The Week - USA (2021-11-26)

Best books...chosen by Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Termination Shock, focuses on looming climate disaster.

But the influential science fiction author has also been focused on another mounting

concern: information manipulation. Below, he recommends six books on the topic.

24 ARTS The Book List

The Philosophical Writings of Peirce edited

by Justus Buchler (1940). The Victorian style of

American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce

can be heavy reading, but writing in 1877, Peirce

somehow summed up the weirdly symmetrical

right/left hostility toward free discourse that

afflicts the public sphere almost 150 years later.

Most of the relevant bits appear in the essay

“The Fixation of Belief,” which focuses on the

different ways people come to believe things.

The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan

Rauch (2021). I found Peirce’s writings through

this recent book, in which Rauch calmly articu-

lates the problem our civilization is having with

separating truth from falsehood. Peirce, as Rauch

explains, established the doctrine of fallibilism: the

disarmingly simple idea that none of us can ever

be sure that our beliefs are correct, which is why

we need a process for agreeing on what’s true.

Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum

(2020). Applebaum explores the rise of populist

authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe and

applies the lessons to what’s been going on in the

U.K. and U.S. This is a useful guide to the play-

book used by bad actors seeking to undermine

and overthrow democracies.

The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch

(2011). This profound book, by one of the lead-

ing physicists of our age, also addresses fallibil-

ism. But it is primarily about the transformative

power of explanations and the almost unlimited

power to create new knowledge through the sys-

tematic application of reason.

A Lot of People Are Saying by Russell Muir-

head and Nancy L. Rosenblum (2019). This

book focuses on conspiracy theories and their

systematic use to undermine democracy. As such,

it’s largely about what the Right has been up to,

and the things we were all dumbfounded wit-

nesses to during the Trump era.

Post-Truth by Lee McIntyre (2018). Paying

roughly equal attention to what’s happening with

the Left and Right, this excellent book is slim

and to the point, generating its rhetorical force

by addressing recent events. An account of how

postmodern thinking spread from the Left to the

Right leads to a final chapter on how to fight

post-truth forces.

Also of interest...in public figures’ private sides

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The diaries and notebooks that

Patricia Highsmith left behind com-

prise “one of the great 20th- century

artistic self- portraits,” said Frances

Wilson in The New York Review of

Books. From age 17 on, the author

of The Talented Mr. Ripley kept a dual running

record of her life—one focused on writing and the

other on serial obsessive love. Aware but ashamed

of her homosexuality from childhood, she trans-

posed that conflict into a body of crime fiction

“the like of which had never been seen before.”

Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries

and Notebooks

edited by Anna von Planta (Liveright, $40) Don’t bother trying to read the sec-

ond volume of David Sedaris’ diaries

straight through, said John Self in

TheGuardian.com. Fame and wealth

had found the beloved humorist by

2003, so the life he’s recording often

consists of world travel and public appearances.

“Wherever he goes,” though, “he spots the pre-

cisely funny detail and finds the mot juste.” You

should, as the title suggests, snack on this book’s

vignettes. Until a more polished Sedaris effort

arrives, they’ll “keep the appetite for delight and

absurdity satisfied.”

A Carnival of Snackery

by David Sedaris (Little, Brown, $32)

Billy Porter’s new memoir “recounts

his lifelong struggle to heal the deep

wounds buried under the sheen of his

charismatic presence,” said R. Eric

Thomas in The New York Times.

The Tony- winning actor and singer

describes being sexually abused by his step-

father and rejected by his Pentecostal church in

Pittsburgh because of his homosexuality. His writ-

ing “aptly matches his go-for-broke vocal instru-

ment.” Though sometimes arch, he “holds little

back, never shying from raw emotionality.”

Unprotected

by Billy Porter (Abrams, $28)

The new book-long tribute to Cokie

Roberts often features her own

words, and that’s wise, said Connie

Schultz in The Wash ing ton Post.

“They are encour ag ing and enlight en-

ing,” evoking what colleagues, listen-

ers, and her husband, Steven Roberts, admired so

much about the pioneering journalist. The daugh-

ter of two House members, Roberts more than

repaid the women who helped her get her broad-

casting career started. “It is heartening to read

such a celebration of women helping women.”

Cokie

by Steven V. Roberts (Harper, $28)

Damon Galgut

Trying to make sense of his

native South Africa has never

been easy for Damon Galgut,

said Martin Chilton in The

Independent (U.K.). The

newest winner of the Booker

Prize was at university in the

mid-1980s, and he remembers

telling his

grandfather, a

judge, about

being beaten

by police at an

anti- apartheid

protest and

seeing oth-

ers stripped

naked. “Nonsense,” was the

older man’s response, which

told Galgut that white South

Afri cans could no longer even

see what was right in front of

them. “It felt a bit like that—

people insisting that reality

was the other way around,” he

says. The Promise, Galgut’s

Booker- winning novel, returns

to that era to open with a fam-

ily funeral, mixing darkness

and humor as it touches down

at four funerals in all to bring

its portrait of the family and

nation up through today.

Galgut also mixed multiple

points of view in The Promise,

believing that his country’s

story couldn’t be told any

other way, said Jill Lawless in

the Associated Press. “The

notion that any one single

voice can speak for South

Africa is false,” he says.

“We’re a chorus—a very dis-

sonant, discordant chorus, but

we are a chorus.” A Booker

finalist twice before, Galgut

claims that this novel came

together easily once he hit on

that insight. “No other writing

experience,” he says, “has

given me this kind of deep

pleasure.” But that doesn’t

mean he has delivered an

upbeat state-of-the-nation

report. South Africa, he says,

hasn’t yet moved past the

wounds of apartheid and is

plagued by corruption and

violence. “South Africans

are very given to the hope

that we can change things,”

he says. “But that hope is in

short supply right now.”

Author of the week