Reason.com
The Year in Books
Reason staffers pick the best books of 2009
Radley Balko, senior editor
American Homicide by
Randolph Roth is a wonky, meticulously researched, fascinating
survey of murder in America and why we've become the bloodiest
wealthy nation on earth. Roth begins in the colonial period, then
walks us through American history as he documents, analyzes, and
hypothesizes about the evolving reasons why, how, and how often we
kill one another. He looks at regional and chronological variances
in the homicide rate, as well the differences between murders where
killer and victim know one another versus when the two are
strangers. Roth concludes from his research that four factors
contribute to fluctuations in the murder rate in America: political
instability; loss of government legitimacy; loss of a feeling of
belonging among outcast or historically oppressed groups; and loss
of faith in the social hierarchy. Crudely summarized, when
Americans believe we're being governed wisely, fairly, equally, and
legitimately, we're peaceful and productive. But when government
misbehaves, the citizenry does too.
Nick Gillespie, editor in chief, Reason.tv and
Reason.com
I've got a soft spot for anything by Jerome
Tucille, whose It
Usually Begins With Ayn Rand remains one of my absolute
favorite political memoirs.
Gallo Be Thy Name, which traces the rise of
Ernest & Julio Gallo, is a mesmerizing story of true
crime, murder, Prohibition, family drama, capitalism, and
incredible technological innovation. It is also an engrossing
social history of the last 100 years of America and explains
how we went from a nation that gulped Thunderbird, Ripple, Boone's
Farm, Bartles & Jaymes, and other Gallo-created plonk to a
country of refined Chardonnay and Zinfandel sippers.
It's a fun read, a story of triumph, and a cautionary tale, too. And somehow it perfectly captures the mood of a country that is slogging through a really rotten economic period.
Katherine Mangu-Ward, senior editor
Pirates and economics. What's
not to love? George Mason economist Peter Lesson brings home the
doubloons with his pop treatment of the economic reasoning behind
torture, the black flag, and lighting your beard on fire in
The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. In
the golden age of piracy, pirate ships were little floating
polities, complete with due process, guidelines for impeaching the
captain, and workers compensation. Women were scarce on board, so
they don't feature much in the story. But the book's introduction
does contain Leeson's surprise proposal of marriage to his number
one wench and first mate, Ania.
Bonus book: If Leeson's book doesn't fill your Adam Smith pun quota for the holidays, how about adding Russ Roberts' romance The Invisible Heart to the mix?
Michael C. Moynihan, senior editor
There were plenty of worthy releases
this year, so the difficulty is in choosing one that justifies the
designation "best book." Terrific efforts that should
be immediately added to your Amazon wish list, but were edged out:
Brian Nelson's largely overlooked account of the 2002 coup in
Venezuela, The Silence and the
Scorpion; the third book in Tom Ricks's Iraq War
trilogy, The Gamble; Kevin Myers's wildly
entertaining memoir of "the Troubles" in Northern
Ireland, Watching the
Door; Jennifer Burns' intellectual biography
of Ayn Rand, Goddess of the
Market; and Gary Kulik's brilliantly
researched and briskly written investigation into Vietnam War
atrocity tales (both true and false), War Stories.
But the standout book of 2009 is Princeton University professor John V. Fleming’s The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped The Cold War, a literary biography of the most influential anti-Soviet propaganda of twentieth century. Included are brilliant expositions of the well-known literary apostasies of Whittaker Chambers (Witness) and Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon), and the fevered campaigns of character assassination they provoked. But it's Fleming's rescue of Victor Kravchenko's hugely influential and largely forgotten book I Chose Freedom and Jan Valtin's hugely influential and entirely forgotten tale Out of the Night that provide the most fascinating look into the intellectual battles of the Cold War.
Anthony Randazzo, director of economic research, Reason Foundation
House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and
Wretched Excess on Wall Street opens with a near
minute-by-minute description of the last days of Bear Stearns.
William D. Cohan, of
The Last Tycoons fame, transports readers to the
boardrooms of 383 Madison Avenue and the New York Fed to listen in
on the negotiations, anger, despair, fleeting joy, and ultimate
anguish of Alan Schwartz, Jimmy Cayne, and the rest of the motley
crew helming the last days of one of the oldest financial firms in
Manhattan.
