War and Fiction

THE AMERICAN FUTURE:
A HISTORY
Simon Schama
Historian Simon Schama begins with the grand statement: “I can tell you exactly,give or take a minute or two,when American democracy came back from the dead because I was there: 7.15 p.m. Central Time,3 January 2008,Precinct 53,Theodore Roosevelt High.” The reference is,of course,to Barack Obama’s announcement of the political change to come,by springing a surprise win in Iowa. What follows is Schama’s inquiry into America’s past to get a sense of the race,immigration and civil rights issues confronting the country.

D-DAY: THE BATTLE FOR NORMANDY
Antony Beevor
Beevor’s Stalingrad became a runaway bestseller some years ago,consolidating his reputation as a historian of key battles. D-Day,which is just published,should,therefore,be interesting.

TEA TIME FOR THE TRADITIONALLY BUILT
Alexander McCall Smith
McCall Smith produces his 10th Precious Ramotswe book,and you have to pray he’ll keep going. Precious must immerse herself in the culture of football for a case,and her assistant,Mma Makutsi,must work through some tricky personal apprehensions. In the cycle McCall Smith has acquired,there is,after this book,an Isabel Dalhousie novel to look forward to in September,The Lost Art of Gratitude. It must be true then,the legend about him writing 1000 words an hour!

PRISONER OF THE STATE: THE SECRET JOURNAL OF PREMIER ZHAO ZIYANG
Translated and edited by Bao Pu and Renee Chiang and Adi Ignatius
June 4 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Chinese government’s crackdown on the pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square. A key moment of that time was Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang’s meeting with student leaders indicating a despairing sense of helplessness to avert a crackdown. He would spend the rest of his life under house arrest in Beijing and was never seen in public again,though the spontaneous outpouring of respect on his death took the Chinese authorities by surprise a few years ago. These memoirs were recorded on tape which were then smuggled out of China.

LORDS OF FINANCE: THE BANKERS WHO BROKE THE WORLD
Liaquat Ahamed
A consequence of the financial crisis is popular literacy about the central banks. Ahamed’s book therefore finds wider readership than it may have had it been published before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Ahamed studies the conduct of four key central bankers after the Great Depression made itself felt in the 1930s: Benjamin Strong Jr,governor of the New York Federal Reserve,Montagu Norman,chief of the Bank of England; Emile Moreau of the Banc de France,and Hjalmer Schachtof Reichsbank. You don’t need the current context to benefit from the book,but it makes the narrative especially illuminating.

NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISION ABOUT HEALTH,WEALTH,AND HAPPINESS
Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
Sunstein is now US President Barack Obama’s regulatory chief,and along with Thaler he represents the kind of research dominating behavioural economics that is said to influence Obama’s team. Nudge,just out in bookshops in India,is a very readable survey of the ways in which policy-makers and individuals can lay out choices before people — what they would,paying careful attention to the choice architecture — to produce the best possible outcomes. They are against coercion,but they argue that the way default options are set — on stuff as variable as tax forms,credit card fee and cafeteria menus — can determine the costs to consumers.