The Ezra Klein Show

And on the topic of constitutional amendments, I'm reading a galley of Jill Lepore, the brilliant Harvard historian, her new book, We the People, which is about constitutional amendment, which if we think that the lack of anticipation of party in the Constitution is one real design flaw.

My first pick is Sarah Wynne Williams book Careless People and it's a great example of the Streisand effect that when a company tries to suppress something it brings it interest.

It's about his new book, Lions and Scavengers. And talking to him about it surprised me. You learn things talking to people that you don't expect. So I've left this conversation as it was. It's about his book about the political moment before Kirk's murder.

The third book, there's a new book by Josh Hammer, called Israel and Civilization. It's a really beautifully done, thorough, wellassembled explanation of what he thinks Jews should be doing as part of the polity here in the United States.

The last book is a book called Condemnation of Blackness by Khalil Gibran Muhammad. It shows how the stereotype of blacks as criminals has driven policy for decades.

I became obsessed with this quote over the past year from Bernard Crick. It's in this book called In Defense of Politics.

And he says that politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people, not objects for our philanthropy or tasks for our redemption.

This is what public spaces are for. This is what libraries are for, right? Palaces for the People, Eric Kleinenberg's beautiful book about how libraries serve as this, you know, really important social third space.

I know her beautiful book, The Other Significant Others. One of the things I loved about that book was she went back in lots of different societies.

So I was going to say The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. But I will take the opportunity to actually talk about The Politics of Ritual by Molly Farneth. It is a book that came out a few years ago and she from, I think, Princeton University Press. And she looks at, we think about ritual as a way to basically keep solidifying older values.

And then I would recommend Boy Mom by Ruth Whitman. Boy Mom, the book is called Boy Mom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity.

And I would have a chaser of the book, Talk to Your Boys, which recently came out. It's by Christopher Pepper and Joanna Schrader. It's by Christopher Pepper, 16 Conversations to Help Teens and Tweens to Grow into Confident and Caring Young Men.

But reading his new novel, Vigil, which is about an oil tycoon on his deathbed being visited by angels and people from his past trying to get him to reassess his own life, I began to realize that Saunders is more interested in something else now. Not kindness, but the question of judgment.

Thank you, Lord. Thank you for making me who I was, and not some little squirming, powerless nincompoop. Thank you for making me unique, one of a kind, incomparable, victorious.

And in it, there's a very fundamental tension between the side of Saunders that does not want to judge. It wants to explain who we are in terms of the conditions we came from, which is a stance of very deep compassion. And the side of him that thinks judgment is necessary, that sin needs to be recognized, and that you cannot have truth if you are not willing to open up to ideas of fundamental wrongdoing.

He says, Thank you, Lord. Thank you for making me who I was, and not some little squirming, powerless nincompoop. Thank you for making me unique, one of a kind, incomparable, victorious. Tell me about that prayer.

This is a book about sin and judgment. It's about free will and whether or not we have it.

Well, there's one, I'm sure you read this, but I Will Bear Witness by Victor Klemper. It's an book. somebody described it as the first book that shows the Holocaust in color, as opposed to black and white.

So reading that now, it's kind of amazing how relatively slowly it's happening. And then every so often, something seeps in.

And then the third one would be maybe more of an antidote. It's a beautiful book called The Place of Tides by James Rebanks, nonfiction. And he goes to an island, I think it's off Iceland, and he lives with this woman who is, her job is to collect Eiderdown.

One of the books I had in mind while I was writing this was Death of Ivan Illich by Tolstoy. And in that book, it's a much more modest sinner. And his sin is just that he lived his life by the credo that, I just want to do what everybody else is doing.

Salvation in that moment is aligning yourself with what is actually true. The truth is you lived your life in the wrong way.

And Theda Skocpol, as you know, did a wonderful book. She found that the core concerns of the Tea Party were not what the Republican Party used to be about. Which is economics and balancing budgets and cutting deficits. It was cultural issues.

So I've been reading Sam Tannenhaus' great biography of William F. Buckley. And he makes a point that among Buckley's very... People.

And the one book that I have loved and have gone back to over and over is a book by Walter Lipman called A Preface to Morals. It was written in the 1920s during the Jazz Age. And he first identifies, not first, but he identifies very powerfully this problem of modern societies that you lose faith in religion and tradition and community and certainty and you don't replace it with anything and it leaves you with a hollowness inside.

The person who wrote about it most intelligently is the great Harvard scholar Daniel Bell who wrote a book called The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society. And he identified presciently that the future was going to belong to people who had knowledge and that knowledge was going to become the most important determinant of whether or not you were elite or not.

And the final one is, you know, again, back to this question of how do you recreate this life in a modern time? What do you do to bring back old values? There's a wonderful book called The Lost City by Alan Ehrenhalt, a journalist who went back to Chicago wondering why the Chicago of his youth seemed so community oriented and what did they do that was lost?