January 27, 2012

Daniel Yergin’s superb new book: a brilliant survey of energy issues

A review of The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, by Daniel Yergin

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Some two centuries ago a profound economic shift upset the traditional relations of East and West. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe and the United States began to overtake the great civilizations of China and India, the planet’s wealthiest and most sophisticated societies throughout most of recorded history.

Now those two centuries of increasing imbalance are coming to an end, the result of the combined effects of five centuries of globalization beginning with Columbus; advances in transportation and communication in the 19th and 20th Centuries; the rapid spread of literacy, especially in the years following World War II; and major improvements in healthcare, which dramatically extended life expectancy across the globe. As the 21st Century continues to unfold, we may yet see today’s wealthiest economies — those of Europe and the United States — fall behind the Asian giants, as they tap the potential of billions of increasingly healthy, well-educated citizens.

This tectonic shift in geopolitical relations lends great urgency to energy politics today. The rise of the East is as great a factor in the sourcing and distribution of energy resources as climate change. Both factors loom large in economic researcher Daniel Yergin’s superb new book, The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World.

In 1991 Yergin published The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, which gained the #1 spot on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, won the Pulitzer Prize, and established his firm, Cambridge Energy Research Associates, as the country’s most sought-after voice on energy issues. Two decades later, The Quest broadens and updates the earlier book, relating the monumental changes in energy markets wrought by technological innovation, historic geopolitical shifts, and our changing views of energy and climate.

“Three fundamental questions shape this narrative,” Yergin writes in the introduction. “Will enough energy be available to meet the needs of a growing world, and at what cost, and with what technologies? How can the security of the energy system on which the world depends be protected? What will be the impact of environmental concerns, including climate change, on the future of energy — and how will energy development affect the environment?”

Approaching the topic more specifically, he asks, “Will resources be adequate not only to fuel today’s $65 trillion global economy but also to fuel what might be a $130 trillion economy in just two decades? To put it simply, will the oil resources be sufficient to go from a world of almost a billion automobiles to a world of more than two billion cars?” Later the author emphasizes the significance of this question: “Despite growth in emerging markets, one out of every nine barrels of oil used in the world every day is burned as motor fuel on American roads.”

The Quest is a big book, gushing with information. Yergin surveys virtually every significant aspect of energy in today’s world.  He touches on every energy source, every significant energy-related technological development of recent decades, and every major location of energy resources, and he briefly relates the history of each element. For a nonspecialist, The Quest is an immersion course in the nature and politics of energy. It’s fascinating.

Ever the dispassionate analyst, Yergin treats highly controversial issues with a simple, fact-based approach. However, despite its ill treatment by much of the oil industry, he takes on the issue of global climate change in detail and with dead seriousness, leaving little doubt that the more rational leaders in the energy sector have no question about the potential world-changing effects of rising global temperatures.

But Daniel Yergin is no pessimist. Tackling the issue of “peak oil,” for example, he says, “the world is clearly not running out of oil. Far from it. The estimates for the world’s total stock of oil keep growing.”

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January 18, 2012

Help stop Big Media from censoring the Internet!

The video http://vimeo.com/31100268 explains exactly why every American should be screaming bloody murder about the proposed SOPA and PIPA legislation the big media companies are trying to rush through a Congress dominated by people who don’t have a clue about the Internet. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that this is Hollywood talking: it’s the huge robber-baron media moguls, including Rupert Murdoch, Sumner Redstone, and the like as well as Disney and the other big studios.

Go HERE — http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/ – to lodge your protest.

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January 16, 2012

A great story of international intrigue that could have been better told

A review of Tribe, by James Bruno

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Harry Brennan is a veteran CIA field agent, equally skilled in recruiting informants and in front-line combat, but he has little respect for his superiors in the agency and poor insight into the finer points of the high-stakes office politics that threatens to sideline him. Following a botched mission to Afghanistan, he comes to believe that someone in the agency tried to have him killed in the field to conceal a plot to shift U.S. foreign policy to the benefit of Big Oil. The stakes in this latter-day version of the Great Game couldn’t be higher: $25 trillion in oil reserves, a brokered peace between the Taliban and the Afghan government, and the election of a President — not to mention Harry’s life and the life of his college-age daughter.

