My Book of the Year 2020—perfect for advisors as well as the ideal holiday gift for clients—is Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know by Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy, published by the Cato Institute. It takes its place alongside Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist and the late Hans Rosling’s Factfulness as a vivid demonstration that our world is, by leaps and bounds, getting freer, cleaner, healthier, wealthier, longer-lived and less violent. And it does so in as graphically inviting and even beautiful a way as you can possibly imagine—one dramatic chart and supporting commentary on each two-page spread. Dip into it anywhere you like, buzz through its 178 pages of text at a sitting—and hopefully both. A unique and astonishing testament to the counterintuitive truth that optimism is still the only realism.
• My first runner-up is Daniel Yergin’s The New Map: Energy, Climate and the Clash of Nations. Mr. Yergin wrote or co-wrote two of the most important books of the last 30 years: The Prize, a history of oil, and The Commanding Heights, a chronicle of how free-market economics (and politics) gradually replaced central government primacy in the years leading up to the fall of the Soviet Union. The former won a Pulitzer Prize; both were turned into multi-episode PBS documentaries.
In The New Map, Mr. Yergin surveys the entire range of global geopolitical change attendant upon fracking, horizontal drilling and the return of the United States to the position of world’s leading oil producer. He documents the stupendous discoveries of new hydrocarbon reserves in some of the world’s oddest places—Israel a net exporter of natural gas?—leading to important shifts in great power relationships, most notably in the South China Sea. The author looks deeply into the trajectories of wind and solar, the rise of electric cars, and the future of self-driven vehicles. This is a must-read book for anyone seeking to understand the geopolitics of energy in the 2020s and beyond.
• Our foremost economic historian—and one of the greatest broad-gauge scholars of the age—is Deirdre McCloskey, a distinguished professor emerita of economics and of history, and professor emerita of English and of communication, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ms. McCloskey’s essential hypothesis—developed over a three-volume, 1,700-page, heavily footnoted work of scholarship—is that the great enrichment of the world since 1800 is not due to science, nor capital, nor anything but human liberty: the opportunity of the common man to raise himself as far as his talent and energy will take him.
As Matt Ridley observes, “There is nobody writing today who mixes erudition and eloquence, or wit and wisdom, as richly as McCloskey.” Her challenge, clearly, has been brevity. Hence, everyone who has ever tried to plow through her iconic Bourgeois Trilogy and failed—including me—must rejoice that, with the economist and journalist Art Carden, she has condensed her definitive case into one sparkling volume of a mere 189 pages. It’s titled Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World. It’s an unalloyed treasure—one that every informed financial advisor should take in, and a possible gift for your more thoughtful clients.
• I’m not sure there is any such thing as a climate debate in this country (or the world, for that matter); if there is I’m clearly missing it. What I seem to encounter on the one hand is existential catastrophism (the world will end in 11 years if we don’t rid it of airplanes and bovine flatulence) and on the other, out and out denial (climate change is simply a hoax, a power grab by the socialist left).
How delightful, then, to discover a serious book by a lifelong and deeply committed environmentalist—indeed, a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment”—who says that climate change is both very real and eminently manageable. The book is Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger. Wherever you stand on the question of climate, and whatever you believe the facts are, you owe it to yourself to read this wonderfully humane book.
• One of the best-selling nonfiction books of this year was a history unlike any other I’ve ever encountered. It’s The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz, and it’s entirely devoted to the first 12 months following Winston Churchill’s becoming prime minister on May 10, 1940.
But in addition to a history of that fateful year when England stood alone, the book is an exploration of the personalities and experiences of the man, his family and the circle around them. If ever there were a book of narrative history that could justifiably be termed a page-turner, this is it. Breathtaking and unputdownable.
• When I was growing up, my parents always said that no one would ever forget where they were when they learned that Franklin Roosevelt had died. I couldn’t really imagine why that experience had affected them so deeply—until about one o’clock on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. Then I understood it perfectly.
Nearly six decades after his death, there has never been a biography in full of John F. Kennedy. (Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life came closest, and it was published more than 15 years ago.) The Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard scholar Fredrik Logevall has begun to redress this somewhat astonishing absence with the publication this year of the first in a two-volume biography, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956.
Paradoxically, the more one thinks one knows about the life of JFK, the more immediately and forcibly one is struck by how much is new—and importantly new—in Mr. Logevall’s telling. The story of Kennedy’s development of his Harvard senior thesis—published later as Why England Slept—is both scholarly and compelling. Here for the first time we see the independent thinker Kennedy is to become. At the moment where Mr. Logevall concludes this chapter with, in effect, a long one-paragraph book review—pinpointing both the analytical strengths and youthful weaknesses of the thesis—I found that I had to stop reading, just to think about what he was saying. This book is a superb beginning; now the joy will be in anticipating the second volume.
• Peter Guralnick is by far the best writer on popular music we have. (Born a couple of months after I was, he was seized in his teens by the blues, as I was by doo-wop rock ’n’ roll.) He’s the author of the transcendent two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, as well as a magisterial life of Sam Phillips and one of Sam Cooke. He’s also published several collections of essays, the latest of which is Looking to Get Lost: Adventures in Music and Writing.
The essays in this book range far and wide, from the story of Ray Charles’s breakout smash hit “I’ve Got a Woman” at the end of 1954, to a lovely little meditation on Johnny Cash, to a piece on the legendary songwriting team of Lieber and Stoller. Along the way, there are studies of undeservedly less well-known artists like Bill Monroe, Solomon Burke, Howlin’ Wolf, and even a couple of novelists. But the long essay on Peter’s gingerly pursued relationship with Elvis’s manager “Colonel” Tom Parker is alone worth the price of the book. One reads Guralnick as much for the writing as for the personalities and the music—which explains why I have to read everything he writes at least twice. He is an American national treasure.
• I don’t read widely in sports, but I always try to pay attention to really superior sports writing. That explains why I was all over Tom Callahan’s Gods at Play: An Eyewitness Account of Great Moments in American Sports. That subtitle is—deliberately, I suspect—somewhat hyperbolic. For this is less a book about moments as it is a personal memoir: 50-odd years of great writing by one of the premier sportswriters of my generation.
Yes, here are such things as Roberto Clemente’s 3,000th and last hit, the Ali-Foreman fight in Zaire, and Secretariat in the Belmont. But here too are Arthur Ashe’s news conference at which he disclosed that he had AIDS. Joe Morgan whispering thanks to an almost-blind Jackie Robinson on the field at the 1972 World Series. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar saying he was more interested in being a good man than in being the greatest basketball player.
As is the case with Guralnick, any writer—or anyone seriously appreciative of good writing—has to read Callahan twice.
• The great art book publisher Taschen is out this year with a magnificent—and very reasonably priced—Vincent van Gogh, 1853-1890: The Complete Paintings. (I got it from my son and daughter-in-law for my birthday, or else I might not have known of it; could the same be said of the art lover on your holiday list?)
In addition to bringing together all 871 of van Gogh’s paintings—the overwhelming preponderance in color—this volume contains a richly detailed monograph on his life and art. But for me the book’s greatest accomplishment is to show the paintings chronologically. For the first time, it was borne in on me how wildly prolific he was in the last year of his life—from the summer of 1889 until he killed himself in July 1890. If possible, this presentation has the effect of magnifying the tragedy.
© 2020 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. All these books were reviewed upon publication in Nick’s monthly newsletter Nick Murray Interactive. You may download a sample issue at www.nickmurraynewsletters.com.
