Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF WilliamCollinsBooks.com This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2020 Copyright © Michiko Kakutani 2020 Illustrations copyright © 2020 by Dana Tanamachi Michiko Kakutani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work For permissions see here, which constitutes a continuation of this copyright page. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008421953 Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008421960 Version: 2020-09-16

For readers and writers

everywhere

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Americanah by CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

The Light of the World by ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

Muhammad Ali Books

The Greatest: My Own Story by MUHAMMAD ALI

The Muhammad Ali Reader, edited by GERALD EARLY

King of the World by DAVID REMNICK

The Tribute: Muhammad Ali, 1942–2016, by SPORTS ILLUSTRATED

Experience by MARTIN AMIS

Winesburg, Ohio by SHERWOOD ANDERSON

The Origins of Totalitarianism by HANNAH ARENDT

The Handmaid’s Tale by MARGARET ATWOOD

Collected Poems by W. H. AUDEN

Continental Drift by RUSSELL BANKS

Books by SAUL BELLOW

The Adventures of Augie March

Herzog

The Actual: A Novella

The Image by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

Ficciones by JORGE LUIS BORGES

The Moth Presents: All These Wonders, edited by CATHERINE BURNS

The Plague by ALBERT CAMUS

The Passage of Power by ROBERT A. CARO

Pursuits of Happiness by STANLEY CAVELL

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by ROZ CHAST

Books by BRUCE CHATWIN

In Patagonia

What Am I Doing Here

The Sleepwalkers by CHRISTOPHER CLARK

Books About Foreign Policy and the World

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by EDWARD LUCE

A World in Disarray by RICHARD HAASS

Brother, I’m Dying by EDWIDGE DANTICAT

Underworld by DON DELILLO

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by JUNOT DíAZ

Books by JOAN DIDION

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

The White Album

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by DAVE EGGERS

The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg by DEBORAH EISENBERG

The Waste Land by T. S. ELIOT

Books by JOSEPH J. ELLIS

Founding Brothers

American Creation

Revolutionary Summer

American Dialogue

The Founders on American Democracy

The Federalist Papers by ALEXANDER HAMILTON, James Madison, and John Jay

George Washington’s Farewell Address

Invisible Man by RALPH ELLISON

As I Lay Dying by WILLIAM FAULKNER

The Neapolitan Quartet by ELENA FERRANTE

Books by DAVID FINKEL

The Good Soldiers

Thank You for Your Service

Books About 9/11 and the War on Terror

The Looming Tower by LAWRENCE WRIGHT

The Forever War by DEXTER FILKINS

Anatomy of Terror by ALI SOUFAN

The Great Gatsby by F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Gould’s Book of Fish by RICHARD FLANAGAN

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830–1857 by GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Sinatra! The Song Is You by WILL FRIEDWALD

One Hundred Years of Solitude by GABRIEL GARCíA MáRQUEZ

The Idea Factory by JON GERTNER

The Peripheral by WILLIAM GIBSON

The Examined Life by STEPHEN GROSZ

Seabiscuit by LAURA HILLENBRAND

The Paranoid Style in American Politics by RICHARD HOFSTADTER

The Odyssey by HOMER

Lab Girl by HOPE JAHREN

The Liars’ Club by MARY KARR

A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches

by MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

On Writing by STEPHEN KING

The Woman Warrior by MAXINE HONG KINGSTON

The Language of the Third Reich by VICTOR KLEMPERER

Books About Democracy and Tyranny

On Tyranny by TIMOTHY SNYDER

How Democracies Die by STEVEN LEVITSKY and Daniel Ziblatt

The Road to Unfreedom by TIMOTHY SNYDER

The Sixth Extinction by ELIZABETH KOLBERT

The Namesake by JHUMPA LAHIRI

Books by JARON LANIER

You Are Not a Gadget

Dawn of the New Everything

A Wrinkle in Time by MADELEINE L’ENGLE

ABRAHAM LINCOLN Books

The Speeches and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, edited by DON E. FEHRENBACHER

Lincoln at Gettysburg by GARRY WILLS

Lincoln by FRED KAPLAN

Lincoln’s Sword by DOUGLAS L. WILSON

Arctic Dreams by BARRY LOPEZ

Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West by CORMAC MCCARTHY

Atonement by IAN MCEWAN

Moby-Dick by HERMAN MELVILLE

A Gate at the Stairs by LORRIE MOORE

Books by TONI MORRISON

Song of Solomon

Beloved

Books by VLADIMIR NABOKOV

The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, edited by DMITRI NABOKOV

Speak, Memory

Reading Lolita in Tehran by AZAR NAFISI

A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. NAIPAUL

Born a Crime by TREVOR NOAH

Books by BARACK OBAMA

Dreams from My Father

We Are the Change We Seek: The Speeches of Barack Obama, edited by E. J. DIONNE, JR., AND JOY-ANN REID

There There by TOMMY ORANGE

1984 by GEORGE ORWELL

The Moviegoer by WALKER PERCY

Mason & Dixon by THOMAS PYNCHON

Life by KEITH RICHARDS WITH JAMES FOX

A Life of Picasso by JOHN RICHARDSON

Books About Work and Vocation

Sick in the Head by JUDD APATOW

The Right Kind of Crazy by ADAM STELTZNER WITH William Patrick

The Shepherd’s Life by JAMES REBANKS

Do No Harm by HENRY MARSH

Housekeeping by MARILYNNE ROBINSON

American Pastoral by PHILIP ROTH

The Harry Potter Novels by J. K. ROWLING

Books by SALMAN RUSHDIE

Midnight’s Children

The Moor’s Last Sigh

Books by OLIVER SACKS

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales

An Anthropologist on Mars

Where the Wild Things Are by MAURICE SENDAK

Books by DR. SEUSS

Horton Hears a Who!

The Cat in the Hat

How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

Green Eggs and Ham

The Lorax

Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

The Plays of William Shakespeare

Frankenstein by MARY SHELLEY

Little Failure by GARY SHTEYNGART

White Teeth by ZADIE SMITH

My Beloved World by SONIA SOTOMAYOR

The Palm at the End of the Mind by WALLACE STEVENS

The Goldfinch by DONNA TARTT

Democracy in America by ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. TOLKIEN

The Letters of Vincent van Gogh by VINCENT VAN GOGH

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by OCEAN VUONG

The Poetry of Derek Walcott, 1948–2013 by DEREK WALCOTT

Infinite Jest by DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

All the King’s Men by ROBERT PENN WARREN

Educated by TARA WESTOVER

The Underground Railroad by COLSON WHITEHEAD

The World of Yesterday by STEFAN ZWEIG

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

As a child, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright August Wilson recalled in a speech that he was the one in his family who wanted to read all the books in the house, who wore out his library card and kept books way past their due date. He dropped out of high school at age fifteen, but spent every school day at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh reading history and biography and poetry and anthropology. The library would eventually give him an honorary high school diploma, and the books he discovered there, he said, “opened a world that I entered and have never left,” and led to the transformative realization that “it was possible to be a writer.”

Dr. Oliver Sacks credited the local public library he knew as a child (in Willesden, London) as the place where he received his real education, just as Ray Bradbury described himself as “completely library educated.” In the case of two famous autodidacts, Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the books they read growing up indelibly shaped their ideals and ambitions, and gave them the tools of language and argument that would help them shape the history of their nation.

The pleasure of reading, Virginia Woolf wrote, is “so great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed the world and continues to change it.” In fact, she argued, the reason “we have grown from apes to men, and left our caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked and given to the poor and helped the sick—the reason why we have made shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of the jungle is simply this—we have loved reading.”

In his 1996 book, A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel described a tenth-century Persian potentate who reportedly traveled with his 117,000-book collection loaded on the backs of “four hundred camels trained to walk in alphabetical order.” Manguel also wrote about the public readers hired by Cuban cigar factories in the late nineteenth century to read aloud to workers. And about the father of one of his boyhood teachers, a scholar who knew many of the classics by heart and who volunteered to serve as a library for his fellow inmates at the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenhausen. He was able to recite entire passages aloud—much like the book lovers in Fahrenheit 451, who keep knowledge alive through their memorization of books.

Why do we love books so much?

These magical brick-sized objects—made of paper, ink, glue, thread, cardboard, fabric, or leather—are actually tiny time machines that can transport us back to the past to learn the lessons of history, and forward to idealized or dystopian futures. Books can transport us to distant parts of the globe and even more distant planets and universes. They give us the stories of men and women we will never meet in person, illuminate the discoveries made by great minds, and allow us access to the wisdom of earlier generations. They can teach us about astronomy, physics, botany, and chemistry; explicate the dynamics of space flight and climate change; introduce us to beliefs, ideas, and literatures different from our own. And they can whisk us off to fictional realms like Oz and Middle-earth, Narnia and Wonderland, and the place where Max becomes king of the wild things.

