1. Our Kindly Inquisitors
Written in the middle of the culture wars in 1993, this is a must-read for anyone engaging in or struggling with modern identity politics. Even if you disagree fundamentally with parts of this book, you should read it. Ostensively about free speech, the book is probably more appropriately viewed through an epistemic lens, with Rauch viewing epistemology as deeply intertwined with politics. His crisp language cuts deeply at the core of questions that remain relevant to this day: does the identity of a speaker tarnish the validity of that speech? How do we maintain our right to fight against ideas we find repugnant without suppression and censorship? Who has the right to bless speech, and with it, the ideas that we find acceptable in polite society?
2. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of Modern China
It's not an exaggeration to claim that Deng Xiaoping was the single most influential person in the 20th century - it might not be right, but it's defensible. Deng had an impact on the scale of FDR, Hitler Churchill, Khrushchev and Kennedy. The difference is, Americans don't know anything about Deng. Anyone looking to understand modern China and "socialism with Chinese characteristics" should read this book, as should anyone trying to make big, sweeping societal changes. While not perfect, Deng is appropriately viewed by many Chinese as the founder of modern china, his leadership took a country that had a lower per-capita GDP than North Korea into the modern economy and began the process of healing from the Cultural Revolution.
3. Wild Swans
As a foil to my flirtation with Deng Xiaoping, Wilds Swans is a memoir that centers on the Cultural Revolution and the atrocities that happened under the Communist Party in the middle of the 20th century. Banned since publication in her native China, Chang's prose tells the story of three generations of women before and during the Communist's rise to power and presents the chilling reality of the Cultural Revolution from the perspective of a young woman growing up in a deeply unstable world. One thing stuck with me from this book: there was no KGB or Gestapo during the Cultural Revolution - in China, it was the entirety of the population that terrorized one another in a gruesome perversion of Marxist ideology.
4. The Idea Factory
If I had to go back in time, I would go back to Bell Labs and apply for a job. This book explains why. Bell Labs was a powerhouse of innovation - it's hard to find an example of modern technology that doesn't trace back to its hallowed halls. Somehow, under the monopoly of 'Ma Bell, a small research lab in New Jersey attracted some of the most talented scientists and engineers in history: nine Nobel Prizes were granted for the work done at Bell Labs. In fact, this year's Nobel Prize was won for research that was done in Bell Labs during the 1970s and 1980s. This book made me think a lot about the fundamentally inegalitarian world of innovation. Were the people at Bell Labs substantively better than anyone else in the world at what they were doing? The answer is an unqualified yes. Together, they were responsible for more innovation than any similarly sized group of people had any right to be. Interestingly, these researchers did not get rich. They were, of course, well off. But they were motivated by research and by discovery, not by money. Can we have such researchers today, in a neoliberal world dominated by high-paying jobs optimizing the existing world? Or was it a unique confluence of circumstances that led this group of humans to invent our modern world?
5. The Lessons of History
Written by Will and Ariel Durant, this is at once an optimistic and tragic story. The premise is ambitious: to summarize the main lessons and themes from the Durant's life's work, their 10-volume, 10,000 page opus "The Story Of Civilization," and remarkably, it succeeds. The book is structured as a collection of short essays, and the fundamental thesis, that we are more similar to our forebears than we might realize and that we have transcended the world of individual Darwinian competition and earned the right to evolve as a civilization rather than as a species is a compelling way to think about our role in history.
