The Best books of 2019

The Liberal Globe presents the books that read in 2019 and suggest you read them as well. These proposed books belong to different categories in order to correspond to the different tastes of readers. These book categories are Politics-Government and Current Affairs, History, Biography and memoir, Economics, Culture and Ideas, Non-Fiction, Fiction, Science & Technology, Novel.

Politics-Government and Current Affairs

Eight Days at Yalta: How Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin Shaped the Post-War World

By Diana Preston, Publisher: Picador

In this book is described the homonymous conference in Crimea of the then Soviet Union, which was held in February 1945. This conference was codenamed “Argonauta”. There the leaders of England, the USA and the USSR attempted to give a definitive solution to the issues of the post-war order. From the description it turns out that Stalin was a tough negotiator and he comes out winning while there is disagreement among the Polish post-war regime.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914

By Richard J. Evans, Publisher Viking

The great historian of Cambridge University Richard J. Evans writes about the Europe of the period 1815 to 1914 in an exciting way. States, governments, armed forces, political parties, rebels, farmers and landowners, economic, aristocratic and political elites respectively have pursued in every way the power to implement their ideas. This fight has divided the 19th century European society. It is a book suitable for both amateurs and specialists.

History

Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine

By Anne Applebaum, Publisher: Doubleday

The story the author tells us about is the most dangerous catastrophe in peacetime, the extermination of millions of Ukrainian citizens during the period (1932-1933). This catastrophe was imposed by Stalin on those who refused to serve his plans, by making the Soviet authorities to implement food seizures, resulting the death of the 1/5 of the Ukrainian population. In this tragedy is based the timeless and unhidden perpetual trauma that affects the relations between Ukraine and Russia. The author was largely based on the Ukrainian National Archive.

Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse

By Richard Wolin, Publisher: Princeton University Press

This book illuminates the old Riddle, for the allure of totalitarianism in the great spirits (Carl Smit & Martin Heidegger). In addition, it illuminates an early fighting against modernity, which today becomes timely. This war was metabolized in the works of Heidegger’s disciples, who remained under his influence, even when he was renounced, as Wolin shows.

Biography and memoir

An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

By Daniel Mendelsohn, Publisher Alfred A. Knopf

In the author’s world, the Laistytes and the Cyclops represent the complicated relationship between father and son, while the bed of Penelope is presented as the wooden bunk of the author’s childhood years. The revelation of Ulysses’ identity becomes a personal excess of the assumption of sexuality in at least one awkward environment. In the end the reader can understand what “Ithaca” really means.

Economics

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a human future at the new frontier of power

By Shoshana Zuboff, Publisher: PublicAffairs

This book presents in an impressively documented way, while also causing a strong dose of exciting reading, the threats it causes and will cause in the future the digital revolution in human nature and in particular the behemoths of the digital economy that usurpet the most sensitive personal secrets and data of people.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events 

By Robert Shiller, Publisher: Princeton University Press

The Nobel Laureate author presents how the well-known public perceptions can create the economic trends, without the use of the mathematical model of economics.

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems 

By Abhijit Banerjee and Easter Duflo, Publisher: PublicAffairs

The Nobel prize winning duo of economists present a different method in order to undertake and solve tough problems using empirical evidence. With the use of their method both economists highlight thorny global issues ranging from corruption to inequality.

Culture and Ideas

Motherhood: A Novel

By Sheila Heti, Publisher Holt & Company

This book literally deconstructs perhaps the most sacred totem of patriarchal society, motherhood. It links the relevant decision on whether a woman will become a mother on dice and connects procreation with writing and sex. In the end, however, she returns the decision to procreation and to become a mother with the family traumas (of the Holocaust) proving that in the end it is conscious and not accidental the decision of motherhood.

Death: The Final Stage of Growth

By Elizabeth Kubler Rossi

This book is the classic masterpiece of the American psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler Rossi who introduced the five stages of mourning. Since every passing day we are approaching death, this handbook provides us with the necessary tools to be useful to ourselves and others, and if this is imposed by situations. At the same time his reading contributes to a more complete, dense and conscious life.

The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

By Jacob Burckhardt, Publisher: Schweighauser’sche Verlagsbuchandlung

This book is a fundamental work of art history and essential for understanding the phenomenon of Renaissance. The book gives answers to questions of the type:  What do I owe as a man and an artist in Renaissance? Why does Renaissance exercise such attraction? Reading is a challenge for ongoing searches and surveys.