When I was a child, books were both an escape and a sanctuary. I was an only child, accustomed to spending lots of time alone. I read in the cardboard refrigerator carton that my father had turned into a playhouse by cutting a door and windows in the sides. I read under the blankets at night with a flashlight. I read in the school library during recess in hopes of avoiding the playground bullies. I read in the backseat of the car, even though it made me carsick. And I read at the dining room table: because my mother thought books and food were incompatible, I would read whatever happened to be at hand—cereal boxes, appliance manuals, supermarket circulars, the ingredients of Sara Lee’s pecan coffee cake or an Entenmann’s crumb cake. I read the recipe for mock apple pie on the back of the Ritz crackers box so many times I could practically recite it. I was hungry for words.

The characters in some novels felt so real to me, when I was a child, that I worried they might leap out of the pages at night, if I left the cover of the book open. I imagined some of the scary characters from L. Frank Baum’s Oz books—the Winged Monkeys, say, or the evil Nome King, or Mombi the witch who possesses the dangerous Powder of Life—escaping from the books and using my bedroom as their portal into the real world, where they might wreak havoc and destruction.

Decades before binge-watching Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and The Sopranos, I binge-read Nancy Drew mysteries, Black Stallion novels, Landmark biographies, even whole sections of the World Book Encyclopedia (which is how my father fine-tuned his English, when he first moved to the United States from Japan).

In high school and college, I binge-read books about existentialism (The Stranger, No Exit, Notes from Underground, Irrational Man, Either/Or, The Birth of Tragedy), black history (The Autobiography of Malcolm X; The Fire Next Time; Manchild in the Promised Land; Black Like Me; Black Skin, White Masks); and science fiction and dystopian fiction (1984, Animal Farm, Dune, The Illustrated Man, and Fahrenheit 451, Childhood’s End, A Clockwork Orange, Cat’s Cradle). My reading was in no way systematic. At the time, I was not even aware of why I gravitated toward these books—though, in retrospect, as one of the few nonwhite kids at school, I must have been drawn to books about outsiders who were trying to figure out who they were and where they belonged. Even Dorothy in Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Lucy in Narnia, I later realized, were strangers in strange lands, trying to learn how to navigate worlds where few of the usual rules applied.

In those pre-internet days, I don’t remember exactly how we heard about new books and authors or decided what to read next. As a child, I think I first heard of Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin, and Philip Roth because there were articles by or about them (or maybe photos) in Life or Look magazine. I read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring because my mother was reading it, and T. S. Eliot’s poetry because my favorite high school teacher, Mr. Adinolfi, had us memorize “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I was one of those readers who experienced many things first through books—and only later, in real life, not the other way around.

“You read something which you thought only happened to you,” James Baldwin once said, “and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important.”

The books I write about in these pages include some longtime favorites (A Wrinkle in Time, Moby-Dick, The Palm at the End of the Mind), some older books that illuminate our troubled politics today (The Paranoid Style in American Politics, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Federalist Papers), some well-known works of fiction that have continued to exert a formative influence on successive generations of writers (Winesburg, Ohio; As I Lay Dying; The Odyssey), works of journalism and scholarship that address some of the most pressing issues of our day (The Forever War, The Sixth Extinction, Dawn of the New Everything), works that shine a light on hidden corners of our world or the human mind (Arctic Dreams, Lab Girl, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat), and books that I’ve frequently given or recommended to friends.

Some of my favorite classics are here, but there are lots of lists out there of must-read classics, not to mention the class syllabi we remember from high school and college. And so, I’ve also tried to include a lot of recent books—novels, stories, and memoirs by contemporary writers, and nonfiction works about how technology and political and cultural upheavals are bringing tectonic changes to our world.

Like all lists and anthologies, the selections here are subjective and decidedly arbitrary. It was difficult to whittle my choices down to a hundred (which is why some entries actually contain more than one book), and I could easily have added another hundred books that are equally powerful, moving, or timely.

Over the years, I had the good fortune to have some inspiring teachers who enriched my understanding and appreciation of books. And some wonderful editors—like The New York Times’s former managing editor Arthur Gelb, a mentor to many of us and a journalist equally at home in the world of culture and the world of breaking news—who made it possible for me to make a living for many years by reading.

In these pages, I’m writing less as a critic than as an enthusiast. I’m not trying to explicate hidden meanings in these books or situate them in a literary continuum; I’m trying to encourage you to read or reread these books, because they deserve as wide an audience as possible. Because they are affecting or timely or beautifully written. Because they teach us something about the world or other people or our own emotional lives. Or simply because they remind us why we fell in love with reading in the first place.

Today, in our contentious and fragmented world, reading matters more than ever. For one thing, books offer the sort of in-depth experience that’s increasingly rare in our distracted, ADD age—be it the sense of magical immersion offered by a compelling novel, or the deep, meditative thinking triggered by a wise or provocative work of nonfiction.

Books can open a startling window on history; they can give us an all-access pass to knowledge both old and new. As the former defense secretary James Mattis, who assembled a seven-thousand-volume library, said of his years in the military, “Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught flat-footed by any situation, never at a loss for how any problem has been addressed before. It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead.”

Most of all, books can catalyze empathy—something more and more precious in our increasingly polarized and tribal world. Reading, Jean Rhys once wrote, “makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.”

Over the years, I had the good fortune to have some inspiring teachers who enriched my understanding and appreciation of books.

At its best, literature can surprise and move us, challenge our certainties, and goad us into reexamining our default settings. Books can jolt us out of old habits of mind and replace reflexive us-versus-them thinking with an appreciation of nuances and context. Literature challenges political orthodoxies, religious dogma, and conventional thinking (which, of course, is why authoritarian regimes ban and burn books), and it does what education and travel do: it exposes us to a multiplicity of viewpoints and voices.

Literature, as David Foster Wallace has pointed out, gives the reader, “marooned in her own skull,” imaginative “access to other selves.”

Or, as President Barack Obama observed during his last week in the White House, books can supply historical perspective, a sense of solidarity with others, and “the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes.” They can remind us of “the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day,” and the capacity of “stories to unify—as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize.”

In a world riven by political and social divisions, literature can connect people across time zones and zip codes, across cultures and religions, national boundaries and historical eras. It can give us an understanding of lives very different from our own, and a sense of the shared joys and losses of human experience.

AMERICANAH

(2013)

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

With Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has written a wonderfully touching, incisive, and very funny coming-of-age tale that’s both an old-fashioned love story and a sharp-eyed meditation on race, class, immigration, and identity in our rapidly changing, globalized world.

Adichie’s spirited and outspoken heroine, Ifemelu, grows up in Lagos, Nigeria, where she falls in love, in high school, with Obinze, the earnest and quietly charming son of a literature professor. The two have instant chemistry—“she realized, quite suddenly, that she wanted to breathe the same air as Obinze”—and picture a future together, possibly in America, a country Obinze reveres.

When teacher strikes interrupt their college lives and Ifemelu receives a scholarship to attend university in America, Obinze urges her to take it. He tells her that he will get a visa and follow her there as soon as he completes his college degree, but harsh post-9/11 immigration policies will prevent this from happening. He will instead spend several miserable years as an illegal immigrant in London, where he is unable to find any but the most menial jobs. Eventually, he returns to Lagos, where he becomes a successful property developer, marries, and has a child.

Ifemelu, meanwhile, struggles to adapt to life in America. She compares what she sees firsthand with memories of Cosby Show episodes she watched growing up. And she hungers “to understand everything about America”—“to support a team at the Super Bowl, understand what a Twinkie was and what sports ‘lockouts’ meant,” order “a ‘muffin’ without thinking that it really was cake.” Back home, she hadn’t really thought of herself as “black,” and she’s startled by how ubiquitous arguments about race are in the United States, permeating everything from romances to friendships to on-the-job dynamics. In a blog post addressed to “Fellow Non-American Blacks,” she writes, “Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t ‘black’ in your country? You’re in America now.”

Adichie has a heat-seeking eye for telling social and emotional details, and she uses that gift to convey Ifemelu’s experiences with extraordinary immediacy.

Adichie has a heat-seeking eye for telling social and emotional details, and she uses that gift to convey Ifemelu’s experiences with extraordinary immediacy while satirizing both the casual racism of some Americans and the sanctimony of those progressives eager to wear their liberal politics like a badge.

As a foreigner, Ifemelu notices the myriad oddities of American culture with wry humor. She notices that Americans tend to stand around and drink at parties, instead of dancing; that many “wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall” to send the message that they are too “superior/busy/cool/not-uptight” to bother looking nice. She notices that they call arithmetic “math,” not “maths,” and that academic types can get bizarrely incensed over matters like “imported vegetables that ripened in trucks.”

As the years scroll by, Ifemelu achieves success with her blog called Raceteenth or Curious Observations by a Non-American Black on the Subject of Blackness in America. She is confident in a way she hadn’t been before, and after a breakup with a wealthy white businessman she settles into a perfect-on-paper relationship with a black professor who teaches at Yale.

