13 September 2016 (Milos, Greece) – I only have one rule for a great non-fiction book: it needs to make me think. I belong to a publisher’s consortium (a membership that came from a long-time part-time position as a professional reader for a publisher who is also one of my IP clients) and I receive about 10 books a month. Some books stay in my libraries (I keep duplicate copies of my favorite and most-referenced books at my home in Greece and my home in Brussels) but the bulk go to my foundation for distribution to libraries and schools across Europe that have few financial resources and are in desperate need of books.
I spent part of my summer reading advance copies of some of the fall’s nonfiction releases, and here are 5 that I highly recommend:
- The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
He’s baaaaaaaack. The storyteller behind Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short explores the friendship that exposed irrationality, transformed our understanding of decision-making, and won Daniel Kahneman a Nobel Prize in economics (and additional fame for Thinking, Fast and Slow). It’s about the Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky who wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. It made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. And it reveals something I did not know about the two men: they were battlefield tested and had important careers in the Israeli military.
2. David Bowie: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Melville House)
I have been a Bowier fan since … well, forever. When David Bowie died this past January (see my brief tributes here and here), the publishing industry was quick to address grieving fans. At the end of June, Dey Street published On Bowie by Rolling Stone contributing editor Rob Sheffield, author of 2007’s Love Is a Mix Tape. In July, Gallery released The Age of Bowie (I swear it was stacked in every airport I transversed) by British music journalist Paul Morley, who was artistic advisor to the curators of David Bowie Is, a retrospective organized by London’s Victoria & Albert Museum in 2013. Both excellent books. As was the 2013 exhibit.
The coming season brings various reissues, novelty titles, and books including David Bowie: The Last Interview and Other Conversations. It is a collection of terrific interviews, beginning with his first, with the BBC in 1964 (when he was 17-year-old David Jones and not yet a public figure), to his last, which Melville House is keeping a secret until publication(it’s a doozy).
3. A Voyage in the Clouds: The (Mostly) True Story of the First International Flight by Balloon in 1785 (Farrar Straus Giroux)
The purpose of my foundation is to execute the guiding philosophy of my mother which was to provide opportunities for reading, travel and other luminous encounters for children. So I receive a fair amount of books for children. All of these go to libraries.
A Voyage in the Clouds tells the story of the flight of the first manned balloon in 1785. John Jeffries, an Englishman, and his pilot, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, a Frenchman, wanted to be the first and set out on January 7, 1785 to cross the English Channel to France. All seems to be going fine until Blanchard takes a nap and Jeffries decides the balloon looks too fat and adjusts the air valve – how hard could it be? Too bad he drops the wrench over the side of the aerial car and with no way to adjust the valve the balloon begins to sink. Jeffries and Blanchard throw as much as they can overboard – until there is nothing left, not even their clothes. Luckily they come up with a clever (and surprising) solution that saves the day. It is aimed for teenagers but it is a great read to the young’uns.
4. Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders (Workman Publishing Company)
I got hooked on the Atlas Obscura website a number of years ago because its self-description is spot-on: “definitive guidebook and friendly tour-guide to the world’s most wondrous places. Travel tips, articles, strange facts and unique events”. Through the site I visited the Phlegraean Fields in southern Italy, the smoking, sulfurous landscape also known as Campi Flegrei which has long been been associated with Hell and the underworld. Dante visited multiple times.
This book adds to my “bucket list” of natural wonders to see. Borrowing from a blurb by Joshua Foer (one of the authors) the book shows the “the dazzling glowworm caves in New Zealand, the baobob tree in South Africa that’s so large it has a pub inside where 15 people can drink comfortably. Architectural marvels, including the M.C. Escher-like stepwells in India. Mind-boggling events, like the Baby Jumping Festival in Spain, where men dressed as devils literally vault over rows of squirming infants”.
5. A Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge (Guardian Faber)
The most chilling selection I read. It is an amazing insight into American gun crime: the Guardian journalist picked a day at random and spent 18 months exploring the lives and deaths of all the youths who were shot dead during those 24 hours.
Last year in London I gave a talk to cops just back from their assignments in Afghanistan police training, explaining their frustration and the waste of such U.S. missions vis-a-vis my experiences in the Middle East. I will soon publish a critique on the “madness of guns” in America and I found A Day in the Death of America confirmation of almost everything in my essay.