1. “The Exception” by Christian Jungersen
Body Count: Books: The New Yorker: “In a Danish novel, office politics can be murder.”
This icy and affecting novel, with its juxtaposition of people trying to do good and yet behaving very badly toward each other, can certainly be read in many ways, but always with the vague unease that the privileged residents of Western liberal democracies feel about their comfortable lives. A onetime journalist and international-development expert named Gunnar observes, “We all know that the bottle of wine we’ve drunk tonight could have paid for vaccinating twenty kids and saving the life of at least one.” Soon enough, Gunnar has more to say on the broader question:
“I very much hope that the world will become a better place. And if it does, our grandchildren may look at us the way young people today regard the generation who collaborated with the Nazis. They’ll say, ‘I do not understand you.’ We will explain that life simply was the way it was. ‘Famines came and went and no one did anything about it. People died of hunger to provide us with cheaper coffee.’ We’ll have to admit that we knew but chose to do nothing about it.”
2. The Long March by Sun Shuyun
Briefly Noted: The New Yorker: Shuyun, a Chinese-born BBC documentary producer, retraces the route and interviews the few remaining survivors, in an account that shows the human cost of Mao’s revisionism
3. Prophet of Innovation by Thomas K. McCraw
Briefly Noted: The New Yorker: “After a series of dramatic turns (including stints as Austrian finance secretary and investment adviser to an Egyptian princess, and a tragic, arguably bigamous marriage), Joseph Schumpeter landed in the dubious sanctuary of Harvard (“despicable playground of despicable little tyrants,” he wrote), where he turned out several key texts in twentieth-century political economics. McCraw doesn’t get lost in the baroque details of Schumpeter’s story”
Snap Judgment 