But Ifemelu cannot stop thinking about Obinze, “her first love, her first lover, the only person with whom she had never felt the need to explain herself.” And she realizes that “the cement in her soul” that she often feels is a kind of homesickness—for Lagos and her family. And so, after thirteen years, she decides to return home—a journey that proves as jarring as her voyage to America. Her experiences, so powerfully recounted by Adichie, become a story about belonging and not-belonging in a world where identities are both increasingly fluid and defining, a story about how we are shaped by the places where we grew up and the places where we come to live.

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

A Memoir

(2015)

Elizabeth Alexander

In this haunting memoir about love and loss and grief, Elizabeth Alexander describes the shattering emotional aftermath of the death of her beloved husband, Ficre Ghebreyesus, and how she and her two sons, Solomon and Simon, consoled one another and guided one another through a dark corridor of sorrow and back out into the light.

One night at bedtime, she recalls, thirteen-year-old Simon asks her if she wants to come with him to visit Ficre in heaven:

“Yes, I say, and lie down on his bed.

“‘First you close your eyes,’ he says, ‘and ride the clear glass elevator. Up we go.’

“What do you see? I ask.

“God is sitting at the gate, he answers.

“What does God look like? I ask.

“Like God, he says. Now, we go to where Daddy is.

“He has two rooms, Simon says, one room with a single bed and his books and another where he paints. The painting room is vast. He can look out any window he wants and paint.”

When it’s time to leave, they take the elevator back down. “You can come with me anytime,” Simon tells his mother.

Alexander—an award-winning poet and a former professor at Yale University who is currently president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—communicates the raw grief she experienced in losing her husband of fifteen years. Her book is really a love letter to him, and it leaves us with an indelible portrait of Ghebreyesus as husband, father, and artist. She brings his brilliantly colored paintings alive on the page. She describes how they met. And she remembers how they fell in love, cooking together, writing haikus to each other in a shared notebook, listening to Ahmad Jamal, Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln, Randy Weston, and Don Pullen, “geniuses of the African diaspora we both celebrated.”

Just as her poetry (American Sublime, The Venus Hottentot, Antebellum Dream Book) explores the connections between the present and the past and the complexities of identity, so this memoir memorializes the strange twists of fate that can bring two people together. Alexander and Ghebreyesus, it turns out, were born within two months of each other, on opposite sides of the globe—she in Harlem; he in war-torn Eritrea, which he fled at the age of sixteen, making his way to America by way of Sudan, Italy, and Germany.

In the wake of his death, Alexander feels their house suffused in sorrow. She feels she “can wait forever for him to come back”; she will “leave the light on in the living room, the light that faces the street.” She dreams of his returning, improbably, on a skateboard. She thinks, “I am getting older and he is not.”

She realizes she does not know how to operate the DVR because it made no sense for both of them to learn how. She continues to pay his cell phone bill for a year and a half afterward, because she didn’t want to lose the text messages. She avoids bookstores because she imagines seeing him in the history section or the art section or the gardening section.

Alexander and Ghebreyesus met in New Haven and raised their two boys there and in nearby Hamden. Writing as both a poet and a longtime resident, she perfectly captures New Haven’s “mixed-metaphor landscape of New England trees and industrial detritus,” as well as its unexpectedly excellent food and the mixed rhythms of college life and street life.

Alexander’s book ends with her and her sons leaving New Haven for New York. They plan to stop by Grove Street Cemetery to say goodbye to Ficre, but they are delayed by a doctor’s appointment and don’t make it to the cemetery before closing time. It’s okay, her son Simon says: “The grave reminds me of Daddy’s death, but I want to remember Daddy’s life.”

Just as her poetry explores the connections between the present and the past and the complexities of identity, so this memoir memorializes the strange twists of fate that can bring two people together.

MUHAMMAD ALI

THE GREATEST: My Own Story (1975) Muhammad Ali (with Richard Durham)

THE MUHAMMAD ALI READER (1998) Edited by Gerald Early

KING OF THE WORLD: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (1998) David Remnick

THE TRIBUTE: Muhammad Ali, 1942–2016 (2016) Sports Illustrated

He said it best, of course: He was “the astronaut of boxing” who “handcuffed lightning,” threw “thunder in jail”; the dazzling warrior “with iron fists and a beautiful tan”; “the greatest fighter that ever will be” who could “run through a hurricane” and not get wet.

Muhammad Ali not only rocked the world with his electrifying speed and power in the ring. He also shook the world with the force of his convictions: his determination to stand up to the racist rules of the Jim Crow South and to assert his freedom to invent himself—“I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.”

“I am America,” he proudly declared, decades before the Black Lives Matter movement. “I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.” He stood with Martin Luther King, Jr., for freedom and social justice. And he stood up against the Vietnam War, refusing to be drafted in 1967 on religious grounds as a conscientious objector—a decision that would cost him his boxing title, three and a half years of his career at the peak of his powers, tens of millions of dollars in prize money and endorsements, and for many years his popularity.

Ali was a larger-than-life figure: not just an incandescent athlete dancing under the lights, but a man of conscience who spoke truth to power, as well as a captivating showman, poet, philosopher, performance artist, statesman, and hip-hop pioneer, a man compared to Whitman, Robeson, Malcolm X, Ellington, and Chaplin. Writers were magnetized by his contradictions: the GOAT (Greatest of All Time), who vanquished some of the baddest men on the planet but became one of the world’s most revered humanitarians; a deeply religious man who loved practical jokes and practically invented trash talk; “a radical even in a radical’s time,” as President Obama put it, who became so beloved by Americans across the political spectrum that he was featured in a DC Comics book in which he teamed up with Superman to save the world.

Over the years, Ali has also inspired an uncommon amount of arresting writing, from Norman Mailer’s classic account of the boxer’s stunning victory over George Foreman in Zaire in 1974 to David Remnick’s King of the World, a powerful account of Ali’s emergence as a transformative figure in American politics and culture. There is also a plethora of memorable essays about Ali by such gifted writers as Joyce Carol Oates, George Plimpton, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Roger Kahn, many of which can be found in a terrific anthology, The Muhammad Ali Reader.

As for iconic photographs of Ali, many appear in Sports Illustrated’s Muhammad Ali, 1942–2016. They are photos that capture what the fighter José Torres called “his prodigious magic”: the famous photo of a victorious Ali, standing over the fallen body of Sonny Liston; a violent action shot of him catching George Foreman with a hard right in the Rumble in the Jungle; and one of him locked in a grim face-off with an exhausted Joe Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila. There are also images of a skinny, twelve-year-old Cassius Clay learning to box, and a solemn Ali, surrounded by reporters, explaining his opposition to the Vietnam War.

These books remind us that perseverance was one of the consistent themes in Ali’s life: coming back after his government-imposed exile to reclaim the world championship in 1974 by toughing it out against Foreman in Zaire; coming back to beat Frazier twice, after losing their first arduous matchup; and coming back against Leon Spinks in 1978 to win the world heavyweight championship for a third time. As Ali once observed, “Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them—a desire, a dream, a vision . . . the will must be stronger than the skill.”

When Cassius Clay was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, the town was segregated, and even when he returned home from the 1960 Olympics with a gold medal around his neck, he was turned away from a luncheonette. He would return to the Olympics three and a half decades later in Atlanta in 1996 as its final torchbearer; by then, he’d become one of the most revered human beings on the planet.

Ali died on June 3, 2016, and as his funeral motorcade made its way through the city, mourners showered his car with flowers and rose petals. All along the route, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported, lawns had been mowed and driveways freshly swept—out of respect for the Greatest on his final journey.

EXPERIENCE

A Memoir

(2000)

Martin Amis

What is it like to grow up aspiring to become a novelist, when your father is himself a well-known novelist? Martin Amis’s 2000 memoir, Experience, addresses that question with great humor and affection, and creates a moving portrait of a father-son relationship animated by clear-eyed literary insight, enduring love, and a novelist’s ability to animate the past with remarkable emotional detail.

The literary kinship between Martin Amis and his father, Kingsley, has long been clear to fans of both writers’ work. Both got their start as angry young men with a dyspeptic gift for satire and biting humor. Both wrote classic novels featuring feckless, self-deluded heroes (Jim Dixon in Amis père’s Lucky Jim, and John Self and Richard Tull in Amis fils’s Money and The Information). And both fluently lived up to Amis senior’s credo that “any proper writer ought to be able to write anything from an Easter Day sermon to a sheep-dip handout.”

Over the years, Martin Amis’s books leapfrogged over his father’s in terms of innovation and ambition. London Fields (1989) was a dark satire set in a decadent, apocalyptic world, while the powerful House of Meetings (2006) addressed the daunting subject of the Soviet gulag. If such novels spoke to his willingness to tackle huge, historical subjects and experiment with voice and genre and technique, Experience brought a new warmth and depth of emotion to his writing.

It could not have been easy being Kingsley Amis’s son. The elder Amis’s acidic memoirs, published in 1991, not only settled dozens of literary scores but also drew a self-portrait of a prickly and unsparing curmudgeon. Kingsley Amis gave interviews characterizing his son’s books as unreadable, his politics as “dangerous, howling nonsense.”

