Our Book of 2019 - The Economist

评语：In a brief but thought-provoking book, the scientist who developed the “Gaia Theory” about the Earth’s life and climate—and who this year turned 100—predicts that cyborgs may eventually evolve to supplant carbon-based humankind. But don’t despair: the robots, he suggests, might decide to keep people around as pets.

评语：A fascinating study of the evolutionary roots of mental illness. The author, a professor of psychiatry, argues that, in the right proportion, negative emotions may be useful for survival in a similar way to physical pain. Humans, he says, may have “minds like the legs of racehorses, fast but vulnerable to catastrophic failures”.

评语：A former paratrooper and mercenary makes the case that the American armed forces are ill-equipped for the conflicts of the 21st century. To keep the country safe, he contends, the top brass need to modernise their thinking, and respond to the information warfare that is now waged by their adversaries.

评语：One of the most persuasive of the many books that spell out the consequences of climate change—and one of the most terrifying. As Earth moves beyond the conditions that allowed people to evolve, the author warns, “the end of normal” has arrived. Yet amid the rising seas, floods, fires, droughts and hurricanes, both current and impending, he remains optimistic about humanity’s ability to deal with the havoc it has caused.

评语：The title of this tricksy, beguiling novel, winner of a National Book Award, refers to the relationship between writer and reader, as well as to the bonding exercises undertaken by the theatre students in the story—and to the trust between teenage girls and predatory men. A tale of missed connections and manipulation, and of willing surrender to the lure and peril of the unknown.

评语：A courageous, insightful and affecting debut novel—and the winner of the prestigious jcb prize for Indian literature—which places a naive upper-class woman from southern India in the midst of far messier realities in Kashmir. Along the way, the story challenges Indian taboos ranging from sex to politics.

评语：A monumental novel—and a bestseller in Spanish—which explores how eta’s terrorism divided families and lifelong friends in a claustrophobic Basque town. Empathetic but morally acute, this may be the definitive fictional account of the Basque troubles; it suggests that redemption is hard but not impossible.

评语：The protagonist of this story is dead when it begins. The body of “Tequila Leila” has been dumped in a wheelie bin on the outskirts of Istanbul; yet, somehow, her mind remains active. While it does, she scrolls back through her life—a pained childhood, stalwart friends in adulthood—in a powerful, unflinching novel that, like all of the Turkish author’s work, is political and lyrical at once.

评语：The year’s unlikeliest literary triumph: a 1,000-page fictional monologue delivered by a worried Ohio housewife and baker, much of which is made up of a single sentence. A prize-garlanded novel that is funny, angry, erudite, profound—and full of great cake recipes.

评语：At last, the Russian novelist-journalist’s mighty prequel to “Life and Fate”, his epic of the battle of Stalingrad and its aftermath, has received a definitive—and hugely powerful—English translation. A seething fresco of combat, domestic routine under siege and intellectual debate, it confirms that Grossman was the supreme bard of the second world war.

评语：A brilliant and accessible tour of Shakespeare’s plays that is also a radical manifesto for how to read and watch his work. Witty, irreverent and searching, this book, by a professor at Oxford University, shines dazzling new light on the oeuvre of the world’s greatest literary genius.

评语：The author’s life and writing have been shaped by his Libyan father’s kidnapping in 1990 by the regime of Muammar Qaddafi. In previous work he tried to uncover what happened; in this slim, bewitching book he finds answers, of a sort, by travelling to Siena. Meditating on art, history and the relationship between them, this is both a portrait of a city and an affirmation of life’s quiet dignities in the face of loss.

评语：Eight years of reporting went into this portrait of American sexuality from a female perspective. The author’s three subjects “stand for the whole of what longing in America looks like”; she spent time in their home towns to study their daily routines, jobs and, above all, their desires. With a novelist’s eye for detail, she captures the pain and powerlessness of sex, as well as its heady joys.

评语：A haunting examination of the world below the surface—a place that has always been envisioned as a zone of treasure and of dread. From the Paris catacombs to the soil of Epping Forest to caverns in remotest Norway, the author, a celebrated nature-writer, re-envisions the planet from the ground down.

评语：An account of the struggle over Kafka’s papers between competing archives in Israel and Germany—plus a woman who inherited them from a friend of his editor, Max Brod—which played out after most of the writer’s family had died in the Holocaust. A book about the provenance of art, and how much, in the end, it matters.

评语：An ingeniously structured, beautifully written double mystery—one concerning the Reverend Willie Maxwell, who was accused of murdering five relatives for the insurance money in Alabama in the 1970s (before being fatally shot himself); the other, Harper Lee’s abortive efforts to write a book about the case. Tom Radney, a lawyer who is the story’s third main character, defended Maxwell—and his killer.

评语：The real meaning of this book by a Nobel-prizewinning duo of economists lies in its method—a patient attempt to take on tough problems through empirical evidence. Known for pioneering the use of randomised controlled trials, the pair offer insights into thorny global issues ranging from inequality to corruption, all with refreshing humility.

评语：True-crime writers in America face a high bar, set by illustrious predecessors such as Truman Capote. The author of “Black Hawk Down” rises to the challenge in this reconstruction of how a horrific crime—the disappearance of two sisters from a mall in Maryland in 1975—was partially solved 40 years later. Dogged and ingenious interrogation of a mendacious suspect finally gets at the truth.

评语：An engaging insider’s account of foreign-policymaking in what now seems like a different era of diplomacy. It describes the efforts of its author—Barack Obama’s Irish-born ambassador to the United Nations—to juggle idealism with the realities of governing, while also juggling motherhood with the demands of representing America on the world stage.

评语：Richard Sorge’s bravery and recklessness in the Soviet cause in Tokyo—where boozing and seduction were among his main espionage techniques—were matched by the venality and cowardice of his masters in Moscow. Despite their brutal incompetence, his intelligence helped turn the course of the second world war. A tragic, heroic story, magnificently told with an understated rage.

评语：“I awoke one morning and found myself famous,” Lord Byron, a Regency poet, once said. The period itself has suffered from the opposite problem—eclipsed by the more solemn and substantial Georgian and Victorian ones that preceded and followed it. Arguing that Britain truly started to become modern in the Regency era, this delightful book explains why it deserves to be better known.

评语：At least 379 people were killed by British soldiers in the Amritsar massacre on April 13th 1919, making that one of the darkest days in the history of the empire. On the event’s centenary, this book persuasively argues that it was less of an aberration than apologists for empire, including Winston Churchill, have chosen to believe.