Fans pick 100 books like Shutdown

The idea to adapt Conrad’s Heart of Darkness came from my teaching of modern world history every semester. Later in that course, I would have students read Achebe’s novel as a foil or answer to Heart of Darkness. The Congolese in Heart are barely people: they have no names, and they are only really described by parts of their bodies.

This book presents the West African world–the communities, the customs, the emotions, the families–that colonialism destroys. While it is easy to be swept away by the story’s momentum in the last two dozen pages, take some time early in the novel to enjoy the world that Achebe lovingly paints. I think it is among the most human expressions of fiction you can read.  

I was one in a world of frustrated and increasingly anxious people back in 2018. Politicians just weren’t talking about the severity of the environmental crisis and the vast actions that we need (and can) undertake to tackle it. And then Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg and Fridays for the Future, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal, and the Sunrise Movement came along. Suddenly everyone was talking about it. This set of essays brings so many of those thinkers and doers together to give us an inspiring road map for getting out of the crisis and realizing a better world in the process. And it shows us that these movements are built on the shoulders of giants, particularly in the global south. 

I can find it overwhelming to think how large and bad the environmental crisis really is. Record temperatures, species extinction, fires and storms. In many ways, this book hammers home the scale – but it does so productively. It’s been an excellent companion for me in learning more about the problem. It’s written by two of the world’s top scientists who have led the way in helping us see this as an environmental crisis, not just a problem of climate change or species loss, but an overall destabilization of the natural world. This is often missed from the mainstream discussion and Lewis and Maslin offer a whole range of approaches that can help you make sense of what we can do in response. 

I was born at the end of the 1980s and the majority of greenhouse gas emissions have been released in my lifetime. That means the world’s emitted more since Seinfeld was first broadcast than in the previous 10 millennia of human history. But this isn’t just a story of the last few decades or of certain bad technologies that use fossil fuels. It’s a story going back centuries, to the emergence of global systems of profit-making that impelled people across the world to seek people and nature to exploit for money. This book has been invaluable in helping me understand that history and in seeing the environmental crisis foremost as a crisis of politics and of the great economic systems that dominate our world. 

Levinson is a rare thing among economists: he is willing to admit what we don’t understand.

This book argues that global productivity declined in the 1970s compared to the 30 years after World War II, and no one knows why. It seems that, under capitalism, economic growth is normally just very slow, and the fast postwar growth was the aberration. But what really matters is how political leaders responded, making a series of bad decisions to try to appease people’s over-inflated expectations of growth. And this happened all over the world, from the U.S. to Germany to Japan to Latin America. This is the book that let me understand every aspect of modern life in the last 50 years—from stagnant wages to the roller-coaster casino economy to political dysfunction to gig companies.

I could really choose any book by Slavoj Žižek as the starting for a psychoanalytic critique of capitalism, but this one is very accessible for someone who has never read him. It also gets into the current dilemmas that are rocking capitalist society. In this book, Žižek shows how psychoanalysis (combined with Hegel’s philosophy) can provide a corrective to the traditional Marxist critique of capitalism. We see here how the attempt to construct an ethical capitalism inevitably fails and obscures a new barbarism. 

In an accessible language and with multiple real-life examples, Madrick systematically critically engages every humdrum idea of principle attributed to the presumed success of capitalism. Following to a great extent Karl Marx’s lead on the self-destruction of the economic system we call capitalism, Madrick updates the critique to the 21st century and shows, time and again, why capitalism is not only prone to recessions and depressions but will bring about its own demise.

As an academic, I was at first skeptical about reading a comic version of Marx’s masterpiece, but Smith and Evans brilliantly manage to be both entertaining and enlightening, hilariously funny as well as dead serious. Even if you’re not familiar with any of the key concepts, you’ll get a lot out of the way they combine simple descriptions with the illustrations, and the updated edition really resonates with the financial crises we’ve experienced in the last couple of decades. 

Professor Perino’s book explains how Ferdinand Pecora, counsel to the Senate Banking Committee, ran the explosive hearings that virtually guaranteed Glass-Steagall’s enactment. I particularly enjoyed reading about Pecora because he and the subject of my book, Carter Glass, were allies in the battle for financial reform. While Perino is a distinguished professor of law, he writes in a non-legalistic and gripping style.

When I was an investment banker in the 80s and early 90s, the prevailing mantra was that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. Nevertheless, I wondered whether slicing and dicing mortgages into different classes of derivatives and selling them to other financial institutions actually added value to the real economy. 

This book made it clear to me that it does not and shows how the overgrowth of the financial sector—rising from four to five percent of GDP in the 1970s to over eight percent in the 2000s—caused the Great Recession of 2008. This explosion of debt was used almost exclusively to buy existing assets, thus crowding out lending for plant, equipment, and research.

The Recession is over, but financialization, a powerful and independent factor undermining US industrial policy, continues unchecked.