The Ezra Klein Show

I got a huge 800-page history of the modern American environmental movement by the American historian Douglas Brinkley called Silent Spring Revolution.

One of the books I wanted to mention was Kevin Rudd's book called The Avoidable War, The Dangers of a Catastrophic Conflict Between the U.S. and Xi Jinping's China.

It is just a very deep and realistic portrayal of the relationship and of the impulses of the leaders and the systems there, and an assessment about how this relationship could become one of conflict.

It's a book he wrote with Robinson, this is Acemoglu and Robinson, called The Narrow Corridor and it's about the fragility of democracy and finding that sweet spot between Leviathan, the excessively authoritarian state and anarchy on the other and that's organized freedom and I think it's an absolutely brilliant discussion of that.

The second book he co-authored is the most recent with Simon Johnson, is called Power and Progress and it focuses on something absolutely fundamental which is can we shape technology to our own ends. I'm more skeptical than they are but it's unbelievably important that we manage to find a way of controlling the technology that we are generating, the energy technology which we failed to do and now the computing technology that we are employing so that we are the masters of our technological development not the slaves.

I mean, there's a new interesting book by Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein, who are both great health economists, called We've Got You Covered, Rebooting American Health Care.

SIMON HUGHES Yeah, that episode is a favorite of mine. And The Prisoner of the Squid, her book is also incredible on that subject.

Landings, a Crooked Creek Farm Year... It's a graphic memoir... I love this book.

It's called Pod by Lelene Paul... It's set entirely in the ocean. It's not science fiction. It's realistic.

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

the idea that comes from this book, Homelessness Is a Housing Problem, which is the musical chairs analogy

So there was a Michael Schoenberger book called San Francisco, which in many ways was not only but heavily a critique of housing first policies

he has a new book out, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, which follows up his short story collection Uncommon Type, both of which are a real delight.

So the new book is called The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece and it is about a movie called the the masterpiece question Nightshade, the Lath of Firefall and that movie is built on a comic.

the first book is called The Ends of the World by peter brannan it's a book that's a history of mass extinctions the earth's five mass extinctions and actually why he doesn't think we're currently in a mass extinction ... it is also an amazing book for understanding the centrality of carbon to earth's geological history

the second book might be a little outdated now but it's called Climate Shock by bernard wagner and marty weitzman it's about the economics of climate change ... wagner's way of thinking about climate change is a little different ... it focuses on risk and that climate change is specifically bad because we don't know how bad it will be

I would probably recommend the John Richardson Picasso, but it's four volumes. So let's leave that aside.

Let's do the Jackie Wulschlager, a Chagall biography. It's my favorite biography in the arts. ... And Chagall is from Vitebsk, and that happens to be the city where my father's side of the family is from.

I won't do Eric Schwartzel's Red Carpet, which is one of my favorites because I've done that on someone else's podcast.

So I'll do Scott Rosell, Invisible China. I think that's the China book that your listeners would learn the most from of all the China books because it's just so unexpected and it's so data rich, Invisible China.

Pekka Himalayan's Indigenous Continent. I won't do that here because I did that on a previous podcast.

So I'll go for David Bernstein, Classified, which is the untold story of racial classification in America, which is also full of incredible surprises and is right on point for where we are in the culture today.