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SOUTH ASIA

According the Wikipedia, "The current territories of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka form South Asia."

Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Aranyak (The India List), introduced and translated from the Bengali by Rimi Bhattacharya (New York: Seagull Books, 2017) (From the back cover: "Satyacharan is a graduate in 1920s Calcutta, who, unable to find a job in the city, takes up the post of a 'manage' of a vast tract of forested land in neighboring Bihar. As he is enchanted and hypnotized by the exquisite beauty of nature, he is also burdened with the painful task of clearing this land for cultivation. Ancient trees fall to the cultivator's axe, and indigenous tribes--to whom the forest had been home for millennia--lose their ancient way of life, and the narrator chronicles in visionary prose the tale of destruction and dispossession that is the universal saga of man's struggle to bend nature to his will.").

Sujatha Gilda, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017).

Nayanjot Lahiri, Ashoka in Ancient India (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2015) (From the book jacket: "In the third century BCE, Ashoka ruled an empire encompassing much of modern-day India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. During his reign, Buddhism proliferated across the South Asian subcontinent, and future generations of Asians came to see him as the  ideal Buddhist king. Disentangling the threads of Ashoka's life from the knot of legend that surround it, Nayanjot Lahiri present a vivid biography of this extraordinary Indian emperor and deepens out understanding of a legacy that extends beyond the bounds of Ashoka's lifetime and dominion.").

Sanjay Subramanyam, Europe's India: Words, People, Empires, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "When the Portuguese explorers first rounded the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in the subcontinent in the late fifteenth century, Europeans had little direct knowledge of India. The maritime passage opened new opportunities for exchange of goods as well as ideas. Traders were joined by ambassadors, missionaries, soldiers, and scholars from Portugal, England, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany, all hoping to learn about India for reasons as varied as their particular nationalities and professions. In the following centuries they produced a body of knowledge about India that significantly shaped European thought." "Europe's India tracks Europeans' changing ideas of India over the entire modern period.").

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THE ROAD TO, AND CONSEQUENCE OF, THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRASH

Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018) ("What made the collapse of 2008 so severe was its extraordinary global synchronization. Of the 104 countries for which the World Trade Organization collects data, every single one experienced a fall in both imports and exports between the second half of 2008 and the first half of 2009. Every country and every type of traded goods, without exception, experienced a decline." Id. at 159. "Precisely how many people lost their jobs across the global economy depends snout guess as to joblessness among China's migrant workforce. But reasonable estimates range between 27 million and something closer to 40 million unemployed worldwide." Id. at 160.).

INSPECTOR MAIGRET #34

Georges Simenon, Madame Maigret's Friend (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Howard Curtis (New York: Penguin Books, 2016).

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DYSFUNCTIONING AMERICA

William Egginton, The Splintering of the American Mind: Identity Politics, Inequality, and Community on Today’s College Campuses (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018) (Egginton "argues that we are in danger of losing our civic culture. Instead of a forum for engaging in debate and achieving compromise, our public sphere has devolved into a blood sport in which scoring point for the home team seems preferable to improving the state of the nation. A strong civic culture depends on having a society whose members are not only individuals set on improving their lots, but also citizens who see their political interests as rooted in the commonwealth they share with their fellows. But since the 1970s, Americans have become increasingly isolated from the national community. As the right advanced an agenda of unfettered individualism and the left made crucial gains in defending minority rights, what was lost was the very idea of a commonwealth which individuals and groups can adjudicate their differences. Id. at 12. Such books (and essays) address (and remind me of) one of the saddest aspects of much of higher education in America today: that it, paradoxically, shrinks the mind rather than expands it.).

IS AMERICA A DYING CULTURE?

Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour (New York:Simon & Schuster, 2018) ("Is America in a state or irrevocable decline? In this provocative and disturbing examination of our country . . . Chris Hedges argues that the United States shows unmistakable signs of a dying culture.").

