33 Nonfiction Books of the Year: When the Facts Change, How Should We Think? | QDaily's Books of the Year, Part 2

The nonfiction list covers a range of subjects across the humanities, science and economics. Once the list is out, we'll follow it with pieces on each subject in turn.

Another year has passed, and it is time again for us to recommend the year's best books.

The Chinese edition of Tony Judt's When the Facts Change came out early in 2018. A year later, going back over our reading notes, that title — when the facts change — makes us miss the thinkers more than ever. Wise thought has become scarce. It would be wrong to blame that on a restless age, or on a society growing fragmented and coarse; wise thought has been scarce in every age. The real question is how the voices of intellectuals grew so faint. People have worried for a long time that intellectuals would withdraw from public life, and now that withdrawal is happening on a large scale. The new question is whether it is temporary or permanent.

This year, China and the world, society and the state, the economy and our own lives were all pushed around by very large questions. In our astonishment, the disappearance of those voices — or their drowning in noise — leaves us more confused and more lost. Or perhaps a turning point is near, because it is people with insight who make it possible to see the road ahead.

So we have tried to introduce as wide a range as we could of books we think are worth reading.

Two years after Trump became president of the United States, more and more books are appearing that take up, directly or indirectly and from many angles, the question of how America chose this president. How did we get here? The Great Regression comes at it through global politics; The Rise and Fall of American Growth through more than a century of industrial development; The Age of American Unreason through the mood of the public at large. Each answers part of the question.

Measured against the breadth of the problems China faces, Chinese thinkers are close to absent. Or, to put it more cautiously, at least too few.

Fortunately, on the poverty, development and equality that a developing country runs into, we can look at India; on what comes after an aging population and the departure of manufacturing, we can look a little ahead, at Japan; on the hard problems of class mobility and urban renewal (gentrification), we can learn from the United States…

So these are the books we recommend.

Unlike in past years, we have dropped the categories we used for three years running — humanities, business, science, lifestyle and aesthetics, and fiction. This year the list is split into a fiction half and a nonfiction half.

The nonfiction list covers a range of subjects across the humanities, science and economics. Once the list is out, we'll follow it with pieces on each subject in turn.

As in previous years, every book that came within our view has been read by our own editorial staff, who introduce them to readers in good faith.

We also had help from our contributing writers in putting the list together. They are always ahead of the rest of us, and they see further. Our thanks to them.

Below is QDaily's 2018 nonfiction book list: 33 titles, chosen by QDaily and our contributing writers.

When the Facts Change

• Author: Tony Judt (UK)
• Translator: Tao Xiaolu
• Publisher: CITIC Press · Sanhui Books
• Price: 68 yuan

"We too have lived through an age of stability, certainty, and the illusion of indefinite economic improvement. But all that is now behind us. For the foreseeable future we shall be as economically insecure as we are culturally uncertain. We are assuredly less confident of our collective purposes, our environmental well-being, or our personal safety than at any time since the Second World War. We have no idea what sort of world our children will inherit, but we can no longer delude ourselves into supposing that it must resemble our own in reassuring ways."

So said Tony Judt in his final lecture, in 2009.

He liked to quote a line of Keynes's — in the long run we are all dead — and in the few short years after his own death, all of it came true. But a voice that wise is unlikely to come again.

The book collects the essays he published in The New York Review of Books and elsewhere, assembled by his wife, Jennifer Homans. The title comes from another line of Keynes's: when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

The Great Regression

• Editor: Heinrich Geiselberger (Germany)
• Contributors: Zygmunt Bauman (UK) and others
• Translators: Sun Bai and others
• Publisher: Shanghai People's Publishing House · Shiji Wenjing
• Price: 49.80 yuan

Why did Mizrahi Jews come to stand for populism? What did that do to the electoral upset in America's Rust Belt? Why did Clinton's remaking of the Democratic Party hand control of the American economy to "the Goldman Sachs party"? Why was the energy for resisting Hitler's Nazi Party — a party everyone knew had to be opposed — spent by the 1930s?

What is Europe? What is globalization?

Thinking matters.

And it is precisely now — with Trump's election win, Britain walking away from the ideal of a united Europe, populism returning worldwide, globalization losing its outline — that intellectuals are telling us the threads of history can be traced.

