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Between Freud developing his psychoanalytic theory, Arthur Schnitzler inventing stream of consciousness narrative in literature, and Gustav Klimt turning the art world upside-down with paintings that combined flattened space with luminous decoration, Vienna circa 1900 was a very exciting place. This book is a love letter of sorts to the city of the author's birth at the dawn of the modern era. But unlike most love letters, this one happens to be written from the perspective of one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, whose rich understanding of the human brain provides a lens through which to view the fascinating history of this time and place. In Kandel’s telling, the brain is a creativity machine through which we perceive the world. “Vision is not simply a window onto the world, but truly a creation of the brain,” he writes. According to the half-century of research that is summarized in the second half of the book, the creative process of viewing a painting starts with a visual stimulus to the retina, is filtered through the several areas of visual cortex, proceeds through brain areas specialized for recognizing faces, recruits emotional responses from the amygdala, and is integrated with memories stored in other parts of the brain. That might sound complicated, and truthfully this book isn’t always the easiest of reading, but those readers who make the effort will be rewarded with a deeper understanding of how our brains make us who we are.

Dear President Obama, I’m writing to tell you about an alarming book that I just finished, called Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Slahi. The author describes how he was detained soon after the September 11th attacks, then brought to Guantanamo, where he was tortured. A federal judge who reviewed the case found no evidence to counter any of the claims that Slahi makes about his innocence or about his experiences being tortured. Despite this, your Justice Department overturned the judge’s ruling that ordered his release, just as it has for approximately half of the other hundred detainees remaining in Guantanamo. Given that you promised to make closing the offshore prison a priority during your 2008 campaign, I find it difficult to imagine why you would do this. Perhaps you are already familiar with Slahi’s case. Even if so, I would still recommend that you read it, as the details of his story make it fascinating, humane, and ultimately uplifting despite its lack of a happy conclusion. A smart, funny, and likable African, the character that emerges from this book reminded me a bit - if I may say so - of the portrait that you paint of your father in your own memoir. I found it amazing that Slahi has been able to hold onto his humanity through his years of detainment. I hope that we Americans will be able to show him that we haven’t lost ours. With your year left in office, please close Guantanamo, and let Mr. Slahi go home. Sincerely, Richard V.

“It is not often in the law,” said Justice Breyer of the Roberts Court, “that so few have so quickly changed so much.” Through the stories of the Supreme Court's most important recent cases and of the justices who decided them, Toobin shows us how the Court has been becoming more activist and conservative in a way that few who haven’t watched closely over the last decade truly appreciate. During his Senate confirmation hearing, John Roberts explained his judicial philosophy by saying that a justice ought to be like an umpire in baseball, enforcing the rules rather than trying to rewrite them. Since getting behind the bench, however, he and his conservative colleagues have not been hesitant to flout longstanding precedents as they have gutted the Voting Rights Act, eliminated meaningful firearm restrictions, curtailed affirmative action, and paved the way for effectively unlimited corporate financing of elections. Perhaps the most valuable thing that a book like this provides is a longer view of how the Court and its interpretations of law evolve, and the contributions that the individual justices make toward this evolution. The Supreme Court moves more slowly and draws less attention than the other branches of government. But seen within the context of the last century, Toobin makes it clear that Breyer was right, and indeed a great deal is being changed by a very few very quickly.

“Development is the only hard truth,” declared President Deng Xiaoping as he began the process of opening up the Chinese economy in 1978. In this timely and fascinating book, Osnos tells of the great scramble for wealth in the generation that followed, and of the lasting marks that it has left on the nation’s character. In many ways China’s rise has been magnificent, pulling hundreds of millions of peasants out of rural poverty within the span of a single generation. But along with the improving living standards has come an increasing tendency for the wealth to concentrate into the hands of those with the right political and family connections. One of the less predictable consequences of Deng’s pronouncement has been a spiritual void that people throughout China have not been able to fill with any amount of economic development. In a country whose chief religion in the 20th century was the worship of Chairman Mao, Osnos writes that the more recent pursuit of fortune “relieved the deprivation in China’s past, but it had failed to define the ultimate purpose of the nation and the individual.” Osnos describes the quests of many young Chinese to find a greater meaning, leading some to embrace Confucianism or Christianity or nationalism, and others to latch on to Western heroes such as Steve Jobs, whose biography many young people “quote like scripture." Osnos relates the stories of an impressive diversity of characters, such as Gong Hainan, a girl from a peasant family who went on to found China’s biggest online dating site; Tang Jie, a philosophy student who believes that China must resist the temptation to become more like Western countries and spends his time creating nationalistic video collages that get millions of views online; and Hu Shuli, a magazine editor who pushes the limits of how much truth she can speak to the Party’s power. Side by side with these are the stories of more well-known activists and celebrities, ranging from Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo to the wildly popular teen fiction writer, blogger, and race car driver Han Han. It should be no surprise that a country as big as China contains such multitudes of personalities, but reading about them from a first-rate writer who has spent years carefully observing it from the inside makes one realize how monochromatic the typical media coverage of China tends to be. The colorful portrait that this book paints will take the reader on a first step toward unraveling the riddle wrapped in a mystery that is China.

