Like Emily Eakin, who wrote the memoir The Frenchmen, I fondly remember doing too much thinking and dubious amounts of learning at Café Pamplona (1959-2020) as an undergraduate. (The would-be Café de Flore of Harvard Square has inspired many other Harvard-bred writers, such as Adam Ehrlich Sachs. Read more on page 44.) Was there inherent value in those gazpacho-fueled intellectual awakenings, even if they were a touch performative? Or, does insight only matter if we do something with it?
From characters whose decisions make us cringe to data that can liberate or control, and archival discoveries that reshape our understanding of history, this selection of books explores the tension between ideas and action, featuring several bold arguments along the way. Together, they illuminate the past, expose artifice in solutions to real-world problems, and, in some cases, find wisdom in the journey itself.
America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance, edited by Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel E. Charles (MIT, $26.95 paperback)
Natapoff, the Kreindler professor of law and Charles, the Ogletree professor of law, bring together a collection of more than 60 essays, each 1,000 words, by Harvard Law School faculty. Diverse in their perspectives yet united in their commitment to legal reflection, the contributors examine topics ranging from free speech and dissent, climate change, and the Supreme Court’s future to AI and “bicentennial melancholia.” The first faculty collection of its scope in the Law School’s 200-plus-year history, the volume serves as a reminder that the nation’s governing ethos and legal framework remain works in progress.
The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory by Emily Eakin ’89 (Penguin, $35)
Derrida, Althusser, Barthes, Deleuze, Foucault, Guattari, Lacan, and de Man. The Frenchmen reveals the overlooked human backstories behind the motley crew of wounded, ambitious misfits who somehow gained an intellectual chokehold on generations of American students in the second half of the twentieth century. Eakin, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, delivers a charmingly indulgent narrative that is both a memoir of her “overdosing” on theory as a student and a jaunt into intellectual history.
We Live with the Sea: Ecologizing Safety in Post-Tsunami Japan by Andrew Littlejohn, Ph.D. ’17 (Duke, $31.95 paperback)
Littlejohn, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, challenges conventional assumptions about disaster recovery by examining communities affected by Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami that claimed upwards of 22,000 lives. Rather than embracing immediate large-scale seawalls and reconstruction, some survivors advocated ecological alternatives like planting protective forests and using animal trails as escape routes. The result is a nuanced study of infrastructure, agency, and resilience.
Radical Duke: How One Aristocrat—and the American Revolution—Transformed Britain by Danielle Allen (WW Norton, $37.50)
What do Thomas Paine, a copy of the Declaration of Independence discovered in England in 2015, and a relatively obscure British aristocrat have in common? They are all key elements in Radical Duke, a history of Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond, who, we learn, was a Paine collaborator and an unsung voice inciting the American Revolution from Britain. Combining archival discoveries with computer-assisted innovations to verify authorship of Paine’s first book, Allen, the Conant University Professor at Harvard, reminds us that the role of the historian in society remains ever-relevant.
America’s Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era by John E. McDonough (Johns Hopkins, $49.95)
How did the U.S. healthcare system become a cautionary tale of the medical industrial complex? According to McDonough, professor of practice in health policy and management at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, it was a wrong turn, or rather a series of wrong turns, inextricably linked to the rise of neoliberalism in American politics. From soaring costs to abysmal population health indicators, the practical applications of policies focused on deregulation and privatization, argues McDonough, have eroded patient care and weakened the healthcare system.
The Practice of Wisdom: Five Quests by Davíd Carrasco, Arthur Kleinman, Stephanie Paulsell, and Michael Puett (Belknap, $22.95)
In this book based on their popular Harvard course, four professors explain why living is the greatest teacher of wisdom, in an exploration that blends spiritual, inspirational, and practical stories with personal stories of growth. Together, Carrasco (Rudenstine professor of the study of Latin America), Kleinman (Rabb professor emeritus of anthropology), Paulsell (Swartz professor emerita of the practice of Christian studies), and Puett (Klein professor of Chinese history and anthropology) offer a guidebook for uncertain times.
The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy by Barney Frank ’61, J.D. ’77 (Yale, $28)
A house divided cannot stand. Here, that house is the political left, whose infighting and reluctance to publicly critique its own ideological extremes, Frank argues, have isolated working and middle-class voters and allowed a populist surge in the process. Published just after the former longtime Massachusetts congressman’s death in May, this concise manifesto offers an urgent, at times scathing, parting shot aimed at his own party, leaving us a portrait of Frank as an unapologetic political pragmatist.
Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People by Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan (WW Norton, $31.99)
Several recent books have questioned whether the Constitution is able to adapt to modern challenges and safeguard democracy. Supremacy argues that the blame lies with a concerted overreach of power by the U.S. Supreme Court. Renan, the Munroe professor of law at Harvard Law School, and Bowie, the Brandeis professor of law, are former clerks to Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. Here, they argue that judicial supremacy became the Court’s dominant ideology, particularly in the wake of Reconstruction. They also challenge its constitutional foundations and reveal its entanglement with the history of white supremacy.
Exceptional Hatred: Antisemitism and the Fight over Free Speech in Modern America by James Loeffler ’96 (Metropolitan Books, $29.99)
Hate speech enjoys constitutional protection under the First Amendment unless it contains specific threats or incitement to violence. This is a truth that our legal system and collective social conscience continue to grapple with, and a subject of particular urgency given the recent and sometimes deadly rise in antisemitism. From the harrowing experiences of the first and only Jewish Miss America to the legal battles surrounding the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017, Loeffler, a professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Virginia, explores how Americans consistently fail to fit antisemitism within the broader frameworks of racism and political extremism.
Unlocking Justice: The Power of Data to Confront Inequity and Create Change by Chad M. Topaz ’96 (Princeton, $27.95)
Data can overwhelm as easily as it elucidates. Through real-life case studies of police misconduct and cash bail disparities, Unlocking Justice provides a narrative bridge between data-driven research and social justice efforts. Topaz, a professor at Williams College and a cofounder of the Massachusetts-based Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity, pairs each example with an actionable path forward, including steps readers can take to tackle systemic inequities.
The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore (Liveright, $29.99)
The “artificial state,” as described here, gives new, ominous meaning to the term “machine politics.” In a 2024 New Yorker essay, Lepore, the Kemper professor of American history and professor of law, defined the artificial state as the “digital-communications infrastructure”—text messages, attention-mining algorithms, AI programs—“used by political strategists and private corporations to organize and automate political discourse.” Expanding on that concept in the book, Lepore leads us through a sweeping “archaeology,” as she calls it, of ideas, inventions, and policies that help explain the modern-day artificial state. She also reminds us that the artifice can be dismantled with the right human engineering.
