What Are We Reading?

I read this book by an Icelandic author before a recent trip there. It centers on a young woman who has dreams of becoming an artist and going to Italy but ends up married to a fisherman who is gone for long stretches of time, leaving her alone to care for the children. Each chapter is entitled as if it is the scene in a piece of art she is imagining, while describing the ordinary life she actually has. Melancholy but beautifully written.

This fascinating book examines an important and under-appreciated chapter of legal history. It analyzes an 1878 case in which the Supreme Court prevented a Southern state from using its own law to protect Black people from discrimination. The book offers much-needed insight into how the law tragically permitted the establishment of Jim Crow and culminated in Plessy.

This is a classic, charming detective novel where the detective behind the scenes just happens to be Queen Elizabeth II. I borrowed it from the library right before Her Majesty died, and it was a treat to take up residence in the castle with her in earlier days, as she subtly maneuvers her staff and law enforcement so they solve crimes for themselves. There is a second volume, All the Queen’s Men, and I’m hoping for a lengthy series.

This is a terrific account of the often bizarre history of racial classifications by government. One comes away with a profound sense of the arbitrariness of our currently accepted set of boxes, which are as much a product of interest group activity and administrative fiat as any underlying claims to justice. I suspect the wheel is still in spin.

This is a marvelous and perceptive collection of related essays and meditations on the ethical and practical discomforts of involvement in a contemporary market economy, tethered to the author’s experience buying a home in Chicago.

This year, I recommend Keri Blakinger’s Corrections In Ink. It’s a powerful and raw memoir from one of the country’s leading criminal justice system journalists about her time in prison for a drug crime. Ms. Blakinger, who is white and grew up with immense privilege, reflects on addiction, second chances and who gets them, and how things could have been catastrophically worse for her had she been a Black or Brown person in the system. It’s a riveting read.

An impressive and stimulating collection of essays on the extraordinarily challenging and timely question of social media and free speech. The diverse range of contributors—from leading academics to influential policymakers—tackle the many aspects of this question and offer penetrating and often surprising insights.

This book paints a picture of the alcohol-sodden and deeply introspective American foreign correspondents who witnessed the world of the 1930s sliding into world war through their diaries and private letters, tracing among other things the career of John Gunther from the time he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago.

Really a hilarious novel—and you don’t need to be embarrassed when laughing and disliking the Israeli visitor.

Every organization inevitably faces crises, and this book provides keen insights on how to prepare for them, how to manage them, and how to recover from them. The book advocates a disciplined approach to events that are usually thought to be unmanageable. A deeply insightful guide for leaders in any organization.

Princeton history professor Linda Colley’s new book tells the story of how written constitutions began to take off as an idea roughly 250 years ago, and key to that narrative is the role the changing nature of warfare played in the need for new systems of governance. To tell this story, Colley weaves in examples from across the globe. Some of these examples will be familiar, but others have been largely overlooked or forgotten. While doing so, Colley’s book offers insights into both world history and contemporary American legal debates about how to understand our constitution.

It’s a sad anything-but-a-novel, but it makes the reader think hard about families on the edge, public housing, and what, if anything, we can do.

It describes the experience of the passengers and crew on one of Holland American Line’s cruise ships caught up in the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lessons in Chemistry is the Ted Lasso of novels. It’s both feel-good and deep. I wanted to hang out with the brilliant, feminist chemist Elizabeth forever. If only another season were coming down the pike.

Graeber, who died tragically young just before publication of this book, had a PhD from Chicago completed under Marshall Sahlins. The book inverts conventional histories of civilization as a march to progress and shows how many of our modern ideas originated in the encounter with native peoples in the New World. It is well-written and brimming with ideas.

Professor Henning's beautifully written stories of lived experiences of our children ground a book about youth, police, racism, and our criminal and juvenile legal systems. Written by a teacher and lawyer who has made a career of fighting injustice shoulder to shoulder with kids in an unjust system, Prof. Henning’s book is both meticulously researched and practically grounded in what we all need to know about juvenile justice in America. If we follow her recommendations for change, we will create a criminal and juvenile system that makes us more safe and affirms the humanity of all of our children.

I am working on a research project seeking to inform my understanding of modern policing and crime control policy by searching for insights from the historical, political context in which it developed. I picked up Adam Hochschild’s new book, American Midnight, in my search for material on the early twentieth century. American Midnight provides a detailed account of another dark period in the history of our democracy, the years of 1917 to 1921, when extremism reared its ugly head. I have enjoyed Hochschild's richly told vignettes starring the real-life anti-socialism villains and pro-civil rights heroes of the day.

Especially relevant after the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs, this is a true story of how a group of young women, initiated by students at the University of Chicago, performed 11,000 abortions for desperate women in the three years leading up to Roe. It is stunning!

This book is about man (a beekeeper) in the center of the Russian conflict in Eastern Ukraine that started in 2014 (before the more recent larger-scale invasion and war). He lives in a small village in between the front lines of the pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian nationalists. There are only two people left in this village, our narrator (who is sympathetic to the Ukrainian nationalists) and his old school nemesis (who is sympathetic to the pro-Russian separatists). The book is about a lot of “gray areas” or “in between” things: the village/front line, our narrator’s nationality (he is perceived by others as either Russian or Ukrainian depending upon the circumstances), his nemesis/friend, conflict/war, and the actual gray of the war-torn landscape. The most recent edition has a new foreword by the author in light of this year’s invasion (and there’s a good NYTimes Magazine article about him as well).

