She named a best books list for The Week. One title on the list:The Age of Dreaming by Nina Revoyr (Akashic, $16).Read about all six books on See's list.
A literary novel masquerading as noir fiction. An older Japanese man, a movie star during the Silent Era, goes back in time to tell the story of his career in Hollywood and the murder that drove him from the business.
One book on her list:Between the AssassinationsRead about the other 12 titles on Nelson's list.
by Aravind Adiga
The stories in his collection—written before his Man Booker-winning debut The White Tiger—again exhibit the author’s characteristic subversive sensibility and pointed prose and again address the power, corruption, and seething despair among India’s underclass.
Frank Partnoy is the author of F.I.A.S.C.O.: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader and Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Greed Corrupted the Financial Markets. He has worked as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and a corporate lawyer, and has testified as an expert before both the United States Senate and House of Representatives. A graduate of Yale Law School, he currently teaches law at the University of San Diego. His new book is The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, The Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals.Manias, Panics, and CrashesRead about all five books on Partnoy's list.
Throughout his long career as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Charles P. Kindleberger battled the dominant thinking in finance. His multi-stage theory,presented in “Manias, Panics, and Crashes,” about “the instability of expectations, speculation, and credit and the role of leveraged speculation in various assets,” was simple but radical. More important, it worked, and still does. First, financial innovation and technology create new opportunity (think subprime lending and derivatives, particularly credit-default swaps). Then profits are fueled by increasing credit and expanding money supply (thank you, Mr. Greenspan). People overestimate expected returns and borrow too much (ah, those AAA credit ratings). Speculation spreads until there is financial distress, and news about a bankruptcy or financial fraud leads to a panicked rush for liquidity (take your pick: Bear Stearns, Lehman, Citigroup, AIG). Regulators should heed Kindleberger’s moral-hazard warning: A lender of last resort should exist, but its “presence should be doubted.”
One title on Ott's list: Singularity. By Kathryn Casey. 2008. St. Martin’s/Minotaur, $24.95 (9780312379506).Read about all ten books on Ott's list.
A criminal profiler with the Texas Rangers, Sarah Armstrong catches a psychiatrist’s dream case: a serial killer who poses his victims as if in rapture, with bloody crosses painted on the wall above the bed—clearly the work of someone on a twisted moral mission. This impressive fictional debut from an established true-crime author introduces a memorable heroine with brains, moxie, and heart.
Adam Leith Gollner is the author of The Fruit Hunters : A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession.The Loved One by Evelyn WaughRead about the other nine titles on the list.
"This rendition comes to you by courtesy of Kaiser's Stoneless Peaches. Remember no other peach now marketed is perfect and completely stoneless. When you buy Kaiser's Stoneless Peach you are buying full weight of succulent peach flesh and nothing else."Fruit as existential crisis. This radio advertisement precipitates the suicide of Aimee Thanatogenos, the triangulated loved one in Waugh's California tragicomedy. Aimee, a cosmetic mortician, is overwhelmed by the futility of modern life. Spurning the advances of a Dennis Barlow, a young poet admirer, she has agreed to marry the dour embalmer Mr Joyboy, an Oedipal wreck in thrall to his mother. As empty as a Kaiser's Stoneless Peach, Aimee kills herself. Waugh's cynical notion of a stoneless peach's putative perfection also foreshadowed the empty promises of today's fruit marketing – from unripe, puckeringly bitter cranberries sold as "all natural, fully ripened, white cranberries" to apples dunked in artificial-grape-flavored bird repellent and branded as "Grapples."
One title on Ott's list: A Rule against Murder. By Louise Penny. 2009. St. Martin’s/Minotaur, $24.95 (9780312377021).Read about all ten books on the list.
Penny’s Armand Gamache novels, starring an intrepid Canadian police inspector in the Quebec village of Three Pines, have quickly established themselves as some of the best traditional mysteries being published today. This fourth entry finds the inspector traveling to a remote resort to celebrate his wedding anniversary; naturally, murder is on the guest list. Despite similarities to Poirot and Maigret, Gamache is a complete original.
Lenore Skenazy is a syndicated columnist, founder of www.freerangekids.com, and author of Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry.The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t – and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger by Daniel GardnerLearn more about Lenore Skenazy and her work at www.freerangekids.com.
This book explains why some of the least likely scenarios – from plane crashes to child abductions – dominate our brains andmake us worse than irrational. They make us paranoid. Gardner points out that with over 6 billion people on the planet, something horrible is happening somewhere every day. And thanks to non-stop media, we will be shown it. The fight-or-flight part of our brains can’t distinguish between likely and unlikely, or even between fact and fiction (like what we see on Law & Order, or CSI). So once a scary image gets lodged in the noggin, it ends up affecting our perception of risk. Especially the risks to our kids! Great stuff – and fun to read, too. Even, amazingly enough, the part about our fears of what could cause cancer. (Namely: Everything.)
Parenting, Inc. How We Are Sold on $800 Strollers, Fetal Education, Baby Sign Language, Sleeping Coaches, ToddlerCouture, and Diaper Wipe Warmers – and What It Means for Our Children by Pamela Paul
I can tell you what all this means for our children: nothing good. If we think that kids should not experience even the trauma of a room-temperature wipe, we are forgetting that little kids need to deal with little adversities so that as they grow up they can deal with bigger ones. This book not only details all the wacky items marketed to gobsmacked parents, it asks the bigger questions: Do we WANT to raise children this pampered? What are we NOT giving them when we give them the very “best” of everything? And, by the way, who can afford all this junk?
