Books of the Year

Page-turners

The best books of 2011 were about China, Congo, Afghanistan, Charles Dickens, Vincent van Gogh, the "Flora Delanica", Jerusalem, Mumbai’s dance bars, quantum physics, sugar, orgasms, blue nights, two moons and other people’s money

Dec 10th 2011 | from the print edition

Politics and current affairs

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future.By Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan. Princeton University Press; 352 pages; $35 and £24.95
Few things will affect our future more than migration. By calculating the how, where and why of future labour shortages, the authors analyse the costs and benefits of human migration.

Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China. By Jianying Zha. The New Press; 240 pages; $24.95 and £18.99
A highly readable study from a Beijing-born writer for the New Yorkerabout China’s “tide players”, the intellectual and entrepreneurial pragmatists who prosper by pushing at the boundaries of what the state permits while taking care never to overstep the mark.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. By Jason Stearns. PublicAffairs; 400 pages; $28.99 and £18.99
A serious account of the social and political forces behind one of the most violent clashes of modern times—a 15-year war in Congo that has spilled over into neighbouring countries and claimed as many as 5m lives—by one of its most meticulous and empathetic observers.

Cables from Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign.By Sherard Cowper-Coles. Harper Press; 352 pages; £25
A former British ambassador to Afghanistan—and an outspoken early critic of Western policy—breaks out of the static group-think and argues that the current military-led strategy in the country is fatally flawed.

The 9/11 Wars. By Jason Burke. Penguin Global; 709 pages; $20. Allen Lane; £30
An ambitious attempt to knit into a coherent whole the sprawling fabric of the “war on terror”. Jason Burke of the Guardian, who has covered Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East through every phase of the conflict, focuses on the ordinary people affected by the troubles rather than on decision-makers in far-off capitals.

Pakistan: A Hard Country.By Anatol Lieven. PublicAffairs; 558 pages; $35. Allen Lane; £30
A former Timesreporter who now teaches at King’s College London, Anatol Lieven has travelled widely through Pakistan talking to generals, shopkeepers, farmers, lawyers and bureaucrats. A book that captures all the drama and colour of this complex Muslim nation.

Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise. By Carl Walter and Fraser Howie. Wiley; 250 pages; $29.95 and £19.99
Two bankers with years of experience in China shine an unprecedented light on the remarkable 32-year effort to build the country’s financial system—on its vices, virtues and many conflicts of interest.

Biography and memoir

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.By Ezra Vogel. Belknap Press; 928 pages; $39.95
An American former intelligence officer in East Asia examines Deng Xiaoping’s role in transforming impoverished, brutalised China into an economic and political superpower.

Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961.By Paul Hendrickson. Knopf; 544 pages; $30. To be published in Britain in January by Bodley Head; £20
The author, an accomplished storyteller, interprets myriad tiny details of Ernest Hemingway’s life, and through them says something new about a writer everyone thinks they know.

Blue Nights. By Joan Didion. Knopf; 208 pages; $25. Fourth Estate; £14.99
Even when Joan Didion writes about the hard drama of her own life, particularly the sudden death of her husband followed by the death of her only daughter, her memoirs manage to be larger than her own grief. This is a beautiful book, tragic and profound.

Van Gogh: The Life. By Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Random House; 953 pages; $40. Profile; £30
An ambitious, original book, by two energetic art-history researchers, which describes the sublime Impressionist as a lonely, syphilitic boozer who bit the hands that fed him.

Charles Dickens: A Life.By Claire Tomalin. Penguin Press; 576 pages; $36. Viking; £30
This is a superb life of Britain’s greatest novelist by its greatest literary biographer.

Ghosts by Daylight: A Memoir of Love, War and Redemption. By Janine di Giovanni. Knopf; 304 pages; $26.95. Bloomsbury; £16.99
A beautifully written memoir, by a Paris-based American war reporter, about the pain of adjusting to normal life after being exposed to the intensity of battle.

