The Economist Best Books for 2015 has come out. The full list is here, but a few that leaped out at me:
Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. By Robert Putnam. Simon & Schuster; 386 pages; $28 and £18.99
The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. In a thoughtful and persuasive book, the former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government analyses the growing gulf between how the rich and the poor raise their children, adding a liberal voice to long-standing conservative complaints about family breakdown
Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles. By Bernard Cornwell. Harper Collins; 352 pages; $35. William Collins; £25
A great and terrible story of a battle that was fought 200 years ago, told with energy and clarity by a writer who has a deep understanding of men in combat and why they do what they do. “Waterloo” proves that Bernard Cornwell’s non-fiction is as fine as his novels, if not finer.
The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East. By Eugene Rogan. Basic Books; 512 pages; $32. Allen Lane; £25
How a multinational Muslim empire was destroyed by the first world war, by a historian of the 20th century who is director of the Middle East Centre at Oxford University.
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. By Mary Beard. Liveright; 608 pages; $35. Profile; 606 pages; £25
A masterly new chronicle, by Britain’s most engaging historian of the ancient world, about Rome from its myth-shrouded origins to the early third century. She shows that the key to its dominance was granting citizenship to so many people.
The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. By Andrea Wulf. Knopf; 496 pages; $30. John Murray; £25
Explorer, polymath, friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Jefferson and Simon Bolívar, Alexander von Humboldt was one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century. His ideas are as relevant today as they ever were.
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics. By Richard Thaler. Norton; 432 pages; $27.95. Allen Lane; £20
Why people don’t behave the way economic models predict lies at the heart of this brilliant intellectual history by the founder of this once-obscure blend of psychology and economics.
Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family. By Anne-Marie Slaughter. Random House; 352 pages; $28. Oneworld; 352 pages; £16.99
Why organisations will have to change radically to make work-life balance a reality, by a respected foreign-policy expert who left her high-octane government job to spend more time with her two teenage sons. A rational, well-argued call to arms. Move over Sheryl Sandberg.
The Fishermen. By Chigozie Obioma. Little, Brown; 304 pages; $26. One; £14.99
A lyrical retelling of the Cain-and-Abel story in which four Nigerian brothers play truant from school, go fishing and meet a soothsayer who predicts that one brother will kill another. Not yet 30, Chigozie Obioma is a writer to watch.