Does it ever seem to you like we are living on a not-quite-cohesive planet a badly crafted science fiction novel? A world in which you talk about something new over lunch, and all afternoon ads for it pop up on your social media feeds. A world in which storms and drought and flood and heat and smoke from wildfires are affecting, even devastating, everyone we know, yet our petroleum-based over-consumption continues like nothing has changed.
These twelve books won’t solve climate change or stop the impending wave of AI intrusion on our lives. But they will each leave you feeling a shift in your understanding of how the world works. They run the gamut of subject matter and include both fact and fiction. They vary in length from Edward Bernay’s essay on how marketing works, to Thomas Piketty’s tome on the state of global economics (which might take you several summers to finish, but is well worth it).
1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.
I know, you’ve seen the movie, and probably the Mel Brooks spoof on it, too. But do yourself a favor and read Mary Shelley’s original book. It is less about the horror and fright of a rampaging monster (there’s no mention of bolts in his neck in the book; in fact, he’s barely described at all) than it is about the relationship of a person to their created works. While the analogy to any artist is obvious, to me the book speaks more to the works of any architect of social programs, policies and laws. When they go awry, who bears responsibility for fixing them? How many of our actions, born out of greed, ego, or narrow-minded intentions, turn out to cause real harm, even death, in the world? Think of the federal and state housing programs that precluded Black Americans from buying homes; of the subsidies of highways, cars, and a petroleum-based culture; of the foreign policy through which the US armed and trained Osama bin Laden to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. These are our monsters that come back to bite us, to wreak havoc on our homes, neighbors, the people we love. As you read Frankenstein, think about how the solution for Dr. Frankenstein grows every more obvious. Yet he hesitates. Why?
2. Edward Bernays, The Engineering of Consent.
Long before TicTok, before FaceBook, before personal computers, there was marketing. Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew) practically invented public relations and was a master of propaganda. He doubled cigarette sales for major US tobacco companies in 1929 by convincing women that smoking was a symbol of feminist liberation. His union-busting marketing for the United Fruit Company was intertwined with the CIA overthrow of the Guatemalan government. His essay The Engineering of Consent (1947) sets out in clear, simple terms, how easily we are all led to believe whatever it is someone wants us to believe. I find the essay terrifying, as it is an extremely short hop to imagine – and one doesn’t need to imagine, just look around you every day – how Bernays’ theories and approaches work in our era of persistent, mass information. If people are so easily manipulated, one has to wonder, how can a democracy ever possibly work? Dang good question. Becoming aware of the depth and breadth of this manipulation is the first step toward answering it. His books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928), and Public Relations (1945), are also each a frightening tour de force. The essay is available in a .pdf online: http://www.fraw.org.uk/data/politics/bernays_1947.pdf
3. Nikole Hannah-Jones and the NY Times Magazine, The 1619 Project
Be honest. Did you know that the first ship of enslaved Africans arrived in the American colonies a year before the Mayflower? Did you know that many of the men, women and children on the Trail of Tears were persons of African descent enslaved by the Native Americans who were being forced to march west? I thought I was knowledgeable about American history, and prided myself on having never settled for the superficial high-school textbook version. The 1619 Project, as its introduction states, “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” The project exists as an ongoing website, and as a book which is more anthology than chronology, including poetry, short historical quotes, and essays on a wide array of facets of American history, culture and economics. The segments are each so pointed and weighty that I suggest reading it perhaps one section each week, and letting what you’ve read ruminate around in your mind and being for a while before adding more. If I could make one book mandatory reading for every American, this would be it.
4. Mark Kurlansky, Salt.
While we’re on the subject of history, here’s a far lighter read. Mark Kurlansky has mastered the art of following one thread around the world and throughout time to give us a spectacular picture of history – less a snapshot than a slice of an MRI image, crosscutting time and geography. (Don’t miss his book Cod, too.) I also love Salt because, while I grow a huge garden and buy almost exclusively local, organic food, I had never previously thought about where my salt comes from. I now buy it from a salt producer in Maine, the independent salt producer nearest to where I live. This is the perfect book for the beach, basking in that salt air.
5. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century.
This tome is no easy read – and it is worth every second. French economist Thomas Piketty was the first person to attempt to paint a thorough, widespread picture of capital—what it is, where it is, and who has it--over the last two centuries since Marx. His work is entirely transparent. All his data, and that of numerous colleagues working in the field of capital and economic inequality, is on the World Inequality Database website, which also publishes an annual World Inequality Report. But you must start with Capital in the 21st Century to set the groundwork for understanding before moving into his other slightly less hefty, and far more politically direct, volumes: Capital and Ideology, A Brief History of Equality, The Economics of Inequality, and Time for Socialism.
