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Afraid the end of the world is nigh? Here’s a hopeful message, and it’s brilliant

Review of The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World, by Jeremy Rifkin

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

More than half the children born today in the United States or Europe will live to see the 22^nd Century. In theory.

However, if you’re unreservedly optimistic about the future of today’s young children, chances are you haven’t been paying attention. In the face of global warming, overpopulation, resource limits, and the growing number of species going extinct, it’s difficult to look far ahead without wondering whether the human race can truly meet the existential challenges we face.

Jeremy Rifkin thinks we can. He is both a realist, and, if at least one of his many books can be believed, an optimist. In The Third Industrial Revolution, he lays out a comprehensive platform on which the human race can build a sustainable future. His vision of the future is nothing less than brilliant.

To be sure, Rifkin isn’t predicting that his vision will take hold. He’s hoping it will. The Third Industrial Revolution is, above all, hopeful.

Rifkin’s vision is complex and wide-ranging. Within the 300 pages of The Third Industrial Revolution, he delves into energy, communications, transportation, history, economics, thermodynamics, paleontology, philosophy, psychology, education, and numerous other subjects. It’s a dazzling display of erudition.

The author notes that the Second Industrial Revolution from which we’re now emerging was dominated by the telephone, the automobile, and fossil fuels. That’s hard to dispute. The Third Industrial Revolution is being built on the foundation of the Internet and renewable energy, leading humanity forward into a post-carbon era – and that’s the part that requires the reader to “suspend disbelief,” as the writers of science fiction ask us to do.

In this new era, Rifkin writes, “the conventional, centralized business operations of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions will increasingly be subsumed by the distributed business practices of the Third Industrial Revolution; and the traditional, hierarchical organization of economic and political power will give way to lateral power organized nodally across society.” For example, in place of most large electric generating facilities, every building will generate its own energy. Any surplus will be sold to others through trading networks managed by the successors to today’s electric utilities. Rifkin estimates that the process of building out this Third Industrial Revolution will take 40-50 years, roughly the same amount of time that previous economic upheavals required. This assumes, of course, that global warming and other threatening trends will allow us that much time. Rifkin believes they will, and I’m hoping he’s right.

“As we approach the middle of the century,” he writes, “more and more commerce will be overseen by intelligent technological surrogates, freeing up much of the human race to create social capital in the not-for-profit civil society, making it the dominant sector in the second half of the century.” This assertion derives from an earlier book Rifkin wrote, The End of Work.

It’s easy to dismiss this vision as utopian and unattainable, as all utopian visions are. However, Jeremy Rifkin is no idle dreamer. As he explains at great length in The Third Industrial Revolution, this vision has been bought whole by the European Union, the Utrecht region of the Netherlands, and the cities of Rome and San Antonio, among many others. Rifkin, his staff, and a growing number of highly placed collaborators in both industry and government offices have been at work since the publication of the book in 2011 helping to develop custom-tailored regional plans consistent with this vision. Rifkin’s successful ongoing engagement with the European Union is especially impressive – and, he reminds us, “the European Union, not the United States or China, is the biggest economy in the world.”

European officialdom, specifically including such luminaries as Angela Merkel, are now in the process of shifting their economies to incorporate what the author calls “the five pillars” of the Third Industrial Revolution:

(1)   shifting to renewable energy;

(2)  transforming the building stock of every continent into micro-power plants to collect renewable energies on site;

(3)  deploying hydrogen and other storage technologies in every building and throughout the infrastructure to store intermittent energies;

(4)  using Internet technology to transform the power grid of every continent into an energy-sharing intergrid that acts just like the Internet . . .; and

(5)  transitioning the transport fleet to electric plug-in and fuel cell vehicles that can buy and sell electricity on a smart, continental, interactive power grid.

This economic transformation will bring profound changes to our lives and our surroundings. “Vertical economies of scale became the defining feature of the incipient industrial age and gigantic business operations became the norm . . . The distributed nature of renewable energies necessitates collaborative rather than hierarchical command and control mechanisms.” And all this change is consistent with the new pedagogy beginning to take hold in many schools around the globe, which emphasizes collaboration rather than competition, problem solving rather than rote learning, and what Rifkin calls “biosphere thinking,” which places humanity within the context of the web of life on Earth. (Perhaps you’ve even noticed that people under the age of 18 tend not to think the way we older adults do?)