Tribe might have been an outstanding book. The backdrop shifts from Afghanistan, where espionage, major power rivalries, and the outsized ambitions of commerce so often converge, to the Georgetown cocktail circuit, the White House, and the CIA. Harry Brennan is a satisfyingly complex figure. Descriptions of life and work in the CIA, the White House, and on the front line in Afghanistan ring with credibility. The story itself is powerful and almost plausible. And James Bruno’s writing style is evocative.

Unfortunately, Bruno hasn’t produced the book that could have been crafted by a more experienced writer steeped in the principles of narrative technique. Time contracts and expands with no apparent logic: a span of minutes may occupy pages, while the passage of weeks or months is dispensed with in a phrase. Scenes shift without warning, in the absence of even the most rudimentary transitions.

James Bruno is a former diplomat, military intelligence analyst, and journalist who clearly possesses a wide range of knowledge about the themes touched on in Tribe. However, this is his third novel. Here’s hoping he’ll study narrative techniques before he writes the fourth.

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January 13, 2012

Aravind: A social enterprise with scale and impact to match Grameen Bank

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

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

“At first glance, it seemed a venture far too quixotic to be effective. But when intuitive goodness is pitted against unthinkable odds, it stirs the imagination and awakens possibility.”

This is the spirit in which Pavithra Mehta, with co-author Suchitra Shenoy, approaches her history of the world-famous vision care center her great-uncle founded in South India 35 years ago. It is a truly astonishing story — one with profound implications for development throughout the Global South.

“Today, the Aravind Eye Care System is the largest and most productive blindness-preention organization on the planet. During the last 35 years, its network of five eye hospitals in South India have treated more than 32 million patients and performed more than 4 million surgeries, the majority either ultrasubsidized or free.” 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.

In 1958, Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy reached the mandatory retirement age of 58 in his government post and retired to Madurai, a celebrated city of one million people in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Inspired by his guru and the deeply felt spiritual values he had long held, he enlisted his brothers and sisters (virtually all of them opthalmologists like him) to help him found an 11-bed eye hospital. Dr. V (as he was widely known) set the fledgling nonprofit hospital on course to provide cataract surgery to all who needed it, regardless of their ability to pay.

He and his family implemented a staggered fee schedule, charging market rates to those with the ability to pay and a heavily subsidized rate to those with limited means, but worked free of charge to those who could pay nothing — allowing every patient to choose his or her own level of payment. (A future President of India once received free care.) Miraculously, this approach allowed Aravind to earn a profit from its earliest days until the present. Surplus funds permitted Dr. V. to build first one new eye hospital, then three more, and later to fund a manufacturing plant for intraocular lenses and a world-class opthalmological research center.

The quality of Aravind’s eye care services and of the lenses produced in its factory match or exceed the standards of the West. In fact, a recent study compared Aravind’s surgical outcomes to those of the members of the Royal College of Opthalmologists of the UK — and “found Aravind’s complication rates to be less than those of its British counterparts.” Similarly, when one senior Aravind surgeon lectured on corneal ulcers at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, “the faculty adviser told his residents, ‘The amazing stuff you just saw — don’t try it here. We don’t have that kind of expertise.’”

Today, Aravind employs 3,200 persons. Dr. V passed away in 2006 at the age of 88, but his younger brothers and sisters remain involved in Aravind — although they have passed the reins of management to first one and then a third generation of this truly remarkable family. (Aravind currently counts 21 opthalmologists in Dr. V’s family among its staff.)

Aravind’s business model is unique in many ways. It’s a nonprofit that consistently turns a profit. It subjects the most modest and obscure processes at work in the hospital to exacting statistical analysis — everything from the manner in which custodians clean the floors to the number of sutures its surgeons employ — and as a result has attained a level of efficiency that would bring smiles to the faces of the most demanding Japanese plant manager. It shares its management secrets (and they are many) with all comers with an openness and a willingness to train competitors that is simply extraordinary. It pioneered the use of eye care “camps” — one-day events staged in towns and villages throughout the state of Tamil Nadu to generate large numbers of surgical patients, busing them into the nearest hospital in the Aravind system.