This jaw-dropping book tells the story of the tragic and ruthless - but largely forgotten - plundering of the Congo during the colonial “scramble” for Africa by European powers. It is also the story of how that plundering was exposed and defeated through the first great human rights campaign of the twentieth century. The story begins with a trio of villains whose bumblings and shortcomings would be comical if they didn’t lie at the root of one of modern history’s greatest atrocities. The first was Henry Morton Stanley, a wearer of absurd safari caps who fabricated his autobiography and even his own name, as well as swashbuckling stories of his grand adventures in Africa’s interior that made him one of the most famous explorers of his era. The next was Leopold II, the Belgian monarch whose insecurity about the tiny size of his kingdom led him to a single-minded pursuit of an African colony at any cost, portraying his ruthless grab for power and wealth as a humanitarian intervention. Finally, there was Henry Sanford, a failed inventor, incompetent businessman, and former American diplomat whose susceptibility to a monarch’s flattery led him to petition his own government to recognize Belgium’s hold on the Congo as peaceful and legitimate. Although these three men came from very disparate backgrounds and had differing agendas, they were united by a burning desire to be more important than they actually were. After learning in detail how Leopold got his colony, we read with great indignation about how he squeezed it for every ounce of ivory and drop of rubber that he could, spending the profits on lavish palaces for himself and Parisian shopping sprees for his teenage mistress. Meanwhile in Africa, from the slaughter of entire villages to station supervisors collecting natives’ heads, the magnitude of the abuses carried out by his men almost defy description. With estimated death tolls in the millions, Leopold's looting of the Congo stands on par with any of the much more widely known genocides and mass murders of the twentieth century. But Leopold’s reign of terror wouldn’t last forever. The beginning of the end came about when E. D. Morel, an employee of the shipping line that brought ivory and rubber from the Congo back to Belgium, observed that the ships were sending nothing back to the Congo in return, and concluded that the only way these resources could have been obtained was by slave labor. Although there was nothing special in Morel’s background to single him out as a likely human rights crusader, he knew that something had to be done and proceeded to do it. Recruiting allies, giving speeches, and writing hundreds of articles and thousands of letters, Morel abandoned his job and spearheaded a decade-long movement to make the world aware of the horrors going on in Africa and to put an end to them. For a book that’s so deeply researched, King Leopold’s Ghost is quite a page turner. With villains, heroes, and drama aplenty, Hochschild keeps us on the edge of our seat as he guides us through this forgotten chapter of history.

In this brief travelogue, Sacks chronicles his experiences traveling with a group of fern lovers in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. It turns out that, in addition to being the world’s greatest writer-neurologist, the author has long been a fern enthusiast. Describing his first experience with the New York chapter of the American Fern Society, the famously bookish and taciturn author writes that “they were indeed my sort of people, and they seemed to recognize me, welcome me, as one of themselves, as a fern person." The book is a quick read, with one chapter devoted to each of the ten days of the group’s Oaxacan journey. While the book is structured as a chronological record of the daily activities--and Sacks indeed claims that most of the text comes verbatim from the notebook that he kept in real time--he manages to sneak in informative asides on such topics as the production of chocolate, the role of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in agriculture, and the history of Mexico both ancient and modern. I have no special interest in ferns, but was happy to learn a bit about them: that their leaves are properly called fronds; that they can survive in a desert almost as well as cactuses, browning and shriveling up in times of drought and magically becoming green and lush following a brief rain shower; and that there was a great craze for them (a pteridomania, to use the scientific term) in Victorian-era England. Mostly, though, this book is interesting for its poignant descriptions of what it’s like being a traveler in an exotic place. Sacks’s journal is an inspiration for how to travel well: soaking up as much of the experience as possible, digesting it through reflective writing, and emerging as a better-rounded human being.

