At the end of another tumultuous year, Project Syndicate commentators once again recommend books that stood out from the crowd. Striking an impressive balance across genres, this year's selection features old but newly relevant gems, political and intellectual history, topical literary fiction, and forward-looking policy advocacy. The breadth of topics, disciplines, and perspectives will, in one way or another, help readers make sense of the present - or perhaps just gain a better understanding of why its passing will not be widely mourned.

Barak Barfi

Nicholas Morton, The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East, Basic Books, 2022.

Pundits tend to focus on the Crusades as the defining development in medieval Islamic history. But eleventh-century Muslims were more consumed with internecine conflict - the still-salient Sunni-Shia divide - than with barbarian European invaders. And when it came to relations with outsiders, the most important event, post-Muhammad, was the thirteenth-century Mongol invasion. As historian Nicholas Morton of Nottingham Trent University explains, it was these invaders who shattered the various principalities that constituted Islamic civilization, ushering in five centuries of inertia that did not end until Napoleon landed on Egypt's shores in 1798.

Mercedes D'alessandro

Juan Carlos Torre, Diario de una Temporada en el Quinto Piso (Diary of a Term on the Fifth Floor), Edhasa, 2021.

To be an economist is not the same as researching or writing about the economy. In 1983, Juan Carlos Torre, a sociologist, joined the team of economic advisers selected by Raúl Alfonsín, Argentina's first democratically elected president after the fall of its military dictatorship. Then, in 2020, he found time during the pandemic lockdown to transcribe the audio recordings, letters, and diary entries from his time at the Ministry of Economy. The result is a first-person real-time narration of the effort to rebuild the country's economy and its democratic institutions simultaneously.

Torre describes himself as an optimist without illusions. After following him through all the palace intrigue, failed anti-inflation programs, and political debates that he describes, the reader is left feeling like one, too. I recommend this book to anyone seeking an unfiltered glimpse into the workings of real-world economics and economic policymaking.

Jason Furman

Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It, Brookings Institution Press, 2022.

This is a splendid combination of economics, sociology, psychology, and biology that calls attention to some large problems facing boys and men, including growing educational gaps, declining employment, and increasingly uncertain social roles. A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Richard V. Reeves both explains the problems he diagnoses and suggests policies to help address them.

Antara Haldar

Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man, Riverhead Books, 2022.

In Mohsin Hamid's new novel, a white man wakes up to find that he has turned a "deep and undeniable brown." It is a Kafkaesque premise that perfectly captures the stranger-than-fiction surrealism of our current moment. Hamid has swapped the lyrical and libidinal prose of Moth Smoke (2000), and the overt engagement with identity of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), for a more abstract and austere style. In doing so, he offers a conscious exploration of the novel as a mode of social engagement, transferring the burden of imagining an alternate, post-racial reality to the reader.

But The Last White Man is also a paradigmatic pandemic set piece, evoking all the tensions of the summer of 2020. It depicts a society seized by an eerie, inexplicable (and deliberately unexplained) biological event that refuses to be contained until it has affected the entire population. Fear and violence force people into retreat, and fundamental change - like the renegotiation of race relations - occurs by circumstance rather than by choice. Yet with its notable absence of raw drama, the novel reminds us that the re-equilibration after an upheaval is often poignantly mundane. Ultimately, our characters are denied the operatic arcs that poetic justice would seem to demand.

Harold James

Perry Mehrling, Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System, Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Boston University economist Perry Mehrling's touching and highly readable biography of Charles Kindleberger, the great twentieth-century American economic historian, is a fascinating assessment of both the past and future of the international monetary system. It makes the interesting distinction between dominance, which Kindleberger believed to be unsustainable, and leadership, which the world needed (and still needs). The book is also refreshingly skeptical about the vanity of grand plans for monetary reform. As Kindleberger himself professed: "I am a wobbly - not firm - believer in proceeding as the way lies open, muddling through unwritten constitutions."

Alison l. Lacroix

Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, Oxford University Press, 1832.

Frances Trollope was the mother of the famous nineteenth-century English novelist Anthony Trollope, but she first won her own fame with this combination travelogue, political commentary, and sociocultural critique based on her travels in the United States between 1827 and 1831. The book is a lively read, combining tart observations on the uncouth manners of congressmen ("the spitting was incessant"), odes to the forests around New Orleans ("sublime and poetical"), and clear-eyed assessments of antebellum hypocrisy ("They inveigh against the governments of Europe ... and then look at them at home; you will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves").

A dispatch from a distant era of polarization, conflict, and extreme rhetoric, Trollope's book manages to sound familiar, even current, offering readers insight into, and perspective on, our own political and social ructions.

Noëlle Lenoir

Pierre-André Taguieff, Pourquoi déconstruire? Origines Philosophiques et Avatars Politiques de la French Theory (Why Deconstruct? Philosophical Origins and Political Avatars of French Theory), H et O, 2022.

This recent book by French sociologist-historian Pierre-André Taguieff deserves to be translated into English. At a time when "woke" culture is ascendant among university students, especially on American campuses, understanding the philosophical origins of "deconstruction" has become an urgent matter. This magic word is brandished by all those who want to reduce the West to an enterprise that represents nothing other than racism, white privilege, slavery, patriarchy, and colonial imperialism. As the basis of a punitive neo-puritan movement, woke ideology has become one of the biggest challenges for defenders of freedom of thought and expression. Those who believe that it is still possible to live together harmoniously must oppose it, and this book can help them do it.