A literary rendering of a science-fiction thriller. Fun and provocative.

I recently read Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald. This collection of essays from Macdonald is a wonderful retreat into nature. The topics go well beyond bird watching and invite the reader to consider how we view and interact with the natural world.

The setting for this book is a small fishing village off the west coast of Ireland, still clinging to the old ways and language but with some islanders aspiring to modernity. Enter two more modern European visitors, one a French linguist studying (and pushing the islanders to retain) their language, and one an English painter there to find inspiration and solitude to work on his art. A young boy on the island is used/pushed by both of them in different ways: the linguist wants to hold the boy back from speaking English, and the painter (upon recognizing his talent) also holds the boy back with respect to his art. But the outsiders do this for very different reasons. Tradition versus modernity, the relationship between outsiders (even if well-intentioned) and those in “the colony,” and who is given the “dominant” position (in life and in art).

Because of my interest in whales and whaling—my latest book is on animal rights, and I am reviewing two new books on whaling—I have reread Moby-Dick once and listened to it on Audible twice with a superb reader. I read it in high school and really wasn't interested in it. But it is both splendid and perverse, showing the violence that results when humans project their retributive fantasies onto animals. Ahab imagines the whale as motivated by revenge and hate, when, no doubt, that animal is simply trying to live. Meanwhile Ishmael, the narrator, is insightful about many things and responds profoundly to the beauty of whales. At times he briefly deplores human cruelty. But always he carries on and distances himself from his own compassion. It is definitely a book people need to read today, when we have hunted some species of whales to the brink of extinction.

Acerbic humor, devastating social commentary, sparkling repartee, and gender politics, against the backdrop of 1920s and ’30s England.

The book offers a new and bold vision for animal rights and law. It draws on the capabilities approach to consider what each creature needs to flourish as its own form of life rather than a lesser form of human life. By referencing the animal kingdom in all its variety, it provides both a deep ethical justification and practical legal framework.

A collection of lyrical and thought-provoking essays that takes the reader through the American South, with its complex politics, history, and culture.

I’m reading David Quammen’s Breathless, an account which reads like a scientific detective story searching for the origin of COVID. The book is a perfect sequel to his earlier work, Spillover—on the rise of zoonotic diseases. Both books are compelling and riveting.

Reed, a political scientist now emeritus at Penn, was born in 1947, and grew up in New Orleans during the final years of the Jim Crow era. One of his aims is to record for posterity the lived experience of that time for one black person, but another is to demonstrate both the class politics of Jim Crow and how class differences among African-Americans affected their experience of the racism of the era. Another aim is to show the extent to which forms of economic oppression outlived the Jim Crow era, even as the racial composition of the oppressor and oppressed classes changed. The book is full of memorable stories, illustrating both the petty humiliations that were the daily fare of Jim Crow and the transformation of social relations wrought by its defeat. One example from near the end of the book: “[T]he changing conditions generating and attendant to the defeat of the Jim Crow order provided incentives for changed behavior. (Illustratively, and comically, the day after Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the white barber in tiny Eudora walked down the street to my Great-Uncle Clarence's funeral home to announce ‘Mr. Bethune, now that the law has changed, I'd certainly appreciate your business.’).”

A fascinating set of conversations with some of today’s most successful investors and a cook’s tour of the most important asset categories. It deserves a place on investors’ shelves next to classics such as Graham’s Intelligent Investor and Malkiel’s Random Walk Down Wall Street.

A gentle, humorous, and yet profound meditation on reaching a certain point in life that, since Dante at least, has been accompanied by a frisson of unease.

My favorite non-fiction book of the year. I learned something about every science topic that I should have paid more attention to in high school.

I’m revisiting this old favorite, which retraces two couples’ paths of friendship and family. The narrator conveys such love and nostalgia and respect for the people and places in his memory. The setting is sometimes a dinner party with academics in a Midwestern college town and sometimes a vacation retreat in the woods, and I’m a sucker for both. The language is so lovely that I have trouble putting it down.

An easy-to-recount biography of one of the greatest, but perhaps least known of the great robber barons of the late nineteenth century, that provides a window into the excesses of the Gilded Age and the long shadow it still casts.

Towles is one my favorite writers. After his magnificent A Gentleman in Moscow, which I listened to twice on Audible, to savor such delicacy, I waited patiently for his next novel (while in the meantime having a ball with his 2021 short story The Didomenico Fragment). Well, it came out this year—The Lincoln Highway—and was worth the wait. The wit, the nuance, the humor, the historical detail, and the characters that I am sure will stay with me—in short, a gem.

If you’re interested in why humans do the things we do, both consciously and unconsciously, this book is a great read. It’s a pop-evolutionary biology study (think “Malcolm Gladwell does evolution”) that explains why we adapted certain psychological survival mechanisms as a species during our shift out of the rainforest and into the savannah. It talks a lot about our species’ transition from living in a collective to living individually, and why some of these survival mechanisms just don’t seem to serve us well in modern society. If you’ve ever wondered why so many of us seem to have an innate fear of the dark, why we’re so much better at throwing things than many primates, or why kids say things that only make sense to them until about age 4 or 5, this book is for you.

The moving story of three college friends who create a video game empire. Of course, this entails setbacks, betrayals, and ultimately rehabilitation, but with many unexpected themes along the way, such as life with a physical disability, the selfishness of creativity, and a dose of magical realism.