EXPERIENCE creates a moving portrait of a father-son relationship animated by clear-eyed literary insight, enduring love, and a novelist’s ability to animate the past with remarkable emotional detail.

“My father never encouraged me to write, never invited me to go for that longshot,” Martin Amis writes in Experience, “he praised me less often than he publicly dispraised me.”

The younger Amis suggests that some of his father’s more provocative political statements were simply exercises in “winding me up,” and in Experience he conveys the bantering, comradely quality of the relationship between his own younger self—“a drawling, velvet-suited, snakeskin-booted” adolescent cultivating a ridiculous “plumed and crested manner”—and Kingsley in his prime, a tireless womanizer, drinker, and raconteur, an inexhaustible “engine of comedy” within his own household.

Years later, Martin would take his two young sons to lunch at his father’s almost every Sunday, and also joined his father for a garrulous midweek meal. When he left his wife for another woman in 1993, it was his father he turned to for solace and advice. “Only to him,” he writes, “could I confess how terrible I felt, how physically terrible, bemused, subnormalized, stupefied from within, and always about to flinch or tremble from the effort of making my face look honest, kind, sane. Only to him could I talk about what I was doing to my children. Because he had done it to me.”

Kingsley had long suffered from nyctophobia (fear of the night) and monophobia (fear of being alone), and in the wake of the collapse of his marriage to Elizabeth Jane Howard (for whom he had left Martin’s mother) Martin and his brother began to take turns “Dadsitting,” promising him that he’d never have to spend an evening alone.

In Experience, Martin Amis writes persuasively about a lot of things—literary friendships and disputes, the disappearance and murder of a beloved cousin, the horrors of dental surgery. But what’s most indelible about this book is his writing—“for once, without artifice”—of the “ordinary miracles and ordinary disasters” of daily life, of what it means to be a son, and of what it means to be a father with children of his own.

WINESBURG, OHIO

(1919)

Sherwood Anderson

It’s hard to think of an American work of fiction that’s been more influential than Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 volume of interlinked stories about the lonely residents of a small, fictional midwestern village.

Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck all paid tribute to Sherwood Anderson. Works as disparate as Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Hemingway’s In Our Time, Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man, and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried would work variations on its innovative structure, while the fiction of Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor would be populated with outcasts and eccentrics reminiscent of the lost, the lonely, and the dispossessed in Winesburg. You can also count George Saunders, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, Russell Banks, and Tom Perrotta among the many contemporary writers who have written stories or novels that owe a direct or indirect debt to Anderson’s classic.

Like Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), the stories in Winesburg all take place in the same town, and they draw portraits of ordinary people whose ambitions have gone unrealized, whose dreams are receding in the rearview mirror. Winesburg depicts a small-town world where the sense of isolation people feel in their day-to-day lives reflects some of the larger dynamics at work in early twentieth-century America. It anticipates a changing social landscape in which more and more young people are leaving small towns for big cities and their suburbs, and the rural-urban divide is growing ever wider.

Anderson’s stories share the twilight mood of Edward Hopper’s paintings, and they similarly depict solitary individuals whose lives seem defined by missed connections and forfeited opportunities. Among the more than two dozen characters in the book, there’s Doctor Reefy, an aging doctor and widower, who scribbles his thoughts on little pieces of paper that he puts in his pocket and eventually throws away; a lonely young woman named Alice who’s unable to get over a boyfriend who moved on and moved away; Wash Williams, the telegraph operator, who hates life “wholeheartedly, with the abandon of a poet”; the Reverend Curtis Hartman, a minister who spies on a pretty woman through his window and asks for deliverance from temptation; Kate Swift, the schoolteacher, whom the minister lusts after and who encourages the literary aspirations of the book’s young hero, George Willard; and George’s mother, Elizabeth, the ailing proprietor of a shabby hotel, who has invested all her hopes and dreams in her son.

The story of George’s coming of age provides the through line in these stories. A reporter for the local paper, he is the person many of the other characters confide in, and he becomes both a conduit for their stories and a kind of surrogate for Anderson, who himself grew up in a small Ohio town.

After his mother dies, George decides he is going to “leave Winesburg to go away to some city where he hoped to get work on a city newspaper.” He does not want to become trapped in Winesburg like so many of the people he knows; he does not want “the spark of genius” his teacher saw in him to be extinguished. Like many bildungsromans, the book ends with the hero’s departure from his hometown as he boards a train headed west—presumably to Chicago—“to meet the adventure of life.”

THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM

(1951)

Hannah Arendt

As Hannah Arendt observed in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, two of the most monstrous regimes in human history came to power in the twentieth century, and both were predicated upon the destruction of truth—upon the recognition that cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” she wrote, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

What’s alarming to the contemporary reader is that Arendt’s words increasingly sound less like a dispatch from another century than a disturbing mirror of the political and cultural landscape we inhabit today—a world in which the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, does a high-volume business in lies (three years into his White House tenure, The Washington Post calculated, Trump had made 16,241 false or misleading claims), and fake news and propaganda are cranked out in industrial quantities by Russian and alt-right trolls and instantaneously dispersed across the world through social media.

Nationalism, nativism, dislocation, fears of social change, and contempt for outsiders are on the rise again as people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines.

This is not to draw a direct analogy between today’s circumstances and the overwhelming horrors of the World War II era but to look at some of the conditions and attitudes—what Margaret Atwood has called the “danger flags” in Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm—that make a people susceptible to demagogues and dictators, and nations vulnerable to tyranny.

Here are some of the fundamental points Arendt made about the “hidden mechanisms” by which totalitarian movements dissolve traditional political and moral understandings, and the behavior evinced by totalitarian regimes, once they come to power.

 One early warning sign is a nation’s abolishing of the right of asylum. Efforts to deprive refugees of their rights, Arendt wrote, bear “the germs of a deadly sickness,” because once the “principle of equality before the law” breaks down, “the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status.”

 Leaders of totalitarian movements, Arendt observed, “can never admit an error,” and fanatical followers, suffering from a mixture of gullibility and cynicism, will routinely shrug off their lies. Hungry for simplistic narratives that explain a confusing world, such audiences “do not trust their eyes and ears” but, instead, welcome the “escape from reality” offered by propaganda, which understands that people are “ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived,” because they “held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

 Because totalitarian rulers crave complete control, Arendt pointed out, they tend to preside over highly dysfunctional bureaucracies. First-rate talents are replaced by “crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” Often there are “swift and surprising changes in policy” because loyalty—not performance or efficacy—is paramount.

 To ratify followers’ sense of belonging to a movement that is making progress toward a distant goal, Arendt added, new opponents or enemies are repeatedly invoked; “as soon as one category is liquidated, war may be declared on another.”

 Another trait of totalitarian governments, Arendt observed, is a perverse disdain for both “common sense and self-interest”: a stance fueled by mendacity and denial of facts and embraced by megalomaniacal leaders, eager to believe that failures can be denied or erased and “mad enough to discard all limited and local interests—economic, national, human, military—in favor of a purely fictitious reality” that endows them with infallibility and absolute power.

The Origins of Totalitarianism is essential reading not only because it reminds us of the monstrous crimes committed by Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union in the twentieth century but also because it provides a chilling warning of the dynamics that could fuel totalitarian movements in the future. The book underscores how alienation, rootlessness, and economic uncertainty can make people susceptible to the lies and conspiracy theories dispensed by tyrants. It shows how the weaponization of bigotry and racism by demagogues fuels populist movements built upon tribal hatreds while undermining the long-standing institutions meant to protect our freedoms and the rule of law and shattering the very idea of a shared sense of humanity.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE

(1985)

Margaret Atwood

Enduring dystopian novels look backward and forward at the same time. Orwell’s 1984 was, at once, a savage satire of Stalin’s U.S.S.R. and a timeless anatomy of tyranny that foretold the rise of the surveillance state and the “firehose of falsehood” spewed forth daily by Putin’s Kremlin and Trump’s White House in efforts to redefine reality. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World reflected its author’s worries in the 1930s that individual freedom was threatened by both communism and assembly-line capitalism, and it anticipated a technology-driven future in which people would be narcotized and distracted to death by trivia and entertainment.

In writing her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood decided she would include nothing in the novel “that had not already happened” somewhere, sometime in history, or any technology “not already available.” She extrapolated some of the trends she saw in the 1970s and early 1980s (like the rising fundamentalist movement in America), looked back at the seventeenth-century Puritans’ anti-women bias, and drew upon such historical horrors as the Nazis’ Lebensborn program and public executions in countries like North Korea and Saudi Arabia to delineate the malign machinery of Gilead, the dystopian regime she imagined taking over the United States in some not-so-distant future.

When many of us first read The Handmaid’s Tale back in the 1980s, the events Atwood described as taking place in Gilead felt like the sort of alarming developments that could only happen in the distant past or in distant parts of the globe. By 2019, however, American news reports were filled with real-life images of children being torn from their parents’ arms, a president using racist language to sow fear and hatred, and reports of accelerating climate change threatening life as we know it on the planet.

