Summer has arrived, and it’s time to kick back and relax with a good book or three! If you are looking for a few recommendations to add to your summer reading list, here are some recent reads from the staff and students here at the Reynolds Center. Bonus points for checking out these books from your local library.
1929
Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History – and How It Shattered a Nation
Andrew Ross Sorkin
With unparalleled access to historical records and newly uncovered documents, 1929 takes readers inside the chaos of the crash, behind the scenes of a raging battle between Wall Street and Washington and the larger-than-life characters whose ambition and naïveté led to disaster. This is not just a story about money. It is a tale of power, psychology, the seductive illusion that this time is different, disregarded alarm bells, financiers who fell from grace, and skeptics who saw the crash coming—only to be dismissed until it was too late.
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STREETWISE
Getting to and through Goldman Sachs
Lloyd Blankfein
Streetwise abounds with lessons about leading teams of brilliant, aggressive, competitive people and harmonizing them around shared goals; changing when times are hard and when they’re good; managing risk; and knowing a crisis is at hand before it swamps you so you can guide your team to the further shore. The author is open about when he and the firm got it wrong, which was often enough, but the creative, risk-taking spirit was never snuffed – even as the fail-safes put in place to protect the firm and its clients held when they were needed the most.
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ABUNDANCE
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent urban-density and green-energy projects that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. The authors trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. At a time when movements of scarcity are gaining power in country after country, this is an answer that meets the challenges of the moment while grappling honestly with the fury so many rightfully feel.
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THE AI CON
How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna
Is AI going to take over the world? Is it going to replace all our jobs? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything? The answers to these questions, as the authors of The AI Con make clear, are ‘no’. In fact, these fears are all symptoms of the hype being used by tech corporations to justify data theft, motivate surveillance capitalism, and devalue human creativity. Meanwhile, across industries, ‘AI’ products are already being introduced that are unreliable, ineffective, unjust and dangerous. Packed with real-world examples, The AI Con arms you to spot AI hype in all its guises, expose the exploitation and power-grabs it aims to hide, and push back against it at work and in your daily life.
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MIDDLEMARCH
George Eliot
Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.
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GOLDEN GATES
The Housing Crisis and a Reckoning for the American Dream
Conor Dougherty
Spacious and affordable homes used to be the hallmark of American prosperity. Today, punishing rents and the increasingly prohibitive cost of ownership have turned housing into the foremost symbol of inequality and an economy gone wrong. With propulsive storytelling and ground-level reporting, Golden Gates chronicles America’s housing crisis from its West Coast epicenter, peeling back the decades of history and economic forces that brought us here and taking readers inside the activist movements that have risen in tandem with housing costs.
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CARMAGEDDON
How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It
Daniel Knowles
Carmageddon outlines the rise of the automobile and the costs we all bear as a result. Weaving together history, economics, and reportage, Knowles traces the forces and decisions that normalized cars and cemented our reliance on them. He takes readers around the world to show the ways car use has impacted people’s lives and that there are better ways to live.
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THE LANTERN OF LOST MEMORIES
Sanaka Hiiragi
This is the story of the peculiar and magical photo studio owned by Mr. Hirasaki, a collector of antique cameras. Sorting through the many photos of their lives, Mr. Hirasaki offers guests a second chance to travel back in time to take a photo of one particular moment in their lives that they wish to cherish in a special way. Full of charm and whimsy, The Lantern of Lost Memories will sweep you away to a world of nostalgia, laughter, and love.
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HOW TO DO NOTHING
Resisting the Attention Economy
Jenny Odell
In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or back-to-nature meditation, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism.
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THE POEMS OF NAKAHARA CHUYA
Nakahara Chuya
Born in 1907 Nakahara Chuya was one of the most gifted and colourful of Japan’s early modern poets. A bohemian romantic, his death at the early age of thirty, coupled with the delicacy of his imagery, have led to him being compared to the greatest of French symbolist poets. This selection of poems from throughout Nakahara’s creative life includes collected and uncollected work and draws on recent scholarship to give a full account of this extraordinary figure.
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MORE AND MORE AND MORE
An All-Consuming History of Energy
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz
It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. This book reveals an uncomfortable truth: ‘transition’ was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means to put off any meaningful change. More and More and More forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.
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COMPLICIT
How Our Culture Enables Misbehaving Men
Reah Bravo
Weaving her own experience with that of other women and insights from experts, the author reveals the psychological and social forces that make us all enablers of a dangerous, sexist status quo—regardless of our good intentions or feminist ideals. Complicit shows that the path to a better, more equitable society begins with cultivating the self-awareness and mindfulness necessary to act against our cultural conditioning.
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