Cohan’s tale was not only one of the first such styled books—it was followed by A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers and Andrew Ross Sorkin’s epic Too Big To Fail, among others—but it was the best this year. Cohan, after giving readers a play-by-play of the demise of Bear, Tarantinos the story and walks through the history of the firm, telling the stories of its founders and leading up to the climactic and tragic downfall.
Cohan’s exposé vividly reveals the intimate conversations between executives and regulators determined to ensure Bear was bailed out at almost any cost. The story is engrossing and accessible even to those without knowledge of Wall Street. The masterful piece of financial journalism is a must-read for any who are interested in just how the financial market started coming apart at the seams.
Damon W. Root, associate editor
It’s tempting to pick Robert J.
Norrell’s superb
Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington,
which rescues the controversial civil rights leader from the many
smears that have long demeaned him. As Norrell documents, the image
of Washington as an “Uncle Tom” who sold out black political rights
and bowed down before Jim Crow bears no resemblance to Washington’s
actual career. In addition to secretly funding various legal
challenges to the South’s segregation regime, this former slave
built one of the country’s most successful educational
institutions, inspired countless African Americans, and bravely
championed black educational and economic opportunity in the face
of numerous violent threats, including some made by his own
congressman, Alabama Democrat Tom Heflin, who threatened to lynch
him.
But my vote for the year’s best book goes to David and Linda Beito’s landmark biography Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power. Howard was a wealthy doctor, entrepreneur, and mutual aid leader who championed civil rights, capitalism, and armed self-defense amidst the lawlessness and state-sanctioned violence of Jim Crow Mississippi. As Black Maverick convincingly shows, no history of the civil rights movement is complete until it acknowledges Howard’s indispensable contributions.
Peter Suderman, associate editor
Sci-fi novelist Bruce Sterling's
The Caryatids is a tale of technology and politics, but it
is also about survival and humanity's amazing capacity for
adaptation. Set on a radically altered near-future Earth in which
all human governments except China's have been wiped out by
environmental changes, it's post-catastrophic but not
post-apocalyptic. In the absence of nation-states, order is tough
to come by, but where it exists, it's because humans have grouped
themselves into one of two civil-society tribes. On the one hand
are the Dispensation—science-savvy green capitalists bent on
deploying the latest and greatest in innovation to save (or revive)
the planet. On the other hand are the Aquis—technology-obsessed
liberal anarchists whose societies revolve around machine-mediated
communities. The story, which follows a clan of sisters cloned from
a Balkan warlord, is frequently messy, but the book is notable for
the way it avoids both easy cynicism and utopian naiveté. As Cory
Doctorow (whose recommendation was the reason I bought the book)
wrote in his review, what the book offers is honest hope—not
undeserved comfort or thoughtless reassurance, but "hard-nosed,
utterly plausible hope, for a future in which the human race
outthinks its worse impulses and survives despite all the
odds."
Jesse Walker, managing editor
If nothing else, James C. Scott's
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland
Southeast Asia should cure the reader of putting too much
faith in the smooth lines drawn on political maps. A
multidisciplinary mixture of history, anthropology, geography, and
political science, the book describes a vast section of Asia that
Scott calls Zomia, an area whose natural barriers allowed ordinary
people to escape the slavery, conscription, and taxes imposed by
the regimes in the valleys. The picture that emerges depicts a
world where everything is fluid: States grow and shrink with the
seasons and often disappear altogether; ethnic identities shift
with ease. Far from being untouched by civilization, the
"barbarians" in the mountains often turn out to be refugees from
the "civilized" zones, maintaining contact with the more
authoritarian areas but refusing to submit to the governments'
rules. Scott's nuanced account doesn't romanticize the hill people,
but he writes with sympathy about why they would want to have "all
the advantages of trade without the drudgery, subordination, and
immobility of state subjects."