Non-Fiction

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World-and Why Things are Better Than You Think

By Hans Rosling, Publisher Flatiron Books

It’s a book that shows us with evidence that the planet’s population is in better shape than we think. It deals with all the issues of modern life and prosperity, i.e. from infant mortality, living standards, education, learning, culture, freedom and the political situation.

Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future

By Svetlana Alexievich, Publisher: Ostozh’e

In this book the author presents the testimonies of survivors from the infected land of Chernobyl. It includes harsh and painful images, causing outrage at the lack of awareness of the then authorities of the Soviet Union, while misinformation is constantly soaring by disliking the population of the region and beyond. The destruction of secrecy of the Soviet regime caused more victims than the accident itself.

Fiction

The Overstory: A Novel

By Richard Powers, Publisher: Vintage Digital

The many (thousands) trees presented in this story become the cause that the lives of decaying people will randomly cross, giving them the opportunity to understand that beyond the reality there is a world with us infinitely wiser than we will Imagined. A world older bigger than all of us. The Tree world. This book gave the author the Pulitzer Award for 2019.

Augustus

By John Williams, Publisher: Viking Press

This book is the novel autobiography of the first Roman emperor. August. An exciting narrative that keeps the reader constantly pinned.

Science and Technology

Dog Days, Raven Nights

By John M.-Colleen Marzluff, Publisher: Yale University Press

In this story a couple of young scientists decides to load in a car all his belongings and along with his two dogs follows their mentor in the forests of the Northern USA to study the winter conditions of Corvus Corax. There and for the next three years the couple will discover themselves as part of the local ecosystem. The narrative resembles the era of great explorations.

Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence

By James Lovelock & Bryan Appleyard, Publisher: MIT Press

The author forecasts that the artificial intelligence will lead to the creation of cyborgs which will be involved to supplant carbon-based humankind. But as the author suggests there is a great possibility the cyborgs might decide to keep people around in farmhouses as pets.

Novel

The Dry: A Novel

By Jane Harper, Publisher: MacMillan

The novel/mystery unfolds in a charming and wild province of Australia and specifically in a small town that has been hit by a prolonged drought. A vicious crime causes extremes. The detective who arrives in the city to investigate the crime begins to bring to the surface and during the detection of various well-hidden secrets of the community.

The Red-Haired Woman

By Orhan Pamuk, Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

The story unfolds in a Turkey that is in transition period. The heroes of the story father and son fall in love with the same woman in search of their place in Turkish society. Essentially, the author uses two of the most important works of Western and Eastern civilization the “Oedipus” of Sophocles and the “Rustem and Suhrab” of Firdausi trying to highlight the cultural ties between East and West.

Less

By Andrew Sean Greer, Publisher: Abacus

This book gave the Pulitzer Award for literature for 2018 to its author. While in the beginning the reader believes that he is reading a light story about the adventures of Mr. Less, a gay novelist, who on the eve of his 50th birthday tries to forget his last painful breakup by inventing a version of his round the world, in the end the reader discovers an unexpected depth in this story that is not shown at the beginning of the book.

Little Man, What Now?

By Hans Fallada, Publisher: Academy Chicago Publishers

The story takes place in Berlin during the period 1930-1932. The first roar of the National Socialism is evident. The Johannes, the Stoic “Manari” of Emma and their small child. Very difficult to survive in terrible lodgings, with high unemployment and great hunger to plague the population. No future because tomorrow looks like yesterday. But “we have each other.”

Middle England

By Jonathan Coe, Publisher: Viking Press

This book is a vivid portrait of divided England in the last decade of Brexit. There is an anatomy of the situation in the British society that concerns us all. This author achieves it through the parallel lives of the compromised or angry, disproved, persistent, moderate, insurgent heroes where he manages to highlight the mistakes that led to the lasting political-social crisis and the division of the UK’s exit from the EU.

The Testaments

By Margaret Atwood, Publisher: Nan A. Talese / Doubleday

It is a novel that everyone should read regardless of age and since the characters appearing in history are very easy to meet them in their real daily life but also the readers can identify them to themselves. Very interesting in reading given that it does not allow the reader to leave it to do anything else.

Hangover Square

By Patrick Hamilton, Publisher: Europa Editions

The story unfolds in London in the late 1930 in the voracious city and the atmosphere of its pubs. The author’s focus is on the outcasts of life and the absolute average, the unfulfilled love, the instincts and the needs, the totalitarianism whose shadow falls on most of Europe.