laden

Chuck Pfarrer, 2011, ISBN 978-1250006356

There have been a number of conflicting stories about the mission that killed Osama bin Laden. There were politicians who spun the story to make themselves look good. There were agencies who spun the story to inflate their part (if any) in the mission. There were sensationalist news stories geared mostly just to make news and increase ratings. There were stories by people with anti-war agendas to try and make it look inhuman. All in all it is hard to figure out what the real story was.

Chuck Pfarrer's book SEAL Target Geronimo is likely to be the closest to the real story that one is going to find. Pfarrer himself is a former assault element commander of SEAL Team Six, which means that he knows the system from the inside. He also had access to many of the key players in the mission, including some of the SEAL team members themselves.

The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress

Chris Hedges, 2011, ISBN 978-1568586403

Chris Hedges was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times for over twenty years, covering most of the major and minor wars of that period. He is also a Pulitzer Prize winner. His experiences, especially close-up and personal in wars, have given him a distinctly non-mainstream view of the world. A committed socialist and follower of people like Noam Chomsky, who have been railing against “the system” for years, he is outraged about American policy, and deeply worried about the future of America. I have generally found the ranting of people like Chomsky neither convincing nor interesting, but I have to say that Hedges makes a persuasive argument in this collection of articles that our problems in America are far more fundamental, and far more dangerous, than most of us have assumed. It is worth reading this book and pondering whether our ”mainstream” views are really incorrect, and we really have been brainwashed by the media and the political elite, and whether perhaps the emperor really doesn’t have any clothes.

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

Mary Roach, 2011, ISBN 978-0393339918

Surviving in space for long periods, as will be required for a trip to Mars, is difficult. But we have already been preparing with our near-earth space station, the shuttle flights, and the Apollo moon flights. And it isn’t all that glamorous, seen up close. Mary Roach, whose previous books are Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, has a wonderful talent for entering a field and describing it with wit and humor, as she does in this book. Ever think about the problem of defecating in zero gravity? Ever wonder what the astronauts eat (and whether they like it)? Ever wonder why airline passengers don’t have parachutes? This is the book that will explain it. A wonderful, entertaining but highly educational read.

The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

Richard Paneck, 2011, ISBN 978-0618982448

This is a wonderful book about the history leading up to the theory of dark matter and dark energy, the personalities of the people who contributed to this theory, and the theoretical struggles and battles along the way. Well worth reading to get a sense of today’s world of physics, astrophysics and cosmology.

The Information

James Gleick, 2011, ISBN 978-0-375-42372-7

An exploration of the evolution of information from the earliest steps of translating spoken language to writing symbols up to present day quantum processing. Gleick leads us through the evolution of information, exploring the personalities of the key players – Einstein, Shannon, Turing, and many others – while explaining the increasingly complex ideas in terms (mostly) accessible to the layman, but still of interest to the expert in the field. A very good book.

Understanding the World's Greatest Structures: Science and Innovation from Antiquity to Modernity

Professor Stephen Ressler, The Teaching Company, video course 1153

Teaching Company courses are always outstanding, but this course is exceptional. The first nine lectures lead the uninitiated through the fundamental physics of the basic structural elements – columns, beams, arches, etc. – and then the remaining lectures examine great buildings, bridges and structures throughout history in terms of how these structural elements are used, and how engineers learned to exploit these structures to build higher and span greater widths. A nice exploration of the intersection between science, engineering and architecture.

The Next Decade: Where We Have Been…and Where We Are Going

George Friedman, 2011, ISBN 978-0385532945

George Friedman’s 2008 book The Next 100 Years dealt with the likely shape of the world driven by the impersonal forces of geography, geopolitics, demographics, culture, and technological advances. In this book he pulls his focus in to the next decade, arguing that while in the long run impersonal forces shape history, in the short run personalities make a big difference. He assess the problems we face in the next decade, and the leadership qualities needed in our presidents to face them effectively and realistically This is quite a good book.

Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is Unique

John Gribbin, 2011, ISBN 978-1118147979

For decades now there have been attempts to detect signals from intelligent life from nearby stars, all so far to no avail. John Gribbin argues, in his new book Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is Unique, that while simple life may emerge on any planet that has a tolerable environment (not too hot, not too cold, with liquid water), complex multi-cellular life and certainly intelligent life is probably so rare that we may be the only example in our galaxy, despite the enormous number of stars and planets in our galaxy. He details the many things, and the many accidents of nature, that make our planet unique.

He also points out, with detailed discussion, exactly why intelligent life, and indeed all life on earth, is so tenuous. Not only do we live under the threat of major asteroid hits of the sort that have wiped out most species on earth several times before, but we are threatened by climate change not only from our own technological progress, but also from major super-volcanoes (like an exploding Yellowstone) and major outpourings of lava such as formed the Siberian traps 250 million years ago.

This is a fascinating book to read, full of complex detail about how Earth was formed and why not many planets share our metals-rich surface, our shielding magnetic field, our relatively stable orbit, and dozens of other features that have provided enough protection and enough evolutionary pressures to drive the evolution of intelligent life.

Why The West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future

Ian Morris, 2010, ISBN978-0-374-29002-3

Ian Morris’s new book, Why The West Rules – For Now, is a dense, well-researched review of history from the emergence of modern humans to the present, directed toward answering the question “Why did the Western world end up ruling instead of the Eastern world?” After all, the East had advanced civilizations in China and India, among other places, while Westerners were still fairly primitive. Why did science and the industrial revolution advance so much faster and earlier in the West than the East? And what does past history suggest about the future of Western dominance? A very good book, but be prepared to work to follow his arguments.

The Father of US All: War and History

Victor Davis Hanson, 2010, ISBN 978-1-60819-410

We are cursed, as have been civilizations all through history, with those unrealistic idealists who think war can be eliminated if only reasonable men would talk, and those equally unrealistic idealists who think war is an ideal way to solve disagreements between nations. Neither group understands history very well, according to Hanson. He argues that war is an inextricable part of human experience, and the nation would be better off if we all studied the lessons of history. This book is a collection of various essays he has written, most of the expanded for the book. They are very good, and his views are worth thinking about.

God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

Stephen Prothero, 2010, ISBN 978-0061571275

Stephen Prothero's book God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World is a useful introduction to the eight largest religions in the world. In particular, he makes the point that despite ecumenical attempts to argue that all religions are simply different paths to the same God, the eight major religions differ at a fundamental level - they see different problems in the world and seek different solutions to their different problems. Christians, for example, worry about sin and seek salvation, while Buddhists worry about suffering and seek nirvana (without any god) and Hindus worry about getting off the wheel of reincarnation.

Any book about religion is of course going to be contentious, but I think this is a useful approach to understanding the core of each of these major religions -- what they see as the problem in the world and how they try to address that problem.

The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy

Michael Foley, 2010, ISBN 978-1847375247

Michale Foley, a British academic with a wry sense of very British humor, but an impressive span of intellectual resources, has written a book every American should read (but almost none will). I believe he has correctly identified the fatal flaws in our collective Western world cultural psyche, the very flaws that seem to be making it impossible for us to pull ourselves out of the mess are the same flaws have put us into the mess. I cannot write as good a review as has already been written by Phil Hogan of The Guardian in his piece The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to Be Happy by Michael Foley, and so I refer you to that review.

By all means get this book and read it. The writing is witty, but the message is profound.

Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery

Stephen J. Pyne, 2010, ISBN978-0-670-02183-3

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are the first man-made objects to escape the gravitational pull of the sun and begin to travel to the stars. In their journey they have done a “Grand Tour” of the outer planets and sent back enough new data on them to keep astronomers busy for a lifetime. Pyne tells the story of these remarkable spacecraft, from the early political and scientific battles to fund them through to their last planetary encounter, though they are still operating and sending data back and may continue to do so until about 2020. He sets their exploration of the solar system in the context of the two previous great ages of exploration, the First Age led by intrepid Portuguese explorers at the time of the Renaissance and the Second Age, in the 18^th century, that coincided with the Enlightenment. This is a wonderful book, part science and part history/philosophy, that shows the continuity of today’s explorations of space with previous periods of great explorations.

Energy: Myths and Realities

Vaclav Smil, 2010, ISBN 978-0844743288

Dr. Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba, Canada, and author of almost 40 books (to date) and innumerable academic articles on energy and environmental issues. His most recent book (2017) is Energy and Civilization: A History. A quick look at his listing in Wikipedia will produce a list of his other books.

This book, published in 2010, deals with the unrealistic claims being made in many circles about our transition to carbon-free "green" energy. Smil does not write popular books - he writes carefully documented academic accounts of the real state of the world, and it requires some mental effort to follow all the various physics-based units of measurement. But it is worth the effort if one wants to understand the actual facts and constraints about transitioning to carbon-free energy, rather than succumb to the unrealistic ideology-based (rather than fact-based) fantasies being peddled in some quarters

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy David Hoffman, 2010, ISBN 978-0307387844

Now that the Cold War is over (though a new one may be starting) and some of the secret files of both the USSR and the USA are available to scholars, we are learning a lot that we didn't know at the time, most of it a bit unsettling. David Hoffman's 2010 book The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy, working from newly declassified documents and interviews with some of the key players in both the US and the USSR, takes us into the thinking of Soviet and American leaders at the time.

This is interesting history, especially for those of us who lived through those times. But it is more than that; it is a template for how things, in both the US and Russia, are probably still evolving, especially with Russian resurgence under President Putin and the renewed US arms buildup in response to that resurgence (not to mention China's threat). And it makes clear how easy it is for leaders to misjudge and misunderstand leaders in other cultures. This book is worth reading.

Economyths: Ten Ways That Economics Gets It Wrong

David Orrell, 2010, ISBN 978-1848311480

If there is one thing that is painfully obvious these days, it is that the grand economic models that have won some economists fame, fortune, and even Nobel Prizes, are shams. All those fancy models didn't accurately model the risks in the derivatives market. All those fancy models didn't forecast the current global financial crisis. The stimulus steps those models predicted would stem the recession and limit unemployment well below 8% have failed, and failed miserably. Economists are quick to explain away these failings in all sorts of ways, but the test of a scientific principle is that it works, and their models clearly don't work.

Oxford mathematician David Orrell argues in his book Economyths: Ten Ways That Economics Gets it Wrong that the fundamental assumptions underlying current economic dogma (or ideology, as he terms it) are false, and explores the roots of these myths in the history of civilization. This is a serious book, despite being only a 250 page paperback (proof that size, cost, and abstruseness of an economics book is no reliable indicator of its worth). This book is well worth reading, and a good follow-on to one of my other recommendation, Economics Without Illusions.

Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons

Richard Rhodes, 2010, ISBN

The third book in Richard Rhodes’ outstanding trilogy on the development of nuclear weapons. The previous two books are The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987), and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995).

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future

Robert B. Reich, 2010, ISBN 978-0-307-59281-1

Reich is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a past Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, and author of about a dozen books on public policy and the American economy. In this book he argues that the current recession, while perhaps sparked by a housing bubble, is really due to a more fundamental problem – that the American middle class can no longer afford to buy as much as the American economy can produce. And this, he argues, is due to the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. As he points out, in the late 1970’s the richest 1% of the country controlled 9% of the wealth, while in 2007 that same 1% controlled 23.5% of the nation’s wealth, a ratio last seen in 1928, just before the Great Depression.

Economics Without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism

Joseph Heath, 2010, ISBN 978-0307590572

Joseph Heath is not an economist, as he readily admits. He is a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto. He approaches economics from the point of view of understanding whether the common arguments economists and those who supposedly depend upon economists (like politicians and journalists) are logically valid or sustainable. Heath is an equal-opportunity critic. The book is divided into two parts of about equal length: the fallacies of the right and the fallacies of the left. And there are a lot of each. This is an important book to read, because a lot of these fallacies are driving the agendas of the conservatives and liberals today, to the great detriment of the nation.

The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy

William Pfaff, 2010, ISBN 978-0-8027-1699-6

The radical Islamic militants dream of and fight for the imposition of Muslim faith and Sharia law across the entire world. It is self-evident to them that this would be best for everyone. It is an impossible dream, at odds with history and human nature and cultures. Pfaff argues that the American dream of imposing democracy across the entire world is just as impossible a dream, just as unrealistic, just as much at odds with everything we know about history and human nature and cultures. Just as the Islamic militants are blinded to reality by their faith, so too Americans are blinded to reality by their own largely Christian-based faith. It is a powerful book, well argued and thoroughly researched, delving back into the beginnings of the Enlightenment to understand how we came to this condition, and how it has led us to a tragically expensive and ineffective foreign policy.

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution

Gregory Cochran & Henry Harpending, 2009, ISBN 978-0-465-02042-3

The conventional wisdom is that evolution is a very slow process, and as a consequence humans today are not much different than humans 5000 years ago. Chochran (a physicist) and Harpending (an anthropologist) argue, from recent DNA evidence, that this is not so. “Deep” changes (changes requiring mutations in many genes), such as development of an eye, may indeed take a very long time. But “shallow” changes (meaning changes in just one or a couple of genes) can occur quickly, can produce profound changes in physiology and behavior, and if they increase fitness and survival, can spread through a population in relatively few generations. The example has been before us all the time – the evolution of domesticated plants and animals in just a few thousand years. The authors argue that civilization over the past 10,000 years has had a profound selective effect on the gene pool, and is still driving human evolution at an unusually rapid pace. A fascination book to read.

Piercing the Fog of War: Recognizing Change on the Battlefield: Lessons from Military History, 216 BC Through Today

Brian L. Steed, 2009, ISBN 0760335230

Steed examines in some detail six "aberrational" battles in history, from Hannibal's victory at Cannae (216 BC) to the Russian's debacle in Grozny (1994-95),and examines how each involved one side "thinking out of the box" to defeat the other side. He discusses the importance of initiative and maneuver and isolation and other tactical concepts, but he emphasizes especially the importance of understanding the opponent, of understanding how the opponent sees things and expects to operate, of empathizing to the point of being able to see out of the opponent's eyes and walk in his shoes and understand his thinking, both tactically and strategically.

The Dead Hand

David E. Hoffman, 2009, ISBN 978-0-385-52437-7

The title refers to the doomsday machine the Soviet Union built in the 1980s to automatically launch its nuclear missiles toward the US in the event that the Soviet leadership had all been killed or disabled – a frighteningly real Dr. Strangelove device. Hoffman’s book details the political and military story on both sides from about 1975 to the mid-1990s as the Soviet Union fell apart and as American presidents and Soviet leaders hesitantly approached arms control deals, even as military leaders and hardliners on both sides tried to sabotage or evade such deals. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and recently declassified documents on both sides, it paints a fascinating, if highly disturbing, picture.

Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft

Angelo Codevilla 2009, ISBN 978-0-465-00483-6

Codevilla presents a detailed and pointed criticism of American statecraft all across the spectrum, from the Liberal Internationalism launched by Woodrow Wilson, through Realists to Neoconservatives. Each of these academic dogmas has its peculiar beliefs and agendas, but Codeville argues that at root they all share the same naïve and fundamental flaw – they all assume that other nations and peoples think more or less like we do, aspire to more or less the same things as we do, value more or less the same things we do, and therefore would respond to threats and incentives more or less as we would. Clearly that is not the case, and he details American foreign policy failures from Woodrow Wilson to the present day, across both political parties, to make his case.

This is not as easy a book to read as the previous two. It takes some work to really understand the complexities, but it is worth the effort. I don’t agree with everything he writes, but I think on balance his arguments are persuasive. He certainly won’t ever be the darling of the ruling elite in this country, because he thinks most of them are naïve about the wider world, and their dearest policies completely unrealistic. But then, I am coming to believe that too.

My Stoke of Insight

Dr. Jill Taylor, 2009, ISBN 978-0-452-29554-4

Dr Taylor is a neuroanatomist who suffered a stroke in her left hemisphere, yet was able to “watch” the whole process from onset to recovery with her right hemisphere and eventually write about it. A profound book about the nature of the human brain, and about how to help stroke victims recover.

The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power

David Sanger, 2009, ISBN 978-0-307-40792-4

Sanger is the Washington correspondent for the New York Times, and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for his outstanding journalism. In this book he details, from a Washington insider’s point of view, how we got into the various messes we are in (Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, etc) and how we might get out of them. This is not a book that will give much comfort to those who have faith in our ruling elites, but it is important.

Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy

Leslie Gelb, 2009, ISBN 978-0-06-171454-2

Gelb is a past president of the Council of Foreign Relations, a onetime journalist, and has served as a senior official in both the State and Defense Departments, so he knows what he is talking about. Somewhat along the lines of Machiavelli’s The Prince , this book tries to winnow through all the unrealistic idealism and ideology that pervades our political system and home in on the common-sense realities of the relations between nations. As he says, “Power rules, still, and there still are rules on how best to exercise it”

The Devil We Know: Dealing With the New Iranian Superpower

Robert Baer, 2009, ISBN 978-0-307-40864-8

Robert Baer spent 21 years in the CIA until he retired in 1997, and was awarded the CIA's Career Intelligence Medal for his service. Most of that time was spent in the Middle East, so Baer knows what he is talking about. He argues that Iran, in part with our unwitting help, has become the region’s emerging superpower, and we had better learn how to deal with them.

The Age of American Unreason

Susan Jacoby, 2009, ISBN 978-1400096381

Susan Jacoby, who also authored Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004) examines the cultural history of the past 40 or so years that has led America to its current anti-intellectualism, in which even supposedly well-educated politicians don't believe in evolution and climate change, despite an overwhelming scientific consensus worldwide on these issues. Recent Pew polls show an astounding level of ignorance about science among Americans (one in five still believe the sun revolves around the earth!!), and an almost complete lack of knowledge about history. This is a disturbing book to read -- one fears for the future of the nation. But it is important, nevertheless, to understand the roots of this problem, and the effect it is having on our children.

Shop Class as Soulcraft

Matthew Crawford, 2009, ISBN 978-0143117469

Matthew Crawford’s 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft is reminiscent of Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair. Crawford also repairs motorcycles (and with a Ph.D.), but really this book is about is the value of craft work – of working with one’s hands to produce something tangible in the world, as opposed to shuffling bureaucratic paper in a cubicle, or worse yet, shuffling electrons in a computer. This is a philosophical essay about the nature of work and workers, about how the modern corporate world dehumanizes workers and their management and leaves them unsatisfied with life, and how one might recover that satisfaction with a vocation, or at least an avocation, of craft work.

Engaging the Muslim World

Juan Cole, 2009, ISBN 978-0-230-60754-58

Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan who has written several other good books on the Middle East, makes a persuasive case in this book that Western political leaders and Western media have seriously misread the situation in the Middle East, reducing extremely complex and subtle relationships to jingoistic one-liners that fit their political biases. This book is well worth reading. By the way, Juan Cole’s blog, “Informed Comment” is also worth following.

The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran

Hooman Majd, 2008, ISBN 978-0-385-522344-9

Majfd is the grandson of a well-known Ayatollah and the son of an Iranian diplomat. He tries in this book to explain the complexities of the Iranian society and culture. A fascinating book, writing with elegance and humor and a great deal of insight.

Deadly Decisions: How False Knowledge Sank the Titanic, Blew Up the Space Shuttle, and Led America into War

Christopher Burns, 2008, ISBN 978-0-385-51705-8

Christopher Burns has examines how groups of people make erroneous decisions. Reviewing the sinking of the Titanic, the Three Mile Island nuclear incident, the USS Vincennes mistaken attack on an Iranian airliner, the loss of the two space shuttles, the missed signals that the 9/11 attacks were coming, the collapse of Enron, the incorrect intelligence about Saddam Hussain’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, and a number of other recent disasters, he tries to explain how organizations full of supposedly very intelligent people so often find themselves led to incorrect decisions by a combination of human mental habits, organizational expectations, and an inability to detect or recognize bad data.

The Next 100 Years

George Friedman, 2008, ISBN 978-1-59102-660-0

George Friedman is the founder and CEO of STRATFOR, a leading private intelligence and forecasting service. In this fascinating and provocative book he lays out his predictions for the major geopolitical shifts in the next 100 years. He readily admits that predicting details is impossible, but argues that the overall sweep of history can be forecast with fair confidence from fundamental demographics, geopolitical factors, and historically stable cultural biases, prejudices, hatreds and affinities. And he proceeds to use these to lay out a probable future for the next 100 years. Well worth reading and pondering.

The American Way of War

Eurene Jarecki, 2008, ISBN 13: 987-1-4165-4456-1

Jarecki is the creator of the excellent 2005 documentary Why We Fight. President Eisenhower in his 1961 farewell address warned us of the growing danger that the “military-industrial complex” (originally the “military-industrial-congressional complex” in early drafts of his speech) would wield undo influence on American policy. In this book Jarecki argues that the excesses of the Bush-Chaney administration were not an anomaly, but rather the natural culmination of a process that started in George Washington’s time, and has accelerated sharply beginning with the Roosevelt and Truman administrations - a process of a growing coalition between the military services (for whom new weapons programs offer career advancement), defense contractors (who want the business) and Congressional representatives (who want the jobs in their districts, and the lucrative defense company positions when they leave Congress). This book will make you think.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World

Niall Ferguson, 2008, ISBN 978-1-59420-192-9

Niall Ferguson, author of several other books in this list, has taken his title from Jacob Bronowski’s wonderful 1973 BBC TV series The Ascent of Man. He argues, with a great deal of highly readable history, that money, far from being the root of all evil, is in fact one of the great inventions of civilization, an invention that made possible our current prosperity. Quite good, and entertaining.

The Age of the Warrior

Robert Fisk, 2008, ISBN 13:978-1-56858-403-4

Robert Fisk is a well-known foreign correspondent who lives in Beirut and is currently the Middle East correspondent for the Independent newspaper in Great Britain. This will not be an easy book for Americans to read, because he attacks much of our political mythology. But it is an important book, because it views our recent foreign policy from an outsider’s perspective, and the picture isn’t pretty. (And by the way, he is just as critical of other nation’s foreign policy and leaders.)

Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disaster

Richard Clarke, 2008, ISBN 978-0-06-147462-0

Richard Clark worked for thirty years in the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and the National Security Council, serving under three presidents. He has seen the transformation of the military from the inside, from the post-Vietnam reactions to the Iraqi invasions. He is dismayed, even outraged, at what the civilian leadership has done to the military, and at the failure of some senior military leaders to speak up and oppose the naïve and misguided directions of civilian leaders, and he has detailed his arguments in this book. It will make your blood boil, and it should.

Zbigniew Brzezinski – Brent Scowcroft: American and the World

moderated by David Ignatius, 2008, ISBN 978-0-465-01501-6

Zbigniew Brzezinski was President Carter’s National Security Advisor; Brent Scowcroft was the National Security Advisor to Gerald Ford and then the elder President Bush. Both are considered among the brightest minds in Washington. Early this year they sat down with noted journalist David Ignatius for a series of recorded private discussions about America’ place in the current world, and their views on what the next American president needs to do. One is a democrat and one a republican, but both are foreign policy “realists”, and they are in remarkably close agreement about what needs to be done. We all ought to read this book, but one certainly hopes the next president, whomever that turns out to be, reads it.

The Post-America World

Fareed Zakaria, 2008, ISBN 978-0-393-06235-9

As in his previous book The Future of Freedom (see 2003), Zakaria gives a brilliant analysis of a difficult and complex subject, America’s place in the emerging 21^st century world. He argues that, despite so many books to the contrary, America is not doing worse these days, it’s just that the rest of the word (or at least some of it) is doing better, and that requires that we adjust our policies to the new reality. Two detailed chapters discuss in particular the rising influence of China and India, and how we should relate to them. In general he feels that most American institutions are working well, better in fact than in most of the rest of the world. The one prominent exception is our do-nothing political system, mired in ideological trench warfare between the two parties, and frozen into inaction by myriad interest groups and well-funded private business agendas. Well worth reading.

The Return of History and the End of Dreams

Robert Kagan, 2008, ISBN 978-0-307-26923-2

Kagan is an insightful and erudite historian, nominally right-wing in his views but in fact actually more a pragmatist than an ideologue. In this short little book he assesses today’s world in light of Francis Fukuyama’s claim 15 years ago in The End of History and the Last Man that we are entering a post-modern age when liberal democracy would finally sweep through most of the world, and concludes “I don’t think so….”. After short but very good summaries of how the world looks to each of the major powers in today’s world – mainly America and Europe, China, India, Japan, and Russia – he points out that in fact the historically “normal” geopolitical jockeying for power and influence has resumed between these powers. Hence the “end of dreams” of a wonderful, peaceful, liberal, democratic, conflict-free postmodern world. Well worth reading and pondering.

Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent

Fred Burton, 2008, ISBN 978-1-4000-6569-1

In places this book reads like a James Bond novel, but in fact I am told by acquiesces who should know that it is a fairly accurate look and feel of the inside world of counterterrorism. And it will not make you sleep easy at night. In fact, there are dark, unpleasant things going on in the world, as 9/11 showed us. Well worth reading.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East

Martin Seiff, 2008, ISBN 978-1596980518

Martin Seiff is a veteran foreign correspondent with United Press International. His book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East is a breath of fresh air in a field otherwise obscured by foggy theory and wishful thinking. He has little time for liberals and neocons who dream of imposing democracy in the area (and doing so in only a few years), and he is scathing about the inadequacies of various government leaders, particularly during the British administration of much of the Middle East in the last century. If you are committed to believing Churchill never made mistakes, you won’t like this book. If you are committed to believing that free elections always bring good democratic government (despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary), you won’t like this book.

I don’t agree with all of his points (his brief for Saudi Arabia as a new center of stability in the region seems to me a bit of a stretch, for example), but his blunt, non-nonsense appraisal of the history and current condition of the Middle East seems to me far more realistic than what usually comes out of the academic world on this subject. And it is certainly politically incorrect - it will offend diehards on both the left and the right! It has been clear ever since we launched the Iraq and Afghan wars that our government is woefully naïve about the cultures of that area of the world, with consistently painful and expensive results. A book like this might help dispel some of that naiveté

The Age of American Unreason

Susan Jacoby, 2008, ISBN 978-0-375-42374-1

The Age of American Unreason is not an easy book to read. It jumps a bit from topic to topic, and at times the author's sarcasm wears a bit. Nonetheless, it is well worth reading, because her arguments are persuasive and important to America's future. Popular culture has always been aimed at a lower level than the intellectual elite, but her argument is that in times past Americans at least aspired to improve their intellectual level and the intellectual level of their children, while today a variety of forces have conspired to produce a growing anti-intellectual atmosphere and a general "dumbing down" of mass culture to the lowest common level. This cannot bode well for a powerful nation dependent upon a highly complex and technological infrastructure for its long-term survival. Ought we perhaps to be worried that the nation elected for two terms a leader who is proud of his anti-intellectual outlook? The issue isn't about him, it's about us, the public who elected him - about why we would voluntarily choose as a leader in dangerous times one who distains rational intellectual thought . What does that say about us?

Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower

Zbigniew Brzezinski 2007, ISBN 978-0-465-00252-8

Zbigniew Brzezinski reviews the presidencies of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, with respect to their outlook on geopolitics and their successes and failures. The chapter headings for the three presidents give an idea of his assessments: “The Original Sin, and the Pitfalls of Conventional Imagination” (George H W Bush), “The Impotence of Good Intentions, and the Price of Self-Indulgence” (Bill Clinton), and “Catastrophic Leadership and the Politics of Fear” (George W. Bush). Well reasoned and interesting.

Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries

Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2007, ISBN 978-0393062243

This is a wonderful, witty, highly readable collection of essays astrophysicist Neal Tyson has written for Natural History, the American Museum of Natural History's monthly magazine. Well worth reading for anyone who is fascinated by the beautiful complexity of the universe.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World

Alan Greenspan, 2007, ISBN 978-1-59420-131-8

Alan Greenspan, recently retired chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, has written a wonderful book - part autobiography, part academic analysis of the world's economy based on his decades of experience and study of detailed economic data, and yet very readable. The end section, in which he discusses the likely future of the world and American economy, is brilliant, but it rests on the detailed analyses presented throughout the remainder of the book. He makes a strong and persuasive case for allowing free markets to operate with a minimum of government regulation, despite the constant political pressure for popularist politicians to interfere in the name of "saving jobs" (translation - "gaining votes"), and he shows from masses of worldwide data that excessive government regulation and central planning is always counterproductive in the end.

Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the Twenty-First Century

Ralph Peters, 2007, ISBN 978-0-8117-0274-4

Ralph Peters, a retired army lieutenant-colonel and author thus far of some 22 books and innumerable articles (see for example Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph, 1999, below), discusses in detail all the ways today’s politicians misunderstand the nature of war, with uniformly disastrous results. War, he argues, ought not to be entered into except as a last resort, and then only with overwhelming force and a fierce determination to win. He has nothing but contempt for those naïve politicians, most with no military experience at all, who are seduced by promises of “surgical strikes” and “limited war”, and who as a result cause far more carnage and loss of life than is necessary. He finds it ludicrous that in order to be “politically correct” military training avoids discussion of the nature and motivations of religiously-based (ie – Islamic) opponents, even though those are exactly who we are now fighting, and who we will probably be fighting in the future. Worth reading.