Dr. V’s daily journal, assiduously updated throughout his days at Aravind, reflects the breadth and depth of the questions he never stopped asking. For example, “How was Buddha able to organize in those days a religion that millions follow[?] . . . How did the disciples of Christ spread their mission around the world[?]” Yet Dr. V also frequently spoke of his dream to bring efficiency, consistency, and low cost to eye surgery the way McDonald’s did to hamburgers. Aravind remains today a pure expression of the vision and the spirit of unending inquiry that he brought to the venture from the outset.

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January 11, 2012

Third World development: A reading list

To my mind, the emergence of new nations out of a colonial past was one of the most significant developments of the 20th Century, and their uneven struggle to attain the comforts and possibilities of life to be found in Europe, North America, and Japan continues to loom large in the 21st Century. As a consequence, a fair proportion of my reading bears on these issues.

Much of what is written about development in what is variously called the Third World, the Global South, the under-developed countries, or the developing nations is self-serving and less than useful as a guide to understanding the true issues involved. The underlying reality is that since World War II the countries of the “West” have invested a total of nearly $2.5 trillion in “foreign aid” (as it’s popularly known in the USA) or “overseas development assistance” (as it’s termed elsewhere). You might think that investments of that magnitude would have produced dramatic improvements in the quality of life for the billions of people who live in poverty. However, the truth is appalling: there is precious little to show for this outpouring of aid other than the most obvious advances in education and public health.

Here are some of the books I’ve read in recent years that cast light on this reality. Some of them directly address the issues surrounding foreign aid. Others illuminate the backdrop to those issues. But I don’t pretend this list is comprehensive in any way. It’s simply a starting-point. I’ve listed these books in alphabetical order by the authors’ surnames.

Bornstein, David, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. Oxford University Press, 2007. Much of the social change taking place today in the world’s poorest countries is a result of the work of the venturesome folks called “social entrepreneurs” — and Ashoka, the USA-based organization that supports them by the thousands. This box profiles nine of the better-known Ashoka Fellows, demonstrating the role of local leadership in making the world a better place.

——, The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank. Oxford University Press, 2005. Muhammad Yunus gained global fame when he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, but the story of his decades of dogged efforts in Bangladesh — and of the immense organization he built — is much less well know. This book demonstrates how home-grown solutions to development programs are often superior to anything imposed on developing countries by the international community.

Clark, Gregory, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton University Press, 2007. Clark puts the question of economic development in historical perspective, dispelling long-popular myths about the supremacy of the West.

Diamond, Jared, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Viking, 2005. A fascinating exploration of the historical influence of environmental factors in the failure of “developing countries” — and a sobering perspective on the prospects for development breakthroughs in much of today’s overpopulated world.

Easterly, William, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Penguin Press, 2006. This is the best book that tackles the issue head-on and makes the clearest case for an explanation.

Guha, Ramachandra, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. HarperCollins Publishers, 2007. In global perspective, the greatest challenges to narrowing the inequities among nations lie in sub-Saharan Africa and India. This history of the subcontinent after independence helps to convey the complexity of the issues faced by change agents in the world’s second most populous nation.

Hochschild, Adam, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York, 1998). The most dramatic portrayal of the legacy of colonialism I’ve ever read.

Kamkwamba, William, and Bryan Mealer, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope. HarperCollins Publishers, 2009. The astonishing story of a brilliant, self-taught young man who demonstrated the vast potential that underdevelopment leaves behind.

Kristof, Nicholas D., and Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. Knopf, 2009. It is impossible to tackle the issue of economic and social development without considering the central role of women: it’s become a truism in the field that the education and empowerment of women is the surest first step toward meaningful social change. Nick Kristof, a long-time New York Times columnist, is one of the world’s most incisive observers of the daily reality lived by people in the Third World. Previously, Kristof and WuDunn reported jointly from China for the Times.

