The Ezra Klein Show

Then for the third book, I really think everyone should read my book, The Socialist Manifesto.

I picked up his 2007 book, Positively American. And this is a weird book.

It was not as boring as I thought, by the way. He wrote it right after leading the Democratic senatorial campaign committee in 2006, which is the year Democrats took back the Senate.

And then his book on World WarII is amazing, too. It's called THE GOOD WAR and is worth checking out.

And I'm just finishing up a book by Heather Cox Richardson called Wounded Knee, and it's about Sioux and other tribes in the Dakotas.

Cowen wrote what is arguably his most influential book, The Great Stagnation, arguing that we were living through a multidecade slowdown in the pace of technological change.

Tell me the thesis of your 2011 book, The Great Stagnation. The Great Stagnation argued that the rate of productivity growth in the United States had declined since 1973.

What I said in 2011 in the book, The Great Stagnation, I still think is broadly correct that the turning point really was the internet.

There's this line from the book The Way to Love by the Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello. Great, great book, by the way.

Second book I want to recommend is Halfway Home by Ruben Miller. It's an incredible book about the ways in which after people have allegedly returned home from being incarcerated that the shadow of incarceration relegates them to a completely different class status.

The second book I recommend is The Knowledge by Dartnell, which is an interesting survivalguidestyle book about how to rebuild industrial civilization from the ground up if it were to collapse, and it reveals how complex and interrelated our modern society is.

She's the author of the book Aspiration

Sussman's new book is called Work, A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots.

James Suzman, your book is Work a deep history from the stone age to the age of robots, I enjoyed it tremendously and recommended very much even as I betrayed almost every message in it while Working on this to create the podcast.

And then End Times by Peter Turchin, which does fall a little bit on the why nations fail, but kind of gives a sense of why we are in this moment itself and what explains the Trump era based on essentially how people probably have felt stuck for a long time.

There's a good book by, I think, Max Chafkin was the journalist, or Chafkin, I don't know how you say his last name, about Peter Thiel called The Contrarian, which is convincing that Thiel is actually quite conservative, more than libertarian and probably quite religious.

Another book that I just love, and people have seen the series but haven't read the book, is The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis. It is one of the most perfect books ever written. Kind of asks the question, would if Bobby Fischer, maybe the greatest chess player of all time, was a woman? How would it have played out? And the Netflix series was just majestical.

And then two classic books, Tim Wu's Master Switch, my former White House colleague, Master Switch, The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.

The first book that I would pick is Golden Gates by Conor Dougherty, which is a really great look at the housing crisis in California.

You wrote a piece about the book American Dirt. It's a book that came out in 2020 by a white woman. And it's about a Mexican woman and her son who leave for America to escape cartel violence. ... When you look at a book like American Dirt, it's a bad book. There were things about the book and about Mexico that were just silly in how bad they were and how inaccurate they were.

Articulated in texts such as Barry Goldwater's conscience of a conservative.

Geraldine Brooks, who is a wonderful writer... She's written a book about the death of her husband that is incredible. It's a beautiful rumination on mortality and history.

A new book called John and Paul, A Love Story by Ian Leslie.

One of my favorite books by far this year was The Loneliness of Sunny and Sonia.

And the opening scene is the grandparents are sitting on this balcony, and they're sort of like worrying in the morning in Al-Habod, like in northern Uthar Pradesh in India in the 90s. And they're worrying about like what the cook will make over lunch. And a phone rings, and it's their granddaughter, Sonia, studying in Vermont, crying.