Holiday Reading: Selected Books for 2020
The Great Influenza by John M. Barry
One of the heros of the 1918 Pandemic was Dr. Oswald Avery Jr. who was a Canadian-American physician and medical researcher. He dedicated his life on understanding what caused the pandemic and isolated DNA. His ground-breaking work resonates today as the world develop a vaccine for Covid-19.
In 1944 with his co-workers isolated DNA as the material of which genes and chromosomes are made. In 1953, building upon Dr. Oswald Avery Jr work Cambridge University scientists James D. Watson and Francis H.C. Crick announce that they have determined the double-helix structure of DNA, the molecule containing human genes.
Long Walk To Freedom by Nelson Mandela
Mandela provides valuable leadership insights, “I have walked that long road to freedom. I have tried not to falter; I have made missteps along the way. But I have discovered the secret that after climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb. I have taken a moment here to rest, to steal a view of the glorious vista that surrounds me, to look back on the distance I have come. But I can only rest for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not ended.”
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”
Grant by Ron Chernow
Frederick Douglass, the famous American thinker said of Grant, “I see in him the vigilant, firm, impartial, and wise protector of my race from all the malign, reactionary, social, and political elements that would whelm them in destruction.” In 1885, President Ulysses S Grant died a hero. Revered in the north for his victories against the Confederacy in the American civil war, he was respected in the south for his generosity towards disbanded rebels, whom he permitted to return home in peace after their commanders’ surrender.
Range by David Epstein
David Epstein examined the world’s most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields — especially those that are complex and unpredictable — generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They’re also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can’t see. It is never too late to have a breakthrough success.
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom — David Blight
As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery.
Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, using his own story to condemn slavery. By the Civil War, Douglass had become the most famed and widely travelled orator in the nation. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the United States as well as a radical patriot. After the war he sometimes argued politically with younger African Americans, but he never forsook either the Republican party or the cause of black civil and political rights.
In this “cinematic and deeply engaging” (The New York Times Book Review) biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. “Absorbing and even moving…a brilliant book that speaks to our own time as well as Douglass’s” (The Wall Street Journal), Blight’s biography tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. “David Blight has written the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass…a powerful portrait of one of the most important American voices of the nineteenth century” (The Boston Globe).
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Frederick Douglass won the Bancroft, Parkman, Los Angeles Times (biography), Lincoln, Plutarch, and Christopher awards and was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Time.
Deaths of Despair and The Future of Capitalism by Anne Case & Angus Deaton
In 2015, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton garnered a lot of media coverage for an academic paper documenting a rise in “deaths of despair” — from alcohol, suicide, and drugs — among American whites, especially middle-aged whites without a college degree. Now they have fleshed out their thoughts on the issue in a book. Their argument is that in order to combat this plague, the U.S. needs to boost wages, bring back unions, fight crony capitalism, and deeply reform the health-care system.
If that strikes you as a preexisting wish list that’s been tacked on to a problem that happened to present itself but is only tangentially related, you’re not alone. Case and Deaton’s arguments linking deaths of despair to their proposed remedies are far from airtight, and as a result the book is underwhelming.
Let’s start by taking a look at the scope of the problem. In their definition, “deaths of despair” comprise three different categories. Drug deaths are overdoses that, according to the medical examiners and coroners who fill out death certificates, were either accidental in nature or of an “undetermined” intent. Alcohol deaths have several causes, including cirrhosis and other liver diseases. And suicides consist of all intentionally self-inflicted deaths, including intentional drug overdoses.
Case and Deaton note that drug overdoses make up by far the biggest share of deaths of despair, but, bizarrely, they don’t provide a clear breakdown of how all three categories have changed over time. Fortunately, Senator Mike Lee’s Social Capital Project released a report late last year with the relevant data, most pertinently this chart tracking deaths of despair among Case and Deaton’s main demographic focus, middle-aged whites:
Here we see some very important things. First of all, while all three causes of death have been rising since the turn of the century, two of them, suicide and alcohol, are not too far above the levels they hit as recently as the 1970s, while the third — drugs — is continuing a very long-running and long-accelerating increase. Even when we limit our focus to the current century, maybe two-thirds of the death increase is from overdoses. The story here is overwhelmingly about drugs, and this would be even more the case if we counted addiction-related suicides as drug deaths rather than as generic suicides.
In a sense, then, Case and Deaton haven’t really discovered much that’s new. They’ve mainly drawn more attention to the already well-documented opioid epidemic, and in the process pointed out that suicide and alcohol deaths are trending upward too, which is undeniably an important problem but plays only a supporting role in the spectacular explosion of deaths of despair.
The book-length treatment of this observation could be saved, of course, by a compelling argument about what to do about it, rooted in an accurate diagnosis of why these deaths are rising. But the arguments here are mostly lacking.
