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.

Read my full review here.

And if my five top picks — well, ten, really — aren’t enough for you, you might check out an extraordinary list of favorite-book lists here. The sheer number of these lists will blow your mind!

My top five books about business

Posted September 23, 2013

Of the dozens of books about business that I’ve read during the three-and-a-half years since I launched this blog, five books stand out. They remain fresh in my mind, and the lessons they teach continue to illuminate the path as I make my way through the thickets of the business world in all its dimensions, inside and out, variously as a social entrepreneur, impact investor, board member, adviser, and manager.

The five at the top

In alphabetical order by author’s last name

The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World, by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan

The Power of Unreasonable People ranks with David Bornstein’s seminal work, How to Change the World, as a point of entry into the fascinating, and increasingly important, realm of social entrepreneurship. Written by two of the field’s leading voices, this excellent book covers the landscape, describing examples from virtually every area of interest in development, from healthcare to education to poverty eradication. In fact, the book is most rewarding in its presentation of vignettes of individual social enterprises, including interviews with many of their principals.

Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, by Arthur Herman

Two extraordinary men — William S. Knudsen and Henry Kaiser — are the stars of this story, business impresarios who marshaled the stupendous numbers of men and women and the unprecedented mountains of raw materials that supplied the U.S. and its Allies with the weapons of war.

Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World’s Greatest Business Case for Compassion, by Pavithra Mehta and Suchitra Shenoy

This is the astonishing story of Aravind Eye Care, a nonprofit, family-run ophthalmological empire based in South India that exceeds the standards of eye care in Britain and the US, pioneers in advanced ophthalmology, trains eye surgeons from dozens of other countries — and consistently turns a profit. The book is beautifully written.

The Self-Made Myth, and the Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed, by Brian Miller and Mike Lapham

The Self-Made Myth goes straight to the heart of the conservative argument that favors limited government and coddling the rich, striking at the movement’s fundamental values and assumptions with their origins in the work of novelist Ayn Rand.

The Devil’s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal, and the High Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers, by Vicky Ward

An intimate, inside look at the people of Lehman Brothers, the venerable Wall Street investment bank whose record- setting bankruptcy is widely credited with triggering the meltdown of 2008. Like the close-up portraits of the rich and famous that often appear in the pages of Vanity Fair, the magazine that employs the author, this book is nothing more, and nothing less, than a character study of homo sapiens wallstreetianus. Read it for an understanding of how greed — for money, for power, and for the power that money can buy — truly was the central factor at the root of the Great Recession.

Other business books I’ve enjoyed

Arranged in no particular order. Linked to reviews.

! Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine, by Diarmuid Jeffreys ! Rooftop Revolution: How Solar Power Can Save Our Economy — and our Planet — from Dirty Energy, by Danny Kennedy ! Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution—From The Sopranos and The Wireto Mad Men and Breaking Bad, by Brett Martin ! The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public, by Lynn Stout ! KaBoom! How One Man Built a Movement to Save Play, by Darrell Hammond ! Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Methods Fail, by Paul Polak ! Winning the Story Wars: Why Those Who Live — and Tell — the Best Stories Will Rule the Future, by Jonah Sachs ! Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know, by David Bornstein and Susan Davis ! Rippling: How Social Entrepreneurs Spread Innovation Throughout the World, by Beverly Schwartz ! The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, by Jon Gertner ! Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, by Steve Coll ! Raising Eyebrows: A Failed Entrepreneur Finally Gets It Right, by Dal LaMagna ! The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, by Daniel Yergin ! Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson ! Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, by Michael Lewis ! All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera ! The Facebook Effect, by David Kirkpatrick ! The Big Short, by Michael Lewis ! Tribes, by Seth Godin ! Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Dan Heath and Chip Heath ! Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World, by Michael Edwards ! Losing the News: The Future of the News That Feeds Democracy, by Alex S. Jones ! Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, by Ken Auletta ! Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet, by Joseph Menn ! Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel Pink

The five best history books I’ve read recently

Posted September 9, 2013

Of the several hundred books I’ve read and reviewed since I launched this blog in January 2010, many were works of history, my undergraduate major and a field that has continued to fascinate and engage me through the years. It seemed time to take stock of this reading and point to the five books I’ve found to be most outstanding. Although I’ve taken into account both writing style and mastery of scholarship in selecting these few standouts, the most important criterion in my mind was the extent to which these books contributed something substantially new and surprising to my understanding of history.

BTW, just in case there’s any confusion, all the following are nonfiction books. I’ve omitted any of the excellent historical novels I’ve also read and reviewed.

Books are arranged in no particular order below.

The top five

Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power, by Seth Rosenfeld

A powerful and compelling study of the roles of J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan in stirring up violence among student demonstrators and others who opposed their autocratic behavior, the racism endemic among law enforcement officers, and the interventionist military policies of the national administration.