Mehta, Pavithra, and Suchitra Shenoy, Infinite Vision: How Aravind Became the World’s Greatest Business Case for Compassion. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011. The Aravind Eye Care System, based in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, has had an outsized influence on the treatment of eye disease throughout the world. Pavithra Mehta, a grand-niece of Aravind’s founder, tells the astonishing story of this extraordinary institution, illustrating the potential for indigenous development that shuns outside support.

Prahalad, C. K., The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004. In this paean to the multinational corporations of the world, the late C. K. Prahalad, one of the most celebrated management consultants of recent times, presents a host of case studies about the potential of business to foster development while increasing profits. Although the general proposition seems shaky to me, some of the case studies are impressive and thought-provoking.

Sachs, Jeffrey D., The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time. Penguin Press, 2005. Here is the cheerleader’s polyannish case for large-scale development assistance. Useful as a counterpoint to Bill Easterly’s White Man’s Burden, which far better reflects my own experience in developing countries.

Sullivan, Nicholas P., You Can Hear Me Now: How Microloans and Cell Phones Are Connecting the World’s Poor to the Global Economy. Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2007. Grameen Telecom is much less well known that the grassroots bank that spawned it. This intriguing story is a great case study of the long-familiar “leapfrog effect” that allows underdeveloped countries to advance rapidly by skipping over the use of technologies long dominant in the West.

Wrong, Michaela, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower. HarperCollins Publishers, 2006. No consideration of Third World development is complete without taking official corruption into account. This story, which focuses on one courageous Kenyan man who tried to expose corruption, brings to light some of the complications it poses.

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January 8, 2012

Another hilarious tale about inept bounty hunter Stephanie Plum

A review of Explosive Eighteen, by Janet Evanovich

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

You might think that after 17 novels featuring the same implausible characters acting in similarly stupid ways that the humor in the 18th would pale. Not so. In Explosive Eighteen, the exploits of incompetent bounty hunter Stephanie Plum and her sidekick Lula, a former ‘ho, continue to evoke laugh-out-loud embarrassment in public places, and, yes, her ongoing affairs with detective Morelli and bad boy Ranger continue unresolved. As Lula says to Stephanie, “It’s like you’re a reality show, all by yourself.”

Stephanie and Lula set out on the trail of a series of “skips” who have failed to show up in court, among them Stephanie’s old nemesis, Joyce Barnhardt. After a series of misadventures involving the repeated loss of Stephanie’s car (as usual), the two find themselves embroiled in a complex set of relationships with Joyce and a rumored international gang of jewel thieves called the Pink Panthers. It’s pointless to sketch out the story any more than this. The book is worth discovering for yourself.

Here, for example, is Lula in action:

Lancer [a bad guy] “eyeballed the rocket launcher and turned white. “I’m going to have to get tough now. I’m going to have to force you to leave.”

“Do you got one of these babies?” Lula asked him, patting the rocket launcher.

“No.”

“Then how you gonna force us to leave?”

“I have a gun,” Lancer said. And he pointed his gun at Lula.

“I don’t like when people point a gun at me,” Lula said. “It makes me nervous, and it’s rude. Do you see me pointing my rocket launcher at you? I don’t think so.”

Coincidentally, this month the first film built on the Stephanie Plum novels will open, with Katherine Heigl playing Stephanie. Heigl is too blonde, too tall, and too busty to match the character of Evanovich’s imagining, but her skills as a comic actor and her delightfully breezy manner are perfect, and she’s pictured as a brunette in stills promoting the movie. Sherri Shepherd will play Lula, and Debbie Reynolds, Grandma Mazur, one of the series most unforgettable characters. (Grandma Mazur protests: “I’m not so old. There’s parts of me don’t sit as high as they used to, but I’ve got some miles left.” Grandma packs a .45 in her purse. Her hobby is attending viewings at funeral homes.)

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January 4, 2012

“Wrong Man Running?” I’m tempted to say, “Wrong Man Writing”

A review of Wrong Man Running, by Alan Hruska

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Sometimes I wonder when I finish a book why I picked it up in the first place. This was one of those times.

As thrillers go, Wrong Man Running works. It’s suspenseful (which probably explains why I felt compelled to finish reading it), and the protagonist elicited sympathy.