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming

Bjorn Lomborg, 2007, ISBN 978-0-307-26692-7

Bjorg Lomborg’s two previous books, Global Crises, Global Solutions (see 2004) and The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (see 2001) have made the point that supporters for an issue have a tendency to exaggerate their issue into a crisis in order to draw attention to it and gain support and leverage, but that the public perception built on the exaggerated claims, hyped by the press, frequently lead to bad or ineffective policy. In this book he takes on the “Global Climate Crisis”, arguing that although global warming is certainly real, it is nowhere near the crisis that supporters claim for it, and that a clear-headed look at the data would suggest that there are lots of other issues we could spend money on that would have more drastic and more immediate effects in terms of saving lives and improving the quality of life for people around the world. It’s not that he thinks global warming isn’t a problem; it’s that he thinks the billions we might spend to make a small dent in the CO2 level in 50 years could make a huge difference to billions of people tomorrow in better health, better nutrition, education, and the like, and that we ought to be more thoughtful in ordering our priorities and not get stampeded by exaggerated claims of crisis. As in his previous books, his arguments are solidly backed by facts from reputable sources, and deserve serious consideration.

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

Jeffrey Toobin, 2007, ISBN 978-0-385-51640-2

Toobin, a staff writer for the New Yorker and CNN senior legal analyst, interviewed not only the justices themselves, but also some seventy five of their law clerks to build a comprehensive picture of the Supreme Court, how it operates, the issues it deals with, and the personalities of the justices themselves. The entire decades-long conservative battle to “capture” the court and turn it to the conservative agenda (first and foremost, to overturn Roe vs Wade) is documented in detail, along with a brilliant and fascinating analysis of why, despite all the supposedly conservative appointment to the court, Roe vs Wade has yet to be overturned. Also included is a detailed description of the Court’s participation in the disputed Bush vs Gore election. This might seem like an arcane subject, but once I started it, I couldn’t put this book down.

How Doctors Think

Jerome Groopman, M.D., 2007, ISBN 13:978-0-618-61003-7

Dr. Groopman teaches at Harvard Medical School and is chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Anyone whose life will someday depend upon the accuracy of a doctor's diagnosis (and that is most of us) should read this book. Doctors are human, and they make the same common human errors in thinking that problem solvers in other fields make. Dr. Groopman's contribution is to explore those sorts of errors as they affect doctors in their everyday practice, and suggest ways in which patients and their families can help their doctors avoid such errors. But beyond that, this book is an important contribution to helping all of us see the sorts of common reasoning errors we all fall into

The Wisdom of History (Audio lectures)

Prof. J. Rufus Fears, 2007, The Teaching Company, course 4361

Professor Fears, who also gave the brilliant lecture series "A History of Freedom", (see 2001 below), explores Santayana's dictum that "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it", arguing that the catastrophes of the present day, such as the two world wars of the 20th century, are simply repetitions of similar historical catastrophes that could have been avoided had the leaders of the day understood the lessons of history. This lecture series questions some of our basic American beliefs (or myths), and proposes some fundamental lessons that history teaches those who will bother to study it.. Very good.

The Only Three Questions that Count: Investing By Knowing What Others Don't Know

Ken Fisher, 2007, ISBN 10:0-470-07499-X

Fisher, a highly successful manager of his own investment fund, argues that much of what "every investor knows" simply isn't true, and seeing through the investment myths gives one an advantage in the market. He proceeds to examine some of the "common knowledge" of investors, and show that they are not supported by the data. The importance of this book comes from his three questions: (1) What do I believe that is actually false? (2) What can I fathom that others find unfathomable? and (3)What the heck is my brain doing to mislead and misguide me now? These apply as well to life as to investing, and his use of these three questions in exploring investing myths is instructive.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007, ISBN 978-1-4000-6351-2

Taleb was the author of Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life (see below 2001), which exposed how poorly most of us understand uncertainty. The Black Swan expands on this theme, and in particular on the huge impact that unpredicted and unpredictable events have on the course of events. Talib argues that we (including the highly paid experts) know far less about the world than we think we do; that we fool ourselves with narrow models that don't allow for the inevitable unexpected and improbable perturbations. He also offers some interesting strategies for minimizing exposure to the bad effects and maximizing the probabilities of capitalizing on the good effects of unexpected events. This is a wonderful book that needs to be reread a number of times to extract all the brilliance.

The Silence of the Rational Center: Why American Foreign Policy is Failing

Stefan Halper & Jonathan Clarke, 2007, ISBN 10: 0-465-01141-1

Halper is a Senior Fellow at Cambridge University's Centre of International Studies, and Clarke is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs. The crux of their argument is that because of its unique background America is unusually susceptible to "the Big Idea" (eg: "War of Terror", "Revolution in Military Affairs", "Axis of Evil", etc.). These "Big Ideas" take on a life of their own in the media and in political discourse, even though they often have little or no rational substance behind them, and as a consequence they tend to stifle or drown out rational, facts-based debate by the experts who really understand the issues. I find their argument persuasive.

Walking Zero: Discovering Cosmic Space and Time Along the Prime Meridian

Chet Raymo, 2006, ISBN 0-8027-1494-3

It is a rare art to be able to weave together the history of science, the history of the world, and the life histories of the scientists involved and make it all fascinating. In this little book Chet Raymo does exactly that, and the result is wonderful. It will take only an afternoon to read it, and you will be very glad you did.

The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take To Win it Back

Jeff Faux, 2006, ISBN 10: 0-471-69761-3

Faux argues that global affairs are controlled by a relatively small group of largely American corporate and government elite, of both political parties, all of whom are either wealthy or powerful (or both), whose primary objective is to preserve their wealth and power in the short term, with little regard either for the long term implications or for the consequences of their policies on the rest of the population. He has harsh things to say, for example, about NAFTA and about our balance of payments problems, arguing that in the long run our elites have adopted policies that will be very painful indeed to the rest of us (though the rich will probably manage to avoid most of the consequences themselves.) His arguments are well documented, and worth considering.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Robert Cialdini, 2006, ISBN 10:0-226-64462-6

Dr. Robert Cialdini is Regents Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and CEO of his own company that provides influence training worldwide. This is the book to read after reading Scott Adam's 2017 book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter. Cialdini is the master persuader that Adams calls "godzilla" in his book. If you want to understand how everyone from politicians to marketing executives to special interest groups to sales people are messing with your mind every day, this is the book to read. You won't be happy with what you learn, especially if you like to think you are not susceptible to influence, but you will be better prepared to deal with the real world.

The Foreign Policy Dis-connect: What Americans Want from Our Leaders but Don't Get

Benjamin Page &; Marshall Boulton, 2006, ISBN 10:0-226-64462-6

Based on a series of surveys taken between 1974 and 1988 by the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations, this book makes two points: (1) despite some relatively minor party, regional and religious variations, the American public has a remarkably consistent view of what they want in American foreign policy, and (2) they differ significantly from the views of the ruling elites of the past few decades, irrespective of political party. For example, the America public cares more about the health of the domestic economy than the ruling elites, and prefers cooperative multilateral diplomacy more than the Washington insiders. Very illuminating.

Dangerous Nation: America's Place in the World from its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Robert Kagen, 2006, ISBN 0-375-41105-4

Kagen is the author of Paradise and Power (see 2003 below). This first volume of a planned two-volume review of American foreign policy takes us up to the beginning of the Spanish-American war. Kagon's thesis is that America has always been viewed by others as a dangerous nation, first for its expansionist policies as it swept across the North American continent swallowing up English, Spanish, French and Russian settlements and land claims, and second because the evident success of its liberal government encourages others to demand democracy and threatens authoritarian rule anywhere in the world. Very thoughtful and well argued.

This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession

Daniel Levitin, 2006, ISBN 978-0-452-28852-2

A wonderfully readable book that explores the amazing neuroscience behind our experience of music. As usual, things in nature are endlessly more subtle and complex than we think they are at first glance. Lots of fun to read.

America Against The World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked

Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, 2006, ISBN 13:978-0-80509-7721-6

Based largely on some 91,000 interviews worldwide between 2002 and 2005 by the Pew Research Center's Global Attitude Survey, this book presents an interesting and somewhat unexpected view of American attitudes. Among other findings, there is less difference than one might expect between "red" and "blue" Americans, but more difference between mainstream Americans and our political elites. On many issues, Americans are more like the rest of the world than Western Europeans are. And while our political elites sometimes favor (at least in their rhetoric) exporting our way of life to the rest of the world, Americans in general have no such interest, and in fact are prone to ignore the rest of the world whenever they can.

The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape The Future

Vali Nasr, 2006, ISBN 13:978-0-393-06211-3

Nasr is a professor of Middle East and South Asia politics at the Naval Postgraduate School. His contention is that, just as the conflict between Catholics and Protestants shaped the history of Europe for centuries, the conflict within Islam between the Sunni and the Shia has shaped Middle Eastern history for centuries, and will shape it in the future. This book explores in detail that theological and political tension within Islam, from its historical roots to the present. It also in passing shows, once again, how poorly the current American political system understands the social, religious, and political complexities of the world.

The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change A Culture And Save It From Itself

Lawrence Harrison, 2006, ISBN 13: 978-0-19-530041-3

This book takes its title from an astute quotation by Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." Harrison, author of Culture Matters (see 2000 below), argues with considerable data that cultural traits are a major factor in whether or not a society prospers in the modern world. And we can certainly see dramatic examples all over the globe these days. He then makes the liberal case for using the political process to change dysfunctional cultures in ways which improve their prospects in the world. A good book.

America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

Mark Steyn , 2006, ISBN 0895260786

Mark Steyn has regular columns in such publications as the London Telegraph and the Atlantic Monthly. This is his first full-length book. Although his tone is jocular and witty, his message is deadly serious. Much of the first world (Europe, Russia, Japan, etc) has birth rates below maintenance level, and will lose a large proportion of their population in the next few decades. Meanwhile, the Muslim world has an exploding population and a strong religious fervor, and is exporting both to fill the vacuum left as first world countries depopulate themselves. America is an exception – we are maintaining (barely) our population level – but in a few decades we may stand alone, facing a world predominantly Muslim, predominantly hostile to us, and with a stronger will to succeed and conquer than our own will to survive.

Letter to a Christian Nation

Sam Harris, 2006, ISBN 0307265773

Sam Harris’s previous book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (see 2005 below), argued the case against religious belief in more measured, philosophical tones. In this little book Harris argues that our own nation’s religious beliefs are making us a real and present danger to the world, probably even more of a danger than the irrational beliefs of Islamic terrorists. Those who are unwilling to question their beliefs and expose them to critical analysis of course won’t read it. But the rest of us ought to pay attention, if only for the long-term safety of our own offspring.

The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It and How to Get it Back

Andrew Sullivan, 2006, ISBN 0060188774

Andrew Sullivan, as editor of the New Republic and a frequent essayist for Time and The Sunday Times of London, has been a major conservative voice in U.S. politics for 15 years. He is concerned in this book about recovering “true” conservatism from the clutches of the religious right. But what makes the book really interesting is his extended exploration of the fundamentalist’s mind set, whether Christian or Muslim or Communist or some other “dogma”.

Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency

Richard Posner, 2006, ISBN 13: 978-0-19-530427-5

Posner is a Federal Appeals Court judge, lecturer at the Chicago Law School, and author of several other highly respected books. This book, written for constitutional lawyers and government policy makers, is nevertheless profoundly important for the rest of us as well. It is all too easy to condemn as violations of civil liberties all sorts of actions that, pragmatically, are necessary in times of war or national emergency. There are times when individual rights must give way to the greater public good, and of course there are also times when the government unnecessarily oversteps its bounds in the name of national security. This closely reasoned book explores the judiciary’s work in trying to keep these two conflicting “rights” in balance.

Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery

David Warsh, 2006, ISBN 978-0-393-05996-0

A wonderful and quite readable book about the search in Economics for a means to model and explain the effects of the growth of knowledge, and the role that knowledge plays in explaining why some nations are progressing economically so much faster than others. Along the way it also gives a good picture of how academic theories evolve amid the tensions and rivalries of different schools and departments.

The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire

Harold James , 2006, ISBN 0691122210

Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University. This thin but information-dense book argues that the very process of establishing international rules of trade and diplomacy (generally considered good things) bring about the politics of empire (generally considered a bad thing). And he argues that this is a not a new observation; Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations and Gibbins in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire both made similar points in 1776, though modern interpreters of these works generally miss it. A very good book that will take several readings to grasp all the interconnections and subtleties.

War: Ends and Means (Second Edition)

Paul Seabury and Angelo Codevilla, 2006, ISBN 978-1574886108

Seabury and Codvilla write to break through the wall of ignorance and denial about war that seems to surround contemporary American. Wars are inevitable (as history shows), whether we wish them or not, and often war, bad as it is, is preferable to the enslavement or extermination that is the alternative (ask the Jews about this, or ask those being slaughtered every day by the new Islamic Nation). But wars are useless exercises unless a nation has a clear idea of what their ultimate objectives are and how they are likely to achieve those objectives. This is an important book!

American Theocracy : The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury

Kevin Phillips, 2006, ISBN 067003486X

Kevin Phillips, nominally a Republican political strategist, argues that “a reckless dependency on shrinking oil supplies, a milieu of radicalized (and much too influential) religion, and a reliance on borrowed money….now constitute the three major perils to the United States in the twenty-first century”. Hard to argue with that!

Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Daniel C. Dennett , 2005, ISBN 067003472X

Danial Dennet is a professor of philosophy and the director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, and author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (1996). Dennet explores the question of where religion comes from, why the phenomena (with endless local variations) seems to be endemic across all sorts of cultures, and what evolutionary purposes it serves. He doesn’t have definitive answers; rather he poses challenging questions and hypothesis that are worth exploring. His knowledge spans an amazingly wide range, from neurobiology to social anthropology. A wonderful book.

Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies Against America

Walid Phares , 2005, ISBN 1-4039-7074-2

Phares, who is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and an MSBBC/NBC correspondent, argues that most academics who interpret the Middle East for the government don’t really understand it, and many have been systematically courted and deluded over the past few decades by the jihadists with petrodollars. He details the thinking and world views of the Muslim jihadists from the inside, having been raised within the culture that promotes them, and lays out what he thinks is their long-term strategy. This is a contrarian view, but well argued and worth paying attention to.

The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (Revised Edition)

Richard Heinberg, 2005, ISBN 0-86571-529-7

Heinberg is on the faculty if the New College of California in Santa Rosa, and this is his third book on this subject. Of note in this book is his extensive review of the relationship of energy use to the progressive development of civilizations, and his emphasis on Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) as a way to examine the potential energy replacements for petroleum. The short summary is that most of the currently touted energy replacements are highly inefficient – taking almost as much energy to create as the energy they provide. A few, such as ethanol, actually may take more oil to produce than the oil they would presumably replace. Worth reading.

Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare

Colin S. Gray, 2005, ISBN 0-29784-627-2

Colin Gray is Professor of International Politics and Strategic Studies at the University of Reading, England, and for many years a major consultant to the US and British governments on defense issues. He argues from a historical perspective that the next century will continue to have wars just as preceding centuries have, despite the current orthodox view among many of the political elite that the world has moved beyond such conflicts. Or as he puts it in the introduction, “Another Bloody Century does not argue that nothing changes, only that little if anything of importance does.” A very good book with the broad historical perspective lacking in most current debate on the subject.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

Charles Mann, 2005, ISBN 1-4000-4006-X

Like the (now discredited) myth that chimpanzees are peaceful creatures, environmental activists have long believed that Native American tribes were small, primitive, and lived lightly on the land in ways we ought to emulate. Mann summaries the recent research that challenges all these views, painting instead a picture of an American population (before European diseases wiped out most native Americans) perhaps larger than Europe’s in 1491, of technological advances in some areas beyond those of the Europe of 1491, and of very substantial human modification of the landscape and ecology. Not only a good book, but yet another reminder that all knowledge is tentative, and subject to revision in the light on new data.

The New World Disorder: Reflections of a European

Tzvetan Todorov, translated by Andrew Brown, 2005, ISBN 0745633692

Tzvetan Todorov is Director of Research at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research) in Paris. This thin book gives a good view of American policy as seen by a liberal European (not necessarily French) intellectual, and argue that there is a structural problem in current foreign affairs, not necessarily all due to American policy.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Steven Levitt, 2005, ISBN 0-06-073132-X

Yet another author who demonstrates that the data often don’t support what we would like to believe. Levitt is an unusually bright guy who is adept at teasing out from the data underlying causes and effects. His studies of why the nationwide crime rate has dropped so precipitously, whether the quality of schools really make a difference in how kids do in life, and whether sumo wrestlers and school teachers cheat are all fascinating and fun to read. A great book.

God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It

Jim Wallis, 2005, ISBN 0-06-055828-8

Religion, generally Christian, has been entwined within American history and American politics since this nation was born. We have been through many phases of emphasizing religion, and a few recent phases of denying altogether the place of religion in our national life. Wallis argues that God does have a place in our national life, but that neither the fundamentalists on the political Right nor the secularists on the political Left have a viable view of what that place should be. An important book to read for those on both sides of the current national debate.

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Sam Harris, 2005, ISBN 0-393-32765-5

In polite society it is considered impolite to discuss religion, and downright rude to subject someone else’s religion to rigorous intellectual inquiry. Harris argues that when millions are slaughtered each year and billions (the majority women and children) are systematically oppressed, exploited, abused, denigrated, mistreated, and even murdered as a result of various religious beliefs, it is highly immoral not to subject these beliefs to critical rational examination. Moreover, when fundamentalist believers now have the power to kill hundreds of millions in the name of their faith (think of a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, or Israel and Iran, for example), it is suicide not to discuss the underlying religious beliefs that drive such insanity. This is not just a problem of Islam, or just of third-world countries. Polls suggest that about 40% of Americans believe, on the basis of their faith but with no creditable evidence, that the world was created 6000 years ago, so this irrationality permeates our own society as well. Not a book for those who are too emotionally committed to their beliefs to subject them to rational examination, but profoundly important.

Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies

Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, 2004, ISBN 1-59420-008-4

Buruma and Margalit are professors at Bard College and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, respectively. This brilliant little book explores the underpinnings of the antagonism of some toward the West. Surprisingly, those underpinnings are themselves largely based on Western philosophical thought, especially the utopian and romantic (and largely unrealistic) views of seventeenth and eighteenth century German and French philosophers.

America’s Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle between America and its Enemies

George Friedman, 2004, ISBN 0-385-51245-7

The American political system isn’t very good at understanding “the big picture” in world events, and the media even less so. George Friedman, the founder and CEO of STRATFOR, a leading private intelligence and forecasting service, has written a brilliant discussion of our “terrorist” enemies and their tactics and goals, and a brilliant dissection of the problems with our political and intelligence systems which make them less than ready to deal with these sorts of threats. Well worth reading.

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

Susan Jacoby, 2004, ISBN 0-8050-7776-6

In this age when right wing religious fundamentalism seems to be a growing force in America, this book serves a useful purpose by reminding us that the battle of religion vs secularism has been a constant feature of America history since the founding of the nation, as the history of the Comstock laws and the Scopes trial remind us. It is also useful in that it corrects some common current myths, such as that the clergy were always opposed to slavery.

The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror

Bernard Lewis, 2004, ISBN 978-0812967852

Bernard Lewis has written a number of very good books about the Middle East. This one is especially important, because it is evident from the events of the past several decades that the American public in general, as well as the political elite in Washington, don't really understand the world view of the so-called "Arab street", and that has resulted in a number of expensive embarrassments and missteps in our foreign policy. We tend (quite naturally) to think that the Arab world sees the world more or less the way we do. But that is not the case - they see a very different world. Lewis does a good job of introducing us to that world view, and the historical antecedents that have shaped it.

Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror

Richard A. Clarke, 2004, ISBN 0-7432-6024-4

Richard Clarke held high-level position in defense and intelligence from the presidency of Ronald Regan through the presidencies of Bill Clinton and the second Bush, so he saw from the inside most of the decisions that lead up to 9/11, and many of the critical decisions made after 9/11. As he makes plain in the introduction, this is his first-person eyewitness account of the events – others may have seen things differently. Still, the story he tells is enlightening, revealing both the smart things the government did, and the really dumb things that bureaucratic inertia and turf fights produced. Well worth reading.

War, Terror, Peace and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk

Walter Russell Mead, 2004, ISBN 1-4000-7703-6

Mead is a senior fellow on the Council for Foreign Affairs, and author of several other respected books, some with a slight liberal slant. In this small book he offers a relatively non-partisan perspective on the changing balance of power between four major political views of the American public (economic nationalists, idealistic internationalists, isolationists, and popularist nationalists) and the political elites, and the resulting shifts on the American approach to foreign policy. He also explores the ongoing shift from what he calls Fordism to Millennium Capitalism and the impact that is having on foreign policy. A good, thoughtful book with some new perspectives.

Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

Niall Ferguson, 2004, ISBN 1-59420-013-0

Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard as well as a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus Collage, Oxford, and is also the author of Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (see 2002 below). His argument is that America has an empire, whether we admit it or not, and that on balance a liberal American imperialism is better than most of the likely alternatives. However, since Americans are not temperamentally or culturally comfortable administering an empire, our empire is likely to be relatively fragile, dysfunctional and short lived. His scholarship and the range of his arguments is truly impressive.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Jared Diamond, 2004, ISBN 0670033375

As in his previous book, Guns Germs and Steel (see 1997 below), Jared builds from a central question. In this case the question is “what makes some societies succeed for thousands of years, and others collapse?” There is no single answer, of course, but Diamond homes in on five basic causes which, alone or in combination, seem to be the key drivers for social collapse. Very good.

Don’t think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

George Lakoff, 2004, ISBN 1-931498-71-7

This slim little volume is an action-oriented condensation of Lakoff’s Moral Politics (see below, 2002), which focuses on the role of metaphors and cognitive frames in political debate. Lakoff’s view is that conservatives have understood cognitive frames and made good use of them, while liberals (aka “progressives”) have not. As a result, conservatives control the language and content of current political debate, which is why liberals are out of power. Conservatives have learned, for example, to reframe “tax cuts” as “tax relief”, thus bringing into the debate all the unconscious frame references that go with “relief” (from pain, from oppression, etc.). If liberals are to reclaim power and restore the traditional conservative-liberal political balance, they need to learn how to reframe their own essential values in ways which resonate with the electorate’s existing frames and metaphors. A very good book by a brilliant linguist.

The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

Richard Dawkins, 2004, ISBN 0-618-00583-8

Evolution by natural selection, with the gene as a major player, is by now pretty well accepted, except for a minority who are emotionally committed to a literal interpretation of their sacred texts. But, as is almost always the case in nature, the whole story is much more subtle and wonderfully complex that it first appears. In this book Dawkins unravels some of these subtleties and complexities in a well written and interesting “Canterbury Tale” of evolution’s progress, using the tale of this species or that to explain some of the finer points of evolution’s machinery, some of the innovative techniques that have been developed for untangling the evolutionary process, and some of the ways we can easily misinterpret or misunderstand what is actually happening.

The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic

Chalmers Johnson, 2004, ISBN 0-8050-7797-9

Johnson’s thesis is that over the past half dozen administrations of both parties, the shaping of American foreign policy has increasingly moved into the hands of the military and unelected elites, and out of Congressional oversight, and as a result we are in danger of losing our republic. Although Johnson’s far-left ideology forces him to assume the worst possible motives for all American actions, he nevertheless makes an arresting case, buttressed with considerable research, and it’s worth considering his claims seriously.

Where the Right went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency

Patrick Buchanan, 2004, ISBN 0-312-34115-6

Buchanan, nominally a conservative, is the odd man out in American politics: opposed to most of the positions of both the current political left-wing and the neoconservative right-wing. Nevertheless, he lays out some compelling arguments in this book that ought to be thought about seriously. His main contention is that the policies of the past 50 years are leading America into a decline not unlike that of the British Empire in the last century, and driven by many of the same mistakes.

The Story of Human Language (Audio lectures)

Prof. John McWhorter, 2005, The Teaching Company, course 1600

McWhorter, now a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has also authored a number of good books and articles on linguistics and on black culture (see for example Losing the Race: Self-sabotage in Black America, under 2001 below). This 36 lecture series is easy to listen to and wonderfully informative for those of us who weren’t quite sure what the field of linguistics really encompasses. It is also instructive in the way it displays the enormous range and variability of human language structures – yet another example that helps to lift us out of our parochial view of the world.

The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West

Gilles Kepel, 2004, ISBN 0-674-01575-4

A wonderfully thorough, and quite readable summary of the intricate twists and turns in American foreign policy towards the Middle East, the Arab world and the many Islamic jihad movements from Roosevelt’s 1945 meeting with king Saud of Saudi Arabia to the present, with particular attention to the origins and influence on foreign policy of the American neoconservative movement in recent years.

The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Barnett, 2004, ISBN 0-399-15175-3

Barnett is a senior member of the Pentagon’s pool of strategic researchers, and a professor at the Naval War College. But he does not present the Pentagon’s current politically correct views. Instead he presents an alternative perspective on today’s world, based on the concept of “rule sets”, and analyzes how they are changing, or need to change, to keep up with cultural and technological changes, and what happens when they don’t change or adapt fast enough.

Global Crises, Global Solutions

Bjorn Lomborg (Ed) 2004, ISBN 10-521-60614-4

See Lomborg’s previous book, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (2001). This volume documents the results of the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus project, in which a group of the world’s leadings economists and specialists attempted to prioritize the critical issues currently facing the world, and then address the top 10 items on their list, documenting the current state of knowledge and proposing and critiquing possible solutions. The emphasis is on finding cost-effective solutions, since too often radical solutions are proposed that sound good, but are not economically sound and hence not politically viable. Very good.

Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror

By “Anonymous”, 2004, ISBN 1574888498

This is the second book by this author (see below in 2003 for the first book), and it extends the content of the first book with a brilliant and deeply troubling topical analysis of our policies. According to the author we are in for a very long and very bloody confrontation, not the quick and sanitary conventional war envisioned by our political and military leaders, and our current very naïve policies are not helping the situation. Nor does the nation or its political leaders in either party seem to understand the true nature of the problem or be ready to pay the bloody price which the author assures us we will have to pay – whether we like it or not – to survive this war intact.

Civilization and its Enemies: The Next Stage of History

Lee Harris, 2004, ISBN 0-7432-5749-9

Harris’s book is about forgetting – how we in our modern first-world comforts have forgotten that through most of history, and still today in many parts of the world, most people never knew when their crops would be plundered and their children sold into slavery by the next passing tyrant or pack of brigands – “we have forgotten the face of the enemy”. This book is about how a liberal, progressive civilization deals with ruthless enemies who don’t play by the same rules. Very relevant to today’s issues.

Who Are We: The Challenges to America’s National Identity

Samuel Huntington 2004, ISBN 978-0684870540

Huntington’s predictions in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order turned out to be largely correct, despite the attacks it suffered from liberal academics who wanted to believe something else, so one ought to pay attention to this book, in which he once again argues against the current liberal fad of multiculturalism and warns of the dangers it poses to America.

Military Power : Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle

Stephen Biddle, 2004, ISBN 0691116458

Biddle is one of the most outstanding current defense analysts in the USA. He argues, in great technical detail and with much historical background, that despite the US fascination with developing ever more advanced weaponry, modern battles are won or lost on the basis of their tactics, their flexibility of command, and the effectiveness of using combined arms. Battles are not won by gadgetry, however expensive and impressive it may be. Runs counter to most of the current Pentagon thinking, and is therefore an important book to read.

The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21^st Century

Thomas X. Hammes, 2004, ISBN 0-7603-2059-4

Hammes, a full Marine colonel still on active duty, has spent much of his career training (US backed) insurgents around the world. His view of 4^th generation war (long term, low intensity, transnational asymmetric guerilla wars, as in Iraq) is first hand, and in this excellent book he describes the evolution of 4^th generation war from its birth in China under Mao through to the current worldwide Al Qaeda network, and he argues that the US military establishment, still prepared for 3^rd generation war (maneuver warfare), is poorly prepared for the tasks it will face in the next century, and discusses the military and political reforms that will be needed to face and defeat current and future insurgent opponents of the US.

The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America’s Economic Future

Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, 2004, ISBN 0—262-11286-8

Explores in great detail the changing American demographics, and the implications these changes have for our economic future, including especially the effects it has on such large government programs as social security and Medicare.

Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama Bin Laden, Radical Islam & the Future of America
by Anonymous, 2003, ISBN 1574885537

This book, by “Anonymous”, an active senior US intelligence analyst with extensive Middle Eastern experience (the Washington press quickly identified “anonymous” as Michael Scheuer of the CIA), is of profound importance in the current debate over how best to deal with Islamic terrorism. Fundamentally the author thinks we Americans are badly mistaken to think of Osama and his followers as “terrorists”, rather than recognizing that they are exceedingly intelligent, well organized and patient warriors battling us from a profound sense of religious duty to protect their religion, a sense which is widely shared and applauded throughout the Islamic world. This first book traces in some detail all that is known about Osama’s evolution into our implacable enemy, and into the inspiration for much of the Islamic world.

Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21^st Century
William Bonner and Addison Wiggin, 2003, ISBN 0-471-44973-3

Bonner is a contrarian investment advisor, and this book argues that structural factors will soon bring an end to the long American prosperity. Interesting enough for its main thrust, what really makes this book a gem are the many philosophical byways Bonner takes in exploring why crowds do what they do, and how groupthink creates realities.

The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World
Immanuel Wallerstein 2003, ISBN 1565847997

Wallerstein argues that despite America’s apparent dominance in the world, in truth that dominance is precariously balanced and largely illusionary, and in fact real dominance has been declining since the Vietnam War. A contrarian view, but one worth considering seriously.

Theater of War: In Which the Republic Becomes an Empire
Lewis Lapham, 2003, ISBN 1-56584-847-0

Lapham’s thesis is that most of Washington’s actions and the media’s coverage, from both political parties, is theater put on by people who really don’t understand the world very well. He is much concerned that there is virtually no substantive public debate about the critical issues of the day, and worries that as a result we are in serious danger of losing our republic. In his original short essays he is easy to read; collected into a full-length book the constant sarcasm becomes a bit wearying after a while, even though he is a good writer. Nevertheless, he makes good points and his contrarian interpretation of events is worth considering seriously.

Younger Next year: A Guide to Living Like 50 Until You’re 80 and Beyond

Chris Crowley & Henry Lodge, MD. 2003, ISBN 0-7611-3423-9

We used to think growing into doddering, drooling old men and women was “natural” and unavoidable. However biochemical research over the past decade has established that most aging effects are not natural, and are to a large extent avoidable, so that while we may still have a natural limit to our lifespans, barring accidents or comparatively rare diseases we can live almost all of that lifespan as fit and active individuals. This is a very practical and readable book about how to achieve that lifestyle, based on good science and sound advice.

Ripples of Battle: How wars of the past still determine how we fight, how we live and how we think.

Victor Davis Hanson, 2003, ISBN 0-385-50400-0

Hanson, a prolific and brilliant writer (see as well below Carnage and Culture, 2001, and An Autumn of War, 2002), analyzes the profound effects some key past battles have had on the evolution of our ways of life and of thought. In some ways, this is a continuation of the analysis theme he started in Carnage and Culture.

A Declaration of Interdependence: Why America Should Join the World

Will Hutton, 2003, ISBN 0393057259 (also printed in Britain under the title The World We Are In, ISBN 0349114714)

A very cogent and well-reasoned appeal by a somewhat left-of-center British journalist, sometime editor in chief of The Observer, who argues for a more European view of the world, with more focus on the long-term social contracts and less on short term shareholder value so important in America. Quite good, and especially important as it gives a somewhat different view of the world than we get from the American press and writers.

Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions

Clyde Prestowitz, 2003, ISBN 0465062792

There is substantial evidence that much of the rest of the world is increasingly distrustful of America and American power. Some liberals have blamed this on poor American policy, but their ideologically-based arguments are ultimately not very convincing. Prestowitz, a conservative with substantial government and private experience in international trade policy, makes much the same case, but for more persuasive and well-documented reasons. Clear and well written. A very important book.

Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill

Jessica Stern, 2003, ISBN 0-06-050532

Jessica Stern, a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is one of the nation’s foremost experts on terrorism. In her search to understand the roots of terrorism, she has interviewed terrorists – domestic and foreign – in their homes, in prison, and in their hiding places. What emerges is a complex picture of the motives that drive terrorists, and the social forces that keep terrorist organizations together. Her conclusions at the end about how we must confront the terrorist threat are of particular interest.

Global Disorder: How to Avoid a Fourth World War

Robert Harvey, 2003, ISBN 1-84119-838-2

This is an update of Harvey’s 1995 book Return of the Strong. Harvey, a onetime MP and member of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, and onetime assistant editor of The Economist, provides a brilliant, pragmatic, and wide-ranging survey of the current political and economic instabilities in today’s world which might, if mishandled, eventually lead to another major war, and offers some strategies for maintaining world stability. Of particular interest to Americans because he offers a British perspective which, while essentially pro-American, is not colored by the knee-jerk political and moral ideology which taints so much of our internal national debates.

Lies (and the Lying Liars who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right

Al Franken, 2003, ISBN 0-525-94764-7

Although this is not a heavyweight book, but rather a humorous look at the far right by someone who is openly liberal, it nevertheless serves an important purpose. While Goldberg’s book Bias (see 2002 below) argues that the media biases the news (and it does, but not necessarily politically), Franken argues, and documents, that some of the right-wing idols tell outright lies, and get away with it! No doubt there are liberal liars in the media as well. The real point is to alert us once again that the media is not a wholly trustworthy source of information, and on important issues we need to go back to original sources!

The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad

Fareed Zakaria, 2003, ISBN 0393047644

There is a durable American myth that giving people the right to vote for their leaders automatically brings a desirable, democratic state. Fareed argues that in the absence of a liberal tradition in a culture -- a rule of law, separation of powers, and effective protection of individual rights, democratic elections are as likely as not to install autocratic leaders or simply legitimize theocracies, kleptocracies or dictatorships, as has happened often in recent years. In fact, Fareed argues that democracy does not always work, and that even where it does work it requires strong limits to work effectively, and he explores the problems that have come from democratic popularization in the US over the past few decades (California comes immediately to mind). A truly profound book.

20:21 Vision: Twentieth-Century Lessons for the Twenty-first Century

Bill Emmott, 2003, ISBN 0-374-27965-9

Bill Emmott is Editor in Chief of The Economist. In this book, arguing from past history, he posits that the two primary questions that will determine how the world goes in the Twenty-first century will be (1) will America continue to lead the world and guarantee the peace, and (2) will capitalism continue to spread, or be challenged by a new alternative economic order. He examines both of these questions in detail, exploring factors that might influence the answers to these key questions. A fascinating analysis of the political and economic history of the Twentieth century.

Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order

Robert Kagan, 2003, ISBN 1-4000-4093-0

This brilliant and cogent little book is an expansion of Kagan’s article “Power and Weakness” in the June/July 2002 issue of Policy Review – an article that caused a good bit of controversy in the diplomatic world. In it he explores the differing world views of America and Europe as a function of their history and their relative strength militarily and economically. In a nutshell, America as the superpower acts as it must in that role, and Europe acts in the only way weaker powers can act. Indeed, Europe’s current commitment to a Wilsonian “postmodern paradise” is only possible under the benign umbrella of American power, both to protect them from outside threats and to quell internal distrust about a reunified Germany. A valuable contribution to the discussion about world order.

Why Things Break: Understanding the World by the way it Comes Apart

Mark Eberhart, 2003, ISBN 1-40000-4883-4

The study of fractures in materials sounds like a fairly esoteric field, yet Eberhart, a professor at the Colorado School of Mines, has written an engaging little book about his personal journey from childhood to the present trying to understand why some things break under stress and others just bend. Along the way the reader will also learn all sorts of interesting little facts, and get some insight into how science and the scientific community really works. A good read.

Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservative Think

George Lakoff, 2002, ISBN 0226467716

Lakoff, a professor of Linguistics at UC, Berkeley, approaches the question of the chasm between liberals and conservatives by assuming that each side is wholly consistent within its own world view. He then attempts to develop a cognitive model that explains the differences in the two world views. He argues that these are more than just partisan differences – they are deeply rooted in differences in family life. Useful not only for its main argument, but also for once again showing that culture can shape two people’s fundamental world views in such diverse ways that when they look at exactly the same event or situation, they actually perceive different things.

Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich

Kevin Phillips, 2002, ISBN 0-7679-0534-2

A very detailed, scholastic, and non-partisan historical review of wealth in America. Of particular interest (or concern) are the large number of parallels between the initial signs of decline of previous empires (Spanish, Dutch, and British in particular) and the current conditions in America (increasing wealth inequity, focus on paper wealth versus real productive activity, exportation of production to lower-cost offshore labor markets, etc). Popular books on the immanent decline of America come in waves every few years, but most are shallow and trendy. This one is different – it has a great deal of solid research and historical basis behind it.

Where is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life.

Stephen Webb, 2002, ISBN 0-387-95501-1

With about 100 billion galaxies in the known universe, each containing about 100 billion stars, it seems almost inconceivable that there are not other intelligent species in the universe. But to date we have detected no evidence of them, and that is the Fermi Paradox that has engendered decades of speculation. Webb, a physicist, has assembled fifty of the more interesting speculations for discussion. The result is a fascination book ranging widely over astronomy and cosmology, mathematics and statistics, the nature of civilizations, the nature of planetary formation and evolutionary processes, and many more topics. Truly a mind-stretching book.

An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War of Terrorism.

Victor Davis Hanson, 2002, ISBN 1-40003-113-3

A series of essays and articles written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, in which Hanson brings his profound classical scholarship and historical perspective to the unfolding events. Americans in general see events in the moment and are largely blind - even profoundly ignorant – of the historical context within which they are occurring. Hanson tries to remedy this a bit.

Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power

Niall Ferguson, 2002, ISBN 0-465-02328-2

Although it offends American sensibilities to say so, the truth is that the US has inherited a global empire, and we had better start learning how to manage it. Ferguson leads the reader through the history and the lessons of the British Empire, which certainly had its unpleasant aspects, but on the whole seems in the long run to have improved the lives of those who were part of it by imbuing them with some of the institutions and attitudes essential to creating stable democracies and liberal social orders. It is politically correct to decry colonialism, but in fact the British Empire, like the Roman Empire and the Mogul empire of Genghis Khan, demonstrate that the issue is much more complex than a simple good vs evil discrimination – empires sometimes (not always) bring order out of chaos, impose peace on endlessly warring factions, encourage trade, and diffuse widely some of the better institutions and attitudes found among their peoples.

Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World

Ralph Peters, 2004, ISBN 0-8117-0024-0

Ralph Peters is also the author of “Fighting for the Future” (1999 – see below). In this book, a collection of his recent articles, he examines America’s response thus far to global terror, and concludes that our political and military leaders really don’t understand the core issues, and that our current policies are probably going to be ineffective.

What Does a Martian Look Like: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life

Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, 2002, ISBN 0-471-26889-5

Most respected speculations about extraterrestrial life are made by astrobiologists, and that name, according to Stewart and Cohen, summarizes the major deficiency in their views - they are extrapolating from our astronomy and our biology. Hence they come to the conclusion that life, as we know it, can only survive under rare circumstances. Stewart and Cohen argue that view is far too narrow, and that life of some sort, and even intelligent life, is probably far more adaptable and varied than our small earthbound samples. Full of their usual wit, as well as penetrating analysis, this book greatly broadens the field of xenoscience (their own choice for a better word to describe the field as it should be studied).

The High Cost of Peace: How Washington's Middle East Policy Left America Vulnerable to Terrorism

Yossef Bodansky, 2002, ISBN 0-761-535799

Bodansky is the Director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. In addition, he is the Director of Research at the International Strategic Studies Association and a senior editor for the Defense and Foreign Affairs group of publications. In Michael Chrichton’s novel Rising Sun there is a wonderful scene early in the book, faithfully portrayed in the movie as well, when the audience suddenly realizes that things are not as nearly simple as they appear, and that in fact there are layers and layers of complexity and hidden agendas to the Japanese characters that are invisible to the naïve American. Bodansky’s analysis of the Middle East follows this model. He is sharply critical of recent administrations, both Democratic and Republican, arguing with a wealth of detail that our American view of the middle east is naïve and simplistic in the extreme, and that in fact very complex games are being played by all parties in the Middle East - Iraq, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Iran, Jordon and the Palestinians - both against us and against each other. Not everyone agrees with all of his points of view, but the underlying message that we are very naïve players in this game, with our glib talk of bringing democracy and free markets to the area, comes through convincingly.

Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11

Thomas L. Friedman , 2002, ISBN 0374190666

Friedman, who is the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, won his third Pulitzer prize with this book. It is important for two reasons. First, it counters much of the politically correct fuzzy thinking that has gone on since 9/11 about how it was somehow America’s fault, and second it outlines the Arab world’s real fundamental problem: an inability to move into the modern world. This is an inability born of the repressive regimes that rule most Arab countries, usually in tacit agreement with religious fundamentalists and often with American support, coupled with burgeoning largely-unemployed populations driven by unrestrained 24-hour TV and internet extremist propaganda. He makes it clear that much of the Arab world really does live on another planet from us, and the Arab street readily believes the most unlikely anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda. He argues persuasively that for our own safety America needs to stop treating Arab nations as just distant gas stations, and involve ourselves aggressively in bringing education, better government, and reality to these countries before their unrest spills into a true clash of civilizations.

Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World

Margaret Thatcher, 2002, ISBN 0-06-019973-3

Onetime Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher provides her perspective on the world, and on the roles Britain and America ought to play in the world. Though clearly conservative in outlook, this is no conservative polemic, but rather a well-reasoned review of world diplomacy during her term in office and since. It is especially useful because, while pro-American in overall tone, it provides a non-American point of view. Of particular interest are the “lessons” in diplomacy and national strategy liberally sprinkled throughout the text.

The Science of Discworld II: The Globe

Terry Prachett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, 2002, ISBN 009-1882737

This book is a second volume follow-on to The Science of Discworld, in which a delightful, humorous and insightful Terry Prachett science-fantasy story is interleaved, chapter by chapter, with Stewart and Cohen’s scientific and philosophical observations on the same subjects. Whereas the first book dealt with the physical processes by which the cosmos and our own home planet evolved, this second book deals with the evolution of human thought. Stewart (a mathematician) and Cohen (a reproductive biologist) offer an extraordinary range of perceptive ideas and hypothesis (See also their books below: Figments of Reality, 1995, The Collapse of Chaos, 1994, and What Does a Martian Look Like? The Science of Extraterrestrial Life, 2002)

The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs

David Pryce-Jones, 2002, ISBN 0-06-106047-0

The author argues convincingly that the apparently pathological activities of the Arab world are driven neither by the religion of Islam nor by nationalism, even though Arab leaders appeal to both in their media statements. Instead, he argues that all Arab relationships are in fact fundamentally driven by a family or community “shame and honor” response, which drives each individual to such actions as will elevate the “honor” of his group at the expense of everyone else. These arguments bear remarkable similarity to the “amoral familism” described by Edward Banefield in the 50's (see his book below under 1958). He also argues that we will never know how to deal with Arab problems as long as we continue to see them through romanticized and idealized “Eurocentric” viewpoints.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Malcolm Gladwell, 2002, ISBN 0-3163-46624

A fascinating discussion of why fads get started, how epidemics work, and why some ideas or products just suddenly take off while others, apparently equally appealing, don’t. Discusses the importance of “connectors”, mavens, and “stickiness” in this process.

Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the Edge of Technology

James R. Chiles, 2002, ISBN 0-06-662081-3

Human (as opposed to natural) disasters have a pattern - they tend to come from a string of small failures that are not noticed or at least not correctly interpreted until matters have gotten beyond recovery. From the sinking of the oil platform Ocean Ranger to the destruction of the shuttle Atlantis there are common lessons to be learned, and this book points them out.

Does America Need a Foreign Policy: Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century

Henry Kissinger, 2001, ISBN 0-648-85567-4

Kissinger approaches a wide ranging review of the current world state with a great deal of attention to the historical, social, economic and cultural contexts within which today’s foreign policy issues are embedded. He is a brilliant scholar and an engaging writer, with both a strong academic background and significant practical experience in the field. Whether one agrees with his views or not, the underlying message is clear - most foreign policy issues are nowhere near as simple as passionate but uninformed activists think they are. Kissinger’s other books about his time in office, such as The White House Years, Years of Upheaval and Years of Renewal are also worth reading for both the sense of how diplomacy really works, and for his keen insights into the character and culture of the world’s leaders and their peoples.

Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

Victor Davis Hanson, 2001, ISBN 0-385-72038-6

Hanson, a military and classical historian of some note, argues that western powers rose to dominance largely because they learned to wage war in a more disciplined manner than their opponents. He analyzes nine key battles, from the battle of Salamis in ancient Greece to the Tet offensive of Vietnam, to make his points. Of interest not only to those interested in military history, but also to those interested in the roots of our modern society.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in the Markets and in Life

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2001, ISBN 1587990717

Humans don’t understand probability very well, as the markets, the media, and many other facets of our world and lives prove. Nassim points out some of the fallacies we live with in a very readable and entertaining manner. This book will interest and is accessible to both the trained statistician and mathematician and the ordinary untrained lay person. But some of the implications are quite profound, both for investment strategy and for life in general.

A History of Freedom (Audio lectures)

Prof. J. Rufus Fears, 2001, The Teaching Company, course 480

Freedom, which we largely take for granted in our society, is actually a complex process which few societies in history have mastered. In a series of 36 brilliant lectures, Professor Fears traces the development of the ideas of individual and social freedom from its birth in Athens to the present day. It is clear that the American dream of spreading free societies throughout the world is naive - many cultures simply lack attitudes and social customs essential to achieving and maintaining freedom.

Untruth: Why the Conventional Wisdom is (almost Always) Wrong

Robert J. Samuelson, 2001, ISBN 0-8129-9164-8

We (the general public) believe many things which just aren’t supported by the facts, even though we would like to believe them because they support our current belief set. Samuelson’s columns over the years have found this a fruitful field. This is a collection of some of his most pointed columns.

Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News

Bernard Goldberg, 2001, ISBN 0-895-26190-1

That the media impress on the news their own liberal or conservative agendas and biases is hardly surprising - they do exactly what the rest of us do. What is surprising and instructive, however, are the more subtle and even unconscious manipulations made in the interests of making the news “more interesting” or “more palatable” or “more saleable” to the listening/viewing/reading public in the ongoing battle to win market share.

The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World

Bjørn Lomborg, 2001, ISBN 0-895-26190-1

Lomborg, a former member of Greenpeace and associate professor of statistics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Aarhus, challenges widely held beliefs that the world environmental situation is getting worse. Using statistical information from internationally recognized research institutes, he examines a range of major environmental issues that feature prominently in headline news around the world, including pollution, biodiversity, fear of chemicals, and the greenhouse effect, and documents that the world has actually improved. He also shows how many environmental organizations make selective and misleading use of scientific evidence to promote a sense of crisis and strengthen their political leverage.

Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World

Walter Russell Mead, 2001, ISBN 0-375-41230-1

Mead’s central argument in this book, well supported by his historical review, is that despite the conventional wisdom that America didn’t even have a foreign policy until World War II, and has been largely inept ever since, actually America has had an active foreign policy since its inception, and in general our foreign policy has been far wiser and far more effective that most other nations, from following our “Manifest Destiny” to sweep across the continent and unite the whole land into one nation (think how much less powerful we would be if what is now America were still divided up into separate Spanish and French and English and American nations) to our maneuvering in World War II that left us a superpower. As Mead argues, America’s foreign policy has shaped today’s world, and in general it has shaped it better than competing nations would have shaped it.

The Tragedy of Great Power Politics

John J. Mearsheimer, 2001, ISBN 978-0393323962

In foreign affairs, there are liberals and realists. Liberals view foreign affairs from an optimistic ideology that believes that reasonable people can always negotiate successfully, and that there is a better world ahead with world peace. Realists have a darker view that human nature hasn't changed appreciably in the past several thousand years, and so we need to deal with the world the way it really is, not the way we wish it were. John Mearsheimer is a foreign affairs realist (as are Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and Zbigniew Brzezinsk), and makes a very good case for this position in his 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. As he points out, the evidence of history is heavily on the side of realists and against the liberals. This is quite a readable book, but an important one.

Losing the Race: Self-sabotage in Black America

John McWhorter, 2001, ISBN 0060935936

McWhorter, an African-American himself and a professor of linguistics at Berkeley, advances the thesis that Black American culture has locked itself into a self-sustaining and self-defeating attitude of victimology, with some worrisome side attributes, such as the proud anti-intellectualism that black peer groups often display. Understandably, this is not a popular book in the black culture, and McWhorter has had to endure a good deal of unwarranted abuse from black leaders for writing it, but it is an important book to read, and his thesis is most likely largely valid.

Hubbert’s Peak:The Impending World Oil Shortage

Kenneth S. Deffeyes, 2001, ISBN 0-691-09086-6

Geophysicist M. King Hubbert used analysis in 1956 to predict that US oil production would peak in the early 1970's. His prediction was widely derided at the time by politicians, academics, and the oil companies, but it proved accurate - US oil production peaked in 1970 and has been dropping ever since. Kenneth Deffeyes, a Professor Emeritus at Princeton and a geologist, uses the same sort of analysis worldwide to predict that the world’s peak oil production will occur in the 2005-2009 time frame, and thereafter oil will become increasingly expensive as the easy-to-recover reserves are depleted. Not only is this an important book for its long-term implications, but Professor Deffeyes does a good job of teaching the reader where oil comes from, how it is distributed in the world’s geology, and how it is recovered.

The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization

Thomas L. Friedman, 2001, ISBN 0-374-185522

There is a good deal of debate about whether the driving force, the single “big idea” at the root of today’s global trends, is Huntingdon’s “clash of civilizations”, the power realignment between Europe and America after the Cold War, or some other factor. Friedman makes the case for globalization as today’s most significant factor. In particular, he argues that the “electronic herd”, those trillions of dollars of investment capital that now move around the world electronically at the click of a mouse button, are a powerful force in reshaping national economic and political systems, since they reward with cheap investment capital open, honest, rationally-run societies, while inefficiency, dishonesty and non-rational government policies cause this same capital to flee nations in hours.

Fleet Tactics and Coastal Combat, 2^nd Ed

Wayne P. Hughes, 2000, ISBN 978-1557503923

For all the importance of air power and air dominance, and now space dominance since space sensors are so important, naval power is still the foundation of American security, since we are a nation facing the two major oceans of the world, and since the majority of the world’s trade travels by sea. This book is an outstanding analysis of lessons learned from Nelson’s time through World War II and to more recent conflicts.

Rivers in Time: The Search for Clues to Earth’s Mass Extinctions

Peter D. Ward, 2000, ISBN 0-231-11862-7

This is an update and expansion of Ward’s 1994 book The End of Evolution: On Mass Extinctions and the Preservation of Biodiversity. Ward makes a gripping tale of the research that has uncovered a series of at least 15 mass extinctions in earths past, including at least three that destroyed most existing species. He argues that we are in the midst of yet another mass extinction that started a few thousand years ago as humans spread over the earth, and indeed that we humans are the cause of this one.

The Blackwinged Night: Creativity in Nature and Mind

F. David Peat, 2000, ISBN 0-7382-0205-3

Peat, a physicist with an extraordinary range of interests across science, the arts, philosophy and psychology, explores the essential nature of creativity in the context of some of the most fundamental questions of physics and the nature of the world. A delightful book worth picking up and rereading every few years.

From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present

Jacques Barzun, 2000, ISBN 0-06-017586-9

Barzun, a French-born American, student of law, history and culture, one of the founders of the discipline of cultural history, and sometime professor, dean of faculties and provost of Columbia University, has produced a massive 800-page summarization of his studies of Western history and culture from its emergence at the Renaissance and Reformation to the present day, outlining the cultural and intellectual threads which run through this period. Besides giving a new perspective on many of the issues and key players (Cromwell, for example, wasn’t at all the monster that popular myth makes him out to be), this study shows the intellectual roots of many of the cultural ideas we now take for granted (but perhaps ought to question).

Fleet Tactics and Costal Combat

Capt. Wayne P. Hughes Jr, USN (Ret.), 2000, ISBN 1-55750-392-3

Whatever one’s personal views of war, it is not possible to understand the past or rationally assess the available options in the present without understanding warfare. Hughes’ book is an excellent introduction to modern naval tactics, which are markedly different from the tactics of either air or ground warfare. In the process of exploring naval tactics, especially in the newly-important area of projecting effective force into costal waters, he teaches a good bit about the nature of tactical thinking in general.

Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being

George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez, 2000, ISBN 0-465-03771-2

Lakoff and Núñez are cognitive scientists fascinated with the field of mathematics. This book explores where mathematics comes from, starting with some primitive counting and quantity skills in infants and progressing, by means of increasingly complex cognitive structures, to the full expanse of advanced mathematics. The authors argue that mathematics is a wholly human mental construct (meaning that mathematics only exists in human consciousness – there is no “ideal” or Platonic mathematics out there in the universe waiting to be discovered), and that it is tightly coupled to our perceptual and motor experiences. This raises the interesting possibility that alien intelligences, with different perceptual and motor experiences, might well develop an entirely different mathematics – unrecognizable to us (and vice versa).

Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe

Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, 2000, ISBN 0-387-98701-0

Some decades ago Frank Drake and Carl Sagen proposed the “Drake equation” to estimate the prevalence of intelligent life in the known universe. The substance of their argument was that even if the odds of intelligent life around any given star were vanishingly small, the number of stars in the known universe is so immense (appx. 10²¹) that there surely must be millions of intelligent races, albeit perhaps none near us. Ward and Brownlee offer a counter argument. Although they assume simple life (viruses, bacteria, and perhaps even single-celled organisms) probably arise anywhere conditions are favorable, they suggest that a number of special conditions must occur for these simple life forms to have time enough to evolve to higher plant or animal forms before large-scale stellar incidents (like large asteroid hits or intense radiation from catastrophic processes in nearby stars) exterminate them, and that these special conditions are exceedingly rare in the universe. A fascinating and well thought out contribution to the debate. However, see also Cohen and Stewart’s rebuttal in What Does a Martian Look Like, (2002)

Culture Matters

Lawrence Harrison & Samuel Huntington, Eds, 2000, ISBN 0-465-03175-7

A collection of essays on the effect of culture on social progress. The editors have taken pains to assemble contrasting, differing, and even conflicting views in this collection. However, as a whole they challenge the current politically correct thinking that every culture can move into the modern world, and if they haven’t, it is someone else’s fault (colonialism, great powers, exploitation, etc.) rather than their own.

The New Prince

Dick Morris, 1999, ISBN 1-58063-079-0

In 1513 Niccolo Machiavelli published his book The Prince, a book still in print which any serious student of history or diplomacy ought to have read and re-read. Dick Morris offers a similar theme in this book - practical advice for American politicians on what works and what doesn’t these days. As the architect of Clinton’s mid-term reelection, Tony Blair’s successful bid for Prime Minister, and several other high-profile political successes, his wisdom is worth listening to.

The Accidental Theorist and Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science

Paul Krugman. 1999, ISBN 978-0393318876

Paul Krugman, 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, is a very smart guy, and an ardent apologist for the liberal views of economic policies.. His book The Accidental Theorist and Other Dispatches from the Dismal Science is a collection of some of his best his articles in the New York Times and elsewhere. I have to say that I often don't agree with his views, but that is all the more reason to try to understand them, and to understand the underlying assumptions that drive his views.

His views are important (a) because he represents the liberal position on many economic issues, and makes good cases for them and (b) because he may well be right and I may be wrong, and one needs to constantly question and challenge one's views if one is more interested in gaining understanding and approaching truth than in just being comfortable.

Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph?

Ralph Peters,1999, ISBN 0-8117-0651-6

An exceedingly important book, dense with common sense. Although nominally Peter’s focus is on the nature of the military we will need in the future, the essence of his message is that it is more important to understand the minds and cultures of our enemies than to invent yet more esoteric weapons systems. Peters argues persuasively that American will remain hugely dominant in the world for the foreseeable future, but that future will be increasingly bloody as failed states around the world return to Hobbsian brutality. This will require from us clear-eyed calculation about where military intervention is really needed and can really make a difference, and where it will just be a waste of American lives – something markedly different than our current media-driven reflexive drive to try to right all the world’s wrongs.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard Feynman

1999, ISBN 0-7382-0349-1

Richard Feynman, winner of the 1965 Nobel prize in Physics, was an extraordinary man. This collection of short works, interviews and speeches is full of fresh new outlooks on a diverse range of topics by a man who was a master of “out of the box” thinking.

The Future in Plain Sight: Nine Clues to the Coming Instability

Eugene Linden, 1998, ISBN 0-684-81133-2

Books on impending apocalypses or the immanent decline of America are a popular staple of the book trade, but a few are worth reading anyway. This is one. Linden argues that there are a few trends, already visible if one but looks, that outline some of our coming troubles in the world. Some of his arguments are not all that far from those in Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2005)

Lessons Learned the Hard Way: A Personal Report

Newt Gingrich, 1998, ISBN 0-06-019106-6

Politician’s books are generally ghostwritten, long on generalities and short on substance. This book is different. Gingrich, who is also a reputable historian and author of several other books, discusses frankly what he learned from his days in Congress, mistakes and all. Whether or not one agrees with his conservative bent, there is lots of good, sound information and advice in this book, and Democratic Party strategists would do well to read it for pointers on how to move their own party out of the minority.

Condemned to Repeat It: The philosopher who flunked life and other great lessons from history

Wiek Allison, Jeremy Adams & Gavin Hambly, 1998, ISBN 0-670-85951-6

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, a quotation from George Santatyana, is the focus of this book. The authors use lessons from history to drive home a set of basic principles for succeeding. Very good.

