The Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia, Andrei Lankov (Oxford University Press, 2014).| www.thepsmiths.com
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World, Charles C. Mann (Picador, 2018). There used to be famines. Poor harvests and crop failures have been with us since the development of agriculture. Archaeological evidence makes it clear that farmers have always lived on the knife’s edge of subsistence, often hungry or malnourished, and it doesn’t take much to push them over the edge into famine: too much rain or not enough, volcani...| www.thepsmiths.com
The Children of Men, P.D.| www.thepsmiths.com
When We Cease to Understand the World, Benjamín Labatut (New York Review of Books, 2021). Have you ever sat and stared at the sea? If you’ve been near it, then I’m sure you have. As soon as it hoves into view, our eyes are drawn ineluctably up to that far horizon, that endless undulating plain. Coast-dwelling cultures around the earth have stories and legends about the ocean’s strange magnetism, like some eldritch vista that once beheld deepens and ages the soul, but stare too long and...| www.thepsmiths.com