100 books like American Happiness and Discontents

While some dictators grab power through violent coups, a surprising number of authoritarian leaders initially won power through the ballot box. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s book tells the story of authoritarian populists such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, who won elections and then eroded democratic norms and institutions.

In many cases, populist authoritarians subvert democracy not by overtly breaking the law but by gradually weakening institutional checks and balances. Populists exploit societal divisions and erode democratic norms by portraying themselves as the true voice of the people while demonizing opponents as illegitimate.

My first 3 picks put much of the blame for widespread attention capture on greedy actors engaged in a “race to the bottom of the brainstem” (Tristan Harris, former Google employee, became popular opponent of exploitative big tech). 

Although Carr does not shy from that theme, he seems to put much of the responsibility on our own shoulders: it is we who must resist many temptations of convenience in order to preserve our own cognitive strengths, such as creativity. Otherwise, we become shallow thinkers and reliant on AI even for something as characteristically human as wisdom. 

Carr’s follow-up to this book, The Glass Cage, is also very intriguing, and it offers a little more hope for a humanity that is currently bound up in a web of frightening technological dependency.

In my mind, Carr nails the real threats of AI: a total dumming-down of humanity to a level where we… show more.

This is an obvious choice, but it’s obvious for a reason–it sets out clearly and rigorously the extent to which the super-rich across multiple different countries suck up an ever-increasing share of aggregate income and wealth.

There’s doubtless some satisfaction from being one of the small proportion of purchasers to get through all 700+ pages, but it’s actually quite readable and peppered with literary references to writers like Jane Austen and Honore Balzac.

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.

J.B. West was a White House Usher from 1941 to 1969. His book details many of his experiences in performing this rare and unique job in the White House, where he personally worked for Presidents (and First Ladies): Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. There have only been three books written by White House Ushers: Ike Hoover, who served from 1904 -1933; J.B. West, 1941-1969; and me, Chris Emery, 1986-1994.

As you might have deduced, I love Michael Bamberger books. This one had me enthralled because it took me down a path I did not envision.

He introduced me to three characters in the game I might not have otherwise come upon. Instead of the top players in the game, he focused on those who love the game in their own way, and while their stories – another golf writer, an old friend, a woman who overcame incredible odds in her home country – are not well known, they are nonetheless fascinating.

This was a difficult book to put down.

I saw my first raven near Mount Rainier. The bird looked me in the eye, hopped to the left, sized me up, and continued his business. The advancing Russian army drove Bernd Heinrich and his family into the forest near Hahnheide, Germany, where they lived in a small hut for five years.

There, he began his lifelong quest to connect with insects (especially bees), owls, trees, antelope (he runs ultramarathons), geese...and ravens. The mind of the Raven is a deep, scientific meditation on the intersection between being human and raven. It concludes that “ultimately [our differences are] less a matter of consciousness than of culture” (342).

I wonder how culture has dulled my imagination, a struggle Heinrich clearly has fought more successfully than I have.

A wonderful and slightly maddening memoir, this (it’s nonfiction, Jim, but not as we know it). Bayley survived her childhood by absorbing books. She evokes the worlds of David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, and everything Agatha Christie ever wrote, by ventriloquising and interweaving the voices of those stories with the story of her own parental neglect, thereby insisting, if dreamily, that the boundaries between her reliable book-land and her unstable real-life-land will remain blurred. It’s only slightly maddening (I did much the same as a child; part of me will always be Katie tumbling out of the swing). The book’s deliberate ambiguities suggest that Bayley is claiming sanctuary, reserving the right not to divulge what is still too unbearable to relate, and why shouldn’t she? It’s an amazingly honest, touching book.

Although not nearly as well-known as Richard Adams’ Watership Down (an epic tale, with voyages and battles on the scale of Homer’s Odyssey), this book was published decades earlier and could be seen as a quiet precursor to that far more violent story.

The gardeners among you will immediately recognize both the fear and the excitement that the animals feel when contemplating unfamiliar humans. My wife and I, who have moved dozens of times in our long careers, often quote a line from Little Georgie: “New folks coming, oh my!”

GQ writer Flynn and his wife and two kids are minding their own business on their surburban Durham “faux farm” when a friend calls to ask if they want to add a peacock to the two chickens that wander their yard. They end up with three of the kaleidoscopic birds, and Flynn’s chronicle of the family’s first year with Carl, Ethel, and Mr. Pickle takes readers on an implausibly relatable journey from the bird’s place in history, culture, and myth through its evolutionary biology and breeding habits to its endangered status in the wild, offering sardonically hilarious and harrowingly poignant life lessons along the way.