The Ezra Klein Show

All this was in my head as I started reading Melanie Challenger's book How To Be Animal, a new history of what it means to be human.

You write, we are animals as we embrace and as our bloodied newborns slide from the bodies of women but not when we make vows. We are animals as we bite into the flesh of our meal but not in the workplace.

She is also the author of On Extinction, How We Became Estranged from Nature.

I've been reading Lighthead by Terence Hayes and his poems kind of spin together high art and formal technical innovation but I think what I really get from them is this kind of political punch that kicks in and it takes the wind out of me.

The second book which is foundational for me is Racial Conflict and Economic Development by Arthur Lewis. Anybody trying to understand the intersections of politics, economics, and identity group stratification or racial disparity, I highly recommend that you read that book.

You wrote a book on this that came out in 2010 called UFOs, Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record.

Another book I'd recommend is called The UFO Evidence, a 30year report by Richard H. Hall, published in 2001.

And a third one is a more recent book called American Cosmic by Deanna Pasulka, who's a professor of religion at the University of North Carolina.

I'm reading Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This, which is a fantastic little weird book about the Internet.

My colleague Carlos Lozada ... wrote a book about other political books, it's called What Were We Thinking, in which he read the torrent of Trumpera political books and tried to understand the metanarrative that emerged out of them.

The first one I want to recommend is the memoirs by Ulysses Grant. It covers his time at West Point, fighting in the MexicanAmerican war, in the Civil War. It ends before he gets to the presidency. He wrote it in the last months of his life. He needed the money. And that's a big reason that he wrote this book. It is a lengthy book, a remarkable book. It is funny. It is incisive.

The next book I want to recommend is called An Hour Before Daylight. And it's one of several memoirs that Jimmy Carter wrote. This is about growing up on his father's farm in Georgia in the Depression. And it is a surprisingly beautifully written book. It was a Pulitzer finalist for a biography in the early 2000s.

The last book is a book of letters. It's called All the Best by George Bush. And it is a massive book. It's about 700 or more pages. Bush got a lot of criticism for not being particularly articulate, for not capturing the quote unquote vision thing. But you really see who he is through his correspondence across the decades.

So I took a trip to Santa Cruz recently, and I was wandering through my favorite bookstore, bookshop Santa Cruz, and I ran across this book by Kristen Godsey called Everyday Utopia, What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life.

So I want to begin with the point you make early in the book where you write, quote, today's future positive writers critique our economies while largely seeming to ignore that anything might be amiss in our private lives.

Diamantis and Kotler have this book called Abundance.

Jenny O'Dell's recent book about Saving Time and the way that we have come to think of time as this fundamentally sort of fungible asset that we allocate in order to achieve certain goals.

The third book is Gender and the Politics of History by Joan Wallach Scott, who as a grad student many years ago kind of broke my brain and really gave me this sort of language of trying to understand patriarchy and trying to challenge patriarchy through a certain way of thinking about history.

Now Palka has written this book, Recoding America, and I want to say it clearly, this is one of the best policy books I've read.

Jen Palka, your book is called Recoding America. I really, really recommend it strongly to people.

The next one is Radical Help by Hilary Cottom, who is a Brit looking at the social safety net, the workforce training system, the healthcare system. She takes that concept I have in the book of user needs over government needs and just pushes them so much further in a way that is really inspiring.

And I just think she moves the Overton window about what it would mean to truly meet user needs in government funded systems. I hope everybody who works in social services and healthcare would read it.

A book called Wealth and Power by Orville Schell and John Delury, both great China scholars, both great China watchers. And it's really the story of China from 1850 to the present.

And for India, there's a wonderful short book called The Idea of India by Sunil Khilnani, a young academic, ... it just gives you a feeling for what it felt like to be this newly decolonized country.