We need the long view of history. It may make us pessimistic, even leave us feeling helpless, but at least we will know the world did not come from nowhere.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth

• Author: Robert Gordon (US)
• Translators: Zhang Linshan, Liu Xianwei, Sun Fengyi
• Publisher: CITIC Press
• Price: 128 yuan

The "growth" and "progress" we take for granted are only the markers of one "special century."

That century began around 1879 and ended around 1970.

In all the history before it, growth and progress had never shown such force; whether they have continued since — since the 1970s, to be exact — remains to be seen. Robert Gordon thinks a conclusion can already be drawn: growth has slowed.

In his research, progress since 1970 has narrowed into one small band of human activity, the band tied to entertainment, communication, and the gathering and processing of information. In everything else people care about — food, clothing, housing, transport, health, the working environment inside and outside the home — progress has slowed, whether you measure it by quantity or by quality.

The rise in American living standards over the past 150 years rested largely on innovations big and small. But any account of America's future economic progress has to look past innovation to the headwinds, which are dragging at the pace of progress like a gale. The strongest of them is worsening inequality: since 1970, the share of the fruits of American growth taken by the top income bracket has kept growing.

The Railway Journey

• Author: Wolfgang Schivelbusch (Germany)
• Translator: Jin Yi
• Publisher: Shanghai People's Publishing House · Shiji Wenjing
• Price: 59 yuan

Wolfgang Schivelbusch sees the railway as an integrated machine of wheels, track and carriages — machines that grew into a single rail system, a giant machine laid over the earth.

And not only that.

From the traveler's point of view — a literary vantage — he examines how the railway changed time, people and landscape (space), down to how a fruit grown in one place took on a different feel and different qualities, for grower and buyer alike, once it entered the rail system.

This is industrialization, and what industrialization produced. As Schivelbusch marvels at the way space and time were remade, he seems to return to Thoreau's old question: "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas" — but what will we have to say to the people of Texas?

These are good questions to raise. There is no need to worry that Schivelbusch has simplified the landscape, nor to fret over what exactly Thoreau would have said to Texans; the world's development proved long ago that demand is more often manufactured than found. But that is no reason to give up the deeper questions behind it.

The Age of American Unreason

• Author: Susan Jacoby (US)
• Translator: Cao Yufei
• Publisher: New Star Press
• Price: 58 yuan

When Susan Jacoby set out in 2007 to write about "anti-intellectualism," she overlooked Twitter. Nothing could have convinced her that a decade later an American president would run the country in 140 characters at a time.

Nothing could have convinced her either that vaccines — which in her own adolescence stood for one wave after another of humanity's victory over infectious and inherited disease — would become an object of suspicion, and in the name of science at that.

Jacoby seems to spend the whole book with a look of bewilderment on her face, then sets about working out where exactly things went wrong.

Why has wisdom grown scarcer and scarcer in America, and how did junk thinking take over our brains and our public conversation…

This may be an underrated book, especially for those of us used to Weibo (with its character limit) and Zhihu (with its plausible-sounding knowledge and its smug "thanks for the invite" answers).

Dictionary of Human Stupidity

• Author: Piergiorgio Odifreddi (Italy)
• Translator: Yao Yiran
• Publisher: Beijing United Publishing · Weidu
• Price: 58 yuan

To quote one entry:

Cipolla's laws of stupidity

First, the number of stupid people is always larger than you imagine. Second, whether a person is stupid has nothing to do with any other trait they have. Third, stupidity harms others without benefiting oneself, and often harms oneself as well. Fourth, the potential damage done by stupid people is consistently underestimated. Fifth, of all kinds of people, the stupid are the most dangerous.

The third law is in fact the definition of stupidity.

In another entry, on "the internet," Piergiorgio Odifreddi, the book's author, adds: 90 percent of what circulates online is nonsense. On social sites like Facebook and video platforms like YouTube, anyone can share the most trivial details of daily life, and their friends will of course be generous with their likes.

The internet has also created the conditions for a Cambrian explosion of new species of stupidity. …Acting together, they make people's virtual lives even stupider than their real ones.

Enough said.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

• Author: Katherine Boo (US)
• Translator: He Peihua
• Publisher: New Star Press
• Price: 49.80 yuan

Katherine Boo is not Indian, does not speak the local languages, and has never lived a lifetime in that setting. "After years of bad health, I also doubted I could handle the monsoon and the squalor of the slums. On one long night alone at home in Washington, D.C., I decided to try anyway. I had just tripped over a big dictionary and landed in a pool of spilled Diet soda, with a punctured lung and three broken ribs, unable to crawl to the phone. In those hours I understood that since I clearly could not live in peace with a large dictionary, I might as well look for an interest in some other field — one beyond what I called my expertise, where the odds of failure might be high but the engagement might mean more."