JAMES EARL CARTER, PRESIDENT

Stuart E. Eizenenstat, President Carter: The White House Years,  forward by Madeleine Albright (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2018).

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INSPECTOR MAIGRET #33

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Old Lady (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Ros Schwartz (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ('You see. Now I'm alone. My dragon left ages ago . . . I so enjoy being on my on." Id. at 144.).

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ON ALAIN LOCKE

Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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INSPECTOR MAIGRET #32

Georges Simenon, Maigret at the Coroner's (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ("Maigret was aware that when traveling, a man is always a little ridiculous, because he would like life to go on just as it does back home." Id. at 72.).

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DIMINISHING THE ECONOMIC VALUE AND QUALITY OF KNOWLEDGE

Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (New York: Penguin Press, 2017) ("Organizing knowledge is an ancient pursuit. Those who toiled in this field over the centuries--librarians and bookstore owners, scholars and archivists--were trained to go about their work lovingly, almost worshipfully. A professional code implored them to treat their cargo as if the world depended on its safe transit through the generations. Tech companies share none of that concern.They have presided over the collapse of the economic value of knowledge, which has severely weakened newspapers, magazines, and book publishers. By collapsing the value of knowledge, they have diminished the quality of it." Id. at 78.).

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FASCISM IS IN OUR FUTURE

Madeline Albright, Fascism: A Warning (New York: Harper, 2018).

BARRACOON

Zora Neale Hurston, Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo", edited by Deborah G. Plant, foreword by Alice Walker (New York: Amistad, 2018) (From the "Foreword": " Reading Barracoon, one understands immediately the problem many black people, years ago, especially black intellectuals and political leaders, had with it. It resolutely records the atrocities African peoples inflicted on each other, long before shackled Africans, traumatized, ill, disoriented starved, arrived in ships as 'black cargo' in the hellish West." Id. at x.).

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TRUTH, AND THE PROBLEMS THAT RESULT WHEN TRUTH IS UNDERMINED

Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018) ("Madison . . . put it like this: 'A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.'" Id. at 172.).

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INSPECTOR MAIGRET #31

Georges Simenon, My Friend Maigret (Inspector Maigret), translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin Books, 2016) ("Perhaps it was Mr. Pyke's impeccable correctness that made him seem unrefined . . ." Id. at 19.).

GLOBALISM AND THE GENEVA SCHOOL

Quinn Slobodan, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018) (From the book jacket: "Neoliberals hate the state. Or do they? In the first intellectual history of neoliberal globalism, Quinn Slobodan follows a group of thinkers from the ashes of the Habsburg Empire to the creation of the World Trade Organization to show that neoliberalism emerged less to shrink government and abolish regulation than to redeploy them at a global level.").

PRIVACY IS AN AMERICAN ILLUSION

Sarah E. Igo, The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard University Press, 2018).

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TARGETED ASSASSINATIONS

Ronen Bergman, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History Israel's Targeted Assassination (New York: Random House, 2018).

FOOD FOR THOUGHT . . OR ACTION

Jennifer Summit & Blakey, Action Versus Contemplation: Why an Ancient Debate Still Matters (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

