News & Reviews
The 40 best books published so far this year | The Economist
Biography and memoir
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. By Sam Tanenhaus. Random House
William Buckley revived American conservatism in the second half of the 20th century with his love of argument and erudite, incisive prose. This biography runs to more than 1,000 pages—yet is not a word too long.
Careless People. By Sarah Wynn-Williams. Flatiron Books BUY NOW
Sold as “the book Meta doesn’t want you to read”, this memoir is a riveting corporate kiss-and-tell. It portrays Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and boss, as unfeeling and shallow.
The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI and the Race to Invent the Future. By Keach Hagey. W.W. Norton
A deeply researched, gripping account of Openai. Though the author had access to Sam Altman, its co-founder and chief executive, this is no hagiography.
Source Code: My Beginnings. By Bill Gates. Knopf BUY NOW
The tech billionaire-turned- philanthropist recounts his origin story, from his birth in 1955 to the early years of Microsoft in the late 1970s. Mr Gates’s programming prowess and entrepreneurial zeal were entwined from the start, it shows.
The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip. By Stephen Witt. Viking
This book is a guide to Nvidia and Jensen Huang, the man who turned the company from a pedlar of graphics chips for computer gamers into the semiconductor titan at the heart of the artificial-intelligence revolution.
Business, economics and technology
Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. By Patrick McGee. Scribner BUY NOW
Can Apple thrive without China? A journalist at the Financial Times explains how the company became enmeshed in the country and what the fracturing of global trade means for one of the world’s most valuable firms.
The Art of Uncertainty: How to Navigate Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck. By David Spiegelhalter. W.W. Norton
Using some intuitive assumptions and (very) simple algebra, this book offers an invaluable guide to thinking about uncertainty. It will appeal to many more than just aspiring mathematicians.
Chokepoints. By Edward Fishman. Portfolio
An insider’s guide to economic warfare. With a satisfying amount of dash and drama, the author takes readers on a global tour of American sanctions. Ingenious technocrats have forged new, more precise tools of economic coercion.
The Corporation in the 21st Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrong. By John Kay. Yale University Press
One of Britain’s leading economists asks what firms are for. Texts about purpose in business are all too often waffly and worthy, but this one is admirably clear.
Empire of ai. By Karen Hao. Penguin Press
A journalist explores the murky mix of missionary zeal, rivalry and mistrust at Openai in the run-up to the birth of Chatgpt. This tale reveals disturbing truths about the culture of Silicon Valley.
House of Huawei. By Eva Dou. Portfolio; 448 pages READ REVIEW BUY NOW
A technology-policy reporter has parsed decades’ worth of documents to piece together how Huawei’s enigmatic founder rose from poverty to lead what is probably China’s most powerful company.
Culture and arts
Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum. By Elaine Sciolino. W.W. Norton BUY NOW
Few of the nearly 9m people who visit the Louvre each year leave feeling as if they have truly mastered it. The author is a chatty, amiable tour guide; she focuses on themes and small details.
Bye Bye I Love You: The Story of Our First and Last Words. By Michael Erard. MIT Press
This book dismantles many long-held beliefs about utterances at both the beginning and end of life. It may sound a hard read, but it is a beautiful and even strangely comforting one.
Fatherhood: A History of Love and Power. By Augustine Sedgewick. Scribner
An American scholar describes how thinking about dads has changed over time. What is striking is the sheer variety of nonsense that people have believed. Another common theme is cruelty.
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs. By Ian Leslie. Celadon Books BUY NOW
A rich reading of the relationship between John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney. Their friendship moved from complicity to competition to something curdled and, eventually, to terrible loss.
Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. By John McWhorter. Avery
The title might lead readers to expect some culture-war bomb-throwing. Instead, the author provides an erudite tour in five chapters, one each for: “I”, “you”, “we”, “he/she/it” and “they”.
Raising Hare. By Chloe Dalton. Pantheon BUY NOW
In this tale, joy and wonder come bundled in a four-legged, long-eared, skittish little package. Caring for the leveret opens the author’s eyes to the natural world; she is an elegant writer and sharp-eyed observer.
Fiction
Among Friends. By Hal Ebbott. Riverhead Books
This accomplished debut revolves around two wealthy families that come together to celebrate a birthday at a country house. Simmering tensions and festering rivalries test relationships, but eventually a brutal betrayal threatens to upend lives and maybe even destroy them.
Beartooth. By Callan Wink. Spiegel & Grau
Thad and Hazen, two brothers, make a living chopping down trees in Montana. One day a forbidding outsider known as “the Scot” approaches them with a lucrative but perilous offer involving an illegal venture in Yellowstone National Park. A taut, compelling book.
The Dream Hotel. By Laila Lalami. Pantheon BUY NOW
An intriguing novel about the creep of technology and the trade-offs people make for convenience. The author tells her dystopian tale by combining traditional storytelling with excerpts from a company’s terms of service, medical reports and meeting minutes.
Flesh. By David Szalay. Scribner BUY NOW
A man’s life is dramatised in a few crucial stages, from a youthful sexual relationship with an older woman in Hungary to a stint as a multi-millionaire in Britain and then on to uncertainty after a personal tragedy. The author’s elegant, stripped-back prose powers a narrative rich in pathos.
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way. By Elaine Feeney. BUY NOW
Claire returns home to care for her dying father. As she tries to settle down again in her family home in the west of Ireland and negotiate a new future with an old flame, she finds herself confronting past pain. A powerful, poignant book.
