Reason.com
The Year in Books
reason staffers pick the best books of 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.
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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|#
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".