October 1, 2021
Ranging from when New York City was inhabited by the Lenape people to the present day, from grubby brothels to chic hotels, Bird tells the story of New York by focusing on A Block in Time that's bounded east-west by Sixth and Seventh avenues and north-south by 23rd and 24th streets and is overlooked by the famous Flatiron Building (45,000-copy first printing). Chief editor for Le Monde diplomatique, Chollet argues In Defense of Witches, whom she sees as symbolic of female resistance to male oppression throughout history, with the women most likely to be perceived as witches--independent-minded, childless, or older--still being outcast today (75,000-copy first printing). Having reported from Hong Kong as well as South East Asia, journalist England offers Fortune's Bazaar, the story of kaleidoscopic Hong Kong through the diverse peoples who have made the city what it is today (75,000-copy first printing). A former senior editor at The New Yorker and author of the multi-best-booked Ike and Dick, Frank returns with a reassessment of our 33rd president in The Trials of Harry S. Truman. Influential Brown economist Galor, whose unified growth theory focuses on economic growth throughout human history, tracks The Journey of Humanity to show that the last two centuries represent a new phase differentiated from the past by generally better living conditions but also a radically increased gap between the rich and the rest. Following A Thousand Ships, which was short-listed for Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction and a best seller in the United States, Haynes's Pandora's Jar belongs to a growing number of titles that put the female characters of Greek mythology front and center as less passive or secondary than they've been regarded (25,000-copy hardcover and 30,000-copy paperback first printing). In Against All Odds, popular historian Kershaw tells the story of four soldiers in the same regiment--Capt. Maurice "Footsie" Britt, West Point dropout Michael Daly, soon-to be Hollywood legend Audie Murphy, and Capt. Keith Ware, eventually the most senior US general to die in Vietnam--who became the four most decorated U.S. soldiers of World War II. After World War II, six women were given the daunting task of programming the world's first general-purpose, all-electronic computer, called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) and meant to calculate a single ballistic trajectory in 20 seconds rather than 40 hours by hand; internet law and policy specialist Kleiman interviewed four of the women over two decades, eventually writing Proving Ground and producing the award-winning documentary The Computers (50,000-copy first printing). From former Wall Street Journal reporter and New York Times best-selling author Lowenstein (e.g., When Hubris Failed), Ways and Means shows how President Abraham Lincoln and his administration parlayed efforts to fund the Civil War into creating a more centralized government. New York Times best-selling author Rappaport (Caught in the Revolution) shows what happened After the Romanovs to the aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals who fled the Russian Revolution for Paris (60,000-copy first printing).
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January 24, 2022
The deep forces underlying human advancement are limned in this probing study of economic development. Brown University economist Galor (Discrete Dynamical Systems) proposes a “unified growth theory” to explain how countries escaped from an age-old Malthusian cycle, in which fitful technological advancements promoted higher birth rates and then overpopulation and a retreat in living standards to dire poverty, to the modern regime of rapid, permanent improvements in technology, wealth, and health. He argues that the sluggish premodern growth of population and technology sparked a “phase transition” to the Industrial Revolution, creating a demand for skilled labor that led parents to have fewer children and spend more on their education, which in turn stimulated more innovation and growth in a virtuous circle. Exploring the roots of present-day economic inequalities between countries, Galor chalks them up to better or worse political institutions and environmental conditions, as well as the presence of “future-oriented mindsets” of hard work and thrift, and a society’s level (moderate, ideally) of ethnic diversity. In lucid, accessible prose, Galor ingeniously traces obscure influences over centuries, contending, for instance, that areas close to Martin Luther’s headquarters of Wittenberg, Germany, have higher modern-day educational attainment because of the early Protestant emphasis on Bible-reading. This engrossing history reveals that subtle causes can have astounding effects. Agent: Jennifer Joel, ICM Partners.
February 1, 2022
Insights into two important questions: Why has the world suddenly become so wealthy, and why is there vast inequality between nations? In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote that when societies produced a food surplus, the rise in living standards was always temporary because the population also rose and consumed it, so living conditions reverted to the subsistence level. However, soon after his death, living standards rose steadily. Since then, life expectancy more than doubled, birth rates plummeted, and per capita income skyrocketed with no end in sight. Traditional scholarship gives the Industrial Revolution credit, but Brown University professor Galor argues persuasively that the move away from Malthusian theory had less to do with the steam engine than "human capital." During most of history, laborers put their children to work and earned extra income, which encouraged them to have more children. Consequently, populations rose. By the 19th century, jobs often required workers who could read and calculate. Since so many people were uneducated ("literacy rates over most of human existence were insignificant"), some businesses joined the growing movement for free, compulsory, universal education. Children became human capital that increased in value as they became skilled at higher-paying jobs. With so much invested in each schoolchild, who brought in no income, parents had fewer children. When school attendance rises, fertility drops, and this is happening around the world, even in developing nations. Poverty is declining, and prosperity is increasing to the point where environmental degradation is a persistent problem. Regarding his second theme, Galor explores inequality without delivering a firm explanation of why some societies prosper. That the quarrelsome, fragmented nations of Europe led the way, while other empires stagnated, has produced a sizable amount of scholarship, to which Galor makes a modest contribution. Diversity has long been praised as a promoter of growth, profit, and creativity. The author astutely examines how it can also lead to political instability and social conflict, showing how multicultural societies that don't work diligently to promote coexistence suffer for it. Big ideas worth attention.
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March 11, 2022
In 1798, British economist Thomas Malthus proposed a strikingly pessimistic theory about social progress: humanity, he argued, would never be able to rise above mere subsistence for long because for every advancement in production, the resulting population growth would soon outpace available resources, resulting in population decline and a return to square one. But, as economist Galor (Brown Univ.) notes in his sweeping new history of wealth, production, and inequality, Malthus was right about the past and dead wrong about the future. Broadly, Galor sets out to answer why, after thousands of years, humanity was in fact finally able to escape the "poverty trap." More importantly, he seeks to understand why some nations and people have been able to thrive and produce monumental gains in material wealth while many others are little better off than they were 200 or 2,000 years ago. While engaging, the author's compression of his decades of anthropological, sociological, and economic research into a slim volume may leave some readers wanting more context. VERDICT Readers of Big Science and Big History will like this wide-angle look at one of humanity's most persistent and dangerous problems.--Colin Chappell
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