How did the United States with its democratic norms and constitutional guarantees metamorphose, in The Handmaid’s Tale, into the authoritarian state of Gilead—a place where women are treated as “two-legged wombs”; where nonwhite residents and unbelievers (that is, Jews, Catholics, Quakers, Baptists, anyone who does not embrace the fundamentalist extremism of Gilead) are resettled, exiled, or disappeared; where the leadership deliberately uses gender, race, and class to divide the country? It started before ordinary citizens like herself were paying attention, Atwood’s heroine, Offred, remembers: “We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

“Nothing changes instantaneously,” she goes on. “In a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”

In fact, the most chilling lines in The Handmaid’s Tale occur near the beginning of the novel. Offred and her shopping partner Ofglen are walking past the Wall—a landmark that once belonged to a famous university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that is now used by the rulers of Gilead to display the corpses of people executed as traitors. As she looks at six new bodies hanging there, Offred remembers the unnerving words of their warden Aunt Lydia: “ordinary,” she said, is “what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”

Atwood’s Offred was not the ass-kicking leader of the resistance seen in seasons 2 and 3 of the Hulu television adaptation; she was not a rebel like her friend Moira and not an ideological feminist like her mother. If some readers found this Offred overly passive, her very ordinariness gave us an immediate understanding of how Gilead’s tyrannical rule affected people’s everyday lives.

In a 2017 essay, Atwood described writing Offred’s story in the tradition of “the literature of witness”—referring to those accounts left by people bearing witness to the calamities of history they’ve experienced firsthand: wars, atrocities, disasters, social upheavals, hinge moments in civilization. It’s a genre that includes the diary of Anne Frank, the writings of Primo Levi, the choral histories assembled by the Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich from intensive interviews with Russians, remembering their daily lives during World War II, the Chernobyl accident, or the Afghanistan war. Agency and strength, Atwood seemed to be suggesting, do not require a heroine with the visionary gifts of Joan of Arc or the ninja skills of a Katniss Everdeen or Lisbeth Salander; there are other ways of defying tyranny, participating in the Resistance, or helping ensure the truth of the historical record.

The very act of writing or recording one’s experiences, Atwood argued, is “an act of hope.” Like messages placed in bottles tossed into the sea, witness testimonies count on someone, somewhere, being there to read their words—even if it’s the pompous, myopic Gileadean scholars who narrate the satiric epilogues to The Handmaid’s Tale and its 2019 sequel, The Testaments.

As Atwood no doubt knows, one of the definitions given by Bible dictionaries for “Gilead” is “hill of testimony.” And in testifying to what she has witnessed, Offred left behind an account that challenged official Gileadean narratives, and in doing so, she was standing up to the regime’s efforts to silence women by telling her own story in her own voice.

COLLECTED POEMS

W. H. Auden

In the days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, copies of W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” went viral by email and fax. The poem—which had originally been written in response to Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the start of World War II in Europe—was reprinted in newspapers, read on National Public Radio, and discussed online. After Donald Trump won the 2016 election and after his inauguration the following January, Auden’s poem was again widely shared and debated.

Auden, himself, had renounced the poem—and other early works that he had come to regard as glib or gauche or a vestige of his leftist youth. But the poem continues to resonate with readers because of its evocation of a dangerous moment in history. Auden writes of “waves of anger and fear” washing over the “darkened lands of the earth.” He writes of humanity’s tragic inability to learn from history—“the enlightenment driven away”—and how we seem fated to suffer “mismanagement and grief” over and over again. At the same time, echoing Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach,” Auden also looks for hope in the possibility of human connection and the urge to “show an affirming flame” in a world beleaguered by “negation and despair.”

Auden’s poems from the 1930s are concerned with the intersection of the public and the personal, and they also attest to his gifts as a kind of anthropologist—observing the worries and fears of people as the world headed off a cliff. The specter of fascism and the social ravages of the Great Depression rumble through many of these poems, which reverberate with apocalyptic premonitions, reminiscent of Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (another widely shared poem on social media in the second decade of the millennium).

In his 1935 poem “To a Writer on His Birthday,” Auden writes of the wireless roaring “its warnings and its lies” and notes that even people in pretty seaside towns will soon be swept along “on the dangerous flood / Of history that never sleeps or dies.” In “Musée des Beaux Arts,” written shortly after the Munich Pact was signed in 1938, Auden wrote about how easy it is to turn away from other people’s suffering, how easily daily life can distract from catastrophe.

Auden moved to America in 1939, and his verse would grow increasingly focused on spiritual and emotional concerns. Though he contended that “poetry makes nothing happen,” his own verse would continue to bear witness to the “age of anxiety,” testifying to the possibilities and solace of art, even at a time when a nation feels “sequestered in its hate,” and “Intellectual disgrace/ stares from every human face, / And the seas of pity lie / Locked and frozen in each eye.”

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

(1985)

Russell Banks

Although Russell Banks’s epic novel Continental Drift was published back in 1985, it tells “an American story” that feels uncommonly current in the opening of the third decade of the twenty-first century. The novel reminds us of the power of the old American dream—namely, the possibility of beginning a new life in the New World, of reinventing oneself, tabula rasa. And it anticipates the growing tensions between refugees desperate to reach American shores to escape violence and despair at home and those working-class Americans who have found their own hopes of economic security and a brighter future for their children slipping out of reach.

The novel’s two central characters, Bob and Vanise, whose lives will violently collide, actually have a lot in common: both are disenfranchised and desperate, and determined to gamble everything on the chance of a better future.

Like many of Banks’s protagonists, Bob Dubois hails from a small New England working-class town; Banks describes him as “an ordinary man, a decent man, a common man.” At the age of thirty, he owns a run-down duplex, a thirteen-foot Boston whaler he built from a kit, and a battered Chevrolet station wagon. He owes the local savings and loan a little over twenty-two thousand dollars—for the house, the boat, and the car. “We have a good life,” his wife, Elaine, insists, but Bob feels increasingly frustrated and trapped; “nothing seems improved over yesterday,” and he’s begun to worry that he will never achieve even his most modest dreams.

One day, he abruptly moves his family to Florida, where he soon finds himself in business with his wheeler-dealer brother, Eddie, and with Avery, a disreputable childhood pal who’s been running drugs. For Banks’s characters, Florida is what California was for people in books by Nathanael West and Raymond Chandler—a ragged, dangerous place where people play loose and fast with the rules, a magnet for dreamers, hustlers, con men, and people with no place else to go. Here, the old pioneer spirit has devolved into a kind of me-first individualism, and nerve and hubris and good luck can make you rich. Bob, however, is caught in a downward spiral—living in a trailer park and bereft even of the job and house that had lent his life in New Hampshire a modicum of stability.

Desperate for money, Bob agrees to help ferry some Haitian refugees from the Bahamas to Miami, and his life is set on a collision course with that of a young Haitian woman named Vanise who’s set off for America with her infant child and a nephew, after their house was destroyed by a hurricane. She imagines that “everything will be different” in America, but instead she is cruelly abused by smugglers.

Banks not only gives the dovetailing stories of Vanise and Bob a terrible inevitability but also turns them into a dark story of our times.

BOOKS BY SAUL BELLOW

THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH (1953)

HERZOG (1964)

THE ACTUAL: A Novella (1997)

Saul Bellow’s most memorable novels are portraits of individuals trying to figure out their place in the world, what it means, as he wrote in Herzog, “to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hopes.”

Though Bellow’s heroes live mainly in the mid- to late twentieth century, their existential predicaments could not feel more timely today. Stuck in an American reality filled with calamities, con games, and cheap distractions, they struggle to find a balance between immersion in this “moronic inferno” and the more pristine realm of the self. Some of his “dangling men” suspect that all the “human nonsense” of daily life, from politics to business to romance, impedes their apprehension of the larger truths of the cosmos—“the axial lines” of “truth, love, peace, bounty, usefulness, harmony.” But others are aware of the temptations of narcissism and isolation. Harry Trellman in The Actual, for instance, realizes that his judgmental intellect and craving for a higher life are the very things that have cut him off from humanity—and from love.

Readers all have their favorite Bellow novels. To me, the three that are marvels of storytelling and that most clearly embody his quintessential themes are The Adventures of Augie March, the 1953 picaresque novel that marked Bellow’s discovery of an exuberant voice that was all his own; Herzog, a remarkable portrait of one man’s midlife crisis and the human quest for meaning in an increasingly atomized age in which the old certainties of religion and ideology no longer hold; and The Actual, a late, elegiac, and very Jamesian tale about one man’s belated efforts to step out of his lifelong role as an observer and submerge himself in (or at least dip a toe into) reality.

Bellow’s heroes are first-class “noticers” who often feel overwhelmed by the “muchness” of the world and who wonder if their personal woes somehow hold a tiny mirror to the “big-scale insanities of the twentieth century.” They are overly aware of mortality, the Big Clock, constantly ticking away in the distance.

