The best books to understand today's biggest domestic and global challenges

When The Shallows was first published in 2010 it rang like a five-bell fire alarm, alerting the world about the mostly negative effects of pervasive exposure to the internet. Science journalist Nicholas Carr noticed experiencing an “uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory” and set out to find answers and solutions by thoroughly studying the extant body of neuroscience literature on a wide array of topics including brain plasticity, cognition, and memory. Republished with slight changes as a tenth-anniversary edition in 2020, The Shallows is now even more relevant in these times of TikTok. It remains an excellent guide (more like a dictionary) for Baby Boomers like myself to understand the culture and minds of Millennials and GenZers. 

Several reviewers, including Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, deemed Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century the most important economics book of the year in 2017, perhaps the decade. As a historian who writes on global economic topics, I find Piketty’s treatment of rising economic inequality extraordinarily insightful. The book forcefully challenges the widely held, naive assumption that the problem of income and wealth inequality will eventually take care of itself. Capital’s relevance is enhanced by the COVID-19 pandemic-generated rise in global inequality. It is a voluminous masterpiece, the result of a dozen years of primary research and thorough quantitative analysis, reminiscent of Karl Marx’s investigations for The Capital. It reads so well that one forgets that it is an economics book.

Hailed by The Economist as the “most important book of the Trump Era,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die is a thoroughly researched, engagingly written book that reminds us that the United States, even with its long democratic tradition, is not immune to a democratic breakdown that may prove irreversible. The authors, both professors of government at Harvard University, look deep into the past and widely around the globe to produce a list of warning signs of shifts from democracy to authoritarianism which have become increasingly common in the twenty-first century. With great persuasiveness, they marshal the thesis that “Democracies may not die at the hands of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power.”

Many people know that American democracy and capitalism have been on a downward spiral for decades. The system is rigged, former Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich sounds the alarm throughout his excellent book The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. He goes deep into these questions as he supports the provocative thesis that despite acrimonious partisan polarization, the real contest is not between the right and left but between democracy and oligarchy; and that the vast majority of citizens (Republicans, Democrats, and Independents) are getting poorer and wield “near-zero” political power. Oligarchs—JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon is their embodiment—have amassed enormous sums of capital and political power, which allows them to further rig the system through campaign contributions, successful lobbying, and even criminal actions for which, if caught, they only pay nominal fines.

American readers and news watchers are deeply segregated: those on the left reading and watching news produced by liberals, and those on the right consuming words and images from conservative authors and broadcasts. And then there is Washington Post columnist George Will, a conservative, who reads voraciously across the political spectrum and offers commentary that reasonable Americans must recognize as honest and insightful. American Happiness and Its Discontents is a collection of thoroughly researched, thought-provoking, exquisitely-written columns written by Will from 2008 to 2020. He offers insightful commentary on a wide range of political, social, and cultural topics and tackles subjects deemed taboo by the left such as the wave of nonsense that has flooded higher education.