Paul Seabright | Archive

Recommended Books in 2013

Because I have had so little time to write here about books I have read in 2013, but have still (fortunately) had time to read some, I thought I would make a list of some of the most memorable, without necessarily adding much commentary.

In the following; books given 5 Stars are enthusiastically recommended, and are on a part with the other books on my “Recommended books” page. But I will mention some others with lower ratings that are nevertheless interesting.

Some of these books were published in 2013 but not all. Books are in alphabetical order of author, five stars first then four stars.

I start with a few I can remember and will add more between now and Christmas, and hope to add a short commentary to each title before then.

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Craig Childs: The Secret Knowledge of Water: “There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning”. A strange and touching memoir of one man’s quest to find hidden water in the deserts of the South-Western United States.

Paul Collier: Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World

Sebastian Faulks: Jeeves and the Wedding Bells

Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion

Michel Houellebecq: La Carte et le Territoire

P.D. James: Death Comes to Pemberley

Barbara Kingsolver: The Poisonwood Bible

Jon Krakauer: Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

Dany Laferiere: Comment Faire l’Amour à Un Nègre Sans Se Fatiguer

Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies: Magnificent first and second books in a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, chief counselor to King Henry 8th. Fascinating from many points of view, including for a subtle portrait of the corrupting effects of power. At the beginning Cromwell is apparently quite upset to hear about the effects of torture on heretics, while by the end of the first book he is sending political opponents to the stake or the executioner’s block, not exactly without a qualm but with a matter-of-fact acceptance that this follows from the policies to which he has become committed. Shows that the best way to make someone do something morally troubling is not to give them good arguments but simply to insinuate to them that it is the logical consequence of something else they have already decided to do. The second book sees this deadly logic applied to the destruction of Anne Boleyn.

Jan Morris: Conundrum

Siddhartha Mukherjee: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Chris Stringer: Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth

Alison Wolf: The XX Factor: How Working Women are Creating a New Society

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Alison Booth: Stillwater Creek

Jeffrey Eugenides: The Marriage Plot

Richard Powers: Gain

Bhisham Sahni: Tamas

Sheryl Sandberg: Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead

Richard Trivers: The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

* * *

Richard Rhodes: Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

La Vie Rêvée d’Ernesto G

La Vie Rêvée d’Ernesto G, par Jean-Michel Guenassia. Published September 2012 by Albin Michel.

Very interesting second novel by the author of Le Club des Incorrigibles Optimistes. Joseph K, born in Prague in 1910, studies medicine and goes to work in Algiers for the Institut Pasteur but has to hide in the malaria-infested southern countryside when the German occupiers begin rounding up Jews. After the War he returns to Prague and becomes a convinced communist. This tale of his gradual disillusionment takes a curious turn when he has to look after a Latin American patient who turns out to be none other than Che Guevara, who begins to be charmed by Joseph’s own daughter. The prose is sometimes slow, and the the plot constructions doesn’t have the same taut architecture as the earlier novel, but it is still a fascinating encounter with some of the twentieth century’s most poignant themes – tenderness, loss and betrayal among those who are caught in the hurricane of historical events.

Five Books on Evolution and Human Cooperation

My interview and selection of Five Books is online at The Browser

A Perfect Spy

A Perfect Spy, by John Le Carré. Published by Knopf in 1986, now available in a Penguin reprint.

I read this book when it first came out and thought it a masterpiece. I re-read it recently with some trepidation, fearing I would be embarrassed by my earlier enthusiasm. I needn’t have worried: it remains a brilliant novel by any standards, and the character of Rick Pym, the protagonist’s father, is unforgettable.

Buy here.

Zero Degrees of Empathy

Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New theory of Human Cruelty, by Simon Baron-Cohen. Published April 2011 by Allen Lane.

A book that sets out to demystify cruelty, avoiding the label “evil” that explains nothing and merely satisfies our demand to express outrage. Provides a compelling account of the factors in the brain that determine when individuals will suffer from an empathy deficit, which at extreme levels may enable behavior of shocking cruelty. But the effects of empathy deficits may work themselves out in a variety of ways. In the book’s most novel and intriguing development, Baron-Cohen compares the kind of empathy deficit that leads to cruelty with the empathy deficits visible in the autistic spectrum, and which are not typically associated with anything of the kind. This measured, rigorous “compare and contrast” approach both acknowledges how much work remains to be done to understand empathy deficits and their consequences, and shows us how much better we can understand them using scientific methods.

Buy here.

The White Tiger

The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga. Published in October 2008 by The Free Press.

A funny, sparky, dark novel of corruption in modern India. Brilliantly describes how the rich manage to maintain a vast servant class in an equilibrium of subjection. The author has been a business journalist, and this greatly enhances both the range of his reference and his understanding for the way perverse incentives lead to collectively terrible outcomes. But although this gives him unusual insight into economic forces, the book is not didactic: he is a superb storyteller, and the book has a rich seam of unsettling malice.

Buy here

Memory: Fragments of a Modern History

Memory: Fragments of a Modern History, by Alison Winter. Published 2012 by Chicago University Press.

A superb account of the way in which attitudes to the reliability of memory developed during the 20th century under the influence of developments in academic psychology, legal pressures for reliable forensic diagnostic techniques, and most recently the “Memory Wars” of the 1980s and 1990s about the status of “recovered” memories of childhood sexual abuse. Concludes with an intriguing analogy between psychopharmacological methods for maniuplating memory, and the way in which the ability to feel pain, once considered more or less definitive of subjective psyhological identity, came to be considered much more contingent once the science of anesthesia made it possible to undergo painless surgical procedures.

Buy here.

Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the Feel of Consciousness

Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the Feel of Consciousness. By Kevin O’Regan. Published in June 2011 by Oxford University Press.

An account of the nature of consciousness based on recent discoveries in neuroscience, especially in the study of mechanisms of attention allocation. Makes a persuasive case that the subjective sensations generated by different sense modalities are grounded in the motor capacities we deploy for exploring the world. Contrary to a widespread illusion about sense perception, we do not experience the world as a simultaneous panorama; instead our brain fills in the many gaps in our sense perception because it can explore the external world to verify the hypotheses it makes when filling in. This is a very original and important contribution to the philosophical understanding of consciousness that undermines traditional claims about the incorrigibility of subjective experience; far from being incorrigible, subjective experience is frequently thoroughly deluded about its own nature. Buy here.

Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About our Everyday Deceptions

Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About our Everyday Deceptions. By Stephen L. Macknik, Susana Martinez Conde and Sandra Blakeslee. Published in November 2011 by Picador.

A tour by two leading neuroscientists and a fine science journalist of the many ways in which professional magicians exploit the known weaknesses in our mechanisms of allocating attention. Buy here.

Haiti: The Aftershocks of History

Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. By Laurent Dubois. Published in January 2012 by Metropolitan Books.

A remarkable history of Haiti since the revolution and independence. Excellently written, largely structured as narrative but with valuable discussions of many aspects of Haitian culture, economics and society; an eye-opener in its accounts of the many ways outsiders have used and imagined the country for their own purposes. A biography fully worthy of its subject, a troubled but remarkable country. Buy here.