芝加哥大学法学院有一个传统，每年底，请法学院全体成员推荐他们认为值得读的好书。近日芝大法学院在官方网站上公布了2020年版的书单。每位推荐者都认真写下了他们的推荐理由。疫情之年，法学院教授所推荐图书的视野和问题意识，也从一个侧面反映了芝大为什么能够成为世界一流大学，为什么能有百位师生和校友是诺贝尔奖得主。推荐的书共有45本，其中，《末日松茸：资本主义废墟上的生活可能》《生活与命运》《骄傲之塔：战前世界的肖像》《卡瓦利与克雷的神奇冒险》等都有中文版。

The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society

Binyamin Appelbaum

An interesting history about the rise of economics and how it transformed the government and how we think about our everyday relationships. The book traces the role of economists in prompting major policy changes such as ending military conscription, deregulating airlines and lowering taxes. It also provides an important critique of the adverse impact of economics on social and economic inequality.

Pelosi

Molly Ball

As the proud owner of a “Pelosi for President 2019” T-shirt who was sorry not to see that hope for successful impeachments come true, and as a feminist scholar interested in women’s leadership, I turned to this biography with interest. Others might also be interested in an account of how a still powerful and relevant politician came into her own (the story of the book’s first half) and to revisit events of the Obama and Trump’s presidency from a different central actor’s perspective, as the book’s second half does.

Days Without End

Sebastian Barry

A novel of many, many things, by one of my favorite authors, the prizewinning Irish writer Barry. It's about the West, immigration, the Irish Famine, a love affair between two men, the Civil War, the American Indian Wars, violence, justice, and family. It also offers moments of humor, darkness, and intense emotion, filtered through the voice of an unforgettable narrator.

The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and Why They Matter

Mark Bekoff

For a book in progress on animal law, I have been reading a lot of the wonderful scholarship animal scientists have been producing about animal cognition and emotions. I will recommend a group of books, not just one. Momma's Last Hug, the most recent book by the great primatologist Frans De Waal, is a moving study of animal emotions; another older book on that topic, covering many more species, is Mark Bekoff's The Emotional Lives of Animals. Two books by philosophers who are also experts in a particular species are Thomas White's In Defense of Dolphins and Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Finally, an amazing combination of cutting-edge research and argument is Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. This is a large literature, and there is a lot more, but these books will start anyone who cares about wild animals on a fascinating journey.

The Vanishing Half

Brit Bennett

This is a brilliant novel about race, gender, passing, and twinship. Some characters pass into their true selves, some pass into a lie, and some live double lives. The novel centers around Stella and Desiree, identical twins who take very different paths. While one twin finds some measure of freedom by passing as white, the other remains stuck in a life she didn’t choose; not-passing creates its own prison. The theme of twinship extends well beyond the duo at the novel’s center. Desiree and Stella each have one daughter—a next-generation pair linked by their mothers’ secrets. In fact, nearly every character has a twin or counterpart. One white man is a senseless annihilator; another is a savior (if a myopic and misogynist one). Many characters are internally twinned, passing between two selves—the chemistry teacher who’s a drag queen by night, the girl who becomes a boyfriend, the devoted but murderous husband. Desiree’s daughter Jude is the pillar at the center holding everything together—she is innately incapable of passing, which brings both pain and fulfillment. This beautiful book reminds us how much courage it takes simply to be yourself.

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

David W. Blight

My holiday treat is Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight. This is the most comprehensive account of Douglass’s complicated life and thought, benefitting from newly discovered materials and from Blight’s mastery of the era. (His story of how North and South re-argued the cause and import of the Civil War over the generations in Race and Reunion: the Civil War in American Memory, is definitive.) Blight untangles Douglass’s complicated private life with clarity and care. Not everyone will find the Douglass they want, and that is part of the author’s point. I will be happy to read anything Professor Blight writes.

Penric's Demon

Lois McMaster Bujold

The first in a new series of nine novellas by one of the best living fantasy authors. The main character is possessed by a demon and uses his newfound powers to solve mysteries, heal the sick, and revolutionize the system of scholarly translation. Each story is funny and satisfying on its own, and taken together they build an interesting and theologically complex world.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon

If you ever thought about reading this winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but never got around to it, which describes me until recently, I strongly recommend this quirky and moving novel.

