Professors’ reading picks for winter 2024

I just finished Ruth Rakoff’s superb novel “Untethered,” about siblings who choose very different lives — but retain a relationship which puzzles their partners and friends.

I’m currently reading Noah Feldman’s latest, “To Be a Jew Today,” which is frank, insightful and beautifully written.

For something different from typical GPS political economy, try Orlando Whitfield’s “All That Glitters.” It is a nonfiction blend of Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” and Joan Didion’s essays, mixing into self-reflection and cultural commentary. The cultural setting is the contemporary art world, and the story is about a hedonistic mix of staggering sums of money, unanchored vanity, occasional artistic creativity and fraud. This is a market geared to wild pursuit of the next big thing where bad conduct may be excused as a signal of path-breaking innovation.

I’m currently reading Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel, “Underworld,” which is about, among other themes: technological disruption, media spectacle, conspiracy theories and political paranoia, and anxiety about human extinction in the shadow of nuclear weapons. The book is set in Cold War-era America — the plot is (loosely) organized around a search for the baseball that Bobby Thompson hit into the stands in a famous home run for the New York Giants in 1951 — but its concerns are wholly relevant to the post-9/11 and Trump eras.

A book that all GPS students should read is “Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed,” by my late dissertation advisor, James C. Scott. It is about the rationalizing techniques that states use to render their populations legible and manageable, and how those techniques entail certain blind spots that have contributed to disastrous attempts at social engineering. It is also a powerful critique of the limitations and distortions of modern social science.

“Napoleon: A Life” by Andrew Roberts is a biography that provides an in-depth and balanced portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte, bringing to life his complex character, military genius, and influential leadership. Roberts’ narrative style makes this biography not only informative but also compelling, appealing to both history enthusiasts and general readers.

First up, Bob Woodward’s “War.” Although neither Trump nor Biden gave Woodward interviews for this book, it sure seems like he talked to virtually everyone else. Focusing on Ukraine and Gaza, the survey of the Biden administration is broadly laudatory.

David Sanger, chief foreign policy correspondent for The New York Times, goes over the ground from the China-Russia threat angle in the breathily-titled “New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion and America’s Struggle to Defend the West.” (He is actually better than the title.)

Alexander Ward, also a journalist, has a book trying to identify the Biden doctrine. The title and purpose are self-explanatory: “The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump.” Ward offers a nuanced discussion of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, noting among other things the substantial casualties during the Trump administration — despite Trump’s objections to staying in — and the agreement the president negotiated with the Taliban that called for a complete withdrawal of American forces in 2021, after his first term.

For those interested in the US-China relationship, the most interesting and controversial entry into this genre is Robert Blackwell and Richard Fontaine “Lost Decade: The US Pivot to Asia and the Rise of China Power.” Even more than the other books on this list, Blackwell and Fontaine have an ax to grind. In their view, the much-vaunted “pivot to Asia” not only amounted to little, but revealed that the entire engagement project was a strategic mistake of epic proportions. That is wrong-headed to me, but this is a serious book that students of China and the region are all reading and arguing with.

“Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy,” by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, is a useful history of the economic tools the U.S. has been using in the present to pressure both allies and adversaries toward its own geopolitical goals. Dan Drezner, a political scientist at Tufts University, recommended it to me last fall and I finally got around to reading it.

Chris Miller’s “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology” is a long, narrative history with a number of anecdotes about the semiconductor industry and its, at times, symbiotic relationship with the military industrial complex. I found Miller tended to repeat himself, as if he wrote the chapters as stand-alone essays later turned into a book. As such, the book could have done with some better third-party editing.

Respected Civil War historian Carol Reardon’s theme in “Pickett’s Charge in History & Memory” is the major difference between actual history and how we remember history, which are totally different things. Using Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg (“the high water mark of the rebellion”) as an example, she convincingly and in much detail shows how our memories then until today often bear little resemblance to the actual facts that historians can nail down and are more influenced by the development of post-war politics. Ignored is the courage of the other Southern states’ veterans of the event and the equally courageous Northern troops who repelled the advance. As Pickett said after the war about the causes of the assault’s failure, “It had something to do with the Union soldiers.”