Figments of Reality

Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, 1997, ISBN 0-521-571553

Stewart & Cohen argue that the traditional scientific approach to understanding everything in reductionist terms (dissecting a process in detail down to its most primitive elements) doesn’t work - too many natural processes in the world are not only interdependent, but actually co-evolve, each changing the evolutionary history of the other. Hence evolutionary changes in prey drive evolutionary changes in the predators, which in turn drive changes in the prey... etc. For example, according to these authors, neither the evolution of human speech nor of human culture can be understood alone - each shaped the evolution of the other. A profound work, much enlivened by the authors’ wicked sense of humor.

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Samuel Huntington, 1997, ISBN 0-684-84441-9

A book of profound importance to anyone trying to understand today’s world. Huntington argues that despite all the talk about “globalization”, the world is in fact divided into a small number of core “civilizations”, distinguished by fundamental and resilient cultural differences which remain and will remain despite an apparent veneer of Westernization, and that a stable world order must account for this fact. He explores in depth America’s available survival strategies as other civilizations grow in power and seek to overtake our dominant world position. Should be read together with Howard Bloom’s Lucifer Principle, 1995, below. Readers interested in this subject should also read The End of History and the Last Man, by Francis Fukuyama (under 1993)

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Jared Diamond, 1997, ISBN 0-393-03891-2

A friend of Diamond’s in New Guinea asked the key question that frames this book: why have some cultures and peoples advanced so much faster than others? Diamond explores in some detail what resources (potential food crops, tamable animals, access to metals, easy transportation means, etc. etc.) major cultures have had, and how well they have exploited them. His conclusion, roughly, is that all major cultures have exploited to the limit what was available to them, and the past differences in rate of progress of cultures are largely attributable to the differences in resources, geography and climatic conditions that their location happened to give them.

The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives

Zbigniew Brzezinski 1997, ISBN 978-0-465-02726-2

Brzezinski takes the reader on a geostrategic and historical tour of the world, and discusses the various axis of power, or geopolitical “pivot points” in the world (past and present), in the context of how America should act to preserve its primacy in the world. It is another view of the “great game” that nations have played throughout recorded history, and I found his analysis fascinating.

The Trouble with Testosterone: and other essays on the biology of the human predicament

Robert Sapolsky, 1997, ISBN 0-684-83409-X

A wonderful, witty, and informative series of essays on science by a respected evolutionary biologist and neurobiologist, who also wrote another series of good essays under the title Why Zebras Don’t get Ulcers. Although the topics of the essays are matters dealing with human behavior, and the ways in which biology may or may not influence this behavior, an underlying point of these essays is the way in which good scientific method and clever researchers can tease out the subtleties in complex natural systems.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Carl Sagan, 1996, ISBN 0-394-53512X

In this, the last book that Carl Sagan wrote, he argues passionately and convincingly for the role of true science in modern life, and worries about the cultural tendency to denigrate scientists, to cast them in the role of unfeeling, insensitive, slightly mad “Dr. Stangeloves”, with the result that less and less of our young people find it appealing to go into the sciences, and more and more of the population appears to be reverting to the superstitions and prescientific thinking that we thought we had left behind in medieval times.

The Future of War: Power, Technology & American World Dominance in the 21^st Century

George and Meredith Friedman, 1996, 0-517-70403-X

George Friedman and his wife Meredith are the founders of STRATFOR, a leading private intelligence and forecasting service. In this book they examine the evolution of weapons from their infancy, when they revolutionize the battlefield, through to senility, when the cost of defending the weapon long enough for it to perform its mission exceeds its usefulness. Walled castles, armored knights, tanks, manned aircraft, battleships and aircraft carriers have all gone through this cycle. The Friedmans argue that new technologies such as intelligent precision munitions, GPS-guided cruise missiles, and space-based surveillance are revolutionizing warfare again. A fascinating book to read.

The Logic of Failure: Recognizing and Avoiding Errors in Complex Situations

Dietrich Dörner, 1996, ISBN 0-201-47948

First published in German in 1989, this translation was published in 1996. Based in part on studies of how people attempt to manage computer simulations of complex environmental problems, Dörner then shows how the same operator errors have appeared in real catastrophes, such as Chernoble. Has some very illuminating ideas about how people misperceive complex situations, and how they lock in too quickly on a fallacious model of what is happening, and then refuse to abandon that model even as evidence accumulates that their decisions are making the situation worse.

Making Movies

Sidney Lumet, 1996, ISBN 978-0679756606

Sidney Lumet, director of such successful movies as Serpico (1973) Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Q & A (1990) , has written a wonderful insiders book about movie –making., This is not an exposé of the lives of famous actors, but rather a discussion of what goes into the making of a movie from the director’s point of view. Fascination for those of us who have watched movie-making from the outside.

Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America

John Keegan, 1996, ISBN 0-679-42413

See the other John Keegan books listed later in this list. This most recent work is not only a good analysis of how the geography of the Eastern United States shaped the battle of the American Revolution and the Civil War, it is also an insightful and largely complementary view of America and the American spirit by an observant Englishman.

The Neurological Origins of Individuality (Audio lectures)

Prof. Robert Sapolsky, 1996, The Teaching Company, course 179

These eight lectures (the new expanded second edition is now 24 lectures) are quite accessible to the non-biologist, and very well done. They illustrate that individual variations in our neurobiology account for much of what we think of as our own unique personality. And they force us to re-assess how our society handles some deviant behavior - we have advanced enough to stop burning epileptics as demon-possessed, but we still jail and punish as criminals many people who actually suffer from biologically-based disabilities.

The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

Thomas Sowell, 1995, 0-465-08994-1

Sowell’s argument is that the ruling elite, not only of America, but of Western Europe as well, all share a more-or-less common world view, in which it is the task of the “anointed” leaders to identify “crisis” and enact huge and expensive government programs to solve them. What is remarkable about this world view is that it is highly resistant to real data about results.

Sowell identifies four typical stages: (1) The “crisis”, wisely discerned by the elite even though the masses (that's us) are clueless, (2) the “solution”, a massive government program of some sort, (3) the result – more often than not leading to all sorts of unintended and detrimental effects, and (4) the response, in which the elite explain to the masses why it is that their wise policy really was right even though the results were disastrous.

Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb

Richard Rhodes, 1995, ISBN 978-0684804002

The second book of Richard Rhodes’ excellent trilogy documenting the development of nuclear weapons in the US and the policies that accompanied their deployment. The other books are The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987) and Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons. (2010)

The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition in the Forces of History

Howard Bloom, 1995, ISBN 0-87113-664-3

Bloom uses a wide range of studies to show how “memes” (ideas) organize groups of people into super organisms (believers in Democracy, or Christianity, or Islam, or....) which behave in many ways similar to gene-driven individuals. He then looks at the “pecking order” phenomena as it applies to these super organisms and draws some interesting conclusions. At the core of his argument is the view that most of the things that we think of as bad or evil about humans (like aggression and war) are, in fact, wired in natural behaviors which serve clear evolutionary purposes. A very sobering and thoughtful book

About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution

Paul Davies, 1995, ISBN 0-671-79964-9

Until Einstein’s time, physicists assumed time was “just there”, another natural attribute of physical processes and objects. Most of us still make that assumption, but in fact there are difficult and unresolved questions about time - does time really flow from future to past or is that just a quirk of the way we humans perceive things? Is the arrow of time reversible just as almost all other physical processes are, or does time always flow in just one way, from future to past. Davies has produced a very readable book in this subject, exploring some difficult and abstruse philosophical and scientific questions in quite an understandable manner.

Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Jean Heidmann, 1995, ISBN 0-521-45340-2

There are an estimated 100 billion galaxies, comprised of some 10²¹ stars in the observable universe out to the current cosmological horizon of about 14 billion light years. Therefore, even if the probability of a planet supporting life around a given star is vanishingly small, and the probability, given life, that it will be intelligent life is also vanishingly small, there are almost certainly millions if not billions of intelligent life forms is the cosmos. Of course, none may be near us, or if they are, we ourselves may not be advanced enough to know how to recognize them. However, the international SETI (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) effort is trying, and Heidmann's book, translated from the French, is a good technical introduction to the current theoretical and technical state of this effort, which has moved in 40 years from Drake's single-channel study of two nearby stars in 1959 to Horowitz's current attempt at Harvard to deploy the BETA billion-channel radio telescope search system. Technical, but quite accessible to anyone with a reasonable science background.

If You Came This Way

Peter Davis, 1995, ISBN 0-471-11074-4

One of the most difficult social issues of our time is that posed by the growing underclass who lack the skills, ability, and/or work attitudes required to make a living in our increasingly complex culture. Peter Davis has traveled the country talking to these people in an attempt to understand who they are and how they got where they are, and his findings suggest that many of our middle-class views of this underclass are seriously flawed, so that our attempts to solve the problems they pose are likely to be similarly flawed.

The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2000 Years

Bernard Lewis, 1995, ISBN 0-684-80712-2

Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, is a prolific writer about the Middle East. This book encompasses, in brief but very readable form, the history of the Middle East from before Christianity and then Islam arose through to the present. It is a complex and bloody history of repeated conquest and endless internal strife, but one does see common threads running through the ages which help explain the current condition of the Middle East.

Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics

Edward Rothstein, 1995, ISBN 0-8129-2560-2

Music and mathematics have at least one characteristic in common: they evolve in complexity, or unfold more of their possibilities, from generation to generation. Rothstein, a noted music critic with formal training in mathematics, explores these parallel evolutions, and the similarities in the minds of those who labor in these fields, in a delightful and thoughtful way.

Great World Religions: Beliefs, Practices, Histories (Audio lectures)

Various lecturers, 1995, The Teaching Company, course SA600

Whatever one’s personal views about religion, it is not possible to begin to understand any society or culture, including our own, without studying its religions - the religion of a culture shapes its attitudes, its expectations, its education, its social contracts, its political system, and its fundamental world view. This set of 50 lectures, given by brilliant scholars and lecturers who are specialists in each religion, gives a good introduction to each of the world’s major religions.

Diplomacy

Henry Kissinger, 1994, ISBN 0-671-6599-1X

The seminal text in the field - Kissinger discusses in depth the historical roots of diplomacy and the competing political views on foreign policy that emerged with it, as well as describing some of his practical experiences in the field in his capacity as both the National Security Advisor and as the Secretary of State for two different presidents.

Government’s End: Why Washington Stopped Working

Jonathan Rauch, 1994, ISBN 1-891620-49-5

Rauch argues that our government has reached the normal, mature, “demoscloratic” end state of a democratic government, an equilibrium state in which myriad special interest groups essentially paralyze its ability to act. He explains the asymmetric processes -- similar to Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” process - that leads to this state of affairs, and argues that it is no one’s fault - not the liberals nor the conservatives, not the Democrats nor the Republicans -- or rather, that we are all at fault, as we each pursue our own individual agendas with the best of intentions! His conclusion is that the result need not be dismal, but like the effects of human aging, has to be accepted and managed. The logic seems to me to apply as well to large corporations as it does to our government.

The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World

Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, 1994, ISBN 0-670-84983-9

Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, both highly respected in their fields (mathematics and reproductive biology, respectively) take on the whole issue of understanding complex systems - systems whose individual operating rules may be simple, but whose emergent behavior can be highly complex or even chaotic in the technical sense. They argue that much of interest in the world, including the evolution of human thinking, can never be understood by the common scientific approach of decomposing processes to their simplest level - rather one must look at how all these processes interact.

Vital Dust: The Origin and Evolution of Life on Earth

Christian de Duve, 1994, ISBN0-465-09045-1

Christian de Duve won the Nobel prize for Biology in 1974 for his work on cell structure. In this wonderful book he traces the steps (known to date) that were required for life to arise on our planet, and for it to develop from its simplest form to its present complexity, showing how living processes adapted to one environmental challenge after another, and how these challenges shaped evolution.

Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

Randoloh Nesse & George Williams, 1994, ISBN 0-679-74674-9

Medicine has traditionally focused on the proximal cause of disease - what condition or organism is immediately responsible for the present illness. But starting about 1990, some medical leaders began to ask the more fundamental question: what is the evolutionary nature of both the infecting organism and the body’s response to it. Looked at in that light, many of the things we do to try and treat diseases, like reducing fevers, may actually interfere with effective defenses the body has evolved over eons.

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions of Writing and Life

Anne Lamott, 1994, ISBN 0-385-48001

As the title says, this is a book about the craft of writing, and also about life. Anne Lamott is witty, insightful, and very practical. Anyone who has ever had the desire to write ought to read it. Also recommended, for either writers and/or new parents, is her 1993 book Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year.

In Defense of Elitism

William A. Henry III, 1994, ISBN 0-385-46899-7

Henry's thesis is that since World War II, most domestic issues have been fought around the balance of egalitarianism and elitism, and that the balance has swung too far towards egalitarianism. In our concern to "make people feel better about themselves" by "dumbing down" everything from school textbooks to the nightly news, Henry argues, we are in danger of shortchanging our best and brightest, and thereby endangering our entire society. Multiculturalism and affirmative action are discussed at length in this context. Note that Henry is not a right-winger, but rather a staunch Democrat and card-carrying member of the ACLU. Though-provoking reading!

Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America

Robert Hughes, 1994, ISBN 0-446-67034-0

"Values" are a political battle-cry these days, usually as a code word for single-issue campaigns like abortion or welfare. Hughes, an Australian who has lived in this country for over 20 years, looks at us, and what appear to be our real values, from the outside with perception and humor, spearing equally both the left and the right, and wondering, like most of the rest of the world, why we are so preoccupied with our "Inner Child" that we seem to have forgotten our "Inner Adult". In his view, we have gotten so wound up in seeing ourselves and each other as victims, and demanding "rights" and "compensation", that we have lost sight of essential truths.

West of the Thirties: Discoveries Among the Navajo and Hopi

Edward T. Hall, 1994, ISBN 0-385-42421-3

Hall, who is also the author of The Dance of Life (1983), listed later in this list, began his working career among the Navajo and Hopi Indians, and this little gem of a book shows us his growing awareness, and a young person, of how their world-view differs radically from ours.

The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex

Murray Gell-Mann, 1994, ISBN 0-7167-2581-9

Gell-Mann, winner of the 1969 Nobel prize in Physics for his work leading to the discovery of the quark, is a member of the Santa Fe Institute (see Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, 1992, below). This book explores the roles of "complex adaptive systems" in settings ranging from the simple (the quark) to the complex (the jaguar). Fascinating, but "information dense", this is a book to be read slowly and pondered.

Up to Your Armpits in Alligators? How to sort out what risks are worth worrying about.