Grant

Ron Chernow

1,100 pages about General and President Ulyssess S. Grant, this book was surprisingly gripping despite its length. Part military history, part West Wing intrigue, part meditation on the process of reconciliation and reconstruction, the book is also full of rich legal nuggets and cameo appearances by everybody from Mark Twain to George Custer. The biggest puzzle about Grant is how somebody who was so mediocre at almost everything in his life turned out to be such a historically great general. But he did.

How Constitutional Rights Matter

Adam Chilton & Mila Versteeg

Events of recent decades challenge even the modest ardent believer in the Whiggish historiography of democracy’s inevitable expansion. Counterexamples of democratic backsliding in recent years raise complex questions about when rights are in jeopardy, whether some rights are more at risk than others, and whether constitutions and legal regimes can prevent their loss. Chilton and Versteeg propose a provocative theory about when constitutional rights matter and persuasively test it against empirical evidence. A comprehensive and path-breaking contribution.

At Bertram's Hotel

Agatha Christie

Murder and intrigue in a civilized and sedate (suspiciously sedate?) hotel in London's Mayfair, ca. 1965. Miss Marple investigates; tea and cakes are consumed; zippy cars are driven; and the passage of time is gently compassed. Various Honorables, Anglican canons, and Scotland Yard inspectors make appearances.

White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America's Racist History

Jane Dailey

This is a bit awkward because this book was just published on November 17 by my wife, Jane Dailey, a professor in the University's History Department. But my enthusiasm for this book is quite real. It explores the white fear of interracial sex as a central cause of racial segregation and, of course, of laws banning interracial marriage. It is a truly fascinating and terrific read. To quote Drew Gilpin Faust, the former President of Harvard University: "This indispensable narrative powerfully illuminates how anxieties about 'miscegenation' and interracial marriage shaped and sustained white supremacy for four centuries. Every American should read this book." And, I might add, especially lawyers!

Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration

Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear

This book was written by the New York Times reporters covering the Trump administration’s immigration policies. It provides a behind the scenes account of a large number of major policy changes, like the travel ban, the drastic cut in refugee quotas, and the family separation policy. What sets Border Wars apart from many other Trump era books is that the focus is on the policy instead of on anecdotes about Trump behaving badly (although there are some of those too). The book provides a detailed account of the radical changes to immigration policy that a small group of administration insiders were able to push through without any changes to existing legislation.

Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

Frans De Waal

For a book in progress on animal law, I have been reading a lot of the wonderful scholarship animal scientists have been producing about animal cognition and emotions. I will recommend a group of books, not just one. Momma's Last Hug, the most recent book by the great primatologist Frans De Waal, is a moving study of animal emotions; another older book on that topic, covering many more species, is Mark Bekoff's The Emotional Lives of Animals. Two books by philosophers who are also experts in a particular species are Thomas White's In Defense of Dolphins and Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Finally, an amazing combination of cutting-edge research and argument is Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. This is a large literature, and there is a lot more, but these books will start anyone who cares about wild animals on a fascinating journey.

The Office of Historical Corrections

Danielle Evans

Every story in this collection is a gem reflecting different facets of racism, sexism, and the legacy of slavery, with the hope for reparations and reconciliation glimmering through the darkness. In “Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want,” an artist and inveterate Me Too violator gives new meaning to the art of the apology as he attempts to make amends to the many women he has preyed on and scarred. In “Alcatraz,” a woman spends decades seeking to clear her grandfather’s name and recover his pension after he was wrongly convicted of murder in the military at 18 and served time in the notorious San Francisco prison. It’s the quest for reparations in a microcosm: “There was something comforting about imagining I knew exactly what I’d been cheated out of.”

Girl, Woman, Other

Bernardine Evaristo

I usually don’t appreciate my book club books until after we meet and discuss them, but Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo doesn’t need a discussion to make it interesting. It was the 2019 Booker Prize winner, and I could see why.

The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts

Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman

The Bible Unearthed, by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, is a modern archeological-historical account of the Israelite history told in the bible. This is one of the most fascinating myth-busters I have ever read, told in an accessible and even entertaining style. The book thoroughly persuaded me that some of the canonical stories of the Old Testament never took place! There was no exodus from Egypt; no glamorous City of David (in fact, David and Solomon were at most the “kings” of a tiny and weak compound that was far from loyal to a single god, Yahweh); or that the patriarchs of the Israelites were a mythology shared by many other peoples in the region. The book explains what political motivation likely drove the authorship of the bible in the Seventh Century B.C., and makes you wonder about how myths are sustained, even by entire contemporary academic disciplines.

