The Ezra Klein Show

The first one I want to recommend is Herman Pontzer's book, Burn. It's a really great book on several levels. First of all, it's really wellwritten, really entertaining. And second of all, as opposed to a lot of nutrition books ... this book actually does have an incredible discovery about the human body. And it relates to the relationship between our energy expenditure and our physical activity level.

The MANIAC, which is a sort of fictionalist biography of John von Neumann, but also a very imaginative and powerful exploration of the origins of the AI revolution and of the potential consequences of it.

She's the author of the parenting book, No Bad Kids.

Third, Hugo Mercier. It's Not Born Yesterday. And it's about what we talk about right now is, can somebody like Donald Trump talk to you, a fairly liberal human being, and through the magic of his disinformation, suddenly you walk away thinking, I will vote for that man? It shows people tend not to be persuaded by oratory rhetoric and tend to believe what they believe.

He's the author of Believe, Why Everyone Should Be Religious, a book I enjoyed very much, even though quite a bit of it I had some questions about.

a book by a spiritual teacher called Joan Tollefson which has the remarkable title Death the end of self-improvement

what I really appreciated about this book was how unlike a lot of books in this space which claim to be about showing up for the present moment but then when you look at the present moments in question they all seem to be looking at the beauty of nature or appreciating the beautiful taste of a glass of water or whatever it might be she's really applying this idea to some grueling experiences

I also wanted to recommend a book called The End Doesn't Happen All at Once by Ki Rainer, Born Free, and Raghuny Thor Srinivasan, which is an epistolary account of the first couple of years of the pandemic. Very moving, very personal, two friends writing back and forth through the experience.

Calling the Shots, which is a book by the sociologist Jennifer Reich that was published in 2016. And it's an ethnography and a history of the antivax movement that I found incredibly useful and illuminating and helping me think about this.

And then a book called Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala, who is an economist. It's a memoir that she wrote. She lost her entire family in the 2004 Sri Lankan tsunami. Her husband, her two children, and her parents all at once. It is an unbelievably beautiful book, and it is the best thing I've ever read about grief and resilience and optimism after hard things have happened.

I'm a big fan of this book by a writer named Charles Mann. And the book is called Wizards and Prophets. Great book. The book is tracking this divide in ways we think about environmentalism and solving environmental problems. Wizards want to sell them technologically, prophets argue mankind has grown beyond its wisdom.

One way I hope we don't repolarize is part of the Abundance book out of Derek Thompson. I mean, we have two chapters in that book. It's fundamentally about the bureaucratization of science.

Showdown at Gucci Gulch is one of my, like, all-time favorites and a great read, and will leave you hopeful for the possibility of this type of reform effort.

I'm publishing shortly called 38 Londres Street which is a sequel to East West Street and examines the relationship between Augusto Pinochet and a Nazi who became the manager of a king crab cannery in Punta Arenas in Chile.

Janet Flanner's World, uncollected writings 1932 to 1975, Janet Flanner was the New Yorker correspondent in Europe and she wrote extraordinary letters from Europe including on Nuremberg and they are so pertinent for what we've been talking about today.

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett is a wonderful book that draws the connections between the personal and the broader political in a way that really resonated with me.

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolao is a fictionalized account of tales that are central to a book I'm publishing shortly called 38 Londres Street.

The second book is Edward Said's The Question of Palestine. That was actually published like in, I think, late 70s before Hamas was founded. And it's a good glimpse into the Palestinian thought when it comes to Palestine and Zionism from the perspective of Palestinians.

The second book I thought to recommend is Bridge Colby's Strategy of Denial. It answers the key question the media keep asking, is Trump an isolationist or an interventionist or a liberal internationalist? When you open this book, you find something very different from the media narrative.

Beth Macy among them with her fantastic book, Dope Sick.

My favorite book, one of the most influential books interesting in my life is called Built to Last. It's about the tyranny of war versus the genius of and. It changed my mindset and my outlook, political terms, not just in business terms.

I wasn't joking about Built to Last. It's so interesting to have a book that shaped me early on. I was aspiring to be a small business person and read the book Built to Last. It was about a Stanford academic that was studying what works, what makes companies endure.