Books Right Out of the Headlines Highlight Summer Reading
Brandon
Sun “Small World” Column, Monday, September 9 / 24
Zack Gross
Zack Gross
I usually use one of my columns each year to focus on a few books, read over the summer, that made a difference to my thinking. This year is no different, and I’d like to draw the reader’s attention to one work of fiction and one non-fiction that hit home, as they jump right off the headlines of current news outlets. The great challenges, or dangers, facing humanity and our planet today come from the areas of politics, and the environment and global health.
Anne Applebaum, a past recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, is a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine and a prolific author of books about 20th century history and 21st century politics. She has specialized in how the Soviet Union, it its day, disregarded human rights by taking over countries in Eastern Europe, putting countless opposition individuals into hard labour prisons (gulags), and causing millions of peasants to starve due to policies that fed the elite and the urban, while starving the peasantry. In many ways, contemporary Russia is not much different.
Her books on recent politics look at the danger of our losing our democratic institutions as many of our political leaders become increasingly autocratic. As someone who used to hang her hat on the conservative side of the political spectrum, she is acquainted with the Putins, the Trumps, the Boris Johnsons and their ilk, and pillories them in her 2020 book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, and in her latest book, just published a few weeks ago, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, she describes how political leaders on the far Left and Right are working together to reshape the world.
Her new book is written in a style accessible to the average reader, and tries to wake us up to the threat from Russia, China, Iran and other countries and their leaders to replace democratic systems by flooding us with mis- and dis-information through social media, by restricting their own people’s freedoms, and by enriching themselves by living a sumptuous lifestyle, stealing from the public coffers, while their own people struggle to make ends meet. Her strong critique is essential to understanding how today’s world works.
On the fiction side, I finally sat down with Station Eleven, Canadian Emily St. John Mandel’s masterpiece which was published 10 years ago. Why did I wait so long? This spellbinding book tells the story of a disease that wipes out over 90% of Earth’s population, and what happens in the ensuing 20 years. As we deal now with the ravages of the climate crisis and rethink our health care in the wake of COVID-19, this is indeed a timely book, and prophetic in that it was published five years before COVID. The cast of characters in the book are people whose lives were connected before the pandemic and continue to connect afterwards. While reading this sounds like a complete downer, it offers both a warning and a message of hope.
There are some great memes on social media about us bookworms (or bibliophiles). One has a wife phoning 911 to say that her husband has just been buried by his pile of “books to be read” falling over on him. Another pictures and compares the tallest structures on Earth – the Eiffel Tower, the Space Needle, etc., and the books that I’ve bought but haven’t read! The fact is that the publishing industry is churning out fiction and non-fiction faster than anyone can keep up with, whatever kind of reading one’s tastes run to.
At the same time, many people, especially our younger generation, are replacing a love of books with what I would call “an internet addiction,” swapping out reading for video games, on-line entertainment, and daily gossip on social media. Anne Applebaum points out that sacrificing serious and rational reading will lead to a deficit in our ability to hang onto our freedoms and to do the right thing when challenges arise. We must be more critical of those who lead us, but not fall into the trap of bowing down to the person who offers easy solutions, cynical diatribes, or three-word slogans. If we “up our game” intellectually, then we will force our leaders to do the same. Emily St. John Mandel says that there is innate good in the world and it can help us survive the most terrible possibilities.
And now, for me, it’s on to my autumn reading! Remember that your local library is a great and usually free resource, offering you the joy of learning, understanding, imagining, and so much more.
Zack Gross is Board Chair of The Marquis Project, a Brandon-based international development organization, and co-author of the new book The Fair Trade Handbook: Building a Better World, Together.
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