And so this book came to be.

One passage runs like this:

Every time Abdul returns to Dongri, he is still looking for the Master. He wants to tell the Master that in the last years of his childhood he tried to be a decent person, but now he is fairly sure he is a grown man and cannot keep it up. A man, if he is wise enough, does not draw a clean line between good and evil, true and false, justice and whatever the other thing is.

"For a while I tried not to let the ice inside me melt," he says. "But now, like everyone else, I am slowly turning into dirty water. I tell Allah I love him very, very much. But I also tell him that, given the way the world works, there is no way for me to become a better person."

Capital: The Eruption of Delhi

• Author: Rana Dasgupta (UK)
• Translator: Lin Panqiu
• Publisher: Nanjing University Press · Imaginist
• Price: 88 yuan

Everyone will take something from this book about Delhi.

India's demolitions, India's corruption, India's democracy, India's housing prices, India's overnight-fortune myths, India's slums… and then — I assume this book's Chinese readers are already in the middle class, or will be within a few years — they will see a little of China in it too.

Many readers, wearing their middle-class hat, may cluck their tongues and feel relieved that at least we are not India (the poor one).

In fact India's middle class is just like ours: "most of them find it hard to imagine that they share this country with hundreds of millions of struggling farmers, hunters and other creatures who seem to exist only in legend."

On what India and China share and where they differ, these three passages get it about right:

"When they wanted to build a city, they had to bring in people from elsewhere to make it run, because they had no labor of their own. People living in mansions cannot make a city run. What makes any city run are the people in shacks and slums — rickshaw pullers, vegetable sellers, cobblers, construction workers and so on. Those are the people who keep any city going."

"So people who could not find work in Bihar, Rajasthan or Uttar Pradesh moved from their villages to Delhi. In Delhi they found they could get work but had nowhere to live, so they started building small houses on empty land at the edge of the city. To the government they were a bloc of votes worth having, so the government decided to register them as Delhi voters and give them water, electricity and ration cards. Later their families came too, and they lived there together, normally, for thirty years."

"People kept coming to Delhi, because there was plenty of work here. The Delhi metro alone needed tens of thousands of workers. They built countless shacks right under the government's nose, and the government said nothing. But later the government decided these people were dirty and spoiled the look of the city. And as the city spread, the areas where they lived were no longer the edge of it — the government wanted to make money from that land, so it told these people that living there was illegal and told them to go."

Street of Eternal Happiness

• Author: Rob Schmitz (US)
• Translator: Wang Xiaoyue
• Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House
• Price: 48 yuan

Any translated book about the real China, written by a foreign correspondent posted here — a "wire reporter," as they are commonly called — is worth recommending.

There are fewer and fewer of them now. There were never many to begin with.

Their angle and their stance need no debate: as far as we can see, they are all objective, friendly and generous, and careful to the point of timidity about hurting ordinary people's feelings. The government and the powerful, of course, are another matter.

That is a reporter's nature and duty.

Street of Eternal Happiness is by Rob Schmitz, and its subject, Changle Road, is a street in Shanghai. Schmitz tells the stories of several people who live along it, and in them gathers all the opposing forces a big city holds.

Shock of Gray

• Author: Ted Fishman (US)
• Translator: Huang Yuwen
• Publisher: SDX Joint Publishing Company
• Price: 48 yuan

Why is the world growing old?

The answer is not very systematic. Ted Fishman lays out the state of a number of countries that are both old and poor.

But he does offer some insight.

Industrialization, for instance, drove the making of the modern city and the modern state.

Yet once manufacturing moves away, the mechanism that produces a middle class is bent out of shape — not everyone can move into modern services, and the harder question is whether modern services can create wealth for a country as large as China. Before this, Europe's decline and America's decline were both tied to manufacturing moving away. Is that a cause or an effect?

Or take this: education pushes back the age at which most people enter the labor market, leaving a person only about 30 productive working years. The time available for creating wealth is clearly shorter. Is that a reason for being poor?

