Preeti Aroon: Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer. After graduating from Emory University in 1990, the adventurous and intellectual Christopher McCandless spent the next two years mostly hitchhiking around the United States, living by his wits. In April 1992 he finally made it to Alaska to begin a “Great Adventure” of living alone in the wilderness. Four months later, his starved 67-pound body was discovered.
Blake Hounshell: The Myth of the Rational Market, by Justin Fox. In which we learn that Irving Fisher, the Yale professor who famously predicted that the 1920s stock-market boom would last forever, laid the intellectual groundwork for our latest Great Recession.
Joshua Keating: Young Stalin, by Simon Sebag Montefiore. The story of how Josef Djugashvili rose from the streets of Gori, through a stint in seminary, and a brief career as a romantic poet to become a bank-robbing revolutionary and later one of history greatest tyrants is an amazing story on its own. Thanks to recently unearthed Soviet-era documents and Montefiore's formidable writing chops, it's a true tour-de-force.
Christina Larson: Los Angeles Times Beijing bureau chief Barbara Demick takes readers inside the Hermit Kingdom in her new book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. Through extensive reporting drawn in part from multiple visits to the China-North Korea border, Demnick constructs what daily life is like for residents of the least free place on earth.
Annie Lowrey: A smattering of interesting articles tagged on Delicious and finally read recently or today: Matt Labash's delightful profile of Marion Barry in The Weekly Standard, S. Frederick Starr's clear-eyed academic look at Central Asiain The Wilson Quarterly, Mark Lynas' thrown-bomb on China's intransigence on climate change at Copenhagen for The Guardian, perpetual Foreign Policy favorite and supposed Tory candidate Rory Stewart's kind words for the United States' Afghanistan strategy in The New York Review of Books, Alec MacGillis's profile of urban guru Richard Florida in The American Prospect, and Lauren Collins on Sonia Sotomayor in The New Yorker.
Britt Peterson: I’m reading, or more accurately, staring fascinatedly at photos by David Hlynsky of Cold War-era shop windows in Eastern Bloc countries. The photos are like a dispatch from a vanished world of alien kitsch, beautiful and surreal, like “Subway map, toy store,” or “Butterfly, nightgowns, panties.” In an interview with More Intelligent Life, Hlynsky talks about the loss of this world and what it means to him: “[When] I walk through those countries now I … get a sense that the colours have all changed, and gone are the bright primary colours. It’s now just the colours of advertising.”
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