Why the West Rules — for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, by Ian Morris

An archeologist and historian explores the broad patterns of development over the past 15,000 years of humanity’s presence on Earth, upending much of the conventional wisdom among historians and noting that the West’s ascendancy since the advent of the Industrial Revolution is the exception, not the rule, in the historical balance of power between East and West.

Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace, by Peter Janney

Shocking revelations of the role of top CIA officials in the assassination of John F. Kennedy — and the impact of his death had on the US pursuit of war in Vietnam. The author, son of a senior CIA officer who knew many of the key figures in this drama as a child, drew on newly available material to explain how Kennedy’s mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was murdered under orders from the CIA, ostensibly to prevent her from revealing the conspiracy behind the President’s murder.

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann

The second of two books by Charles C. Mann that explore the world of the late 15th Century. 1491 revealed the surprising reality of the Americas before Columbus — teeming with population far greater than Europe’s, and far more sophisticated than previously believed. 1493 deals with the Columbian Exchange, historians’ term for the massive shift of flora, fauna, technology, and disease between the Old World and the New, with profound effects for both.

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt

A brilliant study of the influence of a hitherto obscure ancient poet whose shockingly prescient understanding of the natural world influenced the explorations of numerous Renaissance scholars — and whose impact is felt to this day.

Other excellent works of history

! Zealot, by Reza Aslan ! Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin III ! The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark ! The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran, by David Crist ! The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, by Masha Geffen ! The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, by Robert D. Kaplan ! Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben McIntyre ! 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann ! Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage, by Douglas Waller ! In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson ! To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, by Adam Hochschild ! Cleopatra: A Life, by Stacy Schiff ! The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War, by James Bradley ! Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers ! Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured Allied Victory, by Ben McIntyre ! Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin ! The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, by David Grann ! Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine, by Diarmuid Jeffreys ! The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, by Jon Gertner ! Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse

The five best historical novels I’ve read recently

Posted September 11, 2013

The top five

Note: Every title in this list is linked to the corresponding review.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

A beautifully written tale of love, courage, and faith in a world dominated by greed and the lust for power, this extraordinary novel is set around the turn of the 18th into the 19th Century in Nagasaki, Japan, where a young Dutch clerk arrives for his first posting for the Dutch East India Company.

And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini

A brother and sister born into rural poverty in Afghanistan in the late 1940s live contrasting lives through the tumult and violence of the decades that follow, taking them to Paris and the South San Francisco Bay of the 21st Century.

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh

A rich tale of class conflict, exploitation, and forbidden love set in 1838 against the background of the opium trade, shortly before the Opium War in China that set the stage for mounting conflict in India, as the trade declined.

The Debba, by Avner Mandelman

Framed as a murder mystery in which a young Canadian- Jewish man returns to Israel in 1977 to investigate the death of his father, a revered hero of the Israeli war for independence three decades earlier, The Debba deftly explores the complex interaction of Arab and Jew and the muddled politics that existed for so long before contemporary events hardened views into stark black-and- white contrast.

Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks

An extraordinarily vivid and compelling story of faith, love, superstition, and redemption, set during the Black Death in 14th Century England, based on documented historical circumstances.

Other excellent historical novels

! The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick DeWitt ! A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, by Anthony Marra ! Live by Night, by Dennis Lehane ! Maya’s Notebook, by Isabel Allende ! The Oracle of Stamboul, by Michael David Lukas ! River of Smoke, by Amitav Ghosh ! Istanbul Passage, by Joseph Kanon ! Caleb’s Crossing, by Geraldine Brooks ! March, by Geraldine Brooks ! Alibi, by Joseph Kanon ! Spies of the Balkans, by Alan Furst ! Conspirata, by Robert Harris ! Stardust, by Joseph Kanon ! People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks ! Blindspot, by Jill Kamensky and Jill Lepore ! Between the Assassinations, by Aravind Adiga ! Homer and Langley, by E. L. Doctorow

My three favorite books on science

Posted October 1, 2013

Now, for starters, please note that these favorite science books of mine are only those I’ve read and reviewed during the past three-and-one-half years since I started this blog. So, you won’t find The Origin of Species or any of the other classics here. With that understood, my three favorites, in no special order, are:

The top three

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

This book is extraordinary on several levels: as a beautifully researched work of medical and scientific history, as a portrait of the profound impact of racism in America, and as a brutally honest first-person account of a writer’s challenging, decade-long struggle to write a serious book . .

Read on.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A History of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Are you wondering why cancer occurs more frequently with age? Dr. Mukherjee’s lucid prose, and his masterful command of the field of oncology, make it a snap to understand. Cancer is a genetic disease, and every gene among the 25,000 or so in the human genome is vulnerable to mutation in the course of time . . .