Writing in prose that shifts gears effortlessly between the ebullient and the depressive, Bellow vividly conjured the busy mental life of his heroes—men who live, quite willfully, in their heads—and their daily, creaturely existence, as well as their encounters with what he called “reality instructors”: assorted salesmen, con men, and fixers who goad his protagonists into a recognition of everyday life. In fact, Bellow’s novels attest to his ease in grappling with big, Russian-novel-like ideas while at the same time using his gift for streetwise portraiture and description to capture the “daily monkeyshines” of “the cheapies, the stingies, the hypochondriacs, the family bores, humanoids,” and barstool comedians who populate his hectic and captivating world.

THE IMAGE

A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

(1962)

Daniel J. Boorstin

Published in 1962, Daniel J. Boorstin’s book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America uncannily foresaw the reality-show world we inhabit in the Trump era. For that matter, the book anticipated the arrival of someone very much like Donald J. Trump himself: a celebrity known, in Boorstin’s words, for his “well-knownness,” a loudmouthed showman, skilled in little besides self-promotion and staging what Boorstin called “pseudo-events”—that is, contrived events meant to generate publicity and appeal to the hunger of audiences for spectacle and diversion.

Boorstin’s descriptions of the nineteenth-century impresario and circus showman P. T. Barnum—who ran a New York City museum of curiosities filled with hoaxes like a mermaid (which turned out to be the remains of a monkey stitched together with the tail of a fish)—will sound strangely familiar to contemporary readers: a self-proclaimed “prince of humbugs” whose “great discovery was not how easy it was to deceive the public but rather how much the public enjoyed being deceived” as long as it was being entertained.

In recounting how illusions were displacing knowledge, how advertising was taking the place of content, The Image would influence the work of myriad writers from French theorists like Baudrillard and Guy Debord to social critics like Neil Postman and Douglas Rushkoff. Decades before the rise of the internet, Boorstin envisaged the “thicket of unreality” that would increasingly come to surround us as fake news, conspiracy theories, and political propaganda proliferated over the World Wide Web.

Much the way that images were supplanting ideals, Boorstin wrote, the idea of “credibility” was replacing the idea of truth. People were less interested in whether something was a fact than in whether it was “convenient that it should be believed.” And as verisimilitude increasingly replaced truth as a measurement, “the socially rewarded art” became “that of making things seem true.” No surprise then that the new masters of the universe in the early 1960s were the Mad Men of Madison Avenue. No surprise that the Republican strategist Lee Atwater, anticipating the age of Trump, would argue in the 1980s that “perception is reality” and his clients—and many GOP supporters—would buy it.

Decades before the rise of the internet, Boorstin envisaged the “thicket of unreality” that would increasingly come to surround us as fake news, conspiracy theories, and political propaganda proliferated over the World Wide Web.

FICCIONES

(1944; English translation, 1962)

Jorge Luis Borges

Edited by Anthony Kerrigan

Translated by Alastair Reid, Anthony Kerrigan, Anthony Bonner, Helen Temple, and Ruthven Todd

Jorge Luis Borges’s magical tales are like M. C. Escher drawings—fascinating, enigmatic tableaux filled with labyrinths, mirrors, and mazes that reverberate with a sense of metaphysical mystery. The lines between the real and the imaginary blur together here, as do the lines between writer and reader, life and art.

Translated into English in 1962, Borges’s Ficciones presaged many of the postmodernist techniques that would be embraced by later generations of writers across the world. Some of his tales reinvented familiar genres like the detective story, turning them into philosophical meditations about time and the nature of cause and effect. Some gave us fantastical events and strange beings: transparent tigers, wizards who conjure up visions in a bowl of ink, an encyclopedia that chronicles imaginary worlds. Some seemed to foretell the dizzying world of the internet where we would be deluged with tidal waves of data and multiplying, multifarious possibilities.

“The Garden of Forking Paths” describes a novel that is a kind of hypertext—filled with forking paths and alternate futures that exist simultaneously. And “The Library of Babel” depicts the universe as an infinite library, containing all knowledge past and present. “Everything is there: the minute history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, . . . the veridical account of your death.”

I had the opportunity to meet Borges in 1982, when he was giving a lecture at the New York Institute for the Humanities. He was a shy, fragile-seeming gentleman who said he couldn’t imagine himself living in a bookless world. “I need books,” he said. “They mean everything to me.”

The chief event in his life, he once wrote, was his father’s library, and in 1955, he was appointed director of Argentina’s National Library. As he grew increasingly blind, he relied on family, friends, and assistants to read aloud to him every day.

Among the authors Borges said he loved most were Kafka, H. G. Wells, and G. K. Chesterton, suggesting that he felt more of an affinity with storytellers who shared his own “amazement at things” than with so-called avant-garde writers and theorists.

When he began writing himself, his prose was baroque. Now, he said in 1982, “I try to write in very simple words. When I was young, I used to think the invention of metaphor was possible. Now I don’t except for very essential ones: stars and eyes, life and dreams, death and sleeping, time and the river.”

Having made a promise to his mother years earlier, he added that he has continued to say the Lord’s Prayer every night. “I don’t know whether there’s anybody at the other end of the line, but being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God. This world is so strange, anything may happen or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, more futuristic kind of world. It makes me more tolerant.”

The Moth Presents

All These Wonders

True Stories About Facing the Unknown

(2017)

Edited by Catherine Burns

The storytelling phenomenon The Moth was founded in 1997 by the writer George Dawes Green; its name comes from his memories of growing up in St. Simons Island, Georgia, where neighbors would gather late at night on a friend’s porch to tell stories and drink bourbon as moths flew in through the broken screens and circled the porch light. The Moth went on to become a Peabody Award–winning radio show and has since grown into what its artistic director, Catherine Burns, calls “a modern storytelling movement” that has inspired “tens of thousands of shows worldwide in places as diverse as Tajikistan, Antarctica, and Birmingham, Alabama.”

Participants have included well-known authors like Richard Price, George Plimpton, Annie Proulx, and Christopher Hitchens and scores of people from every background imaginable—scientists, writers, teachers, soldiers, cowboys, comedians, and inventors, among myriad others. The stories are “true, as remembered by the storyteller,” and are performed live.

The forty-five stories collected in The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories About Facing the Unknown translate remarkably well to the page. They are stories that chronicle the startling varieties and travails of human experience and the shared threads of love, loss, fear, and kindness that connect us. Some are urgent and raw. Some are elliptical and wry. Some are laugh-out-loud funny. And some are shattering in their sadness. But while the stories vary greatly in tone and voice, there is little sarcasm or snark. The emphasis is on communicating with the audience, with sharing an experience, a memory, a moment of grace.

Moth stories can be seen as part of the oral storytelling tradition dating back to Homer, but the personal nature of the tales—and their air of spontaneity—owes as much to stand-up comedy, blogging, talk-show anecdotes, and group therapy. They are not random reminiscences, however, but closely focused, finely tuned narratives that have the force of an epiphany, conveying with astonishing candor and fervor the familiar or the startling and the strange.

In “Unusual Normality,” Ishmael Beah—who lost his family to war in Sierra Leone and became a child soldier at age thirteen—relates how he was adopted by an American woman when he was seventeen and how he attempted to fit in at school in New York. For instance, he did not tell his new classmates why he was so adept at paintball: “I wanted to explain certain things, but I felt that if they knew about my background, they would no longer allow me to be a child. They would see me as an adult, and I worried that they would fear me.

“My silence allowed me to experience things, to participate in my childhood, to do things I hadn’t been able to do as a child.”

Other stories pivot around a relationship between two people: the scientist Christof Koch and his longtime collaborator Francis Crick (who together with James Watson discovered the structure of DNA); Stephanie Peirolo and her son RJ, who suffered a traumatic brain injury after his car was struck at a blind intersection; the actor John Turturro and his troubled brother Ralph, who lives at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens; Suzi Ronson, a hairdresser from a London suburb, who cut the young David Bowie’s hair, joined his tour, and went on to become a music producer.

One of the most moving tales is “Fog of Disbelief” by Carl Pillitteri, who was working as a field engineer on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear generating station in Japan when a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit the island in 2011, resulting in the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl; it left some 18,490 people dead or missing and led to the evacuation of more than 300,000.

After checking on his crew and colleagues, Pillitteri became concerned about the older woman who ran the restaurant where he ate five or six times a week. He spoke no Japanese, she spoke no English, and he and his friends knew her, fondly, only as the “Chicken Lady.” The little building housing her restaurant was badly cracked by the quake, and she was nowhere to be found—even months later, when Pillitteri returned to the exclusion zone from America to look for her. Eventually, he enlisted the help of The Japan Times in tracking her down and learned that her name was Mrs. Owada.

Almost a year after the quake, he received a letter from her: “I have escaped from the disasters and have been doing fine every day. Pillitterisan, please take care of yourself. I know your work must be important. I hope you enjoy a happy life like you seemed to have when you came to my restaurant. Although I won’t be seeing you, I will always pray for the best for you.”

