Summer reading: History and science

The signs are, depressingly, that institutions and governments have not learnt the lessons laid out in The Big Short.

Further compelling recent history comes from Bob Woodward, the Washington Post journalist, one half of the team that uncovered the Watergate scandal. In Obama’s Wars: The Inside Story (Simon & Schuster, £8.99 £8.54), Woodward uses impeccable sources to tell the story of the President’s decision to ramp up the war in Afghanistan in 2009 yet also to insist on a withdrawal of US Forces beginning later this summer.

The President appears to be a reluctant warrior, presented with no good choices. He could pull back substantially, as doves such as the Vice-President, Joe Biden, would have preferred, but see Afghanistan consumed by civil war. Or he could escalate the war in the hope of victory but commit more American Forces to an apparently endless conflict. Somehow the President charts a middle way. We will soon see if it is successful. But Woodward’s real triumph is to show how American government works and how an inexperienced commander-in-chief found the strength to lead.

Steven Levy, in In the Plex (Simon & Schuster, £18.99 £17.09), charts the history of Google, the world’s most visited website, notably its rocky relationship with China’s censors that culminated in the search engine quitting the country in 2009.

Levy, a technology writer, shows how Google — young, idealistic and sincere — did not foresee how a strong and suspicious regime would block its progress. But Google added to its problems, its team in China rife with unresolved issues around a famous Chinese programmer who ran the Beijing office. In the Plex shows how Google’s visionary leaders had to grow up, discovering that the world is more resistant to change than they had hoped.

Some argue that Chinese repression comes with a level of stability and care for its people. The same cannot be argued for North Korea, as detailed by Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea (Granta, £8.99 £7.99), which uses the tales of six North Koreans to paint a vivid picture of life in the Hermit Kingdom. It deserves the awards that it has been winning.

Fun can be had through Operation Mincemeat (Bloomsbury, £7.99 £6) by Ben Macintyre. The Times columnist unveils the conspiracy by which British spies misled Hitler over where the Allies were launching their counter-offensive, thus changing the course of the war. Dead men tell tales, master spies are double-crossed and the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Ian Fleming couldn’t have scripted a better plot.

Jonathan Safran Foer made his mark through critically acclaimed novels. Now he delves into nonfiction with Eating Animals (Penguin, £9.99 £8.99), a polemic against consuming flesh. The young Foer began thinking about the ethics of eating meat when a babysitter refused to eat chicken, saying: “I don’t want to hurt anything.” His on-off vegetarianism was cemented after the birth of his first child, leading him to investigate the meat industry and inspiring this book. Foer lays out the hypocrisies of meat-eating (why chicken and not dog?) with conviction. Eating Animals didn’t stop me being a carnivore, but I do feel more guilty about it.

Meanwhile, Foer’s brother, Joshua, has also published an excellent book. Moonwalking with Einstein - scroll to the bottom for a Q&A with the author - (Allen Lane, £14.99 £11.99) is the younger Foer’s account of memory contests — in which, for example, competitors memorise strings of numbers that they hear only once. Foer’s recall was poor at the start: after practice and training he became the 2006 USA Memory Champion. It’s a fun ride.

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Fourth Estate, £25 £20) by Siddhartha Mukherjee is a brilliant work of history, tracking cancer from its possible beginnings to a disease that has conquered the world.

Another book for misery-guts is Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America & The World (Granta, £8.99 £8.54) by Barbara Ehrenreich. This is a personal story, beginning when Ehrenreich was given a diagnosis of cancer. She was told by many that, with willpower and positivity, she could overcome her illness. Tosh, she says, arguing that the cult of positive thinking has pernicious effects — dragging us into unwinnable wars, vain efforts to improve ourselves and the belief that we can affect outcomes that are far beyond our control.

You won the US Memory Championships and your book became a bestseller. In what other ways has improving your memory changed your life?

I learnt how to memorise poetry, and random numbers, and even a shuffled pack of playing cards. But there aren’t many opportunities to use those skills in everyday life. The techniques that I’ve found most useful are for remembering people’s names and for speaking without notes. But then, I haven’t tried to take my skills to Vegas yet.

Retro read: Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis

If The Big Short is the must-read account about Wall Street in the past decade, Michael Lewis’s debut book, Liar’s Poker, is an apt prequel. It is a funny and savage memoir of Lewis’s time as an analyst at Solomon Brothers in the 1980s boom years, and reveals the macho, crazy culture of trading floors in New York and London. Presciently, he details how mortgage-backed securities were created at Solomon’s, and how dangerous they could be for the economy.

Hodder, £8.99 (£8.54)

Behind the book: Joshua Foer on Moonwalking with Einstein

Are there any downsides?

My wife gets extra mad when I leave the toilet seat up.

Have you found yourself better able to remember the past?

Not really, but some of the tricks I learnt will hopefully help to make the future more memorable.

What’s your earliest memory?

I was about 3 or 4 years old. I was looking at a science picture book called The Sun, Our Nearest Star.

Where are you going on holiday and what will you be reading?

I took my summer holiday early this year; my first visit to Rome. I didn’t read while I was there, but before I left I tore through Constantine’s Sword, by James Carroll and Luigi Barzini’s The Italians.