The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins her Life’s Work at 72. By Molly Peacock. Bloomsbury; 397 pages; $30 and £20
How Mary Delaney—aristocrat, gardener, woman of fashion and friend to Jonathan Swift and King George III—created the “Flora Delanica”. Less a biography, more an extended prose poem.

Economics and business

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. PublicAffairs; 336 pages; $26.99 and £17.99
An engrossing book by two young economists who draw on some intrepid research and a store of personal anecdotes to illuminate the lives of the 865m people who live on less than $0.99 a day. Winner of the 2011 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs business book of the year award.

The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.By Tyler Cowen. Dutton Adult; 128 pages; $12.95
A small book full of big ideas about the historic changes wrought through education and innovation. An American economist offers plenty to think about for readers of every ideological stripe.

Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon.By Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. Times Books; 331 pages; $30 and £19.99
Gretchen Morgenson, a veteran New York Timesreporter, and Joshua Rosner, a consultant, join up the dots between Congress, special-interest groups, government-sponsored enterprises and Wall Street, including many that other books failed to link, and provide the best account yet of how the American mortgage system went off the rails.

Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World. By William Cohan. Doubleday; 672 pages; $30.50. Allen Lane; £25
A rollercoaster account of how Goldman Sachs does business, and the best analysis yet of its increasingly tangled web of conflicts, by a master-storyteller.

History

Jerusalem: The Biography.By Simon Sebag Montefiore. Knopf; 638 pages; $35. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; £25
The rich and absorbing story of the only city that exists both on heaven and on Earth, as told through its prophets, poets, peasants, kings and conquerors. After his acclaimed biographies of Stalin, Catherine the Great and her lover, Potemkin, Simon Sebag Montefiore has finally turned to the book he was born to write.

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean.By David Abulafia. Oxford University Press; 783 pages; $34.95. Allen Lane; £30
How the Mediterranean became a net exporter of economic and cultural might and the thoroughfare between the Atlantic and Asia. The author is an influential Cambridge historian.

The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-five Minutes in History and Imagination.By Javier Cercas. Bloomsbury; 403 pages; $18 and £18.99
The most widely read book on the 1981 failed coup in Spain, which was first published in 2009 and has now been translated into English. A persuasive and absorbing work by a Spanish novelist and former academic.

Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth.By Frederick Kempe. Putnam Adult; 608 pages; $29.95
A lively, meticulous account of a crucial year in history, when the third world war nearly started in Berlin.

The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples.By David Gilmour. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 480 pages; $32.50. Allen Lane; £25
On the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unifi8cation some of its countrymen are asking whether the Risorgimentodid more harmthan good. A richly detailed account of a controversial question by a British historian and biographer.

The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies.By Matthew Parker. Walker & Co; 446 pages; $30. Hutchinson; £25
A tale of wealth, bravery and debauchery—and how the foundations of the modern globalised world were made of sugar—by the author of an excellent earlier work, “Panama Fever”.

Science and technology

The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen.By Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw. Allen Lane; 255 pages; £20. To be published in America in January by Da Capo Press; $25
A book that breaks all the rules of popular science-writing, by two of Britain’s best known physicists.

Thinking, Fast and Slow.By Daniel Kahneman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 512 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £25
The Nobel prize-winning father of behavioural economics and one of the world’s most influential psychologists, Daniel Kahneman shows how we are not at all the paragons of reason that we so often believe ourselves to be.

Global Warming Gridlock: Creating More Effective Strategies for Protecting the Planet.By David Victor. Cambridge University Press; 392 pages; $40 and £25
A sophisticated analysis of the effects of global warming which shows that the current approach to the problem of climate change is a mostly ineffective mess and that alternative approaches will be hard and time-consuming to get up and running—but worth it in the end.

