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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.

* * * * *

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

* * * *

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

The future of feminism

This is the title the TLS has given to my review of the new books by Alison Wolf and Sheryl Sandberg. The review is here and you can download a pdf here.

Press and Reviews for The War of the Sexes

Picture credit: Boardroom battles….. The Apprentice. Photograph: BBC/PA Photo, from the review in The Guardian.

December 2013 update: Martin Wolf has chosen The War of the Sexes as one of his books of the year in the Financial Times:

“With characteristic brilliance, Seabright uses biology, sociology, anthropology and economics to explain the war of the sexes. Men and women must co-operate to bring their offspring to maturity and conflict is inherent. Yet today opportunities for more successful and equal relations between the sexes are greater than ever before.”

Other reviews:

In chronological order of appearance:

John Whitfield in Nature.

A favorable but somewhat surrealistically inaccurate review by Roger Lewis in the Daily Mail.

Jonathan Rée in The Guardian

Fran Hawthorne in The New York Journal of Books

Camilla Power in Times Higher Education

Alexander Delaigue in Liberation (in French)

Publishers’ Weekly

Anna Cristina Pertierra in Inside Story

Joshi Herrmann in The London Evening Standard

Michele Pridmore-Brown in the Times Literary Supplement, available here (pdf here)

Elaine Graham-Leigh in Counterfire

Some reactions in the blogosphere:

Sander Van Der Linden in LSE Review of Books

My post at the Huffington Post blog

Interviews, other coverage:

The Financial Security Project at Boston College

The page 99 test

BBC Nightwaves, the interview runs from the 23 minutes point and lasts 11 minutes

VoxEU interview

The Moncrieff Show on Newstalk Radio Ireland, section 4, around 9 minutes in

Writers Read

What’s the Use of Economics? Teaching the Dismal Science After the Crisis

This book of essays edited by the excellent Diane Coyle was published on 15th September 2012; the Amazon page is here. Diane also has a column posted on Vox.

I have a very short note in it but many of the other entries are fuller and more rewarding to read.

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.

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.

The War of the Sexes

Paul Seabright, The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation have Shaped Men and Women Prehistory to the Present, Princeton University Press, published May 2012 (eBook April 2012)

As countless love songs, movies, and self-help books attest, men and women have long sought different things. The result? Seemingly inevitable conflict. Yet we belong to the most cooperative species on the planet. Isn’t there a way we can use this capacity to achieve greater harmony and equality between the sexes? In The War of the Sexes, Paul Seabright argues that there is–but first we must understand how the tension between conflict and cooperation developed in our remote evolutionary past, how it shaped the modern world, and how it still holds us back, both at home and at work.

Drawing on biology, sociology, anthropology, and economics, Seabright shows that conflict between the sexes is, paradoxically, the product of cooperation. The evolutionary niche–the long dependent childhood–carved out by our ancestors requires the highest level of cooperative talent. But it also gives couples more to fight about. Men and women became experts at influencing one another to achieve their cooperative ends, but also became trapped in strategies of manipulation and deception in pursuit of sex and partnership. In early societies, economic conditions moved the balance of power in favor of men, as they cornered scarce resources for use in the sexual bargain. Today, conditions have changed beyond recognition, yet inequalities between men and women persist, as the brains, talents, and preferences we inherited from our ancestors struggle to deal with the unpredictable forces unleashed by the modern information economy.

Men and women today have an unprecedented opportunity to achieve equal power and respect. But we need to understand the mixed inheritance of conflict and cooperation left to us by our primate ancestors if we are finally to escape their legacy.

Visit the book’s homepage at Princeton University Press.

Buy on Amazon.

See press and reviews

Endorsements:

“From the mating habits of praying mantises to the battlefield of corporate boardrooms, Paul Seabright takes us on a fantastic journey across time and disciplines to uncover why–and how–men and women have learned to work together, and what forces still keep them apart in modern society.”–Linda Babcock, coauthor of Women Don’t Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation–and Positive Strategies for Change

“The War of the Sexes is a delight to read. Paul Seabright launches a charm offensive on those who would prefer not to think that gender differences have any biological basis, and an intellectual offensive on those who think that these differences are large and intractable.”–Terri Apter, author of Working Women Don’t Have Wives

“Come on a journey from the Pleistocene to the present–a fascinating trip that uses the economic causes and consequences of our reproductive choices to explain relations between men and women through the ages. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the battle of the sexes (which is certainly everyone I know!—-it’s a great read.”–Anne C. Case, Princeton University

Translation rights: Held by Princeton University Press. For all enquiries please contact kwilliams@pupress.co.uk

The Company of Strangers

Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life. Second Edition, Princeton University Press, 2010. Read More →