THE PLAGUE

(1947)

Albert Camus

Translated by Stuart Gilbert

Enduring classics speak not only to the circumstances of the day in which they were written but across the decades or centuries—uncannily anticipating our own experiences and world today. Such is the case of Albert Camus’s startlingly resonant 1947 novel The Plague (La Peste), a novel that can be read, in Camus’s own words, as both a tale about an epidemic and as an allegory about the Nazi occupation of France and a “prefiguration of any totalitarian regime, no matter where.”

Camus was a dedicated member of the Resistance, who believed there was a moral imperative to stand up to the Nazi occupation of France. Inspired in part by his reading of Moby-Dick, he wanted to investigate the metaphysical problem of evil, and his novel chronicles how various characters react to the sudden arrival of plague in Oran, crashing down on their heads as if “from a blue sky.” He described the arc of the pandemic—from denial to fear and perseverance—with what many contemporary readers will recognize as remarkable verisimilitude: government efforts to downplay the threat giving way to mounting deaths and a quarantine; a shared sense of isolation vying with a “sense of injustice” kindled by profiteering and confusion; and for the poor, further deprivation. He described worries about medical supplies, the daily hunt for food, and the growing feelings of futility among “people marking time.”

The duration and monotony of a quarantine, Camus wrote, has a way of turning people into “sleepwalkers” who dope “themselves with work” or who find the heightened emotions of the first weeks devolving into despondency and detachment, numbed by the arithmetic of death. For those who lived through a pestilence, he observed, the “grim days of plague” feel like “the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing” crushing everything in its path.

Like members of the Resistance, Camus’s narrator Dr. Rieux believes that “the habit of despair is worse than despair itself” and argues that the town’s residents must not succumb to feelings of numbness and resignation. They must recognize the plague for what it is and dismiss the reflexive notion that such a catastrophe is “unthinkable” in a modern, supposedly advanced society like theirs.

Dr. Rieux knew “there must be no bowing down” to the plague—no compromise with evil, no resignation to fate. He identified with victims of the plague—“there was not one of their anxieties in which he did not share, no predicament of theirs that was not his.” And he knew the “essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying.”

In the end, The Plague emerges as a testament to the dedication of individuals like Dr. Rieux and a group of volunteers who risk their lives to help victims of the plague. Dr. Rieux insists there is nothing heroic about his work—it is simply “a matter of common decency,” which in his case consists of doing his job.

It’s this sense of individual responsibility, combined with his feelings of solidarity with others, that enables Dr. Rieux to hold fast to two not entirely contradictory truths: the understanding that we must remain ever vigilant because “the plague bacillus,” like the poison of fascism or tyranny, “never dies or disappears,” and the optimistic belief that “what we learn in time of pestilence” is “that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”

THE PASSAGE OF POWER

The Years of Lyndon Johnson

(2012)

Robert A. Caro

Robert A. Caro has said that he was not really interested in writing biographies; he was interested in writing “studies in political power.” This was true not only of his monumental first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, but also of the project that has consumed more than four decades of his life: the voluminous and so far unfinished portrait of the thirty-sixth president of the United States, Lyndon Baines Johnson.

As of 2019, Caro was still at work on the fifth—and presumably final—volume of that biography dealing with LBJ’s disastrous handling of the war in Vietnam. In the meantime, volume 4, The Passage of Power, stands as a model of the art of biography, showcasing all of Caro’s talents as a writer: his instinctive sense of narrative, his ability to help readers feel history in the making, and his gift for situating events within the context of their times.

The volume starts with Johnson’s being catapulted into the White House in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It’s an extraordinarily dramatic—and pivotal—moment in American history, and Caro conveys, on a visceral level, the magnitude of the challenges LBJ faced on entering the White House.

Caro observes that Johnson first had to instill confidence in a confused and grieving nation, and he needed to give the world—in the midst of a cold war that had turned dangerously hot with the Cuban missile crisis—a sense of continuity. To do so, he had to persuade key Kennedy administration members to stay on and to rally behind him. And he had to take on his many doubters, including liberals who questioned his commitment to civil rights and southerners who sought to block his social initiatives.

Johnson’s knowledge of the tactical and strategic levers he could press; his personal relationships with Congressional power brokers; and his bare-knuckled willingness to bully, cajole, horse-trade, whatever it took to get what he wanted—these were the qualities, Caro observes, that enabled LBJ to overcome “congressional resistance and the power of the South” that had stood “in the path of social justice for a century.”

Caro gives us an intimate understanding of how Johnson used the crisis of Kennedy’s death and his own political acumen to push through Congress his predecessor’s stalled tax-cut bill and civil rights legislation and to lay the groundwork for his own revolutionary War on Poverty. Caro also uses his accumulated knowledge of Johnson’s personality—his insecurities, his fear of failure, his need to pander to superiors and dominate his inferiors—to examine the role that character plays in politics and policy making.

Johnson emerges as both a Shakespearean personage—with epic ambitions and epic flaws—and a more human-scale puzzle: needy, deceitful, brilliant, cruel, vulgar, idealistic, boastful, self-pitying, and blessed with such titanic energy that Abe Fortas once remarked, “The guy’s just got extra glands.” He was a man driven by a colossal ego and by a genuine sense of compassion for the powerless and the poor that had been forged by his own childhood. He was a man who, in the weeks and months after the assassination of JFK, was able to overcome his own weaknesses and baser instincts—in Caro’s words, not for long but “long enough”—to act in a fashion that was “a triumph not only of genius but of will.”

PURSUITS OF HAPPINESS

The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage

(1981)

Stanley Cavell

This book will change how you watch Hollywood romantic comedies. It will make you see the Shakespearean underpinnings of such delightful screwball comedies as The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, and The Lady Eve and more recent romantic comedies like Crazy Rich Asians. It will also leave you with a new understanding of some of the classic tropes found in comedy across the centuries—like its use of crisis (the same sort of event that serves as a catalyst for disaster in tragedy) as a spur to the resolution of confusion and misunderstanding.

Hollywood’s brightest comedies from the 1930s and 1940s not only featured spirited heroines, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Rosalind, but also fast, witty exchanges between men and women that recall the animated banter in Much Ado About Nothing. The narrative movement in these films from conflict to confusion to eventual reconciliation parallels, in many ways, the structure of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, and in Pursuits of Happiness, the scholar Stanley Cavell used Northrop Frye’s famous studies of the playwright’s work to bolster his own arguments. Noting that Frye “calls particular attention to the special nature of the forgiving and forgetting” asked for at the end of traditional comedies, Cavell points out that Bringing Up Baby and Adam’s Rib also conclude explicitly with requests for grace, and The Awful Truth and The Philadelphia Story do so symbolically.

Even the retreat to what Frye called “the green world” (a place where the rules of day-to-day life are suspended) that takes place in A Midsummer Night’s Dream has its counterpart in these Hollywood comedies. As Cavell cleverly notes, Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, Adam’s Rib, and The Lady Eve all feature sequences in a distant place where perspective and renewal can be achieved—a setting, in these films, that usually turns out to be Connecticut.

Cavell, a philosopher who taught for decades at Harvard University, can be pretentious and heavy-handed: he analyzes Frank Capra in terms of Kant, compares Leo McCarey with Nietzsche, and brings up Locke’s Second Treatise of Government in a discussion of His Girl Friday. But please persevere—even if that means skimming over some of the denser passages in this book. Cavell provides a hilarious explication of the copious double entendres in Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby and a provocative examination of the meaning of songs in The Lady Eve, Adam’s Rib, and The Awful Truth. More important, he encourages us to appreciate the complexity of these great Hollywood films, and their delightful reinvention of comedic premises and techniques pioneered centuries ago by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Winter’s Tale, and All’s Well That Ends Well.

CAN’T WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING MORE PLEASANT?

A Memoir

(2014)

Roz Chast

Roz Chast’s people are worriers. They worry that they are too angry or too wimpy, too pushy or too passive or too passive-aggressive. They are afraid of driving, and afraid of chickens. They worry about Ebola turning up on West Eighty-Third Street in Manhattan.

Her cartoons—most of which have appeared in The New Yorker over the past several decades—capture the absurdities of contemporary life, the insecurities, neuroses, existential anxieties, and narcissistic complaints of the sorts of city dwellers made nervous by shopping malls and the great outdoors.

Though Chast writes as both a satirist and a social anthropologist, her work has long evinced an autobiographical impulse, drawing upon her experiences as a daughter, wife, and mother. And in her 2014 book, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, she tackled the subject of her parents—and her own efforts to help them navigate the jagged shoals of old age and ill health—with humor and raw candor. Her fondness for the exclamatory (expressed in capital letters, underlined words, and multiple exclamation points) is cranked up several notches here, and her familiar, scribbly people go from looking merely frazzled and put-upon to looking like the shrieking figure in Munch’s Scream—panicked and terrified as they see the abyss of loss and mortality looming just up the road.

Though Chast writes as both a satirist and a social anthropologist, her work has long evinced an autobiographical impulse, drawing upon her experiences as a daughter, wife, and mother.