With characteristic insight and charm, Dr. Sacks describes the cases of seven patients that he’s worked with, illustrating the ways in which we humans have a remarkable capacity for adaptation in the face of all manner of neurological mishaps. The important lesson of the book is that we can obtain deep insights into the human mind by carefully observing the ways in which it sometimes malfunctions. As Sacks writes, "Defects, disorders, diseases, in this sense, can play a paradoxical role, by bringing out latent powers, developments, evolutions, forms of life, that might never be seen, or even be imaginable, in their absence. It is the paradox of disease, in this sense, its “creative” potential, that forms the central theme of this book." The first case described by Sacks is that of Mr. I, a painter who lost his color vision--all of his color vision, in contrast to the much more common red-green colorblindness--following a car accident. There are some surprising details: the patient's vision was in many ways improved, with Mr. I claiming that he could read a license plate in the dark from several blocks away; and he also found that his memory of color had been erased along with his perception of it, perhaps illustrating a deep principle about the way in which memories of sensory experiences are rerouted through the sensory apparatus of our minds as we reexperience them. In addition, Sacks manages to sprinkle throughout the chapter a fascinating lesson about the history of our scientific understanding of color vision. Later chapters describe the “last hippie,” who lost the ability to form new memories after 1970; a man with Tourette’s syndrome who, despite exhibiting a wide array of verbal and motor tics in his normal life, is able to bypass these when performing his professional activities as a surgeon; a patient who had been blind from early childhood and had his sight restored, only to find the world confusing and disorienting, illustrating how vision is something that we learn with our brain in addition to seeing with our eyes; a man who spends his entire adult life painting incredibly detailed and accurate pictures of the village he grew up in, which he has not visited since he left Italy as a child; an autistic boy with remarkable artistic abilities; and an autistic woman who, despite extreme difficulty in understanding other people and the emotional worlds they inhabit, pursues a successful academic career in agricultural science and manages to develop a remarkable degree of empathy with cattle. Some of the findings seem simply bizarre. Regarding the blind man whose sight was restored, Sacks writes that while he "could recognize individual letters easily, he could not string them together--could not read or even see words. I found this puzzling, for he said that they used not only Braille but English in raised or inscribed letters at school--and that he had learned to read fairly fluently.” Other observations are poetically amusing: “He had expected a quarter moon would be wedge-shaped, like a piece of cake, and was astonished and amused to find it a crescent instead." It’s no wonder that Sacks has been described by the New York Times as the unofficial “poet laureate of medicine.” With remarkably keen observation, clarity, and wit, he manages to draw our interest into these patients’ cases on the one hand because they are so unusual, and on the other hand because they lead to lessons that are so universal.

George Packer’s collage of American life is a work of nonfiction that reads like a novel, brilliantly describing the changes in our social, financial, and political institutions through the lives of a score of Americans over the last three decades. The stories of a handful of main characters are threaded throughout the book: a single mother in Ohio struggles to make ends meet and give her children a better life, doing what she can to help save her community after the good jobs disappear and the houses in her neighborhood start going vacant; a bright kid from Alabama moves to DC and spends a career watching the city buckle under the weight of organized money; an entrepreneur from North Carolina dreams of getting rich while securing America’s energy independence and bringing jobs back home from overseas. Uniting all of these stories is a looming sense that the American Dream has been compromised, that the rules have been bent toward the interests of the rich and powerful, and that for many people working hard and playing by the rules no longer seems to be enough to have a decent life. As if turning the telescope around, Packer punctuates these detailed narratives of ordinary folks with snappy profiles of some of America’s most public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Alice Waters. We read about Silicon Valley billionaires, Oprah, and Jay-Z--the Americans who we want to be, who built empires out of nothing, and who seem to take away our excuses for not achieving greatness ourselves. Among these profiles of the rich and famous is a chapter on Sam Walton, and the author has few kind words for describing the man who founded a retail empire and left the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune with "more money than the bottom 42 percent of Americans.” In describing Wal-Mart, Packer makes a big point by touching on the ways that America itself has grown to resemble the retail giant: "It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs, and more part-time jobs as store greeters." There are notes of optimism to be found throughout the book, but mostly this is a story about decay and about the widening disconnect between America’s elites and the rest of us. This is what Packer calls the unwinding. “There have been unwindings every generation or two,” he tells us. “Each decline brought renewal, each implosion released energy, out of each unwinding came a new cohesion.” One can only hope that he’s right, and that another renewal for America is just around the corner.