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Peter Godfrey-Smith

For a book in progress on animal law, I have been reading a lot of the wonderful scholarship animal scientists have been producing about animal cognition and emotions. I will recommend a group of books, not just one. Momma's Last Hug, the most recent book by the great primatologist Frans De Waal, is a moving study of animal emotions; another older book on that topic, covering many more species, is Mark Bekoff's The Emotional Lives of Animals. Two books by philosophers who are also experts in a particular species are Thomas White's In Defense of Dolphins and Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Finally, an amazing combination of cutting-edge research and argument is Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. This is a large literature, and there is a lot more, but these books will start anyone who cares about wild animals on a fascinating journey.

Life and Fate

Vasily Grossman

I’m reading a book called Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. I do a book club with a few college friends. One decided we should read a 1,000 page critique of totalitarianism that was written at the height of the Soviet regime. It’s an amazing book. Most of it centers on Viktor Shtrum, a nuclear physicist, and his growing disillusionment with the Soviet Union. But really it’s a sweeping novel about life during the Battle of Stalingrad. I highly recommend it, though it is not a light bedtime read!

The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler

Thomas Hager

I have now finished Thomas Hager, The Alchemy of Air (2008). It gives a scientific account of the process by which scientists allowed us all to escape Malthus’s dire predictions about future mass starvation by learning how to convert the components of air into fertilizer.

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

Joseph Henrich

Last year I recommended The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich, and now I recommend his next book The WEIRDest People in the World. It shows how in many ways Western Civilization has produced norms, and even minds, that are different from those found in the rest of the world, and it does so with data and empirical work (some brilliant and some that seems like quite a stretch to me) that will help you initiate interesting dinner conversations. The book is also politically provocative in our current era, because we come to see that we are relatively individualistic, while trusting of the state.

Dune

Frank Herbert

Right now, I’m reading Dune by Frank Herbert. Dune tells the story of the residents of a planet that is the only producer of a highly coveted drug. Various factions from planets near and far compete for control of this planet. A Denis Villeneuve film adaptation of the novel starring Timothee Chalamet, Oscar Isaac, Zendaya, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgard and others is coming out in 2021, so if you’re a “read the book before the movie comes out” type of person, there’s no time like the present! My understanding is that there are also five sequels, so if you’re looking for a series, it could be a good option, but I haven’t read those yet.

The Feather Thief

Kirk Wallace Johnson

For pure fun, try The Feather Thief, by Kirk Wallace Johnson. It reads like a fun, intelligent, and overly-imaginative novel, though it turns out to be non-fiction. It is also a great gift for people who know about birds, so as I write this, I am sending a copy to our own, and great, Dean Miles.

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Ibram X. Kendi

A more sweeping work than in Kendi’s more personal, How to Be an Antiracist,Stamped from the Beginning, is a staggering work of both intellectual history and popular education. I have never before found a nonfiction book that spans over four-hundred years and over five-hundred pages to be such a page-turner. Describing the history of racial thought in America as a three-sided battle among segregationist, assimilationist and antiracist ideas, Kendi both challenges most Americans’ simplistic accounts of our history and accessibly reveals how the heroes and villains of those narratives exhibited complex, contradictory, and continuously evolving mixes of those strands of thought. He also persuasively demonstrates how roots in assimilationist and segregationist ideas have doomed to failure some of the advocacy strategies most persistently pursued by those conventionally considered to have been working in the name of racial progress. Most people will be familiar with some of the history and characters that Kendi illuminates and ties together, but it is absolutely eye-opening and important to see it all in one place, fit into a coherent, compelling thesis.

The Invention of Wings

Sue Monk Kidd

An atmospheric and absorbing historical novel set mainly in early-19th-century Charleston that chronicles the story of the real-life feminist abolitionist Sarah Grimké, who was born to an elite family of slaveholding, plantation-owning South Carolinians but then rejected her family's religion, social standing, and way of life. The other, fictional protagonist is Hetty "Handful" Grimké, who begins the story as an enslaved member of the Grimké household but aims for a wider world of freedom. Compelling characters, evocative settings, and an impressive degree of historical accuracy (as Kidd discusses in a fascinating author's note).