“If it is difficult to imagine a change of this kind, think of how preposterous it must have been to a feudal lord, his knights in arms, and his indentured serfs to conjure the possibility of free wage earners selling their labor power in national markets, each a sovereign in his own right in the political sphere, all bound together by a set of agreed-upon rights and freedoms and a sense of national loyalty.”

It’s hard to disagree with that!

Operators’ manual for the people of Lake Woebegone and other shy persons

A review of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

If you’re the sort of person who gravitates to the sidelines at parties, shuns speaking opportunities and the spotlight in general, and wonders how gregarious people ever got to be that way, this book was written for you. And, as it turns out, not just for me, too, but also for between one-third and one-half of the American population.

Here’s Susan Cain framing her subject: “Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race. And the single most important aspect of personality — the ‘north and south of temperament,’ as one scientist puts it — is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum. Our place on this continuum influences our choice of friends and mates, and how we make conversation, resolve differences, and show love. It affects the careers we choose and whether or not we succeed at them.” And, of course, lots more.

The popular misconception of introversion in America is that it’s “somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.” By contrast, extroversion has become what Cain calls the “Extrovert Ideal” in U.S. society, making the rest of us feel somehow guilty when we don’t measure up. Cain takes on this misguided notion with a vengeance. In Quiet, she demonstrates how each of these two personality types has its own advantages and disadvantages. She makes a clear case for including a balance of the two types in any organization, the extroverts to push the limits and the introverts to hold them back from hurtling over the edge.

The terms introvert and extrovert were popularized by Carl Jung in an influential book published nearly a century ago (1921). “Introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feeling, said Jung, extroverts to the external life of people and activities. Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge into the events themselves.” In Quiet, Cain details the many ways in which the two personality types differ in the ways they work, play, invest, love, and perform just about any other function common to Americans in the here and now.

The distinction between the two types isn’t hard and fast. For example,
“[i]ntroverts may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while they wish they were home in their pajamas. . .  Nor are introverts necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating.” Introverts listen more than they talk. Extroverts talk more than they listen. Still, the contrast isn’t complete: these are tendencies exhibiting strong statistical correlations with distinct patterns of chemical interaction in the brain . They’re not universal guides to behavior.

Cain places contemporary views of introversion and extroversion in historical context. A century ago, during what she terms the “Culture of Character,” Abraham Lincoln was placed atop the pedestal of virtue. Today? Tony Robbins represents the ideal in the Culture of Personality. (Tony Robbins?! You’ve got to read the book.)

Quiet is endlessly fascinating, with lengthy passages and sometimes chapters devoted to Robbins, Harvard Business School, Dale Carnegie, Rosa Parks, open-plan offices, Steve Wozniak, and other icons, fads, and trends of today’s America. Throughout, the author presents the detailed findings of research in “personality psychology,” as the relevant field is called. She cites the jargon but explains everything in clear, straightforward prose.

If you want to gain insight into who you are and why you act the way you do, read this book. It’s a pleasure.

Delivering healthcare to billions of the world’s poor

A review of Pharmacy on a Bicycle: Innovative Solutions for Global Health and Poverty, by Eric C. Bing and Marc J. Epstein

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Despite the widespread conviction that the state of the world is deplorable and getting worse by the day, the human race has made measurable, even dramatic progress in some important ways. The collective state of our health is the most telling example. In part because of the eradication of smallpox, the near elimination of polio, and the significant recent progress on HIV/AIDS, humanity in general is living longer and healthier lives. Average life expectancy at birth in India around 1950 was 38 years; today it is 65. In China, it was 41; today it is 77. Over the same period, average life expectancy in the United States has risen from 65 to approximately 80. Numbers can be misleading, but these tell a compelling story.

Building on this amazing success story, major institutions — the United Nations, the U.S. Government, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example — have invested billions of dollars in recent years, targeting specific diseases, promoting the use of vaccines, and building public health infrastructure in developing nations. All these admirable efforts promise to continue the favorable trend in healthcare that has unfolded over the last half-century.

However, there is a hidden dimension in this picture. As Eric Bing and Marc Epstein explain in Pharmacy on a Bicycle, billions of poor people living in rural areas all too frequently fail to gain the benefit of these advances in healthcare. It’s fashionable to look on the world today from the perspective of the cities, but in spite of the massive migration of the last several decades, nearly half (49%) of the world’s population still resides in rural areas. Great numbers of these people live far from transportation hubs, often hours or even days of walking from the nearest road. It’s to these billions of people, nearly all of them desperately poor by American or European standards, that Bing and Epstein turn their attention in their illuminating little book.