This book is about underdogs and their hidden potential to come out on top despite the odds seeming to be stacked against them. As one has come to expect from Gladwell’s books, the prose is crisp and his examples smartly chosen and illustrative. In many cases the stories are delightfully counterintuitive, teaching us that what we assume to be advantages can often be anything but. So how does David beat Goliath? He can adopt an unconventional strategy, typically one that is less pleasant and involves more work. This was done by Lawrence of Arabia, who led his ragtag team of Bedouins on camelback through hundreds of miles of desert to launch an attack on the Turkish-held city of Aqaba that was as unexpected as the journey was dangerous. David can become stronger by using so-called “desirable difficulties" to his advantage. This was done by a boy who was diagnosed with dyslexia, but turned his difficulty into something positive by becoming an amazing listener and eventually one of the greatest trial lawyers of his generation, virtuosic in his ability to exploit a weakness in a witness’s testimony and win an argument. David can take advantage of the confidence that comes from emerging through hardship intact. This was done by the anomalously large number of prominent historical figures who lost a parent early in life. It was also done by the Huguenots, a French religious sect that successfully and openly gave refuge to a large number of Jews during World War II. When your own people have been persecuted for generations, defying Nazi orders and helping some refugees doesn’t seem so impossible. Gladwell’s method of illustrating his point through stories is effective and makes for breezy reading, but at times he comes pretty close to making it sound as if being an underdog is usually an advantage, which of course would be contrary to the word’s very definition. Several times he asks, provocatively, “You wouldn’t want your child to be dyslexic, would you?” and then goes on to suggest that “You just might.” He proceeds to relate some inspiring anecdotes about people--the president of Goldman Sachs among them--who overcame this obstacle in amazing ways to achieve great professional success. The closest that he comes to giving any statistical evidence on this point is another anecdote in which someone describes informally polling a roomful of business executives, at least half of whom put their hands up when asked whether anyone had a learning disability. Gladwell eventually covers himself by mentioning that, for every dyslexic with an inspiring success story, there are many more who aren’t able to overcome their handicap in such a spectacular way and--much to nobody’s surprise--have a harder life because of it. Is dyslexia or losing a parent really a “desirable difficulty”? I don’t think that Gladwell is trying to convince anybody that they are or that underdogs usually win in life, but given the emphasis that he puts on stories where that’s exactly what happens, the casual reader could be forgiven for coming away with that impression.

Very roughly, modern physics research falls under three headings: particle physics, focusing on the very small (think Higgs boson); astrophysics, focusing on the very large (galaxies and stuff); and condensed matter physics--known to the previous generation as solid state physics--focusing on the the very many (very many particles, that is, as in a piece of metal or a cup of fluid). Being a condensed matter physicist myself, I'm particularly attached to the third of these areas. But while there is no shortage of excellent popular-level books on particle physics and astrophysics, I'd never been able to find a good book about my own field that I could, for example, give to my parents to help them better appreciate exactly what it is that I do and why it's interesting. I was therefore excited to learn about this book, which seemed like it might be able to fill that gap. The core idea of this book is that new properties can emerge in systems of many interacting constituents, even though the constituents may not exhibit these properties individually. This happens, for example, when we talk about a liquid flowing or a gas having pressure. These things are possible through collective behavior, even though single molecules can't flow or have pressure. A more exotic example is a bunch of electrons in a metal interacting and forming a superconducting state. Such emergent properties are ubiquitous and robust in physics and in many other areas (think of ants in an ant colony, or transistors in a computer), and--Laughlin would argue--deserve to be considered on equal footing with the "fundamental" laws governing elementary particles. Being a leader in this field and a Nobel prize-winner, Laughlin seems like he would be a great person to write such a book. I have a tremendous respect for Laughlin's work as a physicist. I've read many of his scientific papers and have found them to be models of clear and creative scientific thinking. And while the ideas discussed in this book are beautiful and important, the exposition just doesn't do them justice. Laughlin seems to have thought that the best way to connect with lay readers about difficult ideas would be to unleash his inner stand-up comedian. Here's but one example: "Quantum entanglement is one of those things that's easy to understand but almost impossible to believe--like free checking." Truthfully, this is the sort of one-liner that one expects to be followed by a crisp "Ba-dum TSCHH!" or perhaps a "wakka wakka!" from Fozzie Bear, and isn't especially effective at conveying anything about the nature of quantum entanglement. This sort of thing wouldn't be so bad if it only occurred occasionally, but the fact that every page in the book is full of this stuff. On top of this are the longer digressions that at times make the book seem like an exercise in free association. In order to illustrate the point that "things aren't always what they seem," the author launches into a page-long anecdote about the time when his college roommate kept a dead animal--which seemed to be a rabbit, but turned out not to be--in the kitchen cupboard. Overall, this book gets high marks for the main ideas, but low marks for the execution. Apparently the Brief History of Time for condensed matter physics is still waiting to be written.

