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Best ideas books of 2023

From psychology to AI, pandemics to popular culture, we survey the bigger picture

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Do you often find yourself dancing the “reasonable tango”? This is what the sociologist Kirsty Sedgman, in On Being Unreasonable (Faber), calls the kind of polite argument that acknowledges the opponent’s point with a “Yes, but …” and carries on indefinitely, with no mutual agreement in sight. In this bracing manifesto for being just a little less civilised, she considers subjects such as what should count as bad behaviour in the theatre, what “reasonable” means in law, and why we should not “debate” with fascists. (Sunlight is not the best disinfectant, she points out; bleach is.) Does being meek ever bring about justice? Is performative “reasonableness” really a cloak for the “terrifying thrill of self-righteousness”? The pious tone-policers, she argues, are Unreasonably Reasonable; we could all do with pulling down a few more statues and in general being a bit more Reasonably Unreasonable.

What more reasonable way to investigate the weird misogyny of popular culture in the 2000s than via case studies of famous women? That is Sarah Ditum’s gambit in Toxic (Fleet), a furious and funny book about the public discourse around Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Jennifer Aniston and others. The febrile combination of social media with hungry paparazzi feeding a new ecosystem of online gossip sites gave rise to what Ditum calls the “upskirt decade”, a virtual cesspool of celebrity culture. From “ Nipplegate” (Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Superbowl ) to Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines and the singer’s pillorying as a poster boy for rape culture, Ditum always has something new and insightful to say about old scandals, and how they continue to reverberate in many current conversations, not least among the Unreasonably Unreasonable.

Viciousness towards famous women is also part of the story in Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (Allen Lane), in which she becomes obsessed with her half-namesake Naomi Wolf, and the latter’s curious transformation from hip feminist to Covid conspiracy theorist and truther on the topic of contrails . It doesn’t help that Klein (author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine ) is so often confused with her subject “in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media”. But as she continues “cringe-following” Wolf her themes widen and darken, taking in a cultural history of doubles and evil twins, conspiracy theories more generally, the rise of the populist right in the person of Steve Bannon , and a close reading of Philip Roth, whose Operation Shylock she reads persuasively as the key to many such mythologies.

One chapter of Dasha Kiper’s Travellers to Unimaginable Lands (Profile) begins, almost Rothishly: “When Peter Harwell’s seventy-nine-year-old mother punched a doctor in the face …”, setting the tone for a deeply compassionate but often gently humorous investigation into the psychology of caregiving for those looking after people with Alzheimer’s. The psychologist author explains how ordinary human biases and foibles are ruthlessly exploited by the disease, so that caregivers too often feel terribly guilty at not doing better. As Kiper points out in her lucid explanations of what is known about memory and consciousness, and the brain biology of self-control, no one can be perfect in such a situation: the carers, too, are victims of the disease.

Therapy of an arguably less productive kind is the subject of Seamus O’Mahony ’s splendid The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic (Apollo), an almost incredulous narration of how the cult of Sigmund Freud took hold in Britain and then the world as a hobby for “rich directionless strays” – largely thanks, in this telling, to the Viennese sage’s “bagman”, a sexually incontinent Welsh doctor named Ernest Jones. The latter made himself chief of the British Psychoanalytical Society and introduced Freudianism to the Bloomsbury set. “Being theoreticians of the passive, dividend-drawing and consuming section of the bourgeoisie,” as Prince DS Mirsky remarked acidly of that crowd, “they are extremely intrigued by their own minutest inner experiences and count them an inexhaustible treasure store of further more minutious inner experiences.” Let us give thanks, at least, for the titular “sceptic”, a surgeon named Wilfred Trotter who was superbly unimpressed on meeting Freud but did later coin the term “herd instinct” in social psychology.

After the upskirt decade, might it be time finally to take the female body seriously? In Eve (Hutchinson Heinemann), Cat Bohannon takes a stylish scalpel to innumerable examples of the dysfunctional ways in which medicine and technology have been limping along according to an assumed “male norm”, and investigates the evolution of female anatomy all the way back to mammals that scurried around under the feet of the dinosaurs. Highly entertaining, and full of novel perceptions. “Bodies are basically units of time,” Bohannon points out. “What we call an individual ‘body’ is a way of bounding a series of cascading events that follow self-replicating patterns until finally entropy sets in and enough goes wrong that the forces that keep you from flying apart at the seams finally let go.”

You could say much the same for planetary bodies, for example Earth, which began as a fiery lava ball and will probably end up incinerated by an expanding Sun. In a short window in between, human civilisation, miraculously, has arisen. In The Earth Transformed (Bloomsbury), Peter Frankopan reads the history of Homo sapiens as inextricable from the history of climatic and ecological change, whether naturally abrupt or anthropogenically gradual. Was Genghis Khan’s success made possible by unusually heavy rains? Were the Norse myths inspired by the sun-blotting ash of a huge eruption? One worrying lesson is that, even today, we are not doing nearly as much as we should to increase our resilience against the awakening of large volcanoes.