READING WALTER SCOTT

Scott, Walter, The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. Press, 1993-2012).
Volume One: Waverley  [1814] (edited by P. D. Garside, 2007).
Volume Two: Guy Mannering [1815] (edited by P.D. Garside, 1999).
Volume Three: The Antiquary [1816] (edited by David Hewitt, 1995).
Volume Four [A]: The Black Dwarf [1816] (edited by P. D. Garside, 2007).
Volume Four [B]: The Tale of Old Mortality [1816] (edited by Douglas Mack, 1993).
Volume Five: Rob Roy [1818] (edited by aevid Hewitt).
Volume Six: The Heart of Mid-Lothian [1818] (edited by David Hewitt and Alison Lumsden, 2004).
Volume Seven [A]: The Bride of Lammermoor [1819] (edited by J.H. Alexander, 1995).
Volume Seven [B]: A Legend of the War of Montrose [1819] (edited by J.H. Alexander, 1995).
Volume Eight: Ivanhoe [1820] (edited by Graham Tulloch, 1998).
Volume Nine: The Monastery [1820] (edited by Penny Fielding, 2000).
Volume Ten: The Abbott [1820] (edited by Christopher Johnson (1993).
Volume Eleven: Kenilworth, A Romance [1821] (edited by J.H. Alexander, 1995).
Volume Twelve: The Pirate [1822] (edited by Mark Weinstein with Alison Lumsden, 2001).
Volume Thirteen: The Fortunes of Nigel [1822] (edited by Frank Jordan, 2004).
Volume Fourteen, Peveril of the Peak [1822] (edited by Alison Lumsden, 2007).
Volume Fifteen: Quentin Durward [1823] (edited by J.H. Alexander and G.A.M. Wood, 2001).
Volume Sixteen: Saint Ronan’s Well [1824] (edited by Mark Weinstein, 1995).
Volume Seventeen: Redgauntlet [1824] (edited by G.A.M. Wood with David Hewitt, 1997).
Volume Eighteen [A]: The Betrothedalisman [1825] (edited by J. B. Ellis, with J. H. Alexander & David Hewitt, 2009).
Volume Eighteen [B]: The Talisman [1825] (edited by J. B. Ellis, with J. H. Alexander, P. D. Garside & David Hewitt, 2009). From the book jacket:

The Talisman is set in Palestine during the Third Crusade (1189-92). Scott constructs a story of chivalric action, apparently adopting a view of the similarities in the values of both sides that is to be found in medieval romance. But disguise is the leading theme of the tale: characters frequently wear clothing that conceals their identity and professions and cultures hide their true nature. In this novel the Christian leaders are divided by a factious criminality and are contrasted to the magnanimity and decisiveness of Saladin, the leader of the Islamic armies. In a period when the west was fascinated with the exotic east, Scott represents the Muslim other as more humane than the Christian west.

   The Talisman is one of Scott's great novels. It is a superb tale. It is also a bold departure as, for the first time, Scott explores cultural conflict in the opposition of two world religions.

Volume Nineteen: Woodstock [1826] (edited by Tony Inglis, with J. H. Alexander, David Hewitt & Alison Lumsden, 2009).
Volume Twenty: Chronicles of The Canongate [1928](edited Claire Lamont, 2000).
Volume Twenty-One: The Fair Maid of Perth [1928](edited by A.D. Hook and Donald Mackenzie, 1999).
Volume Twenty-Two: Anne of Geierstein [1820] (edited by J.H. Alexander, 2000).
Volume Twenty-Three [A]: Count Robert of Paris [1831] (edited by J.H. Alexander, 2006).
Volume Twenty-Three [B]: Castle Dangerous [1831] (edited by J.H. Alexander, 2006).
Volume Twenty-Four The Shorter Fiction [1811-1831] (edited by Graham Tulloch and Judy King, 2009).
Volume Twenty-Five [A]: Introductions and Notes from the Magnum Opus: Waverley to A Legend of the Wars of Montrose [1829-1833] (edited by J. H. Alexander with P. D. Garside & Claire Lamont, 2012).
Volume Twenty-Five [B]: Introductions and Notes from the Magnum Opus: Ivanhoe to Castle Dangerous [1829-1833] (edited by J. H. Alexander with P. D. Garside & Claire Lamont, 2012).
Scott, Walter, Reliquae Trotcosienses or The Gabions of The Late Jonathan Oldbuck Esq. of Monkbarns, edited by Gerald Carruthers and Alison Lumsden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. Press, 2004).
Scott, Walter, The Siege of Malta and Bizarro, edited by J. H. Alexander, Judy King, and Graham Tulloch (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. Press, 2009).