The summary (without giving too much away) sounds pretty absurd: A boy runs away from home on his fifteenth birthday and becomes close with a woman who may be his long-lost mother, and is running a private library together with a transgender man who loves listening to Schubert and driving too fast. Meanwhile a kindly, mentally disabled man who can speak to cats and makes fish rain from the sky enlists the help of a young truck driver and journeys across Japan on a mystical quest. The frequent description of Murakami's work as dreamlike and surreal is entirely appropriate. The book is highly engaging, entertaining, and hard to put down. Funky plot elements and magical happenings aside, the real strength of the book lies in the richness of its characters and the world that they inhabit. After reading about Kafka’s adventures, I’ve had some unexpected glimpses into the inner worlds of such characters as a transgender Japanese librarian and a mentally disabled man who talks to cats. And if I learned a thing or two about Japanese libraries and Schubert’s piano sonatas along the way, then so much the better.

This book probably has as much claim as any other to being the foundational text of Western philosophy. At its broadest level, it is an attempt to answer two main questions, which turn out to be related: (i) How should a person live? And (ii) how should an ideal state function? Once these have been settled, we get some discussion about ideal forms and Plato's thoughts on the nature of reality. Like most of Plato's works, the format is a dialogue between Socrates and some other Athenians. Much of the dialogue is a search for a definition of justice. The main part is between Socrates and two very bright and promising young men. These young men will be the future leaders of Athens, so Socrates has an interest in educating them well. The young men challenge Socrates to convince them that it is worthwhile to pursue a just life even under the most challenging of circumstances. Suppose that you’re a just man who is persecuted by others for his just character (as Socrates actually was). Why would this possibly be better than being an unjust man who could lie and steal to get whatever he wants, even while maintaining the reputation of a just man (a scenario that Machiavelli might have favored)? Socrates proceeds by talking about politics and the ideal state, saying that if they can understand what justice means for the state, then they should be able to understand what justice means for an individual. This construction of the ideal state is what I mostly remember the Republic being about from having read the book a decade ago, and I was surprised to be reminded that all of this is somewhat secondary and incidental, and that it’s the individual that Plato and Socrates are really trying to address. Plato’s Republic is a far cry from many modern and liberal ideas of how a state should be run. He wants elites to rule rather than having a democracy. (It was a democratic mob, after all, that would later put Socrates to death.) He wants fix the social order with a “noble lie,” by telling everyone that the gods chose them at birth to be bronze (working class), silver (warrior class), or gold (a philosopher king), and that it is their duty to accept this fate without trying to change it. He thinks that reading Homer teaches the youth bad morals, and wants to censor what they’re allowed to read. There are also some welcome surprises, though, from a modern viewpoint. For example, Plato turns out to be a feminist, reasoning that since women are equipped with the same sorts of minds as men, they should be able to take on the same roles in society. Surprisingly, considering the tendency of many of Plato's earlier dialogues to end at an impasse, we eventually get an answer to the question of what justice is--both for the Republic and for the man--around the middle of the dialogue: courage, moderation, and wisdom are its three components. Justice is to the soul what health is to the body. The latter part of the book focuses on the stratification of reality as Plato saw it. At the lowest level are images such as shadows and sculptures, which are just a reflection of something existing in the real world. At the next highest level are the objects that we see around us. For the most part they could be taken as really existing, but don’t necessarily comprise the ultimate reality. (This is something that we take for granted given modern science, but Socrates didn’t have modern science to explain phenomena like mirages in the desert or pencils appearing to bend in water, so what was real and what was not seems to have been treated with more skepticism back in his day.) At the highest level of reality is the realm of Platonic ideals (or “forms”). This is the realm of pure thought, where the philosopher can conceive of pure ideas such as Square or Justice, to which all similarly-named things in the physical world are merely approximations. This is all illustrated memorably in the allegory of the cave. Between providing theories about how the individual should live, how the state should be run, and the ultimate nature of reality, Plato's Republic gives the reader much to think about. In short, if you're only going to read one book of ancient Greek philosophy, then the Republic should probably be it.

Sprawling over many decades, the story is about the ruthless frontiersman and sugarcane planter Edgar Watson, who is followed by death as he moves from town to town along the Florida coast. This sort of character will be familiar to readers who have seen the film There Will Be Blood, or read the corresponding book by Upton Sinclair. In the preface, Mathiessen describes how he developed Watson’s character: he certainly wanted him to be bad, but not purely evil, since such characters aren’t interesting (cf. Voldemort). Thus, partly balancing Watson’s hair-trigger temper and selfishness are his willingness to work hard and provide for his family. Mathiessen incorporates a strong sense of place into his novel, which is set on the southwest Florida coast. Spanish moss, pileated woodpeckers, and mangrove trees all make occasional appearances. A well known conservationist, he makes many of his values clear in the story--not in an obvious, preachy sort of way, but instead through his tone or by portraying the racists and egret poachers as nasty characters for whom the reader has little sympathy. Stylistically, I thought some aspects were quite clever. The first of the three main sections has a different narrator for each chapter, with each member of the little island community contributing to the narrative, and from these somewhat blurry perspectives a multifaceted portrait of the enigmatic E.J. Watson begins to emerge. The second section follows Watson’s son years after his father’s death. (This middle part is not quite as strong as the others, as the author himself admits in the preface.) The reader’s curiosity continues to build until the third section, when Mathiessen finally gives us exactly what we want: the whole story told candidly from Watson’s own perspective. On the whole the story was compelling and richly deserving of the National Book Award that it won. Mathiessen created a complex and fascinating character who certainly leaves a mark on the reader.