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans.By Mark Lynas. National Geographic; 280 pages; $25. Fourth Estate; £14.99
A highly readable account of how we came to be living in the Anthropocene age and what we can do about it.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood.By James Gleick. Pantheon; 544 pages; $29.95. Fourth Estate; £25
A sprawling yet fascinating book by an acclaimed American science writer, “The Information” ranges from biology to particle physics and explores the links between information, communications, data and meaning from earliest times to the present day.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World.By David Deutsch. Viking; 487 pages; $30. Allen Lane; £25
The long-awaited survey of humanity’s quest for explanation and understanding by an Oxford University quantum physicist who believes that science is as infinite as the human thirst for knowledge.

Revolutions that Made the Earth.By Tim Lenton and Andrew Watson. Oxford University Press; 440 pages; $52.95 and £29.95
An analysis of the evolutionary changes that took place on Earth in response to sudden changes in temperature or atmospheric conditions, by two followers of James Lovelock, the father of the popular theory of Gaia, the self-regulating planetary system.

Culture, society and travel

The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.By Steven Pinker. Viking; 802 pages; $40. Published in Britain as “The Better Angels of our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes” by Allen Lane; £30
StevenPinker’s exploration, within psychology, neuroscience, politics and economics, of why all forms of violence have seen huge long-term declines is a subtle piece of natural philosophy to rival that of the great thinkers of the Enlighten8ment. He writes like an angel too.

Adventures in the Orgasmatron: How the Sexual Revolution Came to America. By Christopher Turner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 544 pages; $35. Fourth Estate; £25
A smart and engaging work of social history that considers sex, psychoanalysis, consumerism and some of the darkest moments of the 20th century.

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. By Edward Glaeser. Penguin; 336 pages; $29.95. Macmillan; £25
This enthusiastic guide to the blessings of human proximity explains why half of humanity now lives in cities and why 5m more are moving there from the countryside every month.

Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars.By Sonia Faleiro. Canongate; 240 pages; £12.99. To be published in America in March by Grove Press; $15
A pitch-perfect conga through the dance bars of Mumbai. The author also explores middle-class marriage in India and its hypocrisies, and the challenges of trying to make it on your own in India’s biggest commercial city.

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. By Elif Batuman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 298 pages; $15. Granta; £16.99
A bracing travelogue of literary adventures by a six-foot-tall American-born Turkish academic. Her erudite enthusiasm for Russia’s big, gloomy and occasionally illogical fiction is as vivid as her humour and sense of romance.

People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman.By Richard Lloyd Parry. Jonathan Cape; 404 pages; £17.99. To be published in America by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in May; $16
A page-turning, if horrifying, read about the murder of a young Englishwoman in Japan and the dubious workings of the Japanese criminal-justice system. Thorough, fair-minded and full of insight.

Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial.By Janet Malcolm. Yale University Press; 168 pages; $25 and £18
An unputdownable story that takes in child abuse, sexual taboo and a ringside trial seat in front of the famous Supreme Court “hanging judge”, Robert Hanophy.

Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything.By David Bellos. Faber & Faber; 400 pages; $27. Particular Books; £20
A wonderful, witty book about words, language and cultural anthropology by a scholar whose fascination with his subject is itself endlessly fascinating.

The Art of Camping: The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars.By Matthew De Abaitua. Hamish Hamilton; 294 pages; £14.99
A memoir of how camping means exploring an unfamiliar place while recreating the safe comforts of home, by an editor-at-large of the Idler and an inveterate fan of guys and poles.

Fiction

1Q84. By Haruki Murakami. Books 1 and 2 translated by Jay Rubin and Book 3 by Philip Gabriel. Knopf; 944 pages; $30.50. Harvill; £34.99
A wild and wilful romance involving a black cat, two moons and a host of nocturnal little people—as well as a boy and a girl.

Other People’s Money.By Justin Cartwright. Bloomsbury; 258 pages; $15 and £18.99
Born in South Africa, now living in Britain, Justin Cartwright casts a sharp outsider’s eye on the City of London and its shenanigans. A novel that is both funny and wise.