Pharmacy on a Bicycle rests on a single, fundamental premise: “Most poor outcomes [in healthcare] are caused not by lack of effective medicines or medical know-how. The ability to prevent and treat many of these diseases inexpensively has been available for a very long time. But getting the right remedies to the right people in the locations where they are needed, in a way they will use them, and at a cost they can afford is continually a challenge. This is not a scientific problem. It’s a business challenge.”

Bing and Epstein argue that humankind has never before been in such a good position to meet this challenge. The costs of many widely-used drugs have fallen dramatically, and scientists have greatly simplified the treatment of many diseases by combining multiple drugs into single capsules or tablets. Extremely cheap diagnostic techniques that provide nearly instant assessments are now available. Through telemedicine, a single well-trained physician can now offer her or his expertise to much larger numbers of patients. The widespread use of clinical checklists and the application of franchising to the healthcare industry have both improved access and lowered costs. And new business models, successfully piloted in many countries, using bicycles, motorcycles, and trained village-level representatives, make it possible for healthcare agencies and for-profit companies to overcome the “last mile problem” that has traditionally limited most of the benefits of the market economy to population centers. “We are now at a tipping point to make lasting global health impacts,” the authors write.

One of the most promising recent developments is the now near-universal access to cell phones; by next year, the number of mobile phones is expected to be greater than the world’s population. “Mobile phones are now being used for patient education and awareness, treatment compliance, health care worker training, data collection, disease and epidemic outbreak tracking, and diagnostic and treatment support.”

Pharmacy on a Bicycle is intended to spark much wider adaptation of these advances by making them more widely known. The book presents a seven-point implementation model called IMPACTS, which encompasses innovation and entrepreneurship, maximizing efficiency and effectiveness, coordinating with partners, accountability, creating demand, task shifting (e.g., empowering nurses to take on some doctors’ responsibilities), and scaling. The book includes an abundance of excellent examples that bring these deadly-sounding prescriptions to life.

Eric Bing is an M.D. who also possesses a Ph.D. in epidemiology and an MBA. He’s the director of global health at the George W. Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University. His co-author, Marc Epstein, is an eminent and much-published professor of management at Rice University in Houston whose previous teaching posts were at the Harvard and Stanford business schools and INSEAD (European Institute of Business Administration).

 

A funny book reveals more than you ever wanted to know about digestion and its byproducts

A review of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, by Mary Roach

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Mary Roach is a funny person, and I mean that in both senses of the word: funny ha-ha, and funny strange. For years now, she’s been writing amusing and often hilarious popular science books about peculiar subjects, including cadavers, the afterlife, the science of sex, life in space, and, now, digestion. Somehow, other science writers have tended to shy away from these topics. (I wonder why?)

So, now, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. 

You can get a pretty good sense of what Gulp is like by reading the table of contents. Check out these chapter titles, for example:

• The Longest Meal: Can thorough chewing lower the national debt?
• Spit Gets a Polish: Someone ought to bottle the stuff
• A Bolus of Cherries: Life at the oral processing lab
• Big Gulp: How to survive being swallowed alive
• Dead Man’s Bloat: And other diverting tales from the history of flatulence research

Got the picture? Good. But don’t get the impression that Gulp is just a funny book. It’s chock full of important information as well. For instance:

• You’ll learn about the difference between a $500 bottle of wine and one that costs $30.
• You’ll find out what Eskimos think of cats.
• You’ll know the difference between laundry detergent and the digestive juices in your stomach.
• You’ll learn which end of the cow its farts come out of.
• You’ll find out how Elvis Presley, President James Garfield, and Farrah Fawcett really died.

Gulp brims over with surprises. And the truly funny thing is, you’ll actually learn a good deal about the digestive process along the way. Mary Roach knows her stuff. This book is far more than a comic tour de force: it’s actually a superior example of science journalism. Kudos to Mary Roach!

Gulp is Mary Roach’s sixth book-length study. The first was Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers a decade ago. Then two years later came  Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex three years after that. Her most recent book before Gulp was Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void in 2010. My review of Packing for Mars is here, and the one for Bonk is here.

Updating McLuhan: How the Internet and the human brain can reinforce each other

A review of Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks, by Tiffany Shlain

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Taking up where Marshall McLuhan left off and bringing his thinking into the 21st Century, Tiffany Shlain explores an extended metaphor in this tiny e-book published as an Amazon Single. She characterizes the Internet as “an extension of our brains — an extension of us,” just as McLuhan saw the book as an extension of the eye and electric circuity as an extension of the central nervous system. In fact, Shlain’s metaphor stands up to greater scrutiny than McLuhan’s. She makes a powerful case.