This short book is based on the famous course of the same name that Sandel has taught for many years at Harvard. The main strength of the book--and no doubt of his lectures as well--is the way in which he begins with examples of moral dilemmas, and then from there attempts to extract general principles from the arguments that these examples lead to. Apparently this process is what is meant by the term “philosophical dialectic.” Sandel’s idea of political philosophy is that it is not an armchair pursuit, but fundamentally requires engagement between two or more parties, and ideally all the rest of society as well. Sandel's examples are chosen with sufficient care that they clearly illustrate the point that needs illustrating, sufficiently realistic to engage the reader’s interest, and sufficiently controversial that reasonable people might disagree about it and be able to have a productive argument. I think the last of these is especially crucial. A few of the many illustrative examples: * Is it permissible for starving sailors to cannibalize the cabin boy while stranded at sea? Utilitarian reasoning says yes, but Kant would claim that human dignity is paramount and cannot be accounted for by utilitarian calculations. * Is torture ever justified? * Is it alright for Romans to feed Christians to the lions if the public wants it? * Is it just for a country to hire soldiers rather than drafting them? * Is it fair to rent out one’s womb as a surrogate mother, or to sell one’s organs, particularly if the seller is poor and desperate for money? What about selling votes, or hiring substitutes for juries? * Is affirmative action fair? The overall scheme of the book is to compare three rival theories of justice. The first, utilitarianism, traces back to Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. The basic idea is that one ought to “maximize utility” by doing whatever leads to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. There are two main challenges to this philosophy: (i) it does not respect individual rights and freedom (see the examples above about the cabin boy and feeding Christians to the lions), and (ii) perhaps not everything can be thought of in the same units of “moral currency” (e.g. a foreclosed home vs. a human life). John Stuart Mill’s work was largely an attempt to reconcile Bentham’s ideas with liberty and individual freedom. Insofar as he succeeded, he was really denouncing core utilitarian ideas. The second main theory of justice is the modern liberal political philosophy, most strongly expressed in the writings of Kant and John Rawls. The goal of this school of thought has always been to develop a framework for law and civic life that is neutral with respect to differing ideas that people might have on what exactly constitutes the “good life.” Such an approach is clearly appealing in a pluralistic society encompassing people of multiple religious and cultural beliefs. In the end, however, Sandel becomes quite critical of the idea that such a program is possible or even desirable. I found the chapter on Kant to be the most challenging one in the book. Kant’s basic ideas, which were largely formulated as a response to Bentham’s utilitarianism, revolve around fundamental principles of human dignity and freedom. He claimed that utilitarian philosophy is flawed because it allows people to be used as means to achieve other people’s happiness, whereas they ought to be viewed instead as ends in themselves. According to Kant, an act that gives us pleasure is not free, since we are merely acting as slaves to our desires. The crux of Kant’s moral philosophy is the categorical imperative. By “categorical” he means “unconditional,” i.e. independent of the particular consequences of a given action. For example, a shopkeeper who treats his customers well only because he wants their continued business is acting according to a hypothetical (concerned with the end result of continued business) rather than categorical (doing the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do) imperative. In Kant’s famous formulation: “Act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” As for Rawls, the main principles at play are the "veil of ignorance" and the difference principle. The first of these says that we should live according to a hypothetical social contract to which rational agents would agree without knowing anything about the sort of life they would happen to be born into. The agents would be unlikely to privilege the rich, for example, since they wouldn’t know whether they would be born rich or not. According to the difference principle, the rewards that are reaped by the most talented individuals must be applied to making the disadvantaged (e.g. the bottom quintile) better off. According to Rawls, distributive justice is not a matter of moral dessert, but of providing for those who are least well off. The third main theory of justice comes from Aristotle. His conception of justice, as opposed to the utilitarian and liberal ideas discussed above, is fundamentally teleological, and so lacks the feeling of universality that’s present in the more modern theories. Suppose that we have a box of flutes. Whom should we give them to? The teleological answer to this question is that the flutes should go to the best flutists, since being played well is what the flutes are for. In a similar spirit, we might ask what people living together in a society are for, and Aristotle’s answer is--just as a flute’s purpose is to be played--that a society’s purpose is to cultivate virtue. This cultivation involves intellectual debate and being an engaged citizen and things like that. Of course, different people might have different ideas about what the best virtues to cultivate are, and herein lies the core difficulty of having a pluralistic society. Working through these differences is done through civic engagement and spirited discourse, but beyond this broad prescription neither Aristotle nor Sandel provides any easy answers. Sandel eventually makes it clear that his own views of justice align most closely with Aristotle’s. I hadn’t expected things to end up this way, thinking that the more modern liberal theories must be more sophisticated, scientific, and correct. In effect, he’s saying that justice cannot be viewed as neatly and scientifically as one might hope, and that it’s necessarily tied up with competing ideas of what constitutes virtue and the good life. This is in the same spirit as the idea presented in Sandel’s newer book, What Money Can’t Buy, as well as in the talks and interviews I’ve seen him give. According to Sandel, markets are not as value-neutral and scientific as the economists would have us believe, and properly coming to terms with their role in our society necessarily means addressing difficult questions about value and virtue. It’s a little disappointing that the author goes to all this trouble to convince the reader that moral behavior in the end depends on the particular details of what a society defines as virtue and what it chooses to value, and then hardly anything is said about what we should think of as virtuous or what we should value. There’s a sense in which it seems like the can has just been kicked down the road a bit. I would have liked very much to have read about a scientific method for determining in general terms what is the right thing to do. This is what Kant and Rawls tried to accomplish, but Sandel makes a compelling case that they were missing something. At least knowing that there may be no such general framework is quite valuable, even if it leaves the reader slightly unsatisfied. Perhaps there’s no shortcut to the sort of wisdom that I’d hoped to get from this book, and we can only hope that, like Tolstoy’s Pierre, we might one day find ourselves knowing what is the right thing to do after living life a bit more.