The Low-Desire Society

• Author: Kenichi Ohmae (Japan)
• Translator: Jiang Jianqiang
• Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House
• Price: 48 yuan

Japanese authors write books the way other people make slide decks, and Kenichi Ohmae is no exception.

Every number is lined up neatly, earnestly making its case.

Looking at Japan naturally makes you want to know China's future. It is a deeply held idea: that on population, on public mood, on consumption and culture, on trade, even on relations with the United States, Japan has a great deal to teach China.

Perhaps.

But given the size and scale of China's economy, the road ahead may not offer much to borrow. Take the decade and more of talk about boosting domestic demand and depending less on foreign trade — the very thing that cost Japan its exchange-rate competitiveness. Its bearing on China is shrinking. And Japan's wealth held in the hands of its households, against a China growing old before it grows rich, is a difference of timing. As for the quality of the citizenry and the quality of governance, that is a larger question for another day.

Evicted

• Author: Matthew Desmond (US)
• Translators: Hu Xinzhun, Zheng Huansheng
• Publisher: Guangxi Normal University Press · Imaginist
• Price: 68 yuan

Why was Matthew Desmond able to walk straight in?

He asked himself that.

"How anyone could sit in front of a stranger with a notebook and a ballpoint pen and lay out the ugly details of their life is still a mystery to me; how anyone could open their door and let me in I still cannot work out. Perhaps tenants on the edge of homelessness needed something concrete, a phone to use or a car to borrow, and also something invisible, something psychological. And there is another reason: people at the bottom often feel they have nothing left anyway, so saying a bit more will not cost them much."

"Does having Matthew here make you nervous?"

"I ran out of secrets a long time ago."

"Me too, you know. Dignity — when you've got nothing left, what is there to guard?"

Matthew Desmond says the research broke his heart.

This is the record of a piece of fieldwork: the lives of people who have been evicted, and of the homeless.

Great American City

• Author: Robert J. Sampson (US)
• Translators: Chen Guangyu, Liang Yucheng
• Publisher: Social Sciences Academic Press

The concepts we know best, industrialization and globalization, reach further than we tend to think.

Robert Sampson writes that "the entire discipline of sociology was in fact built on the transformations of the late nineteenth century" — transformations widely believed to have dissolved the social structures of "communal society" (community).

His own sociological work follows from that: "My strategy is to examine how residential mobility, organizational ties and elite social networks connect neighborhoods, in differentiated ways, to the cross-cutting institutions and resources that sustain contemporary economic, political and social life."

This is a book with a certain theoretical barrier to entry. Fortunately its subject is Chicago, a city that does not lack for stories.

Topophilia

• Author: Yi-Fu Tuan (US)
• Translators: Zhi Cheng, Liu Su
• Publisher: The Commercial Press
• Price: 45 yuan

"Topophilia is a neologism, useful in that it can be defined broadly to include all of the human being's affective ties with the material environment. These ties differ greatly in intensity, subtlety, and mode of expression. The response to environment may be primarily aesthetic: it may then vary from the fleeting pleasure one gets from a view to the equally fleeting but far more intense sense of beauty that is suddenly revealed. The response may be tactile, a delight in the feel of air, water, earth. More permanent and less easy to express are feelings that one has toward a place because it is home, the locus of memories, and the means of gaining a livelihood."

"In fact, topophilia is not the strongest of human emotions. When it is compelling we can be sure that the place or environment has become the carrier of emotionally charged events or perceived as a symbol."

Yi-Fu Tuan takes all this as his subject and sets off on an intriguing intellectual expedition. Put simply: how the scientific model that appeared in seventeenth-century Europe replaced the medieval picture of the cosmos, what that says about the shift in human thought, and what the shift did to our attitudes toward the environment.

What do our experiences of city, suburb, countryside and wilderness mean, and what do they contribute to the values we form? This is a fascinating book.

The New Urban Frontier

• Author: Neil Smith (UK)
• Translator: Li Yeguo
• Publisher: Yilin Press
• Price: 78 yuan

Once a city is defined by consumption rather than by the producers living in it, everything changes. The city we understand as a product of industrialization has nothing more to do with industrial workers.

Or perhaps it still does — they have simply become that fabled thing, the low-income group.

So gentrification means shedding the blue collar; the word itself says so.

So: "it is the value of consumption, not production, that guides decisions about how land in the central city is used."

So the slogans we know so well, things like "building a livable city," are addressed to the middle class. It is livability for the middle class.

