Books

"This book has two origins," Francis Fukuyama writes in the preface to "The Origins of Political Order." "The first arose when my mentor, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University, asked me to write a foreword to a reprint edition of his 1968 classic, 'Political Order in Changing Societies.' " Its second inspiration was the decade that Fukuyama spent studying "the real-world problems of weak and failed states" and that inspired his 2004 book "State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century."

A decade ago this August, veteran New York City cop Joseph Gray went to a Brooklyn strip club, drank himself silly, and then got into his burgundy van and accidentally smashed into and killed three people, including a pregnant 24-year-old woman and her 4-year-old son, Andy. Twelve hours later, the undelivered child had died, too. Gray pleaded with the judge for leniency, but in her words, barreling down the street drunk, in a thousand-pound van, was like "waving a loaded gun around a crowded room." Gray was given the maximum of five to 15 years for second-degree manslaughter.

Fresh out of college and just beginning his work as a syndicated columnist and a researcher at the New America Foundation, Brian Till set out to interview the former world leaders he most admired. He hardly expected to get his foot in the door--much less to have revelatory, insightful conversations with so many of them. Here, he distills their collective wisdom into key lessons for aspiring leaders of the future, including the best ways to handle opposition, public opinion, and the information revolution.

Hardly anyone ever thinks about Minsk, an omission for which there are plenty of good reasons. The weather is unpleasant, the architecture brutal, the country obscure, and—because Belarus has spawned neither émigrés nor much in the way of modernity—Minsk seems stuck in history without memory. This gap in memory is important because, during a particular moment in time, the 1930s and ’40s, Minsk and some similar places in far eastern Europe—Kharkiv, Wola, Vilnius—all mattered very much.

Youth. Antisocial, mobile-tapping, Lady Gaga-obsessed layabouts who get off the couch only to riot. What's to like? Rather a lot. In the Middle East and North Africa, youths played a major role in bringing down some long-standing dictatorships. And that may be only the start. A burgeoning young population might help speed global economic growth and be a sign of positive developments in the quality of life worldwide.

Last June, Khaled Said, a twenty-eight-year-old Alexandrian, suffered a vicious public beating at the hands of Egyptian police. Several witnesses documented the assault with cell phone cameras. Said apparently died from his wounds, but the police claimed he had choked to death on illegal drugs. Outraged Egyptians posted contrary evidence on Facebook pages and on YouTube.

On March 25th, the New America Foundation and the Center for Economic Policy and Research hosted Ha-Joon Chang as he discussed his latest book, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism (Bloomsbury USA, January 2011).

With the help of the 'Dead Presidents' on U.S. currency, Walt Disney's Rescuers, an Indian bus driver named Ram, and sheep-burning French farmers, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism tells the story of capitalism as it is and shows how capitalism as we know it can be, and should be, made better.

From the very beginning there was something uncanny about the cancer cells on Henrietta Lacks's cervix. Even before killing Lacks herself in 1951, they took on a life of their own. Removed during a biopsy and cultured without her permission, the HeLa cells (named from the first two letters of her first and last names) reproduced boisterously in a lab at Johns Hopkins — the first human cells ever to do so. HeLa became an instant biological celebrity, traveling to research labs all over the world.

As the income gap between developed and developing nations grows, so grows the cacophony of voices claiming that the quest to find a simple recipe for economic growth has failed. Getting Better, in sharp contrast, reports the good news about global progress. Economist Charles Kenny argues against development naysayers by pointing to the evidence of widespread improvements in health, education, peace, liberty--and even happiness.

Twenty years ago, Journalist Lou Cannon published an 800-page book, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, which would become the quintessential political biography of the 40th President. (Barack Obama pored over it during his Christmas vacation.) Anchored by hundreds of interviews, the book helped reshape the public's understanding of Ronald Reagan, a leader guided by a bedrock set of principles who managed to compromise with adversaries, including the Soviet Union; a fundamentally optimistic man who also harbored a fear of Armageddon.