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

Gilbert King

This book, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer for General Nonfiction, recounts a familiar and yet astonishing story of Southern criminal injustice. Familiar because the "Groveland Four" were black men falsely accused of raping a white woman in Florida in 1949. Astonishing for countless reasons, many of them involving the work of Thurgood Marshall who ran serious personal risks by traveling to Lake County, Florida to provide representation, just when he was busy with more famous work he did for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do—and What It Says About You

Katherine D. Kinzler

A fascinating account of why we speak the way we do and how it can affect our social relationships. Kinzler is a psychologist by training, but she also draws from linguistics, anthropology and law to discuss the pervasiveness of linguistic bias. She also provides compelling evidence that multilingualism can help combat such biases and, more generally, increase empathy in a time of social and political polarization. Bonus that she is just across the Midway from us (well, at least in non-pandemic times).

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

Erik Larson

The latest masterpiece by Erik Larson tells of England and the Churchill family during Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister. Such a paradox: The blitz and the threat of Nazi conquest made it as horrible a time as England has known, yet I became nostalgic for it for many reasons--including the fact that its political leaders were so able, dedicated, genuine, courageous, and eloquent. If you haven’t picked up this one yet, you should deny yourself the pleasure no longer.

Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey

Andrew Mango

I just read Andrew Mango’s Atatürk, which was a fascinating account of how he forged modern Turkey from the ashes of the Ottoman empire after it chose the wrong side in World War I. Atatürk was a true charismatic—a person who fuses together old and new to create something really novel. He consolidated a new Muslim Turkish identity from the poly-ethnic empire, then mobilized this group to win the war against the Greeks and pressure the Europeans into leaving. Having won the war, he consolidated power, forcing potential rivals aside. It is a real study in the creative use of power, notable because much of his legacy is now under some threat from Prime Minister Erdogan.

Berta Isla

Javier Marias

A young man—as the result of a single act—is drawn into the British intelligence service. The book seems to start as a spy thriller, but with a twist -- most of it is told from the perspective of his young wife at home and chronicles the impact of a life of (necessary) deceit on a marriage and the two individuals in it.

The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal

Martha C. Nussbaum

Should we think of ourselves as first and foremost citizens of the world? Martha Nussbaum traces the arguments for the cosmopolitan ideal from Diogenes through contemporary thinkers and identifies its tensions. She presents a powerful case for her capabilities approach. A book of broad and deep understanding of human dignity.

Polio: An American Story

David M. Oshinsky

Polio in the United States was never as fatal as Covid-19 -- in 1952, at the height of the worst polio wave in U.S. history, the disease killed a little more than 3,000 Americans, whereas Covid-19's toll in 2020 will likely be around 100 times greater than that. But much about the polio experience resonates in the coronavirus age: quarantines and social distancing, panic among parents worried about the long-term consequences of their children contracting the disease, and a closely watched race for a vaccine (the rivalry between Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin was far more bitter than anything we see today among Moderna, Pfizer, and their competitors). Because I teach a course on nonprofit organizations, I was especially interested in Oshinsky's account of polio's lasting impact on the nonprofit sector. The March of Dimes introduced a new approach to charity—what Oshinsky calls "philanthropy as consumerism"—which continues to shape the way we give today.

The Demagogue's Playbook: The Battle for American Democracy from the Founders to Trump

Eric A. Posner

A fascinating review of the demagogues in our nation’s history and an incisive dissection of the traits and contexts which enabled their ascension. Posner shows that the risk of demagogues has been with us since the Founding and offers novel recommendations for reducing this risk in the future.

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Slavery in America

Andrés Reséndez

The field of American Indian Law, which I teach each year, is endlessly fascinating in both law and history. Completely new (to me) aspects of our history are revealed at every turn. This book, by a Chicago history PhD, is a great example. I had no idea about widespread enslavement of native people throughout the Americas, including in the United States, until I read this book. Winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award, it is a can’t miss.

The Long Take

Robin Robertson

The Long Take, by Robin Robertson is a novel-length poem that follows a Canadian infantryman back from D-Day to New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco through the 1950s. Robertson uses the poetic form to weave together vivid, almost photographic images of the war and post-war America with an intimate and moving psychological portrait of post-traumatic stress. The sum is a mesmerizing sense of both a specific life and a particular instant in time.