John and Sean Paling, 1994, ISBN 0-9642236-0-0

We are spending millions across the country to remove asbestos from schools, when the lifetime risk of a child getting lung cancer from that asbestos is about 5 x 10^-6, yet the annual risk that the child will die from a home accident is about 1.1 x 10^-4. Clearly the popular conception of what risks are worth worrying about is flawed. The Palings propose the "Paling Perspective Scale" of risks, a sort of Richter scale for risks. At one end, +6 is 1 chance in 1 (1 x 10⁰) -- such as the chances of dying at the end of one's life. At the other end, -6 is 1 chance in 1,000,000 million (1 x 10^-12) -- something that happens one time to one person in the entire history of the human race. This book shows where many common risks fall on this scale, and the results are not always what one would expect!

Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

Mary Pipher, 1994, ISBN 0-345-39282-5

Our current American culture is very destructive to the self-esteem and self identity of young girls - from the obvious and brutal sexual harassment in schools to the insidious sex-object messages in media and advertising to the pervasive weight the culture puts on looks. Anyone who has a daughter or granddaughter yet to go through adolescence should read this book to learn how to help shelter and support them through the truly horrifying assault they will have to survive.

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life

Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray, 1994, ISBN 0-02-914673-9

Throughout history, "politically correct" thinking has repeatedly led to national folly. This book, by a distinguished pair of academics, is highly controversial because it attacks the foundations of some of our most cherished politically correct beliefs. It is important, because if the research is valid (and the reader must decide that for her/himself from the evidence given), then the authors argue that despite the best of intentions, our nation is on a path toward increasing inequality, and many of our current social programs are exacerbating the problems rather than solving them. It has been attacked for a passing comment about slight observed average differences in measured IQ among races (and European whites are not the highest), but those criticisms miss entirely the main point of the book.

How to Make War: A Comprehensive Guide to Modern Warfare for the Post-Cold War Era, Third Edition

James Dunnigan, 1993, ISBN 0-688-12157-8

Dunnigan argues in the preface to this book that politicians and the public would be less inclined to go to war if they understood what war was really like, and what it really costs. This book provides, in exhaustive detail, the real numbers on warfare - what are the expected losses for different forces under different conditions, what are the resupply and maintenance problems with our new exotic weapons systems, why and how western strategy differs that of the old Soviet Union, and all the current third world states the Soviets trained and equipped.

The End of History and the Last Man
Francis Fukuyama, 1993, ISBN 0380720027

An expansion of a widely-discussed article that appeared in National Interest (Summer 1989). Fukuyama, onetime deputy director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, argues that history has been moving toward an inevitable endpoint, which he asserts is capitalist democracy, and that since we have now reached that point in most of the first world, history has, in a sense “ended”. This book launched a series of discussions, still continuing, about the nature of the political and philosophical shifts now going on in the world. See Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1997 above) for the next major perspective on this issue.

Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science

Alan Cromer, 1993, ISBN 0-19-509636-3

If we think about it at all, most of us assume that humans arrived at the scientific method of thinking as a logical evolution of our culture, and that if the Greeks hadn’t discovered it, some other culture surely would have. Cromer argues the startling position that scientific thinking is a very unnatural thing for humans to do, because it requires that we learn to give up entirely the egocentrism that is central to our personality, and see the world for what it is rather than what we would like to believe it to be. He argues that a particular, highly unlikely confluence of ideas and influences present in the Greece of Alexander the Great allowed scientific thinking to begin to arise (it took many centuries to fully develop), and that this unlikely combination of influences has not been present in any other culture since, so that the rise of true science was an unlikely event that to this day requires training in a strenuous discipline to practice properly.

A History of Warfare

John Keegan, 1993, ISBN 0-394-58801

Keegan, probably Britain's leading writer about warfare, is also the author of a number of other important books in the field, including The Face of Battle, The Mask of Command, and The Price of Admiralty. This latest book is not only about the history of warfare through the ages, but also about its changing place in the social and political structure. He shows conclusively that Caluswitz's adage that "war is the continuation of policy by other means" is much too simple a view.

Exploiting Chaos: Cashing in on the Realities of Software Development

Dave Olson, 1993, ISBN 0-442-01112-1

Olson argues that the entire software development process, from requirements gathering to delivery, is a chaotic process in the formal sense that small changes in initial conditions can produce large, non-linear changes in the process. For example, the very act of gathering requirements from a customer probably itself changes the requirements in unpredictable ways. He proposes ways to improve the development process to account for the "areas of disorder".

Blood, Tears, and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II

Len Deighton, 1993, ISBN 0-06-092557-4

Deighton is most widely known as a writer of thriller novels, such as The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin. However, he is also a recognized historian of the second world war, and author of several books about the war. This latest book is perhaps his best. It is a quite readable survey, not only of the war itself, but of the attitudes and perceptions (and misperceptions) of the participants as they entered and prosecuted the war, and of the unfounded myths that have grown up in the years following the war.

Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century

Angelo Codevilla, 1992, ISBN 0-02-911915-4

The US intelligence system is massive and exorbitantly expensive. Yet despite all that money and all those people and all the expensive equipment, US intelligence has failed to anticipate almost every significant world event since the end of World War II, starting with the Soviet Union’s postwar plans in Eastern Europe, including the Korean invasion, both major Arab-Israeli wars, the Eastern European “color revolutions”, the fall of the Communist party in Russia, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and most recently the so-called “Arab Spring”, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the rise of the Islamic State. US intelligence efforts have, for the most part, been a failure. There have no doubt been successes (which understandably are seldom publicized), but on the major events, there have been a lot of failures.

Codeville tallks at length about how to do intelligence work correctly, with many real-world examples from both American experiences and other nation’s intelligence services experiences of what worked and what didn’t work, and why. He has a background in intelligence work, so he knows what he is talking about. This is a very good book.

A World Lit Only By Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance - Portrait of an Age

William Manchester, 1992, ISBN 0-316-54556-2

Not at all dry and academic, this fascinating book fulfills it's promise of providing a portrait of an age, and it is an age which shaped many of today's basic (unspoken) beliefs in western culture. It is especially interesting to read this book, and then read the series on the Islamic world in the August 6, 1994 issue of The Economist. In many ways, the Islamic world is struggling to move into its own renaissance, and the parallels with Western experience are striking.

The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal

Jared Diamond, 1992, ISBN 0-06-098403-1

We share 98% of the genetic material of our nearest animal relations, the chimpanzees, yet what a powerful difference that last 2% makes. Jared investigates such questions as why we die, why we use drugs, why we wage war, and how language evolves, all in the context of our ape/chimpanzee family relationship.

Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

M. Mitchell Waldrop, 1992, ISBN 0-671-76789-5

A very readable account of the emergence of the Santa Fe Institute, a cross-fertilization of Physics and Economics that produced, among other things, the "law of increasing returns", a principle that drives systems (physical, biological, economic, cultural) toward increasing structural complexity.

Ishmael

Danial Quinn, 1992, ISBN 0-553-07875-5

This was an underground cult book in the environmental movement for a while. A powerful Socratic dialog about the nature of civilization, thinly disguised as a novel. Calls into question some of the most fundamental assumptions upon which the "civilized societies" of the world (including us) base their beliefs.

Teambuilt: Making Teamwork Work

Mark Sanborn, 1992, ISBN 0-942361-54-7

This is a good book about teams and how to make them work, but in addition it has scattered all through it little gems of general wisdom, such as "Wisdom is the ability to discern between the significant and the trivial".

The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works

David Owen, 1991, ISBN 0-679-74144-5

Humorous and informative, this little paperback is good for anyone who aspires to do home remodeling or home building, or who just gets turned on by buying power tools and making great holes in walls. Answers such essential questions as "why shouldn't I use on my house the same paint used in nuclear power stations?", and "just how many different kinds of sheetrock are there?"

The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver-Warfare Theory and AirLand Battle

Robert Leonhard, 1991, ISBN 0-89141-532-7

Much is made today in the military literature of asymmetric warfare as a departure from our normal “strength meets strength” theory of battle. Leonhard argues that effective maneuver warfare always seeks to establish an asymmetric threat, and that our current military doctrine is badly flawed by failing to recognize that.

A Natural History of the Senses

Diane Ackerman, 1991, ISBN 0-679-73566-6

An exploration of the biology and evolution of our five senses by a very accomplished poet and writer. Beautifully written; a joy to read.

The Anatomy of Error: Ancient Military Disasters and Their Lessons for Modern Strategists

Barry Strauss & Josiah Ober, 1990, ISBN 0-312-05051-8

We can look at ancient military undertakings objectively, without the intellectual baggage we carry about more recent events, so the authors analyze these historical wars to extract strategic lessons that are as applicable today as they were then. A fascinating book to read, especially if one thinks about today's events in the same light.

The Grace of Small Things: Creativity and Innovation

Robert Grudin, 1990, ISBN 0-395-58868-5

This little book is very hard to summarize. It is about the place of creativity and innovation in our society, and the ways in which our Western society helps and hinders these processes. Insightful and well worth reading.

From Beirut to Jerusalem

Thomas Friedman, 1989, ISBN 0-374-15894-0

In general, we Americans are naive about the Middle East. We (mis)interpret events there from the point of view of our own culture, and our media feed this by selective reporting and analysis. Friedman’s book, based on his many years of living in and reporting from Beirut and Jerusalem, goes a long way toward educating the reader in the realities and dispelling the popular American myths about that area of the world,. This book won the Pulitzer Prize, and for good reason!

The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Management

Jerry Harvey, 1988, ISBN 0-669-19179-5

Although this book is ostensibly about management issues in organizations, the topics really apply to much larger social issues as well. Harvey's "sermons" are fun to read, but provocative.

The Power Game: How Washington Works

Hedrick Smith, 1988, ISBN 0-394-55447-7

A classic about how the Washington power game between the presidency, congress, the bureaucracy, and all the various outside players really works. Should be read by anyone who is willing to abandon the bumper-sticker-slogan partisan thinking that dominates most political debate, and learn the complexities of how things really work in our government.

The Art of War

Sun Tzu (translated), 1988, various publishers, but one is ISBN 0-440-55005

A little classic through the centuries, with insights on conflicts that apply as well today as they did in Sun Tzu's time.

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Richard Rhodes, 1987, ISBN 978-0671441333

The first book in an excellent trilogy about the development of nuclear weapons in the US. The other two books are Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995), and Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons. (2010). It not only details the technical problems to be overcome, but also the personalities of the key players and the inevitable political battle that accompanied the development.

Filters Against Folly: How to Survive Despite Ecologists, Economists, and the Merely Eloquent

Garrett Hardin, 1986, ISBN 0-14-007729-4

We always simplify the world to understand it, and in so doing we introduce unavoidable bias into our understanding. Hardin argues, with many interesting examples, for a process to counteract this, and so protect us from our own folly, especially in social and environmental policy. Hardin was the author of the seminal article The Tragedy of the Commons that appeared in Science in December1968

The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully.

Gerald Weinberg, 1985, ISBN 0-932633-01-3

Full of pithy aphorisms (example: "Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can't") and sage wisdom. As with all of Weinberg's books, delightful and funny as well as enormously instructive.

Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

Lewis Thomas, 1984, ISBN 0-553-27580

A fun book to read, as are several others of his: The Fragile Species: Notes of an Earth Watcher (1992), and Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony (1984).

The March of Folly; From Troy to Vietnam

Barbara Tuchman, 1984, ISBN 0-345-30823

Barbara Tuchman defines national folly as pursuing a policy which can be clearly seen at the time to be self-defeating. Nations have done this repeatedly, and she examines examples through history in an attempt to understand how this comes about.

The Dance of Life: The Other Dimension of Time

Edward T. Hall, 1983, ISBN 0-385-19248-7

Hall's older classics (The Hidden Dimension, The Silent Language) deal with the cross-cultural differences in the perception and use of time and space. This later work builds on the earlier insights to explore in more depth the different ways time is perceived, not only across cultures, but even within a culture.

Augustine's Laws and Major System Development Programs

Norman Augustine, 1982, ISBN 0-915-92862

A good book, fun to read, with insights about large system procurement that are still pertinent today.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Douglas R. Hofstadter, 1979, ISBN 0-394-74502-7

A fascinating exploration about the similarities between mathematics, visual arts, and music, built around the theme of self-referent systems.

On the Design of Stable Systems

Gerald and Daniela Weinberg, 1979, ISBN 0-471-04722-8

A serious topic dealt with by a wonderfully humorous author. Topics include "The Piddling Principle", "the Kool-Aid Fallacy" and "The Aspirin Illusion". Ever want to know why minimizing error/variation in a feedback system (mechanical, electrical, social, biological) is the WORST thing to do? This is the book that explains it.

An Introduction to General Systems Thinking

Gerald Weinberg, 1975, ISBN 0-471-92563-2

A companion volume to Weinberg's On the Design of Stable Systems, listed above. An excellent survey of how to recognize systems, and think about how they operate, with examples drawn from a very wide range of fields. Some of the "Questions for Further Research" at the ends of the chapters are quite intriguing.

The Mythical Man-Month

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. 1975, 1982, ISBN 0-201-00650-2

An old classic that every engineer and software developer ought to re-read every 10 years or so to see that George Santayana was right: "Those who will not study history are doomed to repeat it".

Myths to Live By

Joseph Campbell, 1972, ISBN 0-14-019461-4

Famous now for the series he recorded with Bill Moyers just before his death, Joseph Campbell in this early series of lectures to the Cooper Union Forum in New York given between 1958 and 1971 lays out most of the his brilliant foundation on the importance and place of myth in cultures.

The Moral Basis of a Backward Society

Edward Banfield, 1958, ISBN 0-02-901510-3

Banfield and his wife studied a small Italian village in 1954-55 to try to understand what kept societies locked into essentially feudal states. His conclusion (summarized roughly) is that so long as a society trusts only family (or tribe) -- a condition he names “amoral familism” -- it cannot progress. This is a particularly interesting observation in the light of the third world problems of the new century.

The Evolution of Political Thought

C. Northcote Parkinson, 1958, ISBN 0-02-901510-3

Parkinson is better known for Parkinson’s Law, a humorous but insightful little book listed below. However, he wrote serious material too. In this almost unknown book Parkinson argues that each political system - dictatorship, aristocracy, democracy, etc. - carries in it the seeds of its own destruction, and that societies move through a reasonably predictable sequence of political systems, albeit occasionally skipping a step or two. Worth pondering for an assessment of how long our own system will last, and what will finally replace it.

Parkinson's Law

C. Northcote Parkinson, 1957, ISBN 1-56849-015-1

Parkinson's first law is that "work expands to fill the time allotted to it". From that starting point Parkinson shows, with much humor, how bureaucracies evolve. This is an old, but very good, classic.

WG's Observations

Book List

Blog Archive

Book & Lecture List

Other good blogs and web sites

WG's Observations

Book List

Subscribe To

Blog Archive

Book & Lecture List

Other good blogs and web sites