What does the NAS staff read in their spare time? All sorts of books. The sort of person who ends up working for a higher education policy institute is likely to be a bookworm. Read down, gentle reader, and you’ll find our back-to-school essays: “What I Read For My Summer Vacation.”
Partly this is so NAS members and other readers of the website can get a better sense of who the NAS staff are and what we do for fun when we’re off the clock.
Partly this is us saying,“A college education ought to make you interested in reading good books for fun, and here’s how we do it.”
And most importantly, we’ve been enjoying these books, and we wanted to share them. We hope you’ll take a look at some of them!
Seth Forman
For anyone interested in American intellectual life of the past sixty or so years, you will find much to ponder in Joseph Epstein’s Never Say You’ve had a Lucky Life, Especially if You’ve had a Lucky Life and Martin Peretz’s The Controversialist: Arguments With Everyone, Left, Right, and Center. Epstein is of course the eminent essayist and former editor of The American Scholar who has had a celebrated and illustrious—yet somehow still quiet and rather atypical—life in letters, politics, and academia. At 86, Epstein has lots to say about his life, career, and friendships, including those he had with his fellow Chicagoans Saul Bellow, Edward Shils, and Alan Bloom.
His simple insights on life and of his own rules of conduct are both poignant and funny. Though Epstein doesn’t complain about it, he may have been one of the first “cancelled” writers of the modern Anschluss, when Phi Beta Kappa removed him from the editorship of American Scholar, mostly for writings that weren’t solicitous enough of feminism and Black Power.
After reading this memoir, you will want to live just a little more like Joseph Epstein.
Peretz was the hardboiled editor, publisher, and owner of The New Republic magazine in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s who has remained a man of the Left when others who share his view of Israel and of American power decamped for the right.
While both men are perhaps the last of those we used to refer to as (non-academic) “intellectuals,” the best surprise in both memoirs is the juicy insight into the small pockets of academia each man occupied for decades. Neither man has a terminal degree, yet both held semi-permanent lecturing positions, Epstein at Northwestern and Peretz at Harvard, and were, apparently, very popular with students. Peretz in particular seems to have known everyone at Harvard, including its presidents and the famous Dean of Arts and Sciences Henry Rosovsky.
I recommend both, but I’ll caution that Peretz’s book is frustrating, offering little acknowledgement of liberalism’s responsibility for the woke takeover of academic and intellectual life, and even the magazine Peretz committed so much of his life to.
Louis Galarowicz
The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity by Eugene McCarraher. This work is a tome of intellectual history, rare for its successful combination of provocation and depth of scholarship. Its florid language and the interspersed zingers, where McCarraher overtly takes aim at a number of facets of contemporary American life, make it a real pleasure to read. McCarraher's focus is not on desacralization so much as re-sacralization – of Mammon – In modern Anglo-American society. Pulling from a wide breadth of ‘thought leaders,’ artists, intellectuals, industry men, influential in the development of American culture, he depicts a migration of religious, spiritual meaning into commercial forms and practices. The details of this transformation, or transfer, of religious conceptions and understandings surprise, and inflect on developments from the eschatological tenor of our current politics to the irresistibility of modern consumerism.
Jared Gould
This summer, I’ve been making my way through Wolves of K Street. Nearly done now, it’s been an enlightening read—full of well-researched history, much of which was previously unknown to me. The book’s core argument is spot on: lobbyists and corporations are the real puppeteers in Washington—aligning perfectly with my own experience.
But at 508 pages, I can’t help but think the author could have benefited from a bit more brevity. The personal stories of lobbyists certainly add some color to the narrative—Lee Atwater’s deathbed conversion to Christianity was particularly moving. But I struggled to see how these anecdotes advanced the main point: our politicians don’t work for the people.
Like many writers these days, the authors also stumble when it comes to recent political history. Part III devotes an unusual amount of time to scrutinizing Trump, while the Clinton years receive a rather cursory glance. As one Amazon reviewer pointed out, there’s no deep dive into the $2 billion the Clinton Foundation received from foreign entities.
Yet I keep reading.
Kali Jerrard
In my limited spare time this summer, I have been taking a stroll down memory lane by perusing through a few great books that I read in high school and college. One such book is Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis, which I think I must have read hastily, because I feel as though I am reading it for the first time. This classic is a retelling of the story of Cupid and Psyche, drawn from the telling in a chapter of The Golden Ass of Apuleius. Lewis makes Psyche's older sister Orual the narrator of the tale in his novel. She is a fiercely protective, mother-like figure to Psyche, blinded by her own emotions and humanity. The first half of the novel chronicles Orual's initial anger toward the gods and her accusation against them for what they demand of Psyche's life. In the latter half, Orual's mindset shifts (or "converts") as she begins to understand that her failings and shortcomings tainted her assessment of the gods, who are lovingly present and guide humanity. Knowing Lewis, it is unsurprising that this retelling is a parallel of the Christian experience, but he weaves the tale in a way that subtly draws the reader in.
Now as we head into fall, I want to read Greek mythology and revisit the works of the Greek scholars ... though I suppose that is what a great book does—it inspires an insatiable hunger for more.
