The Year in Books

reason staffers pick the best books of 2008

December 23, 2008

Ronald Bailey, science correspondent

In Sex, Science and Profits: How People Evolved to Make Money, Terence Kealey, a biochemist and vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham (UK), argues strongly that the conventional wisdom that scientific central planning is necessary for progress is wrong. He cites a good deal of evidence that economic growth associated with research and development is linked almost entirely to private sector research funding. He shows that strong property rights and free markets are essential for scientific and technological progress. There is much more controversy and evidence to savor in Sex, Science and Profits. For example, Kealey argues that patents should be abolished except for those covering pharmaceuticals and that rather than science driving technology, the opposite is true. Everyone now agrees that centralized planning fails to produce economic progress. Kealey persuasively argues that centralized planning also fails to produce scientific progress.

I would also like to make an honorable mention of Cory Doctorow's superb young adult novel Little Brother. A band of San Francisco teenage technogeeks fight for freedom against an oppressive Department of Homeland Security in occupied San Francisco. Little Brother shows how the savvy use of technologies such as RFID cloners, Bayesian analysis, and cryptography can liberate people from oppressive government. Unless you're completely oblivious, Little Brother will fuel your anger over the freedoms that we have already lost to our growing national security state. Moreover, as Little Brother shows, resistance is not futile.

Radley Balko, senior editor

We Americans like to think our republic is unique, that our Constitution has for the most part preserved a form of government that's stacked with checks and balances, representative, and morally superior to the despots, tyrants, and authoritarian regimes that have ruled over most of humanity for most of human history. That's all true. The most important moment in American history is arguably when George Washington declined to run for a third presidential term, despite calls for him to be crowned king, or to serve for life. What's odd, though, is that since then we've come to venerate as "great men" those American presidents who have behaved most like tyrants, and denigrate the few who approached the office with some humility. Gene Healy's book The Cult of the Presidency is scholarly, acerbic, sometimes witty, and ultimately pretty depressing. Healy not only documents and damns the presidents most guilty of expanding the power and influence of the executive branch, he looks at why and how we've come to expect so much of—and invest so much faith in—the occupant of the Oval Office, and why that isn't healthy for our democracy. As we transition from an administration that believed the president has near-plenary powers to one that's promising to lower ocean levels and cure of us cynicism, Healy's book couldn't be more timely, or more important. Historians adore presidents who fought big wars, grew their own power, and broadened the size and scope of the federal government—think Wilson, Lincoln, or either Roosevelt. They have little respect for men like Calvin Coolidge, Grover Cleveland, or Rutherford B. Hayes, men who, as Healy puts it, were content to merely preside over periods of peace and prosperity. Healy's book cautions that it's time to change the way we think about the office of the presidency. There's nothing "great" about aspiring to power, then consolidating, broadening, and wielding it. Kings, tyrants, and politicians have been doing that for all of human history. It's time to define great as the willingness and ability to leave power on the table.

Brian Doherty, senior editor

The book I read this year that most combined reading pleasure, interesting learning, and a sadly large contemporary relevance came from sometimes reason contributor Bill Kauffman: Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin. Martin, a Maryland lawyer, was a contentious, bibulous, lovable yet deeply flawed pain in the ass to his fellows at the convention that launched the Constitution, a document later imposed on the American people very much over the powerful yet ultimately failed opposition of Mr. Martin. Kauffman properly avoids undue somber adulation of either the rest of the Founding crew or his hero Martin, and remains vividly entertaining in chronicling both the power and the ideological plays that went into the making of the Constitution—and the making of the way we now remember the making of it. In this year when the government is ploughing forward with renewed vigor to expand its purview, power, and spending beyond anything even Martin feared—or his Constitution-loving brethren could have expected—we are reminded that the dangers of excessive power are baked into big centralized government at its very inception. But we're also cheered to realize that those who were right in their warnings even centuries ago can see their foresight and sense survive, with the help of light-handed but wise chroniclers such as Kauffman.

Nick Gillespie, editor Reason.com and Reason.tv

In a world of economic chaos and seemingly never-ending bailouts and "stimulus packages," The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding what happens when the government tries to tame the business cycle and fine-tune the economy as if it were a two-stroke engine. (Are you listening, Henry Paulson? George W. Bush? Congress? Barack Obama?)

For the past quarter-century, Robert J. Samuelson has been filing smart, skeptical, and info-rich columns for Newsweek and The Washington Post. The Great Inflation tells the story of how smug economists and politicians in the post-war era almost wrecked the U.S. and how President Ronald Reagan and Federal Reserve head Paul Volcker tamed double-digit inflation in the 1980s. Samuelson provides a rich history of wisdom triumphing over hubris—and he provides a singular commentary on just where the U.S. economy might be headed for the next decade or more.

Katherine Mangu-Ward, associate editor

Neal Stephenson broke my heart with his boring, unwieldy Baroque Cycle. But the Stephenson I know and love from Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, and the underappreciated nanotech thriller Diamond Age is back in Anathem, which tells the story of some fraas (math-oriented secular monks) closeted in a concent (monastery) who are keepers of vast amounts of knowledge and an even vaster clock, while the world outside watches speelies (movies) and chatters on jeejahs (mobile phones). Anathem is Stephenson at his immersive world creating, language tweaking, surprise ending best.

Stephenson is part of an elite geek crew that has started spending ungodly amounts of time (and perhaps money) on something called the Long Now Foundation. Founded in “01996,” guys like Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand, Internet guru Tim O’Reilly, and Wired’s Chris Anderson get together under the banner of “taking the long-term seriously." This entails stuff like building a real-life clock that will keep time for 10,000 years and is “not entirely unrelated” to the clock in Anathem.

