(2021-11-23) Johnson The Books That Defined My 2021

Steven Johnson: The Books That Defined My 2021. These are not necessarily the best books I read in 2021, and many of them didn’t actually get published in 2021, but they are the books that I spent the most time thinking about over the past year.

I’d recommend my last two books. First, there’s Extra Life, which tells the heroic story of how we doubled life expectancy over the past hundred years.

The other book of mine that makes a thoughtful gift for the history buff in your extended clan is my 2020 book, Enemy of All Mankind.

now onto the books not written by me…

Against The Grain: A Deep History Of The Earliest States by James Scott. I’m just about to start reading Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything—maybe the most talked-about book of the past few months—but reading some of the early reviews suggested to me that it has a lot of overlap with this astonishing book by James Scott, who is probably best known for his anarchist-themed history, Seeing Like A State

*The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord.

I’m working on a new project that touches on the question of existential risk, and so I found my way to this book by Toby Ord, who got so obsessed with the urgency of existential risk as a field of study that he basically dropped all the pioneering work he had done co-founding the “effective altruism” movement to focus exclusively on all the ways that we might destroy ourselves. I wouldn’t say that this is the most compelling book I’ve ever read in terms of the prose style or storytelling.*