Ripeness. By Sarah Moss. Picador BUY NOW
In the summer of 1967, 17-year-old Edith travels to Italy to help her sister in the final weeks of her pregnancy. In modern-day Ireland, Edith offers her assistance again, this time to a friend who is weighing up meeting a man claiming to be her half-brother. An insightful examination of family ties and belonging.
Theft. By Abdulrazak Gurnah. Riverhead BUY NOW
Badar, Fauzia and Karim—three people from different walks of life—come of age in Tanzania. The author’s first novel since winning a Nobel prize in 2021 is a tightly focused, beautifully controlled examination of friendship and betrayal.
Twist. By Colum McCann. Random House BUY NOW
A journalist travels to South Africa to accompany a crew that repairs cables at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He clashes with the ship’s chief of mission, John Conway. When Conway later disappears, the writer endeavours not just to find him but to find out who he really is.
We Do Not Part. By Han Kang. Translated by e. yaewon and Paige Morris. Hogarth BUY NOW
The winner of the latest Nobel prize in literature chronicles a bloody chapter in South Korea’s history: the killings that took place on Jeju island in 1947-54. Ms Han incorporates quotations from archive material into her novel. It conjures beauty alongside tragedy.
History
38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia. By Philippe Sands. Knopf AUTHOR EVENT BUW NOW
Weaving together travelogue, detective story and legal drama, this book shows that the long-rumoured connection between Augusto Pinochet, a Chilean dictator, and Walter Rauff, a Nazi officer, was real. The third instalment in a loose trilogy about justice and impunity.
The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War. By Charlie English. Random House BUY NOW
The story of the cia’s most highbrow covert operation. The agency smuggled 10m books into the eastern bloc, including George Orwell’s “1984”, John le Carré’s spy thrillers and Virginia Woolf’s writing advice. The leader of the scheme described it as “an offensive of free, honest thinking”.
The Einstein Vendetta: Hitler, Mussolini and a Murder That Haunts History. By Thomas Harding. Michael Joseph BUY NOW
As a world-famous Jew, revered physicist and vocal critic of Nazism, Albert Einstein had long been an assassination target for the Nazis, but he was out of reach. Did Hitler order the murder of his cousin, Robert, instead? The author doggedly pursues his own investigation into the triple murder of Einstein’s relatives.
Jesus Wept: Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. By Philip Shenon. Knopf
How did the Catholic church go so wrong? A journalist chronicles its failures through the history of seven popes. An ecumenical council, known as Vatican II, might have changed everything, but the reforms that followed were footling, not revolutionary. This book is gripping and damning in equal measure.
The Last Days of Budapest. By Adam LeBor. PublicAffairs BUY NOW
At one time Budapest almost rivalled Berlin, Paris and Vienna in intellectual heft; the city was one of Europe’s finest cosmopolitan capitals. But the second world war changed Budapest for ever. This book is a reminder of how quickly a liberal, sophisticated society can be overrun by baser, crueller forces.
Peak Human. By Johan Norberg. Atlantic Books BUY NOW
A Swedish historian charts the rise and fall of golden ages around the world over the past three millennia, ranging from Athens to the Anglosphere via the Abbasid caliphate. He finds that the polities that outshone their peers did so because they were more open: to trade, to strangers and to ideas that discomfited the mighty.
Strangers and Intimates: The Rise and Fall of Private Life. By Tiffany Jenkins. Picador
A highly original and perceptive take on how thinking about the private sphere has evolved from ancient times to today, in domains ranging from religion and free speech to sexuality—and, of course, privacy in the digital era.
The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation. By Charlotte Beradt. Translated by Damion Searls. Princeton University Press
This remarkable work of journalism—unique in the canon of Holocaust literature—has been newly translated into English. It shows how authoritarianism affects the subconscious.
Politics and current affairs
The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping. By Joseph Torigian. Stanford University Press
There are only a handful of ways to understand Xi Jinping, such as poring over party records or studying the people who most influenced him. Few have shaped Mr Xi more than his father. Xi Zhongxun’s relationship to the Chinese Communist Party and his thwarted ambitions offer clues to what his son wants for China.
Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments. By Kenneth Roth. Knopf BUY NOW
Having run one of the world’s most effective human-rights groups for three decades, the author has sparred with more nasty regimes than most people could name. Here he distils his hard-earned insights. The key to shaming powerful wrongdoers, he argues, is to avoid name-calling and “stigmatise with facts”.
Russia’s Man of War: The Extraordinary Viktor Bout. By Cathy Scott-Clark. Hurst
A richly reported and detailed biography of Viktor Bout, a notorious Russian arms dealer, which benefits from rare extensive interviews with him. In 2022 he was swapped for Brittney Griner, an American basketball player, after 15 years in American custody. Was it one of history’s most reckless prisoner exchanges?
Science and health
Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s. By Charles Piller. Atria; 352 pages
An investigation into how dishonesty and dogma steered Alzheimer’s research off-course. A fascinating story of medical groupthink and warped incentives; some chapters read like a scientific whodunnit.
Is a River Alive? By Robert Macfarlane. W.W. Norton BUY NOW
Through a mixture of storytelling and argument, supplemented with a touch of derring-do, the author makes a convincing case for rivers being living subjects that must be endowed with rights.
More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. By Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. Harper
A necessary, eye-opening and frequently gobsmacking book by a French academic, newly translated into English. It explains how the energy transition is a concept misused and misunderstood to the brink of meaninglessness.
Waste Wars. By Alexander Clapp. Little, Brown
The broad facts of the fiction of recycling are no secret. But this book traces the growth of the global trade in waste and chronicles the effects of consumption by following rubbish to some of the world’s most unpleasant places.
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This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Spine-tingling”
