Books like Ideas — picked by fans

I see David Greaeber’s book as a landmark in the field. He completely changed my understanding of and views on money’s role in society and its evolution. I had the good fortune to meet David a few times (in fact, I made a podcast with him) and feel like I learned from every conversation.

Until I read David’s book, I had assumed that the Barter theory of money and the double coincidence of wants was the natural and unchallenged explanation for how money came to be and what roles it performed. David’s and subsequent authors' work has shown that this view is simplistic and outdated. 

Yes, yes, history is an unbroken river of themes, but it’s also a chain of pivotal dramatic episodes. Dolnick gives us one such moment. In 17th century Europe, within two generations, a collection of brilliant oddballs invented science. They’re people, so they’re doing the sorts of things people do, elbowing and shoving one another to find the ultimate truth before the other guy. I appreciate that in the course of reading such a wonderfully enjoyable story, I somehow learn a great deal about the truth they were seeking, the underlying mathematical order of the universe in which they believed.

Culture is how we group ourselves. Culture is how we see. To make ourselves understood by people of other cultures, we have to lend them our eyes. That’s hard, but Yu Hua meets that challenge for me. His book China in Ten Words offers ten essays about China, each with a one-word title: Revolution. Reading. Copycat. Words like that. Each essay surrounds its title-word with content until one understands what the word means, not to oneself, but to Hua. The essays work like a fusion of memoir and history. They draw the reader into one man’s experience; and at the same time they illuminate a broad patch of history—Maoist and post-Maoist China.

If history is a story, the breaking news might be: Humans Dominate Planet. Why? Because of our superior brains, I’m told. But how do these brains work? Dr. Stephens explains it. He explains it like we’re on our way to get a beer, say, and he’s just telling me something he knows in his usual wisecracking way. I’m chuckling, but his explanation is working, its putting pieces together, I think I see how we operate, how we humans are churning out this history we’re swimming in. 

This is a powerful rewriting of Freudian theory from one of the giants of the Frankfurt School, whom I was fortunate enough to study with at UC San Diego. Rather than accept “reality” as a given, Marcuse transforms Freud’s “reality-principle” into the “performance principle”–we perform far more work than reality itself requires because the capitalist system is profiting from our labor. We are thus subjected not just to repression but to surplus repression–which corresponds to the surplus value capitalists extract from our labor power and our purchasing power.

I was always intrigued but also perplexed by psychoanalysis, and this amazing book completely transformed my understanding of how the human psyche operates under capitalism.

A History of Knowledge is a treasure that invites everyone to explore and enjoy. It recounts the history of human progress from primitive times to the 21st century. Van Doren covers the history of ideas, inventions, civilizations, ideologies, and issues of justice, war, and slavery. Almost no famous thinker, emperor, philosopher, inventor, or artist is not mentioned, and his contribution examined. These are two of my favorite quotations; “Our fathers started the revolution, and we are still living it. We could not stop it even if we wanted to.” “The rich are never rich enough... to have enough is simply to be content with what you have. When wanting comes first, you can never have enough. If contentment is placed first, it does not matter how much you have.”

Mailer published three nonfiction books near the end of his life to lay out his final take on issues he’d been pursuing his entire writing life and as a highly visible, often notorious, public intellectual: On God, Why Are We at War?—echoing his 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam?—and The Big Empty. I chose The Big Empty because the reader comes to understand where Mailer lands finally on so many issues he covered during his decades of political and societal journalism, with a special focus on democracy in America, its potential and its abiding threats.

The book is structured as a series of dialogues with his youngest son, John Buffalo Mailer, who in his introduction argues that such a dialogue with his father represents a necessary conversation among generations. Their topics include, among other pressing intergenerational concerns, the American presidency, endless war, American 21st-century politics,… show more.

I always enjoy Bill Bryson’s stories, wherever he travels. He’s like my favorite funny uncle, and I never tire of hearing from him.

After a couple of decades as a Yank in the UK, he was going to move back home. First, he takes us on one last meandering trip all around the nation, to pay homage, to enjoy good memories, and to get amusingly grumpy about inconveniences. His sense of humor is self-effacing, silly, bungling, and very entertaining.  

I love his keen nose for the absurd differences between the two cultures, his collections of comedy place names, and the British slang phrases he never understood. I grew up in the USA but spent all my adult life in the UK, and this had me laughing out loud, frequently. 

Juan Villoro’s memoir takes readers on a tour of contemporary Mexico City that is also a meditation on chilangos’ (Mexico City residents) relationship with the past. The book bounces between the author’s childhood in the neighborhoods of Mixcoac and Del Valle and the present day, traversing the sprawling metropolis and giving readers a sense of its scale and complexity. Through Villoro, we meet the sewer cleaners and tire repairmen who keep the city humming. We visit monuments like the Angel of Independence and Chapultepec Castle and the bustling spaces of Santo Domingo Plaza and Tepito—places that seem to hover between past and present and myth and reality. At once spry and erudite, the book is an immensely satisfying rumination on the city and its people. 

Several books focused on the Works Progress Administration (WPA), or discreet parts of it, had been published before Borchert’s was released but this is the best of them. I doubt that any other book will ever tell the story of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) quite so well. On one level, it lays out the project’s scope and walks readers through the politics involved with its creation and continued operation. And on another, it explains what the project meant for the writers it employed and how it influenced their work. Every other book on this list was written by an author employed by the project or another part of the WPA; this book will help you understand them as part of a coherent literary moment in American history.