The similarities between the human brain and the Internet have been pointed out before, of course. However, Shlain delves deeply into contemporary neurological science, recent studies in childhood development, and the emergent properties of the Internet. She delivers up a convincing argument that we humans can vastly expand the scope of our understanding and insight by broadening the reach of digital media and engaging an ever-greater portion of humanity in taking advantage of the World Wide Web as a mechanism to share our ideas. Today, only about one-third of humanity — about 2.4 billion people — have access to the Internet. Shlain posits a near future when everyone who wishes may get online and share any thought with anyone else on the planet. By making judicious choices of what we share and what we read or experience online, we can literally reshape our brains.

This surprising claim is borne out by science, as Shlain reports. The human brain at birth is effectively a blank slate, composed of about 100 billion neurons, “the same number an adult brain has — but most of the connections between all those neurons aren’t there yet.” And it’s the connections that determine how we sense the world around us and how behave in response. The first 2,000 days of life — about five years — are critical, because during that time a child’s experiences determine which connections are made, which are strengthened, and which are left by the wayside. However, the process of reshaping the brain doesn’t end at age 5. Throughout our lives, the connections among the neurons in our brains continue to grow, shrink, and shift, the result of all we learn and experience and do as the years go by.

Already, digital “[t]echnology is rewiring the human brain” just as earlier technologies such as the book profoundly changed the ways we think and behave. For example, according to a California neuroscientist whose work Shlain cites, “social networking produces a burst of oxytocin, the hormone responsible for bonding, empathy, trust, and generosity.”

Hence, Shlain writes, “If we’re at the metaphoric first 2,000 days of life for the Internet, then right now is when we need to pay close and careful attention to developing its brain.” With a trillion webpages now online, about 10 times the number of neurons in the human brain, the capacity for new insight by increasing the connections among them is already vast. “Both a young brain and our young, global Internet brain are in highly creative, experimental, innovative states of rapid development — just waiting to make connections.”

Our job is to ensure that the right choices are made to nurture empathy, creativity, and sharing behavior in both. In raising children, this means minimizing the activation of stress hormones in the early years, since “prolonged activation . . . can actually reduce neural connections in important areas of the brain — such as those dedicated to learning and reasoning — while increasing neural connections in the parts of the brain dedicated to fear and aggression.” In managing digital media, we need to ensure that the Internet remains open, so that limitless connections are possible. This means rejecting attempts by corporations and rebelling against those by governments to establish control over the Internet.

Tiffany Shlain has written a thought-provoking little book, entirely worthy of the TED label that promises “ideas worth spreading.” A winner of numerous awards, Shlain is an innovative Bay Area filmmaker who founded the Webby Awards a decade and a half ago and is now pioneering in “crowd-filmmaking.”

Understand how Netflix, Wall Street, and economists use (and misuse) statistics

 

A review of Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data, by Charles Whelan

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In the unfolding Age of Big Data, no one who hopes to understand the way the world works can afford to be ignorant of statistical methods. Not a day goes by that statistical analysis isn’t behind some front-page story — in politics, sports, business, or even entertainment. The statistical concepts of probability, sampling,  and statistical validity, once considered obscure and of interest only to geeks wearing pocket protectors, are now indispensable tools for the active citizen to grasp. Writing in a breezy and intimate style, with humor and lots asides to the reader, Charles Whelan attempts to unpack these concepts and explain them in English with a minimal use of advanced math, and he succeeds . . . up to a point.

Naked Statistics was published just four months after Nate Silver’s best-selling book, The Signal and the Noise, which covers much the same ground in a very different way. (I reviewed that book here.) Whelan focuses on the nitty-gritty of statistical methodology, delving into such topics as how samples are chosen, what’s meant by terms such as correlation, standard deviation, and regression analysis, and how to determine whether the results of a test are statistically valid. However, he doesn’t lose sight of practical questions, unpacking such seemingly puzzling statements as “the average income in America is not equal to the income of the average American” and spotlighting the difference between precision and accuracy. Silver instead explains how statistical methods are applied in a wide range of activities, from baseball and basketball to Wall Street. Whelan includes lots of formulas laden with Greek letters, though, conveniently, they’re confined for the most part to Appendixes that follow many of the book’s chapters and can be skipped by a non-technical reader. (I ignored them.) Silver’s book is refreshingly devoid of Greek letters.