This is a book that lays out gentrification systematically. Gentrification, and the redevelopment of which it forms a part, is a systemic feature of late-capitalist urban development. Just as capitalism works to annihilate space with time, gentrification works ever harder to manufacture differentiated space as the means of its own survival.

An Optimist in America

• Author: Italo Calvino (Italy)
• Translator: Sun Chaoqun
• Publisher: Yilin Press
• Price: 45 yuan

Why do some people always arrive at such uncommon insights? Calvino had no training in sociology and does not seem to have known much about the study of urban landscape, yet he always produced the most interesting observations at exactly the right moment.

My guess is that his feeling for things was simply acute enough — and, obviously, Calvino wrote better than the sociologists.

He compares the ugly buildings of Italy with those of New York:

To love a city is to accept a certain amount of suffering on its account. You watch the city change, familiar streets vanish, the old atmosphere destroyed, and the new face growing uglier, not to be mentioned in the same breath as what came before. …But New York's changes differ somewhat from Italy's. In Italy, when an ugly building goes up, you know you may have to face it for the rest of your life, and your children and grandchildren may have to face it too. New York is different: buildings here last thirty years at most, and some are torn down after seven or eight. The cityscape keeps changing, and you feel you can hardly keep up, left bewildered in front of the temporary signs, fences and scaffolding that come and go. Now and then a building escapes this fate and stands for fifty or even a hundred years, and inevitably takes on the wistful air of a bygone time. When such a building is threatened with demolition, it often stirs a patriotic sort of resistance and protection.

Calvino sums it up: "But fortunately, if beauty is short-lived, so is ugliness. An ugly building will not last long — and taking comfort in that, one feels there is some hope in life again."

Which bears out the book's title. An optimist really is far more level-headed than the rest of us, forever anguished and heartsick, even if it fixes nothing.

The Credential Society

• Author: Randall Collins (US)
• Translator: Liu Ran; proofreader: Ji Dongjie
• Publisher: Peking University Press
• Price: 59 yuan

Professor Randall Collins's views are sharp — insightful and contentious at once. Education, he argues, is not a ladder for social mobility but an obstacle to it. The education system is essentially a currency whose value is set arbitrarily and by force. Like any other currency, credentials face inflation. Degrees keep losing value, and people fighting for jobs are forced to take on more and more education. As for a remedy, he proposes abolishing all certification requirements by law.

He is writing about the United States. Clearly the book can also help us think about China's social reality now. What does education actually do? And what does the expansion of education lead to?

The Ottoman Centuries

• Author: Patrick Balfour, Lord Kinross (UK)
• Translator: Luan Lifu
• Publisher: CITIC Press
• Price: 128 yuan

A general history of the Ottoman Empire seen from the vantage of its political elite.

The empire lasted six centuries, straddled Asia, Africa and Europe, and had nearly 40 monarchs; it is complicated enough on its own. The British historian Patrick Balfour asks us to keep three layers of it in mind: first, it was a country of Turks; at bottom, it was an Islamic state; and above both the Turkish national identity and the Muslim framework, its most important feature was that it was a world empire.

Suleiman I brought the empire to its sixteenth-century peak, after which came three and a half centuries of decline. A declining empire needs reform. The nineteenth century was the Ottoman age of reform, when the empire's rulers hoped to turn this 500-year-old medieval society into a modern state built on Western constitutional principles. In the 1870s the reform effort reached its height and produced a constitutional parliament. Reform is always hard, and autocracy always holds enormous appeal for rulers; the constitutional period ended quickly.

Still, the spread of new ideas worked on the young, and the Young Turks launched a revolution that overthrew autocratic rule. Then the Young Turks turned into an even more autocratic government. At the same time, the battered, dying empire ran into the rise of nationalist ideas and movements around the world. For a multiethnic empire ruled by a single dynasty, that was the death knell.

The Ottoman Endgame

• Author: Sean McMeekin (US)
• Translator: Yao Zhihong
• Publisher: CITIC Press
• Price: 118 yuan

Without understanding how the Ottoman Empire ended, you cannot understand the birth of the modern Middle East or the roots of its conflicts today. On this stretch of history, the general reader is probably most familiar with David Lean's film Lawrence of Arabia and the journalist Scott Anderson's bestseller Lawrence in Arabia. There are also Chinese translations of The Fall of the Ottomans and A Line in the Sand, among others.