Carlos Lopes

Edgar Morin, The Challenge of Complexity, Oxford University Press, 2022.

An archetypical thinker who turned 100 in 2021, Edgar Morin is still as active as ever, with two new books (in French) that offer fresh ideas to help us confront the many challenges we face today. In this collection of essays spanning 60 years of his work, Morin's genius and originality shine through clearly. Though he has lived through the Holocaust, the May 1968 social contestation, the wave independence movements across the world, and the age of hyper-globalization, he still writes with an astonishing degree of calmness and hope, and his prose is all the more rewarding for it.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak

Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2022.

This book about money and finance offered a welcome and instructive change from my usual reading in Asian geopolitics. A financial journalist and historian by training, Edward Chancellor provides a sweeping account of how interest - as the time-value of money - has been conceived and dealt with over millennia. Focusing on the last two decades of ultra-low interest rates, he shows how rising inequality and polarization came to underpin the Arab Spring, the resurgence of populism, and mass protests around the world. Central to his narrative is the fact that wealthy elites and big corporations could tap oceans of risk-free capital at the expense of ordinary people's savings.

This intoxicating period of easy money was always likely to be followed by hard times. Looking ahead, one partial solution - admittedly a long shot - may be to reintroduce a gold standard of sorts, through well-managed central bank digital currencies. But whatever happens, with books like Chancellor's, at least we have a better understanding of the political mess we are in.

Nancy Qian

Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943, University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

In describing the experiences of nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants to the United States, historian Erika Lee shows how the confluence of misguided economic fears, special-interest politics, and xenophobia led to the adoption in 1882 of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned new immigration of Chinese laborers and barred Chinese immigrants who were already in the US from becoming citizens. This was the first US legislation banning an entire group based on its country of origin, and it was followed by similar prohibitions targeting other Asian countries. The limits on immigration would remain in force until 1965, when the National Origins Formula was abolished.

Lee's historical narrative reminds readers of just how long and complex the relationship between China and America has been. And though the book is almost 20 years old, it helps us see today's debates about immigration, race, and national security as part of a long-running struggle in which ideology and economic realities often collide head-on.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

Hanya Yanagihara, To Paradise, Doubleday, 2022.

Set sequentially in 1893, 1993, and 2093, Hanya Yanagihara's novel imagines a different ending to the Civil War and explores a future in which repeated pandemics slowly render democracy impossible. She thus shows us what could have been, and what could still be. With a gift for creating characters who become friends and companions to the reader, Yanagihara walks us through what it actually feels like to live under the pall of constant heat and disease. To Paradise drives home what our current choices mean for our possible futures, and it does so more vividly than a truckload of policy briefs and scientific reports ever could.

Yanis Varoufakis

Brett Scott, Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for our Wallets, Bodley Head, 2022.

If people could see clearly how their money is created, they would rebel - especially now that it is digitized. Monetary anthropologist Brett Scott's highly readable and topical Cloudmoney is, in this sense, a wonderfully revolutionary text. I may not agree with his touching affinity for paper money - which I do not believe offers solutions for the twenty-first century - but his is an argument and an analysis that will help us understand the toxic nature of contemporary money and steer us toward progressive solutions.

Gernot Wagner

Bill McKibben, The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened, Henry Holt, 2022.

This is the most eye-opening climate book I've read in a long time. A longtime journalist and activist, Bill McKibben has written his fair share of books covering climate change and other environmental issues directly. But this one goes further than any of his previous titles in explaining exactly why we - both America and, by extension, the world - are where we are. As is usually the case, the answer does not lie with any single development. There is no unifying theory of everything. Instead, a series of small events - many of which could have turned out differently - led us down the road to monster SUVs, suburban sprawl, and an information environment that has been saturated with "fake news" and cynical opposition to climate action.

Xiao Qiang

Josh Chin and Liza Lin, Surveillance State: Inside China's Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control, St. Martin's Press, 2022.

This book, by two China correspondents for The Wall Street Journal, offers a vivid and terrifying account of how the Communist Party of China under General Secretary Xi Jinping has harnessed new technologies to achieve an unprecedented level of social control. The authors have conducted a groundbreaking investigation into the brutal and extreme application of these surveillance technologies against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, shedding much-needed light on the symbiotic relationship between high-tech companies and the Chinese government. When dictatorship is intertwined with big data and artificial intelligence, the result is an "all-seeing" surveillance state. And now, China is exporting its surveillance technologies to other countries around the world, implying a profound threat to freedom and democracy in this century.

Angela Huyue Zhang

Lulu Yilun Chen, Influence Empire: The Story of Tencent and China's Tech Ambition, Hodder and Stoughton, 2022.

Everyone who is interested in the Chinese tech sector should read journalist Lulu Yilun Chen's new book tracing Tencent's rise. The company, China's largest internet giant, now has a massive portfolio of internet firms across a wide range of sectors, including social media, e-commerce, ride-hailing, gaming, and tutoring. But the future of Chinese Big Tech is very much in question, making the many fascinating stories in Chen's book essential reading for China watchers.

From Project Syndicate