Rick Corinth is a hotshot lawyer nearing 40 who currently serves as deputy DA in New York City, heir apparent to his long-incumbent boss. Mystifyingly, when a series of violent rapes begins to surface, the victims are all women he knows well, and in short order Rick is suspected of the crime. Once he is formally charged, he flees in order to devote himself to finding the real perpetrator. Then the plot thickens.

Unfortunately, like so much pulp fiction, the tale hangs on a series of unlikely coincidences, and practically every character in this book is either drop-dead gorgeous (women) or just gorgeous (men) — or, in a very few cases, ugly. I don’t know about you, but I find this pandering to Hollywood producers tiresome. Oh, yes, we’ll probably see Wrong Man Running on the big screen one of these days. If you like looking at beautiful people and being shocked by what they do, you might consider going. Otherwise, save your ten bucks.

 

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January 3, 2012

1491: Astonishing new evidence about the Americas before Columbus

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

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

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.

As Charles C. Mann explains, in this recently revised edition of his 2006 bestseller, latter-day investigations in all these fields have turned up persuasive evidence 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.

  • “In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire.” And population density both in the Andes and in Mesoamerica was the highest in the world: “the central Mexican plateau alone had a population of 25.2 million. By contrast, Spain and Portugal together had fewer than ten million inhabitants.” Central Mexico housed more than twice as many people per square mile as China or India.
  • The deciding factors in the Europeans’ legendary ease of conquest were disease (smallpox above all) and political infighting within native communities. Compiling recent studies, Mann estimates that “In the first 130 years of contact about 95 percent of the people in the Americas died” — and, more to the point, smallpox and other virulent diseases sped through both North and South America far more quickly than the conquerors. “Smallpox visited before anyone in South America had even seen Europeans . . . The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas therefore would have encountered places that were already depopulated.”
  • The legendary bloodthirstiness of the Aztec (more properly called the Triple Alliance) needs to be seen in context. “If England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed on average, about 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortes estimated for the (Aztec) empire. France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England.”
  • “The corpus of writings in classical Nahuatl, the language of the Alliance, is even larger than the corpus of texts in Classical Greek.”
  • Recent archaeological excavations have pushed back the date of arrival of homo sapiens in the Western Hemisphere from around 9000 B.C.E. to as much as 30,000 or 40,000 BCE. One site on the Peruvian coast, Aspero, “might win the title of the world’s oldest city — the place where human civilization began.” And “people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.”
  • The landscape encountered, first by the Pilgrims and later by American settlers pushing ever further West, was anything but the virgin forest and prairie they thought it was. “Native Americans burned the Great Plains and Midwest prairies so much and so often that they increased their extent; in all probability, a substantial portion of the giant grassland celebrated by cowbooys was established and maintained by the people who arrived there first.” On the Eastern seaboard, too, Indians extensively used fire, clearing tracts for farming and completely transforming the land before Europeans ever set sight on the coast.
  • Even the Amazon basin, long thought to be pristine territory, was home to millions of Indians long before disease introduced by the Spaniards decimated them and left their extensive works throughout the region to the ravages of rain and the forest. Mann notes that “the Amazon’s wealth of fruits, nuts, abnd palms is justly celebrated” and adds a comment from one of his innumerable interviews with scholars: “‘Visitors are always amazed that you can walk in the forest there and constantly pick fruit from trees. That’s because people planted them. They’re walking through old orchards.”

As Mann makes clear throughout 1491, practically all these findings have their detractors. Some cling to old findings (often their own) and simply refuse to accept changed views. Others criticize the methodology (or the investigator). But that’s to be expected. In fact, a collection of scientists in just about any field will behave like the Israeli Knesset, divided into nearly as many factions as there are scientists. But the case Mann sets forth is compelling, controversy notwithstanding. And for anyone with even a smidgen of interest in history, anthropology, paleontology, or ecology, these revelations must be surprising. For a history buff like me, they’re mind-bending.