Edited by leading theoretical ecologist Simon Levin, this book provides the best single-volume introduction to the current state of the field that I could find. The book is helpfully organized by scale into seven parts, starting from the individual species and progressing to local and global ecosystems, and in the last few chapters explaining what humans have to do with all of it. Each part features a general introduction as well as a dozen or so five- to ten-page articles on various subtopics written by experts. Despite not having a strong background in ecology or even related fields like biology, I was able to understand and learn a great deal from what I read. The articles are self-contained enough that they don’t necessarily need to be read in order. Below I briefly summarize each of the book’s seven chapters. Chapter 1: Autoecology Autoecology is the study of single species interacting with their environment. A central organizing principle is the ecological niche. Questions of interest might include how species (animals mostly) choose their environments, and how they adapt to survive when resources are scarce (perhaps by migrating or having babies more or less often) or when their environment changes suddenly (which may have relevance for a world facing climate change). Generally ecologists are interested in shorter timescales than evolutionary biologists, although that line is somewhat blurry in many cases. Chapter 2: Population Ecology At its simplest level, population ecology considers the dynamics of a single population isolated with others, which goes back to Thomas Malthus’s realization that constant birth and death rates mean exponential population growth. Depending on factors such as the change in birth and death rates in an environment containing finite resources, population growth and decline may exhibit more interesting--or even chaotic--behaviors. Population ecology also involves the study of small numbers of populations interacting with each other. One can distinguish between competition (- -), in which each species is bad for the other; predation (+ -), which includes predator-prey and parasite dynamics; and cooperative (+ +) relationships (also known as “mutualism” or “facilitation") such as plants and pollinators, in which each species benefits the other. Chapter 3: Communities and Ecosystems Communities consist of many populations interacting with one another, with biodiversity acting as a major paradigm. An ecosystem is a broader concept, in which one keeps track not just of species but also the flows of energy, carbon, nutrients, etc. In either case, things here are more complicated than the pairwise interactions in population ecology, e.g. since two populations that don’t directly interact (e.g. lions and grass) can still affect one another through intermediate actors (e.g. if the lions eat all the zebras, there will be more grass). Species interactions may be top-down, bottom-up, or “web”-like. An example of an interesting question: how much biodiversity is required for an ecosystem to remain functioning? Another interesting question: How can one identify potential “tipping points,” which may have drastic consequences for populations in an ecosystem? Chapter 4: Landscapes and the Biosphere This chapter focuses on the role that landscapes--mainly climate and topography--play for the species that live in them. As humans have altered most of the world’s natural landscapes, we are of course part of the story. Chapter 5: Conservation Biology This chapter has to do with questions about species extinction and survival, with heavy emphasis on the role that humans play in both. Relevant questions: Will a species survive? How would its extinction affect other species? How do we coordinate conservation efforts? The theoretical framework for analyzing these questions is known as population viability analysis. The role of global warming in this context has received much attention in recent years. The need for better understanding of and stronger conservation efforts for marine ecosystems is emphasized. Ocean acidification, catalyzed by global warming, has potentially dire consequences, and our efforts to protect aquatic species is lagging behind our protection of terrestrial ones by at least a century. Chapters 6 and 7: Ecosystem Services and Managing the Biosphere These last two chapters deal with questions about how humans can get the most out of the biosphere in a sustainable way. From reading the introductions, they feel somewhat less sciency than the preceding chapters, with much of it seeming to border on policy and economics. This certainly isn’t a bad thing, but comments on these chapters are limited since such topics aren’t so much this reviewer’s cup of tea. In short, this book is certainly the best introduction that I could find to the current state of ecology as a discipline. In addition to being useful to outsiders like me, I imagine that the book would also be helpful for students in the field or possibly even for researchers in related fields who want to know more about what their colleagues are up to.