Open City.By Teju Cole. Random House; 272 pages; $25. Faber & Faber; £12.99
An unusual accomplishment, “Open City” is a precise and poetic meditation on love, race, identity, friendship, memory, dislocation and Manhattan bird life.

The Marriage Plot. By Jeffrey Eugenides. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 416 pages; $28. Fourth Estate; £20
A rich and textured evocation of the quest for marriage or how true love never works out, except at the end of an English novel.

Train Dreams.By Denis Johnson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 128 pages; $18
This dense, mesmerising novella about a labourer in the American West conjures up a life lived in the 20th century that reads like it was long, long ago.

The Tiger’s Wife.By Tea Obreht. Random House; 352 pages; $15. Weidenfeld & Nicolson; £12.99
This story, by a 25-year-old Serbian-American woman, of a young Balkan doctor named Natalia, her family and their homeland, is highly original, funny and frightening, and proof that there is no formula for precocity. Winner of the 2011 Orange prize for fiction.

The Cat’s Table. By Michael Ondaatje. Knopf; 304 pages; $26. Jonathan Cape; £16.99
A personal story of dislocation by a Sri Lankan-born Canadian novelist. Superbly poised between the magic of innocence and the melancholy of experience.

The Afrika Reich. By Guy Saville. Hodder & Stoughton; 433 pages; £12.99
A rich and unusual what-if historical thriller that is politically sophisticated and hard to forget.

Poetry

Australian Poetry Since 1788. Edited by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray. University of New South Wales Press; 1,108 pages; $66.95 and £54.95
An exemplary anthology and a generous account of a poetry that deserves to be better known; from Aboriginal song cycles and settler ballads to recent work by Les Murray, Philip Hodgkins and the editors themselves.

Memorial.By Alice Oswald. Faber & Faber; 84 pages; £12.99
This vivid and moving poem weaves together two vital threads from the “Iliad”: the unique ephemerality of each man killed in war and the recurrent, timeless pictures of nature and human activity captured in Homer’s similes.

Clavics.By Geoffrey Hill. Enitharmon Press; 41 pages; $29.95 and £12
An intense and austere new collection by the Oxford professor of poetry, who has been called “the greatest living poet in the English language”.

from the print edition | Books and arts

Page-turners

Dec 15th 2011, 08:40

I appreciate you the Economist for providing this list. Really, this list shows the increasing ratio of China’s influence on this world. Also for me, “Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China’s Extraordinary Rise.” as well as “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.” are excellent for their successfully plain description about the recent 30-year history of open economical power.

Especially, in my opinion, the level of this book “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China”, or you can say also outstanding prominence, can be praised as the same masterpiece as that book “Mao: The Unknown History”, written by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, famous for the same reason and recommend by many scholars concerned of China Study in United Kingdom in 2006’s winter. I have surfed several chapters of this book in Taipei 101’s Page One a month ago. “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China” is indeed regarded as the No.1 recommend of the biography.

However, unfortunately, this book, “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.” is banned in China. According to the sayings of relative department, the only reason is that all of books about Deng must be seriously examined; but on the other side, introducing this book to Beijing’s fifth generation of China’s Communist Party, I am given the contradictory information. These big head show the positive attitude toward this book, saying this book can express the thought and formation of Deng’s policy to China. In addition, many figures concerned of book surprisingly find some truth or some “causes” behind some “incident” , which they have yet known for more than twenty years, in this thick masterpiece.

History can be usually expressed through the connection among the big events and short stories one by one, of course, also from one’s biography - especially the ruler’s- to know the contemporary situation. When it comes to the 30-year open reform history, Deng’s doctrine is the basic norm to know the evolution of Chinese Beijing’s politics and economy. From this book, readers can realize some difficulties when Communist Party faced the several turning points, such as party’s human resource and the inner betray, and how to expand Chinese influence on the world while facing both friendship and confrontation of Japan and United States. (Taiwan issue is few talked of). Furthermore, those who would like to feel the past time read the book talking about not only local figure but also the foreigners such as James Lilley (Lee Jie-Ming’s China Hands). As I always talk, Chinese history is interacted with numerous and various stories and beautiful literature.