As destructive as a lava flow but more terrifyingly mobile was the apocalyptic forest fire that engulfed parts of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, in 2016. John Vaillant’s riveting account, Fire Weather (Hodder), draws on interviews with officials, firefighters and other citizens to provide a minute-by-minute disaster-movie narrative of the inferno, while also pointedly remarking on the fact that Fort McMurray is an oil town, devoted to processing the products of the Alberta tar sands. It is fossil-fuel-induced global heating that is making such “natural” disasters both more frequent and more intense, while modern houses filled with fossil-fuel byproducts (vinyl, plastics, etc) burn more quickly and completely than ever. A deserved winner of this year’s Baillie Gifford nonfiction prize .

And even if plastic doesn’t burn, it pollutes the environment in many other ways: 20,000 plastic water bottles are sold every second, and 4 trillion cigarette butts are chucked away every year. Oliver Franklin-Wallis ’s Wasteland (Simon & Schuster) is a book about all our rubbish: a travelogue around dumps, scrapyards, disposal and recycling facilities, from giant machines that shred TVs and other electronic devices to vast landfill sites in India: the all-too-solid hinterlands of our obsession with buying and throwing away so much stuff.

Can there be a science of history? Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series proposed an elite cadre of “psychohistorians” who could predict the future; in Peter Turchin’s End Times (Allen Lane), the proposed science of “cliodynamics” (after Clio, the Greek muse of history) is less confident of precise prediction but nonetheless makes much of the author’s own forecast, in 2010, that by the 2020s there would be a surge in political instability and violence in the US. He got that right. Surveying the rise and fall of empires and parliaments through global history, Turchin argues that civic upheavals become due when “popular immiseration” (eg, the stagnancy of real wages) is combined with “elite overproduction”: the number of people qualified (via PhD or otherwise) to high social rank exceeds the number of spaces available, leading to dangerous disgruntlement in both camps. Pumping wealth upwards, from low to high in the social hierarchy, eventually leads to “state collapse and social breakdown”.

Another source of state collapse and social breakdown might be artificial intelligence, at least if you believe the most gloomy prognostications from a year in which OpenAI launched GPT-4 and pioneers of the field, such as Stuart Russell , warned that superintelligence might just decide to kill everyone. The Coming Wave (Bodley Head), by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar (the former a co-founder of Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind), though, focuses not on the existential scenario of AI exterminating all humans, but nearer term and more plausible threats of bad actors using AI in concert with synthetic biology or drone weapons.

There are more hopeful stories of biotechnology, of course. Modern practices of vaccination, rather than being a conspiracy of mind control by the deep state as per Naomi Wolf, were in fact developed by heroic outsiders who themselves had to battle the forces of hostile bureaucracy. Such is the lesson of Simon Schama’s magnificent work of medical history, Foreign Bodies: Vaccines and the Health of Nations (Simon & Schuster). Its central protagonist is a Jewish microbiologist from Ukraine, Waldemar Haffkine, who became a hero of the Raj by vaccinating millions of Indians against bubonic plague and cholera. As thanks, he was subsequently blacklisted by the British academic establishment, a victim of the virus of antisemitism – for which no vaccine has yet been invented.

To browse all ideas books included in the Guardian and Observer’s best books of 2023 visit guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene's New Book Reads Like 1 Thing, Says Searing Guardian Review

Reporter, HuffPost

A new book by far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) “duly reads like an audition for the No 2 slot on the 2024 Republican presidential ticket,” according to a scathing review published by Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

“Venom, score-settling, fiction, self-absolution, self-aggrandizement. Greene’s book, ‘MTG,’ has it all,” former Justice Department attorney Lloyd Green wrote in the critique , published Sunday.

Greene toadies up to former president and Republican 2024 front-runner Donald Trump , lies about the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, “embraces the insurrectionists who attacked Congress,” and “offers a meandering defense of her famous comment about so-called Jewish space lasers, insisting she is not antisemitic,” says the reviewer.

Despite promising to tell her “side of the story” in the Canada-printed memoir, the lawmaker does not directly address some of her most controversial moments, such as when her support of the idea of executing Democrats saw her stripped of House committee assignments, Green notes.

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Read the full review here .

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What is left to say about a new John Grisham novel? ‘The Guardians’ has something to add.

What is there left to say about a new John Grisham novel?

Maybe only that Grisham has done it again.

“The Guardians” is Grisham’s 40th novel; he’s now 64 and has been writing suspense novels pretty much nonstop since “A Time to Kill” was published in 1989. Most of his novels are legal thrillers, but Grisham has also branched out into stories about rare books, sports and medicine. (His 2015 e-book, “The Tumor,” is about an experimental cancer treatment called focused ultrasound technology that Grisham champions.) Grisham has even written a YA legal series featuring a 13-year-old amateur legal eagle named “Theodore Boone.”

Such creative longevity is not that unusual in the suspense genre, but what is rare is Grisham’s feat of keeping up the pace of producing, on average, a novel a year (in 2017 he published two) without a notable diminishment of ingenuity or literary quality. Dame Agatha Christie, who barely paused between books to sharpen pencils during her near-50-year marathon mystery career, is another such marvel.