Michael Moynihan, associate editor

It would be easy to dismiss, based solely on its breathless title, Edward Lucas’ book The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West as a revanchist, tub-thumping, probably Russophobic screed. This would be an unfortunate mistake. Lucas, a Russia correspondent for The Economist, writes with occasional—and justifiable—outrage that, after a post-Soviet period of relative political, personal, and press freedom, the country under the command of the beady-eyed Chekist Vladimir Putin has regressed into a sort of non-Marxist Bolshevism. But for the most part, Lucas provides a sober accounting of the closing of Russian society. There is the reemergence of extreme nationalism, as evidenced by the pro-Stalin schoolbooks and the recent raid on the human rights organization Memorial, in which its archives on Stalin’s Gulag were seized; the mysterious murders of Kremlin critics like Anna Politskaya and Alexander Litvinenko; the silencing of independent media voices; and the aggression against former colonies.

Comments

Warty|12.23.08 @ 4:44PM|#

The Baroque Cycle was great. Fuck you, KMW.

|12.23.08 @ 4:49PM|#

"Little Brother" was indeed very good. I really hope a good portion of high school kids all over the world read it. I'd recommend government officials read it too but I'm afraid they are too far gone. Hope lies in the kids.

|12.23.08 @ 5:24PM|#

Didn't Welch have a book or something? I can't remember...

ed|12.23.08 @ 5:45PM|#

You might want to correct the dual entry of The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath. There must be a ninth-best choice out there. I'll look for all of these at half-price next year in the remainders bin, alongside Hillary, American Monarch and Huck! The Arkansas Troubadour.

SIV|12.23.08 @ 6:04PM|#

I'll look for all of these at half-price next year in the remainders bin

It won't be wobbly remainder table either. The short leg will be held up by a copy of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick

MNG|12.23.08 @ 7:17PM|#

The Epstein book looks good, that guy is one smart m*th*rf*ck*r.

"The short leg will be held up by a copy of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick"

Considering he wrote the book way before Mccain was the nominee and that this was certainly far from a foregone conclusion, I'd say Welch did really well. I saw him on at least three interviews on other major outlets. No offense to the many great writers here but that's three more than I saw of any other regular Reason writers. Congrats Matt.

|12.23.08 @ 7:26PM|#

How did Ron Paul's "A Revolution: The Manifesto" not make anyone's list? What a ghastly oversight!

Scott Carpenter|12.23.08 @ 8:39PM|#

It took me a while to appreciate the Baroque Cycle. I ground out on about page 400 in Quicksilver and set it down for over a year. Then picked it up and got going again, and was very happy that I did. Well worth the effort to get through any slow parts, although after that one brick wall, it moved along at a typical Stephenson pace. If you like his other work and struggle with the Cycle, I highly recommend working harder at it. You'll be richly rewarded.

Willie W|12.23.08 @ 11:00PM|#

Sort of silly that this turned into a discussion about The Baroque Cycle . . .

Anyhow, I'd like to see a list of the WORST books of 2008.

Cock Fighting Specialist|12.23.08 @ 11:29PM|#

The short leg will be held up by a copy of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick

Don't worry, SIV, you can always pick up Epic Fail: The Sarah Palin Story for even less.

not me|12.24.08 @ 12:53AM|#

...The Baroque Cycle was great. Fuck you...

...and Anathem really sucks.


On the other hand the Long Now Foundation is pretty nifty

Xeones|12.24.08 @ 8:06AM|#

Um, yeah. The Baroque Cycle kicks much ass, and does so while wearing ridiculous frilly clothes. Haven't read Anathem yet though.

ed|12.24.08 @ 8:59AM|#

I'd like to see a list of the WORST books of 2008

How does one go about making a list that's nearly infinite?

Number 6|12.24.08 @ 10:20AM|#

I loved Anathem, but it's certainly not for everyone.

As far as worst books go, it'd be hard to beat The Shock Doctrine. I picked that one up with the genuine intention of giving Klein's ideas a fair hearing. I didn't make it past page 50, and I was really trying to take her seriously. The problem is that I've read Friedman, and she, apparently, has not. That, or she is either grossly intellectually dishonest or just stupid. The unfortunate thing is that she had the makings of a good book. An examination of the consequences of mixing mercantilism and strong-arm governments would have been worth reading. But it wouldn't have been a book about Friedman, since that's not what the man advocated, nor is it the logical consequence of his ideas.*

*That last thesis could have been worth exploring in depth. But she just took it as a given.

dhex|12.24.08 @ 11:06AM|#

"That, or she is either grossly intellectually dishonest or just stupid."

this is a lot of it, not stupid however. her audience will not have read friedman either.

sadly her audience is far, far larger than friedman's audience. it will probably become cultural canon.

Waterhouse|12.24.08 @ 4:16PM|#

Yeah, Baroque Cycle rules, Anathem was shit. :/

|12.24.08 @ 8:44PM|#

MOYNIHAN!!!!

It's not "Politskaya", it's "Politkovskaya".

Arvind|12.25.08 @ 9:51AM|#

Not many of these books seem to come to India though some of these books seem to be available at http://www.thestorez.com

Marilyn Terrell|12.27.08 @ 10:38AM|#

An intriguing list. I just wanted to point out that in the "New Cold War" review, the expression is "picking nits" (as in lice), not "picking knits".