By the way, “the 1Q84” , by Haruki Murakami, is my favourite novel. Also, the cost of this book cannot estimated at any price, like his most brilliant “Norwegian Wood”, which once affected me very much in my youth. Besides, both are having the relative movie soundtrack and movie worthy of admiration. The series of “1Q84” containing “Janacek : Sinfonietta” impressed so many Japanese successfully in 2009. And after about one year, the movie soundtrack “Norwegian Wood, movie directed by Chen Ying-Hsiung”, product by Jonny Greenwood and CAN, was a fashionable talk in East Asia.

For more than thirty years, Haruki Murakami has constantly been expressing writing style of his unique sense of citizen, already becoming the mutual signal of world’s many youths. According to the report on Time Magazine in Aug. 2007 and upcoming ones, Haruki Murakami recently worked hard in the internationalization of his writings by translating these into more and more languages. For example, his most favourite books among his is Great Gatsby, still under work.

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筆者在這一年內有購進的書來研究的是Dr. Ezra Vogel 傅高義的「鄧小平傳記」。這本據說在中國大陸還是禁書，不過裡面翻閱一些時，傅先生見過江澤民本人作訪問，所推敲鄧的心理是佔很大部份的，尤其是1980年之後到鄧的過世，而在筆者這篇當年忘了而沒有提到。若為可信，江澤民在六四天安門事件時是偏中立沉默了些的。傅大博士今年已近九十歲有了，是貫通百年東亞史學者，以數本清朝以後歷史及偏黨政的現代中國與偏日本經濟的現代日本為觀點，有綜合性通論者，也有出版如朴正熙時代的南韓斷代史。筆者當年除了這本，從讀建中開始就有接觸史景遷Jonathan D. Spence的「The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution 1895-1980」算是國際通用中國現代史的課本，後來筆者在讀長庚大學的時候有購閱曾任倫敦大學亞非學院的英國華裔作家張戎和夫婿Jon Holiday「Mao: The Unknown Story」公認仍至今唯一權威外國人解讀毛澤東的學者，張教授教過在東森新聞留學過英國的王佳婉主播媽媽的指導教授，肄業後就是有在筆者提的這本James & Jeffery Lilley父子合著的「China Hands」及2006年起擔任經濟學人雜誌及之後日本NHK的亞洲地緣學高級顧問 Dr. Bill Emmott所著的「Rivals」，是預測十年內的中國印度及日本三強帶動的亞洲局勢，這可以拿來和美國雷根政府的商務部長Clyde Prestowitz所著的「崛起的四大國：3bn New Capitalism」，這書是首度喊出中國、印度、巴西和俄羅斯為BRICs金磚四國的市場經濟新機運起點。對了，還有一本筆者很敢拿來和北京來往時提問的，是鮑彤確認的趙紫陽自傳錄音：國家的囚徒「Prisoner Of The State: The Secret Journal Of Premier Zhao Ziyang」，筆者在之後是拿這些當通論，及和北京的習李體制的領導討論過的事，以寫入當時在網站的你來我往。

另外筆者小聊1Q84，這本每年都被拿來問是否村上春樹有因此得諾貝爾文學獎，筆者至今放在隨身聽的就是越南導演陳英雄執導的「Norwegian Wood」挪威的森林及配合Can ＆Greenwood的原聲帶音樂，其實也好奇怎麼偏好Janacek : Sinfonietta 楊納傑克的小交響曲配樂。筆者小回憶起2007年時代雜誌曾經出刊一篇說村上春樹想轉型作跨國作家，這本1Q84不會是結束，也給了很好的試鍊。