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Summer Books

It’s almost summertime, the time of year when you can hopefully find some time to lounge at the beach or the pool and crack open a book. Here at the Planet Money newsletter, we have a little tradition this time of year. We ask folks at Planet Money, The Indicator, and the NPR Business Desk to offer some book recommendations. So here you go:

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Jess Jiang recommends An Immense World by Ed Yong. “It’s fantastic in making me think about how other creatures sense their worlds, which seems far from economics. But when I was first studying economics, I remember feeling like I was learning a new way to see and understand the world. And that’s the same feeling I get reading Yong’s book. As an example, the first chapter is a beautiful description of how different animals have different ‘umwelts’ — the small sliver of the world that their senses allow them to perceive.”

Scott Horsely recommends Beyond Measure by James Vincent. “This is the most interesting history of the metric system I've ever read, by a mile.”

Stacey Vanek Smith recommends Limitless by Jeanna Smialek. “Limitless is a must read. Jeanna Smialek looks at the history of the Federal Reserve and how we have gotten to this point in history, where the Fed has ended up with the powers that it has. It’s been so helpful to me and has really helped me understand some of the recent events at the Federal Reserve.”

Pallavi Gogoi recommends Queer Career: Sexuality And Work In Modern America, which is by Princeton University historian Margot Canaday (who also happens to be one of her friends). “The book was released earlier this year, and is a fascinating historical examination of how gay workers navigated life in the office and at other jobs when the United States government barred them from employment. Back then, if you were gay, you couldn’t work in any government job or private company with a government contract. One of the premier scholars in this area, Margot Canaday, writes about the labor regime that was built upon government exclusion, showing how an early version of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ pervaded the corridors of government and corporate power as recently as a few decades ago, even as thousands of gay and lesbian civil servants in the 1950s were purged from the federal government. In this environment, fear of job loss always hung in the air, creating a kind of occupational segregation that kept gay and lesbian workers in their place, hemmed in and unlikely to advance up the ladder. Canaday shows how employers were keen to exploit this vulnerable class of workers, but also provides a fascinating account of the opening of the workplace to LGBT people that eventually occurred.”

Wailin Wong recommends Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by RF Kuang. “A fantasy epic that is brimming with real-life economic history about British colonialism and the Opium Wars. I loved the novel so much I couldn't even read anything else for a month because I was so upset not to be reading Babel anymore! (Bonus shout-out: I picked up this book after it was recommended on Pop Culture Happy Hour.)”

Greg Rosalsky recommends The High Sierra: A Love Story by Kim Stanley Robinson. “Even as a long-time lover of the Sierra Nevada mountains, I found this book to be really insightful. I particularly enjoyed Robinson’s concept of “psychogeology,” the idea that particular environments shape our emotions and behaviors. For example, the Alps might affect our psychology differently than the Sierras. It had me thinking about the sort of behavioral economics of that. How living in certain places might shape our economic choices or habits.”

David Folkenflik recommends American Midnight by Adam Hochschild. “This book is about World War I in the United States, and the quashing of domestic dissent. I hadn’t realized how much of that suppression of democratic debate originated with hostility to organized labor. It’s a reminder the political is often economic, and vice versa.”

Nick Fountain recommends Flawless by Elise Hu (disclosure: Elise is a NPR host and Nick’s friend). “Elise opened NPR’s South Korea bureau back in the day, and her book is about the Korean beauty industry. It’s enormous ($10b/year!), and the book traces its rise, how the government supported it along the way, and how it’s taken over the culture (think: reality shows about plastic surgery makeovers).”

Sam Yellowhorse Kesler recommends Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. “If you’re looking for some complementary science fiction to our three-part AI series, I might recommend something a bit more speculative, such as this novel from Nobel Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro. Klara is an Artificial Friend, a child-like AI with a powerful sense for observation and replication, powered by the sun. Her purpose, at the outset, is to be a friend to her human child companion, a role which lands somewhere for Klara between her job and her destiny. This novel presents a sometimes-beautiful, sometimes-bleak, future for what AI might look like, but as told through the perspective of the optimistic Klara, leaves the reader wondering less about humanity’s future, and more about the outcome of the products we create who take on sentience.”

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