The Ezra Klein Show

Eric Klein's book, 1177, The Year Civilization Collapsed, has been recommended to me by so many people over the years. I finally read it. It's fantastic. This is about things that happened thousands of years ago, but it's really interesting.

I've read John Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie. Oh I love that book. That's a great book and there's a scene that I remember in reading that I'm going to say ...

Tom Wolfe ... The Bonfire of the Vanities

So a couple years back, you wrote this book, Under Pressure, and I want to read a quote from it. You write, A recent report from the American Psychological Association found that adolescents can no longer be characterized as an exuberant time of life full of carefree experimentation, except for during the summer months. Today's teens now, for the first time, feel more stressed than their parents do.

Lisa DeMoore is a clinical psychologist. She's the author of The Emotional Lives of Teenagers and the book Under Pressure.

There's a section in the book where Lenny is reading from The Unbearable Lightness of Being to Eunice.

Chris Clark's The Sleepwalkers, How Europe Went to War in 1914, is a wonderful history book about the origins of the First World War.

Clark shows the perspectives of all the main actors and how nobody wanted a war, yet step by small step we ended up there, making it a valuable comparison for thinking about escalation risks.

there was that famous book from the 70s called Future Shock that sold like millions of copies and popularized the phrase information overload

The first one is Pirate Enlightenment by the late David Graeber. The subtitle is The Real Libertalia. It's about this interesting confederated pirate federation, kind of decentralized government theoretically in Madagascar.

My brilliant colleague Ralph Manguel has a book coming out in late July called Criminal Injustice, what the push for decarceration and depolicing gets wrong and who it hurts most.

In addition to being just a superb writer and thinker and scholar, Ralph is someone who I think writes with great compassion and moral urgency.

One is a book called And the Band Played on by Randy Schultz, which is I think the definitive authoritative history of the public health debacle that fueled the HIV AIDS crisis.

And I'd recommend another book, David Graeber's Debt the First 5,000 Years, which looks at what you do with Debt systems from a very long term perspective, and makes a point about the fact that Debt is always about power.

Another one is Deb Blum's Poison Squad. And this is like an excellent look through a biography of one of the former chemists at the USDA who did research that helped lead to the establishment of the FDA and a lot of the food regulations and other types of consumer protection laws that we have.

Elizabeth McCray's fantastic work, Mothers of Massive Resistance, documents how important teaching history has been as a battleground for white supremacy.

the book that I have just started, and it's a long slog, so I'm not so far through it, is Steve Kotkin's first in his series on Stalin. ... it's remarkable. I love reading that book because it's one where I feel like I can hear the author almost like narrating.

Roxanne Gay is a contributing opinion writer and the author of multiple books, including Hunger and Bad Feminist.

Roxanne Gay is a contributing opinion writer and the author of multiple books, including Hunger and Bad Feminist.

I recommend David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. It's basically optimism at a cosmic level, and it's full of the realization that there are always problems, and there are solutions.

Mick Mulvaney, Trump's third chief of staff, he recommended aides read the book, A First-Rate Madness, uncovering the links between leadership and mental illness.

The second one that I'll mention is a book by Susan Burton called Becoming Ms. Burton. She was incarcerated many times and later built a network of homes for women.

But the second was Dr. Dispenza's series. His books are amazing. Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, You Are the Placebo.