The basic argument of the book is that the media, which has become ever more centralized and corporatized in recent decades, tends to show a consistent bias toward reporting the news in a way that is favorable to those in power, including government institutions and corporations. In the book's preface, the authors make the important point that their analysis differs from a conspiracy theory in that, rather than positing some powerful puppet master who is secretly pulling all of the strings, their "propaganda model" describes the subtle pressures felt by those reporting the news that lead to a widespread understanding about what is acceptable to be presented as news and what isn't. This leads to a large amount of self-censorship of which most of those involved probably aren't even aware. In this sense, the propaganda model is more like a market analysis than a conspiracy theory. Just as important as censorship of the news content is the way that the framework for debate is presented in a way that is congenial to those in positions of power, although they very often don't have to demand this explicitly. An example of such a framework is the way in which the media constantly frames all political stories as a battle between Democrats and Republicans, leaving alternative narratives unexamined. For example, the possibility of decreasing military spending is never discussed, although polls show consistent and widespread public support for this. Rather, the two sides that are presented are the Republicans' plan for huge increases versus the Democrats' plan for moderate increases. The propaganda model comprises five key components, which act as successive filters through which the news must pass: (i) Size, ownership, and profit orientation of mass media. The US media has become ever more centralized in recent decades, with a handful of huge corporations and very wealthy individuals making up the majority of it. Thus it is no surprise that corporate interests tend to be well represented by the media. In some cases this can lead to flagrant conflicts of interest. For example, General Electric, which owns NBC, is involved in weapons production and obviously might prefer the news on this topic to be reported in a certain way. (ii) Dependence on advertising revenue. This tends to put news outlets oriented towards a working-class audience at a disadvantage, since advertisers are less willing to pay for the privilege of advertising to such "lower quality" audiences that don't have much buying power. Further, news outlets have a strong incentive not to upset their advertisers. Reading this chapter led me to reflect on the large number of television advertisements by oil and gas companies that one sees these days, in which the companies boast about how virtuous and necessary they are, working together to create American jobs and build a better future. One can imagine how the relationship between Exxon and CNN might sour if the latter were to air an investigative documentary critical of fracking, for example. (iii) The reliance of media on government, big business, and "experts" for news. It's much easier for media to get their news by going to a weekly press conference at the White House than it is to get it by going out into the world and doing investigative journalism. This sort of tendency creates a cozy relationship between the media and those in power. As Herman and Chomsky put it, "It's very difficult to call authorities on whom one depends for news liars, even if they tell whoppers." (iv) "Flak" as a means of influencing content. The term "flak" refers to any negative responses that the media receives from parties that are unhappy about the way that the news has been reported. While flak can come from both ordinary individuals and large, established organizations, the latter are generally in a better position to produce flak that will actually lead to a media response. Important sources of flak are think tanks, corporations, and the government, all of which can seek to ensure that the media is strongly rebuffed for not being sufficiently pro-business, etc. (v) Anticommunism as an overarching ideology. Obviously this was more relevant when the book was written in 1988. It's tempting to apply the same framework to today's media, but with "communism" replaced by "terrorism," the arch nemesis of all Very Serious People in the media and government today. The analogy isn't quite perfect, though, since anticommunism as a state religion could be used naturally to push a pro-corporate agenda, which lies at the heart of the propaganda model, in a way that antiterrorism can't. (There are some obvious exceptions, of course, in the case of firms like Halliburton, for whom the War on Terror has been quite lucrative.) On the whole I found this book to be a very enlightening read. Despite the fact that many of the examples are a bit dated, I would certainly recommend this book to anyone looking for a critical perspective on mass media today.