The discovery of the skeletal remains of King Richard III, the great royal villain of British history and of Shakespeare’s powerful play, under a carpark in the English city of Leicester made headlines around the world. “The Lost King: The Search for Richard III,” by screenwriter Philippa Langely and historian Michael Jones, is the articulate and engaging story of that discovery: the result of diligent historiography, archeology and intuition, confirmed with DNA and archeological evidence.

The book makes an impressive and convincing case that Richard actually was mostly a pious and just man and king. His mythical reincarnation as a hunchbacked, disabled totally evil man and monarch has no evidence from Richard’s lifetime. Instead, the authors argue this characterization was the invention of Thomas More and Shakespeare, who sought to delegitimize Richard’s claim to the throne (which was much better than Henry VII’s) through pro-Tudor propaganda.

I just finished “Playground” by Richard Powers. It’s a brilliantly written story about oceans, environment and the perils of technology. His descriptions of marvelous sea creatures alone are sufficiently poetic to justify reading this book. The rest is quite poignant as well, particularly at this moment in our socio-political history.

We all try to do our part in reducing our environmental footprints by recycling, but how does recycling really fit into the social and economic development of a country? For “Remains of the Everyday,” Josh Goldstein, of the University of Southern California, conducted over a decade of documentary and interview research and wrote this award-winning book on the role of recycling in social and economic development in China through the second half of the 20th century. Although already a part of daily social practice, recycling was integrated into the planned economy and became highly centralized. Then, the dozens of interviews he conducted with migrant workers reveal that the market reform for a time produced a recycling regime which at once provided migrant workers with economic opportunities and maximized the material that was recycled. This unfortunately was undone by the government seeking a version of capitalist modernism which excluded the migrant-led recycling industry. It tells a fascinating story in a highly readable way.

“Zhou Enlai: A Life” is a masterpiece of political biography by the leading historian of Mao-era China, Chen Jian. I have been particularly intrigued by Premier Zhou since I met with him for four hours in Beijing in 1971 with a small group of other American students. Reading about how pragmatic Communist Party politicians like Zhou, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were intimidated into acquiescence by Mao Zedong at the same time as I watch the identical dynamic playing out today under Xi Jinping is both fascinating and depressing.

Long before ballistic missiles, Twitter trolls, machine guns and other weapons of modern warfare, there was a technology that helped define geopolitical power for centuries: the horse. Thanks to former Dean Peter Gourevitch for this recommendation, I’ve been reading Jonathan Chaffetz’s wonderful history of geopolitics through the lens of horse assets, “Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires.” China — of terracotta warriors fame — loved horses but couldn’t really breed or train them on its own, so dependence on long supply chains for the best horses from the Middle East arose. Purveyors of horses and horsey skills were in short supply, invaluable and strong willed. Often, they turned on their customers, toppling empires. Giddy up.

I recently read “Pedro Páramo” by Juan Rulfo. It’s a novel that, while focused on the experiences of peasants in Mexico, speaks to broader themes that could connect with many readers. Although the book was originally published in the mid-20th century, it has experienced something of a revival in the past couple of years: there’s a new English translation that came out last year, and a Netflix series adaptation is in the works.

One of the things I love about the book is its very good descriptions of characters and landscapes, which reflect universal themes in Latin American history. I think that Valeria Luiselli put it perfectly in her New York Times review: “It is a story of all revolutions: the landless against the landlords, the dispossessed against the powerful. It is a story of usurpation, extraction, and sexual violence. Of stealing land, settling it, and exploiting both the land and its people. In other words, it is a story of nation-building in the Americas.”

“Dinner: Changing the Game” by Melissa Clark has been my absolute favorite cookbook for the last five years. Every recipe is a home run. (Except for the whiskey fondue. I have no words…except awful.)

The New York Times printed Marcella Hazan’s four-ingredient tomato sauce recipe from “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking” in her obituary. She is a legend, as is this sauce.

Madhur Jaffrey is to Indian food what Hazan is to Italian, except perhaps even better. It ain’t easy making Indian food easy, but “Quick and Easy Indian Cooking” is fabulous.

“Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking” by Fuchsia Dunlop has transformed my relationship to vegetables. Who knew that bok choy could be this good?