Matt Welch, editor in chief
While this won't make any
literary Top 10s, we didn't have the luxury of living in a
frivolous year, so I'm going to go with Steven Greenhut's
Plunder: How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries,
Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation. I was
proud to put an excerpt from this on the cover of our February 2010
issue.
Greenhut was an editorial writer for the Orange County Register for more than a decade, and the best of this blood-pressure-generating jeremiad comes from the reporting and commenting he started while at one of the country's last explicitly libertarian editorial pages, whether it's on backroom city council deals to jack up public pensions by 25 percent in 2009, or an unnecessary "shield" program that allows California government workers to run red light cameras and automatic toll roads with impunity, or thuggish public safety unions extracting promises of corruption from putative state attorneys general. What Plunder demonstrates, in ways that should sicken the conscience of citizens from all political tribes, is how the guaranteed revenue stream of tax dollars has been hijacked and perpetually increased by those who have the gall to cloak their larceny in terms of patriotism and concern for the poor. There is a class war emerging in this country and when the looted eventually revolt—and revolt they will—historians will reach back and pluck texts like Plunder as foundational (if long overdue) slaps in the face.
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Pingback| 12.30.09 @ 3:36PM
Wednesday: January 30, 2009 : DBKP REPORT links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
nobody special|12.30.09 @ 3:48PM|#
Has to be the latest installment of SM Stirling's "Sword of the Lady" series.
spur@anon.com|12.30.09 @ 3:59PM|#
KNow it didn't come out this year but The Great War for Civilization by Robert Fisk is a masterpiece
Citizen Nothing|12.30.09 @ 4:02PM|#
This year's english translation of Roberto Bolano's 2666 is the best fiction I've read in some time.
|12.30.09 @ 6:41PM|#
CN,
I bought the three-part paperback version and am currently on the second book (when the story shifts to Mexico). So far, I have to agree with you. Phenomenal stuff.
mm
Pingback| 12.30.09 @ 4:08PM
Twitter Trackbacks for The Year in Books - Reason Magazine [reason.com] on Topsy.com links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Citizen Nothing|12.30.09 @ 4:09PM|#
Oh, and for me, it began with It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand which I somehow picked up in school before I ever heard of Rand.
Tedd|12.31.09 @ 11:28AM|#
I was introduced to Miss Rand long before I heard of It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand but I never read it because the first page of the first chapter falsely describes Ragnar as an "anarchist", and the second pages falsely claims that Miss Rand considered private charity as "inherently evil". I figured that the author was dishonest, so what's the point of reading further?
|12.30.09 @ 4:11PM|#
Is that a photoshop, or a real picture?
Kurt|12.30.09 @ 4:43PM|#
Photoshop.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/politics/bushbook.asp
JTK|12.30.09 @ 6:08PM|#
Scott's nuanced account doesn't romanticize the hill people
"A hundred... serpents. Serpents, for the Garden of Eden. We're very tired, Mr. Scott; beam us up home."
Fiscal Meth|12.30.09 @ 10:43PM|#
What was Ronald Bailey's pick? Matt Ridley's new book perhaps?! We likes!
bs|12.31.09 @ 2:57PM|#
I call bullshit. None of these books can hold a candle to Arguing with idiots or Going Rogue. In fact, the inclusion of a black author with the exclusion of these two fine books reeks of reverse racism!
wffwe|5.24.10 @ 10:48PM|#
Oh, and for me, it began with It Usually Begins with Ayn replica omega Rand which I somehow picked up in school before I ever heard of Rand.
abercrombie milano|5.27.10 @ 3:46AM|#
My only point is that if you take the Bible straight, as I'm sure many of Reasons readers do, you will see a lot of the Old Testament stuff as absolutely insane. Even some cursory knowledge of Hebrew and doing some mathematics and logic will tell you that you really won't get the full deal by just doing regular skill english reading for those books. In other words, there's more to the books of the Bible than most will ever grasp. I'm not concerned that Mr. Crumb will go to hell or anything crazy like that! It's just that he, like many types of religionists, seems to take it literally, take it straight...the Bible's books were not written by straight laced divinity students in 3 piece suits who white wash religious beliefs as if God made them with clothes on...
nike shox|8.11.11 @ 5:21AM|#
is good