Mann is a science journalist who serves as a contributing editor to Science and The Atlantic Monthly. His research is thorough, as is evident with a glance at the extensive bibliography and notes crammed into both this book and its successor, 1493 (reviewed earlier at http://bit.ly/weutM4).

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December 29, 2011

Michael Connelly’s latest: another thoroughly satisfying police procedural

A review of The Drop, by Michael Connelly

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

You might think that after writing 25 other novels and a slew of short stories Michael Connelly’s latest book would show at least a hint of boredom. Instead, the man keeps getting better and better. The Drop, Connelly’s 17th novel about Los Angeles police detective Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch, is one of his very best.

As you might expect in a series of such longevity, Harry is a complex character weighed down by layer upon layer of history. His history in the LAPD takes center stage in The Drop, as a challenging case brings him face to face with his old nemesis, a Deputy Chief of Police now sitting on the Los Angeles City Council and with his former partner, now an aide to the current Chief. If you’re not a Californian, you may not be aware that a seat on the L.A. City Council is a power base of the first order: members of Congress regard election to the Council as a promotion, and Councilmembers frequently run for statewide office. The upshot is that this brilliantly constructed novel revolves around the concept of “high jingo,” police jargon for the intersection of high-level politics with their work.

As the novel opens, Harry is a windower, raising his precocious 15-year-old daughter by himself, and nearing retirement from the LAPD. He holds a plum assignment in the Open Unsolved Unit. During a momentary lull in activity, he is assigned an especially difficult case involving apparently botched DNA analysis and a twenty-year-old rape and murder. No sooner has he begun digging into the mystifying circumstances of the DNA specimen than his old partner calls him from the chief’s office to inform him that the Chief insists he take on a new case: the Councilman’s son has apparently committed suicide, and the Councilman has unaccountably demanded that Harry be assigned to investigate what really happened. Enter stage left: high jingo.

Because Harry lives by the credo that “Everybody counts, or nobody counts,” he stubbornly works on both cases despite the Chief’s assistance he set aside everything else to pacify the Councilman. As the two intertwined investigations unfold with Harry’s customary secretiveness, practically everyone within his orbit becomes upset with him. And therein lies the tale — a particularly suspenseful and satisfying tale.

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December 26, 2011

The 30 best books of 2010-2011

OK, so they’re not really the “best” books of the last two years. Unlike the arbiters of our literary culture such as The New York Times Book Review, I don’t pretend to read everything. In fact, they don’t either. By some estimates, more than one million books are published each year in the English language. So, big-time reviewers, whatever their resources, are forced to choose titles very carefully, and I do, too, to an even greater extent. After all, I’ve read fewer than 200 books since New Year’s 2010, and some of those had been published long before then.

So, what make’s one book “better” than another? To me, the answer’s simple: those I regard as best are the ones I recall most vividly. Whether fiction or nonfiction, these are the books that fastened themselves in my memory, either because of the emotional wallop they carried or because I learned so much from reading them.

Here goes, then. I separate the books I read into three categories: Nonfiction, Trade (“serious”) Fiction, and Mysteries & Thrillers. I tried narrowing down my choices to five books in each category but quickly found I couldn’t do that. Instead, I’ve listed (in no particular order) ten titles of each type.

Nonfiction

And So It Goes — Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, by Charles J. Shields

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

1493: Uncvovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann

The Emperor of All Maladies: A History of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee

To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, by Adam Hochschild

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson

Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder

Trade Fiction

11/22/63, by Stephen King

The Debba, by Avner Mandelman

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, by Paul Torday

Serious Men, by Manu Joseph

Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart

People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks

Homer & Langley, by E. L. Doctorow

Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Spies of the Balkans, by Alan Furst

Mysteries & Thrillers

Shaman Pass: A Nathan Active Mystery, by Stan Jones

Storm Prey, by John Sandford

The Trinty Six, by Charles Cumming

Faithful Place, by Tana French

The Confession: A Novel, by John Grisham

Our Kind of Traitor, by John le Carre

Three Stations: An Arkady Renko Novel by Martin Cruz Smith

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson

The Man From Beijing, by Henning Mankell

Nine Dragons, by Michael Connolly

Your comments are welcome.

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