Mal Warwick's "5 Best" Book Lists

Mal Warwick’s “5 Best” Book Lists From Mal Warwick’s Blog on Books, www.malwarwickonbooks.com Note: Links to my full reviews are embedded in the titles listed here. Five books every American should read Posted January 27, 2014 Stop. I’m not going to make you feel guilty by suggesting you read the Federalist Papers, the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Travels in America, and other works on every historian’s list of seminal books in our past. (After all, how many of us have actually read those books — I mean, actually opened them up and read them from cover to cover?) No, instead you’ll find below a short list of much more recently written books that cast a penetrating light on the reality of American life in the 21st Century. You won’t find any archaic language in any of these five books. I’ve chosen them from among the nearly 300 I’ve read and reviewed here during the past four years. Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin If you treasure your freedom as an American . if you’re concerned about how the U.S. Government spends your tax money . or if you simply want to understand how our country is managed . you owe it to yourself to read this brilliant book. Alternately mind-boggling and blood- curdling, Top Secret America is the most impressive piece of investigative journalism I’ve read in years. Dana Priest and Bill Arkin have written a book that, in a rational world, would usher in an orgy of housecleaning through the far reaches of the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and every other department, agency, or office that pretends to be involved in strengthening our national security. Read more . The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander Are you aware that the highest incidence of the use and sale of illegal drugs is found in communities characterized as White? That the percentage of federal prisoners convicted of violent crimes is 7.9%? That the greatest increase in funding for the War on Drugs took place during the Administration of Bill Clinton? Read more . The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty- Year Conflict with Iran, by David Crist If you were among those who sighed with relief when Barack Obama was reelected because you’d been concerned that a Republican administration would invade Iran, David Crist has news for you. In fact, The Twilight War is full of surprises, even for one who stays relatively well informed about world affairs. The underlying message — the meta-message, if you’ll permit that conceit — is that what we normally consume on a daily basis as “news” is an awkward mixture of critical opinion, wishful thinking, rumor, partisan posturing, self-serving news leaks, and a smattering of hard information. Read more . The Self-Made Myth, and the Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed, by Brian Miller and Mike Lapham [Editor's note: This review was written in 2010, but it could easily apply to 2014 as well.] Last week the Republican majority in the House of Representatives passed a budget that slashes taxes for corporations and high-income taxpayers while drastically cutting federal assistance for food and other safety-net programs. It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic expression of contemporary “conservative” ideology. It’s straight out of Atlas Shrugged, based on the tragically misguided notion that brilliant, driven individuals produce the country’s wealth and are solely responsible for creating jobs for the rest of us. Read more . All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera Once upon a time, not so long ago, really — it was 1999 — there was a group of three exceedingly smart men whom Time Magazine called The Committee to Save the World. In fact, these three men — Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin — seemed to think they were the smartest people in the whole wide world. Together, they had put in place the economic policies of the Clinton Administration, and, boy, did things look rosy then, back in 1999, with a big budget surplus and the Dow Jones averages heading for Neptune! Read more . Now, if you’re tempted to complain that all these five books take a negative view of the issues within their scope, all I can say is, if we can’t identify the problems we face, we’ll never fix them. And I doubt you’ll feel that there are no problems that cry out for fixing. My Five Favorite Books of 2013 Posted December 20, 2013 A popular local website called Berkeleyside had asked me to pick my five favorite books for the year just ending. This proved to be a tough assignment. Of the 50 or so books I’d read so far in 2013, the easy route would have been to turn to familiar writers whose work I nearly always love. I could have picked Barbara Kingsolver (Flight Behavior), Malcolm Gladwell (David and Goliath), Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed), John LeCarré (A Delicate Truth), and Isabel Allende (Maya’s Notebook). I loved them all. But that would have been too easy. These writers all have plenty of readers. So, I decided to select books whose authors are less well known and whose work is all too easily lost amid the hundreds of thousands of new titles published every year in the US alone. Here are my five candidates, then: Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the MaKing of Hitler’s War Machine, by Diarmuid Jeffreys As memories of World War II grow dim and its active participants pass away, it becomes too easy to assign blame for the war to a few highly familiar names (Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, and so forth) and overlook others whose roles in the conflict may have been equally significant. This compelling and deeply researched account of the intimate between the Nazi regime and German’s largest company is a shocking reminder of how so many genteel and well-educated Germans made Hitler’s war possible. It is difficult to imagine a more dramatic example than IG Farben of business unmoored from any moral purpose — not just supplying the products that literally fueled the Nazi war machine and sponsoring the gruesome research of Dr. Josef Mengele (the notorious “Angel of Death”), but going so far as to build its own concentration camp for Jewish slave laborers at Auschwitz. Read my full review here. The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick DeWitt Here’s a Western set in California during the Gold Rush that’s more Deadwood than Gunsmoke, a novel imbued with the spirit and the cadences of speech of the real Old West. It had to be: The Sisters Brothers was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and the panjandrums who manage that process aren’t known to show favor to run-of-the-mill genre writing. The Sisters brothers of the title are notorious hired killers in the employ of a mysterious and powerful man known only as the Commodore. They emerge from the page fully fleshed and displaying their own all too believable quirks and idiosyncrasies. I rarely read Westerns, but this one bowled me over. Read my full review here. The Night Ranger, by Alex Berenson It’s hard to find a thriller writer who is more diligent or more ingenious at research than Alex Berenson, a former New York Times correspondent. In The Night Ranger, the seventh novel in his excellent series featuring John Wells (ex-Army, ex- CIA), Berenson casts a spotlight on one of the greatest tragedies on Earth, the plight of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the recurring drought and unending civil war in Somalia. The action is virtually non-stop, and tension builds steadily toward a shattering climax, making the book progressively more difficult to set aside. Read my full review here. Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, by Lawrence Wright Why is Scientology such an object of fascination when their followers (estimated at 25,000 in the US) are less than half as numerous as those who identify themselves as Rastafarians? Lawrence Wright provides the definitive answer to this question. Just seven years ago Wright’s masterful book about Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. If anything, Going Clear represents an even greater accomplishment, putting to shame previous efforts to tell the story of the notoriously secretive and litigious cult called Scientology. In the pages of this brilliant book, the cast of far-fetched characters who populate the Church come to life, their pretensions, insecurities, contradictions, and (often) mental illnesses on display for all to see — despite Wright’s intensive effort to be fair at every turn. Read my full review here. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk — winner of the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction — is, hands down, the most successful anti-war novel to come out of the Iraq War. It’s a funny book, beautifully written, and I suspect it conveys about as well as any humorless treatment a sense of the war in Iraq from the perspective of the Americans who fought it face to face with insurgents. Ben Fountain finds nearly everyone in sight — Hollywood, Texas billionaires, and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, for starters — to be fair game for satire, and he’s very, very good at it.

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