As Whelan makes clear, perhaps unintentionally, statistics is a forbiddingly technical field. Truth to tell, if you really want to understand statistical methodology and how it can be applied, you need a fair grounding in mathematics and a tolerance for terminology that doesn’t appear in everyday English. In fact, you probably need to take the same sort of graduate school courses Whelan took years ago. This is heady stuff!

All in all, for a run-of-the-mill mathematical illiterate such as me, Nate Silver did a much better job getting across the significance of statistics and how its methods are applied to strip away the complexities of today’s often baffling, data-driven world.

Animal cruelty, pigs in shit, and the end of the human race

A review of Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a vegetarian. However, living as I do in Berkeley, California, from time to time I find myself in the minority at dinners and potlucks. So, as you might imagine, over the years I’ve come to hear most of the arguments against eating animals. 

One thing has always puzzled me about the torrent of passion that invariably erupts when I question why I, or anyone else, should become a vegetarian (much less a vegan): apart from a few rejoinders that the practice of limiting my diet to plants will improve my health, extend my life, and make me a better person overall, most — maybe 80 percent of the verbiage — concerns cruelty to animals.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like furry little animals as well as the next person. Over the course of my long life, I’ve had dogs, cats, and rabbits as well as a few less cuddly animals such as turtles and fish as (dare I say it?) pets. Nor do I kick dogs or other helpless beasts when I’m angry or frustrated with other human beings.

But why do so many people justify vegetarianism on the basis of animal cruelty when the practice of raising animals for food in factory farms promises to drown our country in shit and spew so many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that it may eventually inundate low-lying coastal cities like Berkeley and make our planet uninhabitable for the human race? 

Where’s your perspective, people? Cheez! We’re already eliminating a million species a year from the biosphere by encroaching on animal habitat and screwing with the climate, and you’re worried about hurting chickens and cows?

Do I want to hurt chickens or cows? Of course not! I’ve even petted a heifer or two myself over the years. But still . . .

To give due credit, Jonathan Safran Foer does explain some of the environmental consequences of factory farming in Eating Animals. But his foray into the hidden depths of this tragically misconceived industry is almost exclusively focused on — guess what? — animal cruelty. His descriptions of the way animals are treated are purposely graphic and sometimes hard to take. PETA will love this book. If you don’t have an iron stomach, you might not.

Eating Animals is Foer’s first venture into book-length nonfiction. It’s his fourth book. The novels that preceded it, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, have attracted critical acclaim, including a number of literary awards, and both are being adapted to film. (He also produced a strange  work of fiction that was more a sculpture than a book.) For what it’s worth, I tried reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close but couldn’t get past the first few pages. However, Eating Animals is brilliantly crafted. Foer’s writing style, perhaps even his personality, come through loud and clear. He’s obviously a brilliant young man, and if he can avoid falling prey to the silly experimentalism of some of his early work, he’s got a great career ahead of him.

Oh, by the way, are you wondering why I haven’t become a vegetarian? Well, that’s another story . . .

Want to buy a better brain? Better think twice

A review of Amped, by Daniel H. Wilson

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Some of the very best science fiction explores the unintended consequences of breakthroughs in technology, and not those that are merely fanciful but advances that can be seen years ahead by observers of contemporary science. Amped is such a book.

Amped ventures into the near future — sometime around 2030, it seems — to depict American society in upheaval over the brain implants installed in half a million of its least fortunate citizens. The implants “amplify” the brains of the elderly and infirm, accident victims, and those with severe mental illness and mental retardation, allowing them to focus clearly and to make the most efficient use possible of their bodies. These “amps” are smarter, quicker, and stronger than the average bear — and the vast majority of Americans don’t like it one bit. They’re especially upset about the few amps who began with superior intelligence and outstanding physical abilities and have been turned into superbeings. Nobody likes a smartypants, it seems.

But this novel is not speculative nonfiction thinly disguised as fiction, with lame dialogue used to “explain” and cardboard characters created for the sole purpose of illustrating different points of view. Amped is, instead, a skillfully written novel of suspense that charges ahead with breakneck speed. In fact, the book can best be described as a thriller, with enough action, suspense, and plot twists to sate the desire of any Hollywood producer.

Amped’s author, Daniel H. Wilson, sports a Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, which some consider the epicenter of the field. This is Wilson’s seventh book. His previous works include Robopocalypse (reviewed here) and How to Survive a Robot Uprising.