6. Ursula LeGuin, Left Hand of Darkness.
If you are ready to take a break from the doom of global economics, here is another novel which makes a swell hammock or front porch read. This one tackles something “simple” – gender. Ursula LeGuin was the absolute master of powerful science fiction which delved into the deepest, most difficult human issues through charming and empathetic characters living and traveling on completely believable worlds which she managed to build with an extremely light descriptive touch. Her Hainish Cycle contains the most notorious and prescient of these, The Left Hand of Darkness, which envisions a world of lovely, intelligent, lively people who are genderless – in fact, utterly sexless – except at specific short mating seasons when they can randomly turn male or female. We readers learn along with Terra diplomat Genly Ai just how much of our own earth culture is based on gender roles, and how we have to rethink our communications (no way to get ahead by flirting at diplomatic cocktail parties) and relationships when romantic pairing does not exist. At its core is the question our society is wrestling with today: Who are we all, if we are considered wholly aside from our gender identity?
7. Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist.
I read Gorillas in the Mist when it was first published in 1983. Then Dian Fossey was murdered in 1985. I have since read it over every five years or so, the knowledge of her death just a few years after writing it resonating on every page. Dian Fossey was a vibrant, brilliant primatologist and conservationist. The book simultaneously steeps us in a world of nonhuman life, in the consciousness and relationships and societal structures of nonhuman living beings—and reminds us of the devastating impact of human conflict and greed on all life on earth. The world is so much bigger than ourselves, and we will not begin to seriously address our present ecological disasters until we fully embrace this humbling notion. Gorillas in the Mist is, in my opinion, the place to start on that, as it arises from a perspective of observation, wonder, and love—not the self-righteous, ineffective preaching of many popular environmental books.
8. and 9. Issac Newton, Principia, and Issac Asimov, The Realm of Numbers.
When your heart is aching from the destruction of green places on earth, then it is time to return to the comforting, familiar logic of numbers. Here are two must-reads in that vein, from the two Isaacs: Newton’s Principia (you can buy a paperback, and there are numerous pdfs of early English translations is available online) and Asimov’s The Realm of Numbers. Remember high school science? A body in motion will remain in motion? How to describe the area of an arc cut by a cord? Well, Newton’s Principia is where all that came from. Amply illustrated, and freckled with 17th century commentary, the Philosophiae Naturlis Principia Mathematica was first published in Latin in 1687, and the original is, in my view, far more charming and erudite than the convoluted explanations those high school texts. Also far outshining those high school math texts is The Realm of Numbers, a tiny, fun (yes! fun!) work by the writer otherwise renowned for his science fiction novels, Isaac Asimov. I had real difficulty with math in high school, to the consternation of my rocket-scientist father, who stuck this book in my Christmas stocking one year. I can’t say it improved my math grades, but it did get me looking at numbers in a wholly different way – less as an enemy than as a constant, helpful presence in the world, and one which I needed to get acquainted with in order to live fully.
10. Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons in Physics.
Carlo Rovelli is the latest in an esteemed line of high-level scientists writing for the popular masses (think Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking). In fact, Carlo Sagan is on the cutting edge of the cutting edge of contemporary physics: the study of quantum gravity. In between experiments in the unity of time, space and matter, Rovelli pens a seemingly endless stream of engaging and enlightening, sometimes even mind-blowing books. Seven Brief Lessons in Physics is the gentlest place to start. Like his other books, it’s small, in manageable chapters that seem custom-crafted for nightly reading-aloud on car trips and camping expeditions. Once you’ve mellowed into Rovelli’s overview of physics, move on to his other titles, particularly Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, Helgoland, and The Order of Time, in which you’ll learn that everything you thought you knew about reality, matter, objects, atoms, and minutes—even that cool stuff from Newton you read just a few books ago--is, if not “untrue,” then entirely obsolete. (If you want to keep up with the advancements in physics as well as other areas of science on a near-daily basis, subscribe to Science magazine online or in print, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.)
11. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas.
Three Guineas (1938) would be worth reading for its stunningly masterful prose alone, but the subject matter makes it all the more worthwhile. Many of us have wished we could make a brilliant retort to a solicitation for money, but Virginia Woolf pulls it off with extraordinary grace. In response to a letter asking for support for an anti-war effort, along with letters seeking funds to build a women’s college and helping women enter professions, Woolf paints a comprehensive picture of the pervasiveness of patriarchy and the complex task of meaningfully dismantling it.
12. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.
The Human Condition (1958), is the best entryway into the works of Hannah Arendt, the most influential political theorist of the 20th century. She may be best known, in explaining how ordinary people can participate in totalitarianism, for coining the phrase “the banality of evil.” Discussing the active life versus the contemplative life, the public versus private life, Arendt captures the essence of the history of the human interactions with the world, from politics to labor.
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