Interestingly, the author of The Ottoman Endgame thinks little of either Lawrence of Arabia: the reasons the empire was carved up, he argues, went far deeper than the shallow terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The film "departs wildly from real history"; the book is "startlingly distorted new research." But as the saying goes, listen to both sides and you see clearly, listen to one and you stay in the dark. Reading them against each other can at least help us think about the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East.

The Roots of American Order

• Author: Russell Kirk (US)
• Translator: Zhang Dajun
• Publisher: Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House · Hantang Yangguang
• Price: 138 yuan

When The Roots of American Order appeared in the 1970s, America was in crisis. A revival of "American order" was the hope of the conservative thinker Russell Kirk. Now, in the twenty-first century, America again seems to be in crisis. Politicians have done little more than chant "Make America Great Again," but the more useful question may be what made America great in the first place. Why was America able to become a free and prosperous country?

Kirk thought the fundamental reason was ordered liberty grounded in Christian belief. The book's translator, Zhang Dajun, sums up Kirk's account of America's success this way: religious belief produces a view of ordered liberty; that view produces the institutional arrangements of free markets and limited government; and free markets and limited government give America's economic, social and individual energies as much room as possible to work.

Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia

• Author: Orlando Figes (UK)
• Translators: Zeng Xiaochu, Guo Danjie
• Publisher: Sichuan People's Publishing House · Imaginist
• Price: 139 yuan

"What does it mean to be Russian? What is Russia's place and mission in the world? And where is the 'real' Russia? Europe or Asia? St. Petersburg or Moscow? In the golden age of Russian culture, these 'accursed questions' haunted the mind of every serious intellectual. They are the questions, hidden beneath the surface of the art, that this book sets out to explore."

Orlando Figes can write, and he can tell a story. Besides Natasha's Dance, there are The Whisperers, The Crimean War and others — all thick volumes, none of them dull to read. Figes says that if we look closely enough we may catch sight of the inner world of the Russian people. He is, of course, an excellent guide.

My Past and Thoughts

• Author: Alexander Herzen (Russia)
• Translator: Xiang Xingyao
• Publisher: Sichuan People's Publishing House · Houlang
• Price: 280 yuan

As a rule we do not pick reissues for the annual list. But we think the three-volume memoir My Past and Thoughts, by the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), is genuinely important, and so it belongs here.

Isaiah Berlin praised it this way: "His autobiography is one of the great monuments to Russian literary and psychological genius, worthy to stand beside the great novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy."

Ordinary Vices

• Author: Judith N. Shklar (US)
• Translator: Qian Yidong
• Publisher: Shanghai People's Publishing House
• Price: 48 yuan

People have many vices: cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal… Shklar's purpose in writing the book is not to celebrate human vice or to root it out, but to discuss the harm and the value of these various vices, and to look into the difficulties we face in thinking about them.

What does that mean for a liberal?

A liberal does not seek consistency between vice and virtue; everyone has to make their own choices, and that means unusual ethical difficulty.

"Our lives are necessarily marked by contradiction, by conflicts that cannot be resolved, and by a balance between public and private demands that neither oppose each other nor agree. If we want to understand fully what we think we already know, these ordinary vices can at least show us what it is we have to struggle against."

After all, "no one ever promised us a moral life that requires no effort." It is hard, and worth pursuing.

The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt

• Editor: Dana Villa (US)
• Author: Margaret Canovan (UK)
• Translators: Zhang Xiaoyu, Chen Wei
• Publisher: Yilin Press
• Price: 69 yuan

Philosophers' books are mostly hard going, and a companion volume can help. Even if you think you have understood the text, a good piece of secondary literature makes a fine supplement.

The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt collects essays by 15 scholars from around the world, taking up the main themes of Arendt's thought from political, historical and philosophical angles. The essays come at her from different directions; some praise her, some criticize her sharply.

"She was a thinker, but a thinker firmly on the side of political life — a political life whose substance is a vigorous civic existence roused by public spirit, a life of 'caring for the world,' of independent judgment. So many people failed in the face of the rise of totalitarianism; so many, pursuing wisdom along the philosophical road, set aside political life and human plurality. Arendt never let go of it, and it is exactly for this reason that she gave all her genius and wisdom to showing us the undeniable meaning of a life devoted to actively preserving the freedom of the world," writes the volume's editor, Professor Dana Villa.

