The Ezra Klein Show

I'd say, look, 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.

And your book with Derek Thompson, Abundance, came out. For folks who haven't read the book, we handily adapted a part of it into audio and video.

I mean, my view is that Abundance is best understood as a fairly left wing project, which is to say that there are certain things that liberals and I think in this case also leftists want government to deliver. Housing and a lot more of it, particularly a lot more affordable housing, clean energy, and capable state capacity, the ability to build things like public infrastructure, high speed rail, roads, rapidly.

There are certainly places where I would like to break the power of corporations, break the power of billionaires, tax them more, regulate them more. But then also, if we're going to decarbonize the economy and build all this clean energy infrastructure, corporations are going to do a lot of it.

My favorite book growing up, and which I still have a lot of love for and keep in my house, was Anne McCaffrey's The Dragon Riders of Pern trilogy. Maybe that won't surprise people that I was very into a fantasy novel.

The second one is Frontiers of Illusion by Daniel Sarewitz, a brilliant thinker around science and technology policy who does a great job laying out the myths we believe about science and how we need to enhance the relationship of science to social outcomes.

And then the last one is Donald MacKenzie's An Engine, Not a Camera, a brilliant analysis of the role of economic models and finance theory as drivers of markets, especially in the context of climate and environmental policy.

In his book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, Peter Beinart writes, Self-determination means determination of the self, not others. Just as one person cannot invoke their individual right to self-determination to control another person, one group of people cannot invoke their collective right to control another group.

And then finally, I would say Lucy Sante's book Low Life about the history of organized crime and kind of skeezy characters in New York over the centuries is always a good one to visit.

Donald Hall, the poet, Essays After 80.

The essays are incredible about having lived a whole life... It just gives a sense of someone who has a cohesive life and a wonderful voice.

And the third book I would say to recommend is a novel called Kairos, K-A-I-R-O-S, by Jenny Erpenbeck.

And in that book, I quoted the poet Anne Carson, who has a beautiful book called Eros, the Bittersweet.

There's this great essay by Roland Barthes that I always talk about, but it's called The World of Wrestling. And he talks about how they're always in character.

Laura Spinney's book, Proto, How One Ancient Language Went Global, about the rise of the ProtoIndoEuropean language.

If you read Jonathan Cohn's book about The Ten Year War, about Obama's Obamacare, right?

I asked my friend Chris Hayes, an MSNBC anchor and the author of a phenomenal book on attention to politics, The Siren's Call, to join me.

You just wrote a book about political attention.

The second one is an incredible book that is not out yet that I am able to read an advanced reader copy of. It's by Rob Malley and Hussein Agha. It's called Tomorrow's Yesterday.

The last book is a history of the Cultural Revolution called Mao's Last Revolution by Michael Schoenhaus and Roderick McFarquhar. I read--that book's amazing, although, I mean, my God. Sort of suffocating in some ways to be inside that universe.

I have two books on how to do successful Middle East diplomacy. Since that's kind of what we're talking about. Martin Indig's Master of the Game, Henry Kissinger in the Art of Middle East Diplomacy, and Peter Baker in Sudden Glasser's Masterful, The Man Who Ran Washington, The Life and Times of James Baker. Those are two books I would recommend about--there are real lessons there-- about how to do successful diplomacy.

I have two books on how to do successful Middle East diplomacy. Since that's kind of what we're talking about. Martin Indig's Master of the Game, Henry Kissinger in the Art of Middle East Diplomacy, and Peter Baker in Sudden Glasser's Masterful, The Man Who Ran Washington, The Life and Times of James Baker. Those are two books I would recommend about--there are real lessons there-- about how to do successful diplomacy.

I have a third book, one that isn't out yet, that argues that the U.S., including many who worked on this process for a very long time, has gotten it profoundly and utterly wrong when it comes to peacemaking. It's called Tomorrow Is Yesterday, Life, Death, and the Pursuit of Peace in Israel, Palestine by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley.

And then, of course, Mike Wolf's story, All or Nothing, about the last year before the last elections in America about President Trump, which is interesting, very exciting.