Sources of Our Discontent: Books of Summer 2018

Like most people, I can’t get Trump out of my mind — or off my reading list. But this summer at least he has been sharing space with Russia, New York (my original hometown), overlooked history, oversized personalities, and the timeless quest to understand life in tumultuous times. Here are seven of my current favorites...in 700 words.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

Sometimes a title can say it all. For those who still doubt that we’re in the midst of a radical global realignment — destruction of the so-called “world order” created after World War II and emergence of a “post-truth” authoriarian alliance — this concise but potent overview should settle the issue. Using a literary and historical lense, Michiko Kakutani describes how it was done, largely by Russia but beginning long before Trump’s hostile takeover, and why there’s no guarantee truth will make a comeback anytime soon.

HISTORY

Trump / Russia: A Definitive History

Like a long anticipated prequel, Trump/Russia: A Definitive History provides the backstory — a sordid tale of organized crime, shape-shifting oligarchs and money laundering —that led to our current predicament. One of Trump’s biggest lies, it turns out, is his protest about having nothing to do with Russia. It’s the opposite. 

Journalist Seth Hettana proves that, among other things, Russia has been Trump’s piggy bank and object of desire for decades. His election was a perfect storm, fueled by the combined force of his narcissism and greed and Putin’s thirst for respect and revenge.

City of Sedition: The History of New York City During the Civil War

A myth-busting dive into New York City’s complex relationship with slavery, racism and the south in the mid-19th century, John Strausbaugh’s narrative history follows an ecclectic group of New Yorkers, from Horace Greeley and Walt Whitman to military rogues like Dan Sickles and David Farragut, and puts a fresh spin on key events like the 1863 draft riots. It also underlines the sad reality that know-nothing nativism and white supremacy go much deeper than we like to acknowedge.

FICTION

A Terrible Country

This is a truly wonderful novel, but the title is slightly misleading. Keith Gessen’s writing is crisp, intense and full of ironic humor; his greater accomplishment is revealing the poignance and moral challenges of life in modern Russia. In his subtle tale of a Russian-American academic who returns to Moscow to care for his grandmother in 2008, Gessen (brother of journalist Masha Gessen) explores culture, corruption, hockey, history, repression, and so much more. It’s a revelatory melodrama about commitment and fateful choices made under pressure.

The Other Woman

This timely thriller by Daniel Silva uses the legends surrounding Kim Philby, notorious Russian double agent of the Cold War era, to create a modern mole hunt at the highest level of British intelligence. While the characters are thin at times in this commercial bestseller, the tradecraft and covert ops - from Vienna to Maryland — keep the story moving, while examining the real geopolitical stakes of modern spy games.

BIOGRAPHY

The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera

This is a stylish and captivating portrait of a major cultural innovator, one whose talent, imagination and prescient ideas had a profound impact on photography, publishing and flight. Long overlooked, Felix Nadar was an irrepressible spirit at the center of French life for decades. Adam Begley’s approach is appropriately vivid and irreverent, sprinkled liberally with excellent illustrations that showcase Nadar’s diverse skills, famous associates, and thrilling adventures.

Dante in Love

More than a biography, this sprawling examination of Dante’s life, writing and times revisits his doomed political career, radical philosophy, religious and sexual obsessions, and crucial role in creating the Italian identity in the early fourteeth century. A.N. Wilson also suggests that, especially in The Divine Comedy, he may have anticipated the cultural schisms, disillusionment and democratic threats currently on display.

As Wilson explains, “The old political systems, like the old religions, assumed that we all spoke the same language about our shared inner life. That is no longer the case....Human beings were never in history so alone as they are today, never less certain that they possessed anything in common. Dante, poet of dislocation and exile, poet of a new language, has immediate things to say to us which he has not perhaps said in history.” 

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