The Gene: An Intimate History

• Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee (US)
• Translator: Ma Xiangtao
• Publisher: CITIC Press
• Price: 88 yuan

Unfortunately, Siddhartha Mukherjee has said nothing about the gene-edited babies He Jiankui announced at the end of 2018 — reporters asked him, but he has yet to reply. The episode turned out to be an unplanned sequel to the last chapter of The Gene, and a brutal answer to the many questions the book lays out. On the methods and ethics of gene editing, on the discovery, confirmation and contesting of the gene as a thing that exists, The Gene, like Mukherjee's earlier The Emperor of All Maladies, comes at its subject from culture and science at once, telling the story unhurriedly against the background of human nature and society. "What makes us human" is a vast question, and this book supplies an unusually complete framework of knowledge for approaching it.

La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life

• Author: Elaine Sciolino (US)
• Translator: Xu Lisong
• Publisher: Nanjing University Press
• Price: 58 yuan

"French" is a meme. Popular culture is fixated on decoding the code of French style, and the writing on it, from dressing tips to soup recipes, runs on and on. What is good about this book is that the reporter Elaine Sciolino, after having her hand kissed by the French president, decided to start from an abstract idea instead: seduction. Her subject is intangible, but the questions she asks are remarkably concrete. What does seduction mean to the French? How does it differ from other cultural settings? And in all the areas that have already been written about to death — food, clothes, perfume, conversation, flirtation, shopping, relationships — how does seduction show itself, and how is it carried out? "Seduction is a kind of warfare," one line in the book runs; it is about what to do and what not to do, about knowing yourself and others, about patience with process… Like the book itself, if you do not peel it apart layer by layer you will not find where the pleasure lies.

Travelers in the Third Reich: The Rise of Fascism, 1919–1945

• Author: Julia Boyd
• Publisher: Pegasus Books

The 1930s were the glory years of the Nazis' rise to their peak, and also the years when foreign tourists, British and American ones above all, flocked to Germany. The great majority of them turned a blind eye to the ominous developments under way in Nazi Germany — the suppression of civil liberties and press freedom, anti-Semitic violence, one-party rule, totalitarian dictatorship, concentration camps, military expansion. This was not entirely a matter of their own indifference and self-deception, or of deliberately shutting their eyes and ears. It was also because tourist culture under Nazi rule presented a scene in which the "normal" and the "party-ified" coexisted side by side, peaceably.

People often say that travel is a matter of seeing for yourself. Is it? Why does travel so often hide more from us than it shows, and why is the part we do not see the more essential part? That is exactly the question to sit with while reading Travelers in the Third Reich. (Xu Ben, Professor of English, Saint Mary's College of California)

Note: this recommendation is taken from an article Professor Xu Ben wrote for us; we will publish the full piece later.

The Spy and the Traitor

• Author: Ben Macintyre
• Publisher: Crown

The great spy novelist John le Carré called this the best true spy story he had ever read. And in fact the biography is every bit as good as one of le Carré's novels.

Its subject is the double agent Oleg Gordievsky. In 1963, at 25, Gordievsky joined the Soviet intelligence service, the KGB, and later became a senior Soviet figure in London. But from 1973 on he was secretly working for Britain's MI6, and in doing so he changed the history of the Cold War.

In 1985, when Moscow wanted Gordievsky recalled and his identity was about to be exposed, the British government mounted an operation to get him out. He has lived in Britain since, and has written a number of books about the KGB. He is now 81.

Creative Selection

• Author: Ken Kocienda
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Every company wants a repeat of the iPhone's first decade, Apple included.

There is no shortage of explanations for Apple's success, but most of them come down to one man, and are sometimes boiled down to one man having taste.

Ken Kocienda, a designer and programmer, has a different angle. He worked on the Safari browser, the first iPhone and the iPad, and he is the direct reason you are used to typing on a small pane of glass today.

Better still, Kocienda was not in management; in more than a decade at Apple he spoke with Steve Jobs fewer than ten times, and only in the few minutes around demoing something to him in person. So Creative Selection is not a book that reconstructs how Jobs operated. It is about Apple's most fascinating years, seen from the point of view of someone doing the work: how goals were handed down and then met, how an idea became a product.