The 12 best nonfiction books I’ve read in 2012

This was going to be a list of 10 books, but I couldn’t resist adding another two. It’s been a great year for nonfiction.

1. Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace, by Peter Janney

Review to be posted Dec. 10. Look for it!

2. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander

A penetrating analysis of the racist underpinnings of the U.S. justice system, the result of the ill-conceived “war on drugs” and deep-seated racial fears that has led to the mass incarceration of people of color.

3. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt

This exceptionally brilliant book is the story of a long-lost poem and of the man who rediscovered it more than a thousand years later, helping to trigger an upheaval in medieval European thinking that came to be known as the Renaissance. The Swerve details the staggering impact of the poem, a 7,400-line masterpiece that laid out in minute detail the revolutionary worldview of a Greek philosopher whose greatest influence was felt two millennia after his death.

4. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann

Forget just about everything you learned in school about the peoples who lived in the Western Hemisphere before 1492 — and about the land, too. It turns out that yesterday’s historians, anthropologists, paleontologists, and ecologists got it pretty much all wrong. In this revised edition of a 2006 bestseller, we learn that the Americas before Columbus were far more heavily populated, the leading civilizations far more sophisticated, and their origins far further back in time than earlier generations of scholars had suspected.

5. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo

An enthralling and deeply disturbing book that reads like a novel, this is a three-year study of life in a small Indian slum nestled between the new Mumbai International Airport and the five-star hotels clustered nearby. A quest to understand poverty and the ways people find to transcend it.

6. The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate, by Robert D. Kaplan

Through a geopolitical lens, Planet Earth, and the machinations and foibles of earthly leaders, look a lot different than they do in most history books. Stand a few feet away from a globe and squint: if the globe is properly positioned, what you’ll see is one huge, three-tentacled landmass (Asia-Africa-Europe); a second, much smaller one that consists of two parts joined by a narrow connector (North and South America); and several even smaller bits of land scattered about on the periphery (Australia, Greenland, Japan, Indonesia). That’s the world as Robert D. Kaplan sees it in this illuminating study of world history and current events as influenced by geography.

7. The Self-Made Myth, and the Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed, by Brian Miller and Mike Lapham

A thoughtful and impeccably reasoned new book that goes straight to the heart of the conservative argument favoring limited government and coddling the rich. Rather than quibble about this program or that issue, or fasten on the transparently shoddy logic of a Republican budget that promises to reduce the federal deficit when in fact it will surely increase it, Miller and Lapham’s argument strikes at the fundamental values and assumptions underlying today’s conservatism: the myth rooted in the writing of novelist Ayn Rand of the superhuman “job creator.”

8. Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, by Arthur Herman

Focuses on the role that America’s business community, and especially Big Business, played in the monumental effort that resulted in the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan just months apart in 1945.  Two extraordinary men — William S. Knudsen and Henry Kaiser — are the stars of this story, business impresarios who marshaled the stupendous numbers of men and women and the unprecedented mountains of raw materials that supplied the U.S. and its Allies with the weapons of war.

9. Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World’s Greatest Business Case for Compassion, by Pavithra Mehta and Suchitra Shenoy

The truly truly astonishing story — one with profound implications for development throughout the Global South — of how a retired Indian eye surgeon founded a nonprofit eye hospital in a southern Indian city in 1976 that is today “the largest and most productive blindness-prevention organization on the planet.” Equally important, Aravind also serves as a global resource center for opthalmology, training one out of every seven Indian eye doctors, consulting on management and technical issues with eye hospitals in 69 countries, and operating a state-of-the-art research center.

10. Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben McIntyre

The mind-boggling story of six European double agents who were “turned” or recruited by the British and played roles as large as those of any American general in the success of the Normandy invasion that opened up the Western Front and the path to Allied victory.

11. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t, by Nate Silver

As ambitious as it is digestible, and written in an easy, conversational style, The Signal and the Noise explores the ins and outs of predicting outcomes not just in politics, poker, and sports as well as the stock market, the economy, the 2008 financial meltdown, weather forecasting, earthquakes, epidemic disease, chess, climate change, and terrorism.

12. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, by David Quammen

A fascinating account grounded in scientific research of a class of diseases known as “zoonoses,” that is, animal in origin, that encompasses AIDS, Ebola, Marburg, SARS, H5N1 — and many others of of the world’s scariest diseases. The book recaptures the drama in the lives of the research scientists, physicians, veterinarians, and others who are on the front lines of humanity’s defense against disease.