Chris Kendall
This summer, I've been diving into the history of video games with several different books: Jason Schreier's Blood, Sweat, and Pixels and Press Reset, Tristan Donovan's Replay: The History of Video Games, and Jeff Ryan's Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America. Schreier's books are a good pair. Blood, Sweat, and Pixels tells the story of how video games are made by looking at how some of the most important games of the last five decades were created; while Press Reset looks at some of the biggest studios that produced games and what caused them to fall apart. Donovan's Replay goes much deeper into the history of the medium, starting with the origins of the technology that would become foundational to video games and ending with the story of Nintendo's Wii. Ryan's Super Mario is more narrowly focused on Nintendo, and how Mario has shaped Nintendo's rise and reign. All of them are excellent books, though if I were to suggest a starting point, it would be with Donovan's Replay. The thorough grounding he provides filled in a lot of gaps that helped me understand the others in more depth.
Chance Layton
On a recent summer vacation to Canada, I finally had the time to finish Craig Childs’ House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest. I spent much of my childhood playing in the shadow of Anasazi ruins and have always found their disappearance almost mythical. Childs seems to share that assessment while hiking the line (road? ceremonial path?) carved into the desert from Chaco Canyon to Aztec, New Mexico. His journey to trace the exodus of Anasazi (Ancestral Pueblo) from the high Colorado Plateau takes him through Utah and Arizona to the Sierra Madre Mountains of North Mexico and offers the reader an in-depth picture of the sites along the way. Childs speaks with archeologists and anthropologists—many of whom disagree with each other—to pick up the scent of the retreating culture. This on-the-ground reporting of archeological remains, combined with extensive research, creates a holistic picture of Anasazi culture from generation to generation and landscape to landscape as they followed the rains, escaping drought, warfare, and outright genocide along the way. The adventures had by Childs might explain some of the mysteries found hiding among the cliffs and canyons of the American Southwest, but like any good steward of the land, he leaves it just as he found it.
David Randall
I’ve just finished Jack Vance’s science fiction novel Emphyrio (1969). Not even the best Vance novel, but a memorable portrait of a not-so-bad dystopia. The setting, a country on the planet Halma, is run by an oppressive Welfare Agency, whose rules have superseded the Constitution. Welfare Recipients (not citizens) are rarely able to make themselves financially independent, they are governed by a sort of social credit system, and the occasional dissenter is subject to brutal brainwashing—but most people are well enough off to go on vacations to the planet’s moon, a tolerated underworld allows for enough license to blow off steam, and most people are willing to accept a system that keeps them fed, housed, and employed, even if they are no longer free. Most fictional dystopias posit some sort of bizarrely and cruelly oppressive state (e.g., Hunger Games). Vance shows us a more plausible dystopia, just oppressive enough to prevent liberty—and the more durable because it does not indulge in bizarre cruelty. In Spanish, a dictablanda rather than a dictadura; a soft dictatorship rather than a hard one. The parallels to America, alas, are much stronger now than when Vance wrote the novel.
Glenn Ricketts
My most recently completed summer selection was The Hinge of Fate, the fourth in Winston Churchill's magisterial six-volume history, The Second World War. The book covers the pivotal years 1942-1943, during which the tide of the massive conflict turned decisively in favor of the Grand Alliance which Britain had formed with the United States and the Soviet Union. The title derives from the British Eighth Army's decisive defeat of a much larger and heavily fortified German army under General Erwin Rommel at the battle of El Alamein in October 1942. The outcome made possible massive allied troop landings in North Africa, and induced previously hesitant French leaders to join the effort as well. Churchill, of course, was a prolific historian, and had previously produced a similar six-volume history of the Great War of 1914-1918, The World in Crisis, as well as his four volume History of the English Speaking Peoples. Many political leaders write self-justifying memoirs, and The Second World War is not devoid of that feature. No others that I have read, however, can write with the style of Gibbon or Macaulay or so smoothly reference historical antecedents, ranging from Alexander the Great, to the American Civil War to Otto Von Bismarck. Needless to say, I intend to read volumes five and six of this epic work.
Nathaniel Urban
I reread The Old Man and the Sea this summer. One of my former English professors reminded me that the old man is an old man and the sea is a sea. Simply said, Enjoy the story as it is. Hemingway’s iceberg theory does not apply to this novella.
However, I cannot ignore the maxims on manhood and life that are included:
“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
“Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.”
But to honor the author’s intention and declarative style, all I should say is that The Old Man and the Sea is necessary reading for young, middle-aged, and old men all alike with the story taking on new meaning at each stage of life. I will say no more.
Peter Wood
I just finished Denis Johnson's novel Tree of Smoke. I was in the middle of it when the New York Times released its ranked list of the hundred "best books" of the 21st century. Tree of Smoke appeared as #100. It is a very long story about several participants in the Vietnam war, and it is in some sense a war novel, but like James Gould Cozzens' World War Two novel, Guard of Honor, it isn't about the battlefield or military operations. The lead characters are the nephew of World War Two hero, “The Colonel,” and a Canadian nurse. They become a couple after the nurse's missionary husband dies obscurely in the Philippine jungle. The nephew, who is a CIA operative, dearly wants to play some significant role in the Vietnam war, but his uncle stashes him in a villa far from the fighting, where he spends his idle months reading. A secondary plot weaves around two brothers from an impoverished family in New Mexico. The elder enlists in the Navy, the younger in the Army. We see how the war summons the worst in both of them, and they eventually return home morally ruined. Another strand of the story involves a handful of Vietnamese characters, one of whom is a Viet Cong.
Why bother with this novel? First, because Denis Johnson is an extraordinary writer. Character, dialog, narrative, atmosphere, and pacing are superb. Second, because the novel presents a compelling account of the illusions, idealisms, loyalties, and betrayals at the heart of America’s adventure in Southeast Asia.
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