The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris
What a reassuring book. It is the perfect antidote to rows and rows of books in the “parenting” section that tell us exactly what to do, say, eat and buy to raise aperfect kid. “Guess what?” says Harris (who used to write those other books about parental influence on child development until one day she realized -- she didn’t believe them!): We don’t “create” our kids anyway. Our kids come out genetically pre-programmed to be pretty much who they will end up being, barring huge traumas or deprivation along the way. Then they are shaped, to a certain extent, by their friends, siblings AND us – but we are just part of the equation, not God with a hammer and chisel and a boulder that is Baby. This is good news for those of us worried about that one time last year when we said, “You can do better,” when we think we should have said, “You did a great job!” Our kids are not solely shaped by our input – good OR bad. And certainly not by every little thing we say and do, “right” or “wrong.”
The Case for Make Believe by Susan LinnLinn is one of the founders of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood – the Harvard group that successfully sued Baby Einstein to take the word “educational” off its web site, and has campaigned against commercial TV in the schools, commercial radio on school buses, and stupid products (like Hannah Montana nail polish) in the Scholastic Book flyers kids get in their classrooms. (Did you know that up to a third of Scholastic’s items aren’t even reading material anymore?) In this book she gathers all the research on how important just plain PLAYING is – how it stimulates everything from creativity to communication skills to leadership – and why we have to leave time for our kids to do some of it. Even if that means letting Junior drop out of Mandarin, at least on Wednesdays.
Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting by Carl HonoreHonore became famous in England a few years back for his bestseller, ‘In Praise of Slowness.” This book looks at the same issue – our crazed, pressured lives – from the point of view of parenting, and asks why we think our kids should all be overachievers. The book grew out of his own frank dismay at himself. One day he was at parent-teacher conferences at his son’s school and the teacher mentioned that his boy had some artistic ability. Immediately Carl started thinking he’d better put his son in special art classes to nurture this astounding talent. His son grumbled something like, “Why do grown-ups have to take over everything?” And here, Honore asks the same question.
A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting by Hara Estroff Marano
When people ask me, “What do kids lose if we don’t let them go Free-Range?” I usually answer something like, “The joy of childhood! The exhilaration of shouting, ‘I DID IT MYSELF!!’” But in this book, Marano, an editor at Psychology Today, actually visits campuses to see how overprotected kids do once they are out on their own. She is troubled by what she finds: A lot of young adults unable to function, and even breaking down in record numbers. When parents try to do too much for their kids, she says, they end up hurting more than helping. Hers is a cautionary tale.
How To Live Dangerously: Why We Should All Stop Worrying and Start Living by Warwick Cairns
Sort of the happy-go-lucky flip side of “A Nation of Wimps.” Cairns is also in favor of letting kids take more risks. Not nasty, pointless ones (though it sure doessound like he took some himself), but the kind that most kids have always taken, until recently. He rails against creepy laws in his country – Britain – that have, for instance, outlawed an age-old tradition of pre-school plays wherein the witch on stage throws candy into the audience. Now this is considered “too dangerous.” He also makes one of my very favorite points in ANY parenting book (which is why I quote it in my own): If, for some reason, you actually WANTED your child to be abducted by a stranger, do you know how many years you would have to leave him outside, unattended, for this to be statistically LIKELY to happen? Answer: 600,000 years. I think of his book as the British version of “Free-Range Kids”: A fun and funny plea for us to remember we are living in safe times. Our children deserve a chance to enjoy them – and gain some lovely self-confidence – by us letting go of the handlebars. (But they can still wear helmets. I love helmets.)
One femme on the list:CarmillaRead about all ten femmes fatales on Mullan's list.
Sheridan Le Fanu's tale of a female vampire predates Dracula and established the character of the supernaturally beautiful young woman who is after your blood – literally. Living in a castle with her father, lonely Laura is befriended by the moody, mysterious Carmilla, who seems to sleep most of the day. Bad dreams and bite marks follow. Will Laura discover her lovely companion's true identity in time?
One book on her list:The Gardner HeistRead about all five books on Scotti's list.
by Ulrich Boser
Smithsonian/Collins, 2008
It remains the world's biggest unsolved art theft: On St. Patrick's Day night in 1990, 13 works worth more than $500 million, including three Rembrandts and a Vermeer, were cut from their frames in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. For the next 15 years, recovering the art obsessed a relentless insurance-claims adjuster and art sleuth named Harold Smith. When Smith died in 2005, journalist Ulrich Boser inherited his research. "The Gardner Heist" is Boser's account of how, joining the hunt, he was drawn into the art-crime underworld and into the orbit of notorious Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger. As Boser follows each lead, he develops a tantalizing theory about who committed the crime.
He named his favorite travel books for The Week. One title on the list:River Town by Peter Hessler (HarperCollins, $15).Read about the other books on Stewart's list.
A Peace Corps volunteer describes two years teaching in a Chinese city on the Yangtze. Hessler’s 2006 book is open to the comedy of the everyday; it’s self-deprecating, respectful, and funny. It captures the provincialism, the modernity, the xenophobia, and the energy of modern China.
He named his top ten books on nuclear weapons and arms control for Foreign Policy. One book on his list:McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival, Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (1988).Read about all ten books on Krepon's list.
Bundy's mind worked like a jeweler examining all facets of the policy dilemmas associated with the Bomb. An elegant writer, he came to the subject honestly: His father was Henry L. Stimson's assistant at the War Department, and he helped Stimson write his memoirs.
For the Guardian, he named his top 10 subterranean books. One title on the list:Moonfleet by J Meade FalknerRead about all ten books on Smith's list.
Smuggling was practised not only on the Spanish Main but around our sceptr'd Isle. At New Brighton, Merseyside, where my family is from, the privateers salted their booty away beneath the butter-soft sandstone. Moonfleet contains my cri de coeur: "I believe there never was a boy yet who saw a hole in the ground, or a cave in a hill, or much more an underground passage, but longed incontinently to be into it and discover whither it led."
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