Anne-Marie Slaughter, Giulio Boccaletti, and more for PS Read More

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro; The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles; and more The PS Say More Newsletter | [View this message in a web browser]( [PS Read More]( Welcome to PS Read More, a bi-weekly feature dedicated to enriching your bookshelf, with Project Syndicate contributors' help. In this week's edition, we share recommendations from Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America. We also highlight a recent work by the University of Oxford's Giulio Boccaletti, and bring suggestions from Ashoka Mody, a visiting professor at Princeton, and former Unilever CEO Paul Polman. Anne-Marie Slaughter Recommends... It is striking that, when I [recommended books]( to PS readers in 2019, I selected three works of non-fiction. I have traditionally divided my reading into non-fiction in the morning and fiction at night, but during the pandemic I have increasingly immersed myself in fiction, which can often teach social and historical lessons much more powerfully than non-fiction. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, which I discuss in my [recent Say More interview]( demonstrates this perfectly. That is why my three picks this time are fiction. [The Lincoln Highway]( By Amor Towles I am hardly being original here. This book rocketed to the top of bestseller lists when it was published last year, and was one of Barack Obama’s top 13 book recommendations for 2021 – and for good reason. For starters, it is a rollicking good story. But I think the book’s appeal runs deeper: it captures a spirit of optimism and adventure that many of us feel has been lost in the US. The protagonists are boys living in the early 1950s, a time of new beginnings after World War II. They seek to travel the country’s first coast-to-coast highway, created in 1912, at the dawn of a new century. And the book is written backwards, counting down from Chapter 10 to Chapter 1, when they have lived enough life to begin anew. That possibility is a tonic for us all. [State of Terror]( By Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny I have rarely read mysteries. During the pandemic, however, I learned that they can offer an ideal escape in times of radical uncertainty, precisely because they offer the comfort of a puzzle with a guaranteed solution. I have fallen in love, for example, with Louise Penny’s [Inspector Gamache]( series; I often think that I would simply like to retire to Three Pines. In State of Terror, a political mystery, Clinton contributes insights into the world of high-stakes diplomacy – a world that is familiar to me from my time working for her in the State Department. Yet the reason I recommend this book is that it is really a story of deep female friendship, of how those we love can bear us up and enrich our lives at every turn. Set against the background of high politics – the kind of serious statecraft that is supposed to be much more important than human relationships – the book insists that what newspapers used to cover as “women’s issues” is just as important as the front section, highlighting national and global news. [Klara and the Sun]( By Kazuo Ishiguro This is another novel that has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention. I found it absolutely revelatory. I am not a big science fiction fan, so the idea of a story told entirely from an android’s perspective did not appeal. After reading it, however, I would advise anyone who wants to think about a future in which human and artificial intelligence intertwine to forget the countless non-fiction books and articles on the subject and read this book instead. I came away from Klara and the Sun with a far better sense of how artificial entities – beings? – learn. I pondered the deep ethical dilemmas that will confront us. I mused on the interdependence of emotion and reason. If Ishiguro’s great novel The Remains of the Day is about a man who behaves like a robot, Klara and the Sun is about a robot who behaves like a human. Both invite us to consider the essence of our humanity. Don't miss [Slaughter's recent Say More interview]( in which she proposes a US strategy for dealing with the Ukraine crisis, assesses the potential impact of the Build Back Better plan, and touts the idea of “freedom as a community” introduced in Whitehead's novel. [Read more](. By a PS Contributor [Water: A Biography]( By Giulio Boccaletti Boccaletti says: "Ten thousand years ago, we chose to stand still in a world of moving water, and have been trapped in a dialectic relationship with this powerful agent of the climate system ever since. I wrote this book—a combined history of people and water—to reveal how, over time, this relationship has conditioned the political and social institutions that define our life. In the end, the book's central message is this: humanity's most powerful and dangerous instrument in confronting climate change is not technology, but the institutions through which we are able to exercise collective agency. Therein reside the choices that will shape our future." Read Boccaletti's [Say More interview]( published last November, in which he shares instructive stories that didn't make it into Water: A Biography, challenges the notion of “efficient authoritarianism,” and cites human migration as one of the biggest risks implied by climate change. [Read now](. More Contributor Recommendations From Ashoka Mody: [Why Read Hannah Arendt Now?]( By Richard J. Bernstein “We are now living in dark times that are engulfing the entire world.” Bernstein wrote these words in 2018. They resonate loudly today. As the title suggests, Bernstein explains why it is worth “reading and rereading” Arendt in such a context: “she is an astute critic of dangerous tendencies in modern life, and she illuminates the potentialities of restoring the dignity of politics.” [Read more](. --------------------------------------------------------------- From Paul Polman: [Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds]( By Ping Fu Ping shares a powerful personal story of resilience and courage, which takes her from Mao’s China all the way to the White House. [Read more](. [PS. The latest on innovation for less than $9 a month. Subscribe now.]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [LinkedIn]( Project Syndicate publishes and provides, on a not-for-profit basis, original commentary by the world's leading thinkers to more than 500 media outlets in over 150 countries. This newsletter is a service of [Project Syndicate](. [Change your newsletter preferences](. 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