Chast’s descriptions of her parents are so sharply detailed that we instantly feel we’ve known them—as neighbors or family—for decades: her bossy, impossibly stubborn mother, Elizabeth, and her gentle, worrywart father, George, a couple who were in the same fifth-grade class and who, “aside from WWII, work, illness, and going to the bathroom,” still did “everything together.”

For decades, George and Elizabeth continued to live in Brooklyn (“Not the Brooklyn of artists or hipsters,” but “the Brooklyn of people who have been left behind by everything and everyone”) in the same apartment where the author grew up. The “to do” list of her childhood and adolescence, she recalls, included exhortations like “Avoid contact with other children” (because they might have germs), “Look up symptom in Merck Manual,” and “Do not die.”

After marrying and moving to Connecticut, Chast says she spent the 1990s avoiding Brooklyn. She began to realize, however, that her parents “were slowly leaving the sphere of TV commercial old age” (“SPRY! TOTALLY INDEPENDENT! JUST LIKE A NORMAL ADULT, BUT WITH SILVER HAIR!!!”) and moving into “the part of old age that was scarier” and harder to talk about.

Chast pulls no punches here. She chronicles her father’s habit of chain-worrying, and her mother’s bad temper and insistence on stocking up on useless bargains (like quintuple-queen-sized lobster bisque stockings because they’re 80 percent off) while scrimping on necessities like a safe, reliable new space heater. She writes about moving her mother and father out of their home of forty-eight years, and about the decades of stuff left behind in their apartment—geologic layers of unopened mail, take-out menus, old books, old clothes, old Life magazines, empty Styrofoam egg cartons, antique appliances, and equally ancient Band-Aid boxes and jar lids. And she also chronicles her own flailing efforts to deal with the situation—her acute feelings of anxiety, worry, frustration, and sense of being completely overwhelmed.

Chast’s drawings, photos, and text all come together to create a powerful collage memorial to her parents. Like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, this book helps stretch the definition of the so-called graphic novel and underscores the possibilities of that genre as an innovative platform for autobiography and urgent, complex storytelling.

BOOKS BY BRUCE CHATWIN

IN PATAGONIA (1977)

WHAT AM I DOING HERE (1989)

Writers of books, Bruce Chatwin observed in a posthumously published essay, fall into two categories: “the ones who ‘dig in’ and the ones who move.” Among the members of the first category, he counted “Flaubert and Tolstoy labouring in their libraries; Zola with a suit of armour alongside his desk; Poe in his cottage; Proust in the cork-lined room.” Among the movers, he named “Melville, who was ‘undone’ by his gentlemanly establishment in Massachusetts, or Hemingway, Gogol or Dostoyevsky whose lives, whether from choice or necessity, were a headlong round of hotels and rented rooms—and, in the case of the last, a Siberian prison.”

Chatwin, of course, belongs firmly in the movers category.

He recalls he grew up with wanderlust in his DNA. His grandmother’s cousin Charley, who became British consul in Punta Arenas, Chile, was shipwrecked at the entrance to the Strait of Magellan in 1898; his uncle Geoffrey was an Arabist and desert traveler who received a golden headdress from Emir Faisal, and his uncle Humphrey came to a “sad end in Africa.”

With his father away in the navy, young Bruce spent his childhood drifting about England with his mother, staying with assorted relatives and friends. He later became a devoted “addict of atlases” and after leaving a promising job at Sotheby’s, he decided to hit the road himself as a journalist.

His first book, In Patagonia, was a sensation. Its fragmented narrative, its lapidary prose, its mapping of a landscape that was as much a place in the writer’s imagination as a set of coordinates on the globe—these qualities helped expand the boundaries of travel writing and revitalize the genre. The book’s opening would be widely admired and cited: how a strange piece of leathery animal skin in his grandmother’s cabinet—what he thought of as “a piece of brontosaurus” that had been found in Patagonia by his grandmother’s cousin—lodged itself in young Bruce’s mind, igniting a fascination with that distant land and a determination to one day journey there.

Chatwin’s keen eye for the magical, the incongruous, and the exotic are also showcased in the profiles, essays, and travel pieces collected in What Am I Doing Here. Even the flimsier entries in this volume showcase Chatwin’s gift of observation and his assurance in writing about anything—from Russian avant-garde art to survival tactics in the third world to rivalries in the world of high fashion. His best pieces read like small, perfectly shaped fictions peopled with startling characters. We meet the writer Nadezhda Mandelstam complaining about the lack of grand writers in Russia and asking Chatwin to please bring her some “real TRASH” to read, and Diana Vreeland sipping vodka and mistaking “Wales” for “whales.”

André Malraux, sitting on the edge of his chair and wearing “a light brown jacket with lapels like butterfly wings,” is described as a “talented young esthete who transformed himself into a great man.” And Werner Herzog comes across as “a compendium of contradictions: immensely tough yet vulnerable, affectionate and remote, austere and sensual, not particularly well adjusted to the strains of everyday life but functioning efficiently under extreme conditions.”

The less famous people in this volume are just as vividly portrayed: “a tall, almost skeletal, German mathematician and geographer” who has spent half of her seventy-two years in the Peruvian desert surveying the archaeological phenomenon known as the Nazca lines; a scrawny Tibetan smuggler doggedly embarking on a journey that will lead him across two glaciers and up a nineteen-thousand-foot pass; a botanist and explorer who likes to play Caruso records for mountain villagers in China.

Chatwin clearly felt an affinity with these solitary adventurers who left civilization behind for the outer limits of the world. Indeed his own life was animated by the fiercely held belief he shared with the Sherpas of Tibet, who are “compulsive travelers” and who mark their tracks with cairns and prayer flags, “reminding you that Man’s real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.”

His first book, IN PATAGONIA, was a sensation. Its collage-like narrative, its lapidary prose, its mapping of a landscape that was as much a place in the writer’s imagination as a set of coordinates on the globe—these qualities helped expand the boundaries of travel writing and revitalize the genre.

THE SLEEPWALKERS

How Europe Went to War in 1914

(2012)

Christopher Clark

World War I was a cataclysm that resulted in twenty million military and civilian deaths and the wounding of twenty-one million. It helped catalyze the Russian Revolution, set the stage for the rise of Nazism and World War II, and planted the seeds of many of today’s intractable conflicts in the Middle East. And as Paul Fussell observed in his brilliant 1975 book, The Great War and Modern Memory, the brutalities of trench warfare would send shock waves throughout European culture, effectively shredding the old order and giving birth to modernism and its discontents.

“I shall never be able to understand how it happened,” the writer Rebecca West later said of World War I. How did the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the presumptive heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife, Sophie, on June 28, 1914, push a peaceful Europe into war, and how did that war snowball into a conflagration that would consume the Continent and reconfigure the world?

Such questions are especially timely today, given the myriad ways in which the pre–World War I era resembles our own: it, too, was a time when globalization and new technologies like the telephone were creating seismic changes, and those changes, in turn, were fueling a growing populism. Right-wing, nationalistic movements were on the rise, and larger geopolitical shifts were threatening the stability of the world order.

“What must strike any twenty-first-century reader who follows the course of the summer crisis of 1914 is its raw modernity,” the historian Christopher Clark writes in his compelling book The Sleepwalkers. An “extra-territorial” terrorist organization—built around “a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge”—was behind the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, Clark writes, and the path to war was fueled by the dynamics of a complex landscape that featured “declining empires and rising powers”—a landscape not unlike the one we inhabit today.

Clark writes with thoughtful authority, judiciously sifting through the massive amount of information on the war, focusing on how (not why) decisions were reached and how various roads to peace or compromise were closed off. He does not try to assign blame for the war, and says there are no single smoking guns that can explain what happened. Instead, he argues that “the outbreak of war was the culmination of chains of decisions made by political actors” in different countries—decisions that were often based on misunderstandings, fragmentary or incomplete information, and the ideological and partisan positions of leading political actors.

Clark, who teaches at the University of Cambridge, uses his easy familiarity with European history to examine how each of the principal players in the rush to war—Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Britain, Serbia—had long-standing preconceptions and suspicions about their rivals (and allies) that had been shaped by history and cultural traditions. He goes on to analyze how those reflexive attitudes could lead to bad decision making and how partisan domestic politics (like lobbying from nationalist pressure groups within each country) sometimes resulted in clashes among different factions of a country’s foreign policy machinery.

Clark is also adept at drawing portraits of individual players in the buildup to war. Like the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, who ensured that British policy “focused primarily on the ‘German threat’ ” and who tried to shield “the policy-making process from the scrutiny of unfriendly eyes.” And the erratic Wilhelm II, the German kaiser, who often “bypassed his responsible ministers by consulting with ‘favorites,’ encouraged factional strife” within his own government, and expounded views at odds with prevailing policy.

All these factors contributed to what Clark describes as the “ambient confusion” that swirled across the Continent in the days leading up to war—a war, in his words, that the European nations stumbled into, like sleepwalkers: “watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.”

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