Where do ideas come from? If Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels is anything to go by, the answer is groups of degenerates who spend most of their time carousing, gossiping, dreaming up poetry and making eyes at each other’s lovers. Strictly speaking, this is a history book—about the German romantics, including Schiller and Schelling, who congregated in Jena in the late 18th century. But it also charts one of the biggest shifts in world thinking: away from higher powers and towards the self.
Though its subject is different, Skye Cleary’s How to Be You: Simone de Beauvoir and the Art of Authentic Living is also a mix of history, art, philosophy—and even self-help. The life and thinking of de Beauvoir are both explained and applied to modern questions about marriage, parenting, race and more. This process never seems forced: de Beauvoir—and Cleary—have much to teach us.
There has been a spate of books that cover more recent history but, like Wulf’s and Cleary’s, are actually trading in ideas. Foremost among them is Helen Thompson’s Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century, which recasts some of the geopolitical events of the past century—especially the jockeying for fossil fuels—and shows how they contributed to, or perhaps caused, many of today’s crises.
Gary Gerstle’s The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order does a similar job differently—and with a bit more writerly pizzazz—tracking 20th-century capitalism from its foundations, through its free-market heyday and on to today’s populist counterpunches.
Sarah Churchwell’s The Wrath to Come looks back—specifically, at Margaret Mitchell’s absurdly popular, pro-Confederate 1936 novel, Gone with the Wind, and its 1939 film adaptation—in order to look forward. The “conflict between freedom and power, democracy and fascism, is at the heart of the plot of America,” Churchwell warns.
As for how those conflicts might resolve themselves, Barbara F Walter’s How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them is one of the year’s most persuasively pessimistic books. It’s based on years of research into how civil wars have begun around the world, and it places the US in the “danger zone”. Another book, Abolition. Feminism. Now., by a quartet of authors including the civil rights activist Angela Davis, deals with several of America’s current pathologies, especially its inhumane prison system.
Dismantling Global White Privilege—by Chandran Nair, whose thinktank tracks the movement in global power away from the west—is a reminder that the US doesn’t have a monopoly on white privilege (nor its more dangerous bedfellow, white supremacy). Due in part to the legacies of empire, the field is still tilted against the Asian and African continents and their people, in everything from finance to fashion.
The celebrity status of William MacAskill, the philosopher-king of the “effective altruism” movement—he’s been praised by Elon Musk, among others—should not detract from the incisiveness and, sometimes, originality of his work. His What We Owe the Future is constructed around a powerfully simple notion: that we should do more to prioritise the wellbeing of future generations. From there it spins off into the further reaches of thinking about climate, artificial intelligence and nuclear winter.
The future, too, is the subject of David Chalmers’s Reality Plus. Rather than scoffing at Mark Zuckerberg’s metaversal adventures, Chalmers gives due consideration to what the rise of virtual worlds could mean for the real one—and whether, after a certain point, they’ll even be distinguishable. For more of a tech horror story, read Adrian Hon’s You’ve Been Played, subtitled: “How corporations, governments and schools use games to control us all.”
Or perhaps you’d prefer to avoid the Matrix? In An Immense World, Ed Yong, a Pulitzer winner for his reporting on the pandemic, investigates the wondrous ways animals engage with what’s around them—and what it might all mean for us humans.
Read more
Books of the Year 2022: Lives
Books of the Year 2022: Politics & Reportage
Books of the Year 2022: History