The book restates a plain truth: behind any good design that looks simple and self-evident lies thinking and trying, over and over. But it is not the success manual its subtitle — "Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs" — suggests. Copying the process it sets out will do no more for you than copying Jobs's temper does for an entrepreneur.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

• Author: Jaron Lanier
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

One phone, online at all times; free internet services connecting everyone and every piece of information in the world. That has been the biggest engine of economic growth of the past ten years, and is also held to be humanity's greatest technological advance of the past ten years.

But across that decade Lanier has kept asking whether the price we pay for it is too high. This is his fourth book on the subject.

He is not talking about the spread of bias and fake news, or the fragmenting of information. What worries him more is that people have grown too used to living by the rules and algorithms written by the big internet companies — watching what the algorithm shows you, posting what the algorithm rewards — and are slowly losing their own independent thought, losing the "mystical spark" of the soul, remade into one component of an enormous machine.

Like his earlier books, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now reads more like a manifesto. Its call to action will change nothing: "delete all your social media accounts, or at least deactivate them for six months." But having no solution does not mean we should not take another look at what all our present convenience is really costing us.

Bad Blood

• Author: John Carreyrou
• Publisher: Knopf

A dropout from a prestigious school starts a company, builds a revolutionary product, changes the rules of an industry and finally changes the world. That description, which fits Jobs, Gates and Zuckerberg, for a while seemed to fit Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes just as well.

She claimed the portable machine she had invented could squeeze two drops of blood at home and return the same diagnostic results as several vials drawn at a hospital and hours of waiting. A former US secretary of state sat on her board; the Walton family and Rupert Murdoch were among her investors; Walgreens, America's second-largest pharmacy chain, was going to help her build 40 blood-testing centers. Then, in 2015, the Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou investigated and found that Theranos came nowhere near what it claimed: it was running the analyses on other companies' machines and passing off the results as its own. It was not only the product's performance that was faked; the revenue outlook was invented too. A $9 billion valuation went to zero within months.

Carreyrou did more interviews on top of his original series of reports and wrote Bad Blood, reconstructing how a tech founder who copied even Jobs's clothes and driving habits, unable to deliver on the picture she had painted, went step by step to defrauding investors of more than $700 million on a $9 billion valuation.

Today both Silicon Valley and China are in the habit of doubting how much of what tech companies and their founders say can be believed, and Theranos is roughly where the bubble began to burst.

How to Change Your Mind

• Author: Michael Pollan
• Publisher: Penguin Press

"If I write about this subject, people may think: here is someone whose earlier books were serious, so maybe this is a subject that has been overlooked, rather than one to be waved away as 'doing drugs.'" That, Michael Pollan said in a podcast interview, is why he wrote about LSD.

It is not an arrogant thing to say. Look at The New York Times's ten best books of 2018: How to Change Your Mind is on it. His books are hard to ignore. This UC Berkeley journalism professor is best known for four books about food, and the line "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" drove a decade of rethinking about food and nutrition among America's middle class.

Pollan missed LSD when he was young, and wrote this book after trying it for the first time. He starts with LSD's history — a Swiss chemist's experiments with psychoactive drugs, the drug's effect on the hippie movement in the 1960s — and moves on to how the human brain works (or rather, to our ignorance of how it works), to "trip" guides and experiments helping terminally ill patients accept death, to the recently restarted research on hallucinogens and to government policy. He covers all of it. The book is long, but Pollan keeps the pace up and, as in his earlier books, keeps you turning pages.

LSD remains banned in most places even as research on hallucinogens has resumed, and, as Pollan says, we are still very far from understanding how consciousness can be altered — "even when the alteration is only swapping out one molecule, or sitting through a meditation."

What Was the Meiji Restoration? A View from World History (《明治維新とは何だったのか――世界史から考える》)

• Authors: Hando Kazutoshi, Deguchi Haruaki
• Publisher: Shodensha

This is a book of conversations between two men: Hando Kazutoshi, a well-known contemporary Japanese writer of history, and Deguchi Haruaki, currently president of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University. Hando has written many fine works on modern Japanese history and takes a critical view of the men who led the Meiji Restoration government, arguing that statesmen like Ito Hirobumi and Yamagata Aritomo sowed the seeds of Japan's later troubles. Deguchi brings wide international experience and a deep grasp of economics. Both think broadly and speak sharply, and reading them talk is genuinely useful for coming to a fresh understanding of the Meiji Restoration. (Wang Qian, Project Associate Professor, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo)

Cover image from: Photo By: University of Minnesota Institute of Advanced Studies; banner image from: Wikipedia