The Order of Time

Carlo Rovelli

This brilliant book, beautifully written, is a lucid effort by a physicist to explain to a lay audience what physics has to say about time, why it is surely not what it appears to be, and what theories currently contend for the best account of time.

How to Lead: Wisdom from the World's Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers

David M. Rubenstein,

A magnificent set of conversations with leaders in a range of domains—from the arts to the start-ups, from small organizations to international giants. It brims with insights, wit, inspiration, and practical tips—all elicited from interlocutor who is an accomplished leader in philanthropy, business, and interviewer himself.

Girl Waits With Gun

Amy Stewart

I’ve been reading Amy Stewart’s Kopp Sisters series, which starts with Girl Waits With Gun. They are based on the true story of Constance Kopp, who helped the sheriff catch some criminals in the 1910’s and went on to become a “lady deputy.” The books are that delightful combination of a historical setting, endearing characters, and mystery. They have provided an entertaining foray into a different time and place in the midst of our own challenging and distressing times.

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, is an anthropological study of the production and the consumption of the Matsutake mushroom, one of the most valuable fungi in the world—and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests in the Pacific Northwestern. Tsing, not content with a mere anthropology, uses the Matsutake to explore global chains of capitalist relations, ecological catastrophe and its aftermath, and the experience of diaspora. The end result is both brilliant and unclassifiable.

The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

Barbara Tuchman

I have recently read Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower. It captures the world as it existed just before the cataclysmic changes of World War I. It gives a view of what it is like to live in a world just on the brink. Dramatic changes might happen, but no one knows for sure. It provides an interesting contrast to our own somewhat unsettled times.

Stalin in Power: The Russian Revolution from Above, 1928-1941

Robert C. Tucker

This book reveals Stalin’s genius in new and surprising ways. For example, after Lenin’s failures at transforming Russia, Stalin realized that one cannot get people to do big things through an appeal to ideals like equality (and terror). He turned to nationalist pride. Stalin drew on Russian history, especially Peter the Great, to convince everyday Russians to go along on his unfathomably costly but tremendously successful program of industrialization. I’ve read dozens of books on Soviet history, and this was one of the very best.

In Defense of Dolphins: The New Moral Frontier

Thomas White

For a book in progress on animal law, I have been reading a lot of the wonderful scholarship animal scientists have been producing about animal cognition and emotions. I will recommend a group of books, not just one. Momma's Last Hug, the most recent book by the great primatologist Frans De Waal, is a moving study of animal emotions; another older book on that topic, covering many more species, is Mark Bekoff's The Emotional Lives of Animals. Two books by philosophers who are also experts in a particular species are Thomas White's In Defense of Dolphins and Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Finally, an amazing combination of cutting-edge research and argument is Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. This is a large literature, and there is a lot more, but these books will start anyone who cares about wild animals on a fascinating journey.

The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell

For a book in progress on animal law, I have been reading a lot of the wonderful scholarship animal scientists have been producing about animal cognition and emotions. I will recommend a group of books, not just one. Momma's Last Hug, the most recent book by the great primatologist Frans De Waal, is a moving study of animal emotions; another older book on that topic, covering many more species, is Mark Bekoff's The Emotional Lives of Animals. Two books by philosophers who are also experts in a particular species are Thomas White's In Defense of Dolphins and Peter Godfrey-Smith's Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. Finally, an amazing combination of cutting-edge research and argument is Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins. This is a large literature, and there is a lot more, but these books will start anyone who cares about wild animals on a fascinating journey.

History of the Rain

Niall Williams

A young woman who is ill takes on the task of going through her father’s entire collection of books while she recuperates in the family cottage in a small village in Ireland (where it is, naturally, raining). Written by one of my favorite living Irish authors (I also love his book This is Happiness), this book is both about the joy of reading and also the journey to uncover and make sense of a family’s history through its books.

The Machine that Changed the World

James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos

The Machine that Changed the World is the story of the Toyota production process and the rise of lean manufacturing. In our current political climate, it is essential background to understanding the way that manufacturing has changed over the years and what kinds of industrial policies are and are not likely to bring production back to America.