The Ezra Klein Show

It pushed me back to thinking about this book by Mansour Olson, On The Rise and Decline of Nations, which I don't think is a book that's correct in every respect. But a lot of our growth as a country ... I think his view is that political action in general, it's a public good.

Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations has a passage where he's arguing against mercantilists who say a low wage economy is going to be a strong economy because you can spend your gold and you get lots of work on it and produce lots of stuff and project military power.

The first book is a book called The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer, which is a joint biography of Alan Dulles and John Foster Dulles and how incredibly one was head of the State Department, the other was head of the CIA and how they worked to overthrow multiple countries during Eisenhower's time.

I remember reading Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist back when it first came out. So this was, I think, August of 2019.

How to Be an Antiracist became one of the signature texts of the postGeorge Floyd moment. It dominates bestseller lists, diversity training, school curricula are built atop it.

Kendi says this completely explicitly in How to Be an Antiracist. He critiques, quote, the assumption that racist minds must be changed before racist policy.

When we chatted the last time, I remember and I went and revisited the conversation recently. My big question about the book was, is this level of analysis possible? ... All these people picked up the book. And then the book is just a pretty aggressive attack on symbolic forms of antiracism.

You have a great new interview with Heather McGee if people are looking for a place to jump in there.

There's another book that's set in Boston, which is around the same time called Nazis in Copley Square by a Jesuit priest named Charles Gallagher.

He is also the author of The Righteous Mind, which I think is one of the best books on political psychology, as well as a bunch of other books.

The Bhagavad Gita which is obviously a religious text but has great import.

Certainly, the Nicomachean Ethics, which I taught many, many times. 20 weeks, four hours a week, we barely finished.

I think one of the best books on political leadership and understanding how to foster public opinion change is Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It's one of my favorite books.

The Splendid and the Vile by Eric Larson, which is about Churchill during the Blitz. It also has a lot of parallels to our fight against coronavirus and how Churchill did. And it's a total page turner.

It's a total page turner. It's quite a remarkable book because even with the Blitz, people were falling in love, they were falling out of love, they were becoming alcoholics, they were having interesting people over for dinner and conversations. And it's almost a daybyday diary of Churchill's life during this time.

so he begins asking them, and the result is his new book, The Work of Art, How Something Comes from Nothing, which tracks alongside 43 artists some great piece they did, be it a visual art, a piece of music, a piece of journalism from where it began, and he gets them to turn over their drafts, their sketches, their notes, and tracks where it ultimately goes and how they get it to there.

One thing I enjoyed about the book is the age range of the artists profiled.

Extremely Hardcore by Zoe Schiffer

And another book would be Walter Isaacson's Ben Franklin. I just hadn't known everything about him. And he was the best chess player in the colonies, by the way, which, you know, I was a professional chess player. And he printed money. He was very technical. He figured it out. But, you know, what an amazing person. And I think an amazing book.

William Dalrymple, The Anarchy, which is about the East India Company takeover of India.

Anything by Dalrymple, I'd recommend.

Smart Money that documents all the ways in which China in particular is trying to own that new payment stack.

Trust by Hernan Diaz which is a fabulous book the structure of which is just gorgeous and tells an awful lot about what I'd like to think of as non-fiction entertainment by way of a novel gorgeous books.

Linda Flanagan has a book called Taking Back the Game, which is about sort of like high pressure youth sports, which as the parent of a nineyearold boy I've become very cognizant of. It's a weirdly problematic social crisis for America that I think people should care more about.

I think he's a really important person talking about where tyranny goes and stuff like that. I read a lot more nonfiction. I should read more fiction. And I'm sorry, I'm going to give one more.