What John Grisham gets right about lawyers and the law

Which brings us to “The Guardians,” Grisham’s latest terrific novel. Grisham’s main character here is a so-called “innocence lawyer,” a workaholic attorney-and-Episcopal-priest named Cullen Post. Post has trimmed his life down to the barest of essentials, living in spartan quarters above the nonprofit Guardian Ministries, his workplace in Savannah, Ga. The book focuses on Post’s investigation into the wrongful conviction of a black man named Quincy Miller who was set up to take the fall for the murder of a white lawyer in a small Florida town some 22 years before the opening of this story. (In his life away from his writing desk, Grisham serves on the board of directors of The Innocence Project.)

Post’s efforts to ferret out exculpatory evidence in this cold case put him in grave danger because, for one thing, the shadowy drug cartel responsible for the murder has been known to hold grisly parties in isolated jungle locales south of the border. In the dead center of this novel, Post hears a cautionary tale from a traumatized survivor of one of these gatherings. This account calls upon Grisham to summon up his heretofore unrealized inner Caligula.

In an affecting backstory, Post recalls his early career as a public defender; but the grotesque contradictions of that job — particularly Post’s final assignment to defend a depraved teenage rapist and murderer — brought on a nervous breakdown. After a sincere “come-to-Jesus” moment during his recovery, Post was ordained and began serving with a prison ministry, which led him to innocence work and eventually Guardian Ministries. A trim four-person operation, Guardian Ministries consists of Post; an underpaid litigator who’s a single mother of boys; an exoneree named Frankie who’s turned private investigator; and the nonprofit’s founder, a former business executive who, similar to Post, had a conversion experience and dedicated her life to righting wrongs of the criminal justice system.

That said, “The Guardians” is nuanced in its moral vision: Post acknowledges that most of the prisoners who contact him alleging wrongful convictions are, in fact, guilty; but it’s the thousands of others who have become his vocation. “It’s fairly easy to convict an innocent man and virtually impossible to exonerate one,” Post reminds a potential client. So far, the team has exonerated eight prisoners.

Quincy Miller may just become the ninth. His fate will depend on a relentless re-investigation conducted by Post and his colleagues and some strong-arming of jailhouse snitches and other witnesses who gave false testimony years ago. The lawyer Quincy was convicted of killing turns out to have had ties to a drug cartel. So, too, does the now-retired sheriff who was in charge of the investigation 22 years ago. Post knows he’ll eventually have to visit the secluded scene of the crime, Seabrook, Fla., but he wisely hesitates. Thinking out loud with a colleague, Post says: “Our clients are in prison because someone else pulled the trigger. They’re still out here, laughing because the cops nailed the wrong guy. The last thing they want is an innocence lawyer digging through the cold case.”

In his titanic efforts to turn justice denied for Miller into justice delayed, Post courts danger both human and supernatural. The climax of “The Guardian” slyly nods to many a classic Nancy Drew ad­ven­ture: Post and Frankie steel themselves to break into a boarded-up haunted house, climb up into its dank attic and unearth (as Nancy would say) a “clew” that just may decide Miller’s fate — all before the drug gang gets wind of their location. Post is a driven and likable loner whom, I hope, Grisham will bring back in future novels. After all, as “The Guardians” makes clear, there’s plenty of work left for an innocence lawyer to do.

Maureen Corrigan , who is the book critic of the NPR program, “Fresh Air,” teaches literature at Georgetown University.

THE GUARDIANS

By John Grisham

Doubleday. 384 pp. $29.95

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‘Apples Never Fall’ Review: A Drama Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Formula

This Peacock mini-series about a bitter family and a missing woman is TV’s latest adaptation of a novel by the author of “Big Little Lies.”

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By Margaret Lyons

“Apples Never Fall,” premiering Thursday on Peacock, is the third Liane Moriarty book to be adapted for television, following HBO’s “Big Little Lies” and Hulu’s “Nine Perfect Strangers.” But if you told me it was the 10th, I’d believe you, given how familiar it all feels. The seven-episode mini-series is so well-oiled and unsurprising, it just glides on by.

Annette Bening and Sam Neill star as Joy and Stan Delaney, pillars of West Palm Beach, Fla., who are, as the central couples in these kinds of shows always are, seemingly perfect but secretly damaged. They’ve just sold their tennis academy and are balking at the alleged freedoms of retirement, which Joy thought she’d spend with her four adult children.

However, the kids don’t want to hang out with their hovering mom and volatile, bitter dad; they want to have their own lives of not-very-quiet desperation. Troy (Jake Lacy) is the clenched-jaw rich brother, at the tail end of a divorce from a woman everyone else really liked. Amy (Alison Brie) is the “searcher,” as her mother puts it, an aspiring life coach who would be perfectly at home on any show set in California. Logan (Conor Merrigan Turner) wants to be beachy, not sporty, so he works at a marina and does yoga. Brooke (Essie Randles) is a high-strung physical therapist who is supposed to be planning her wedding but may be getting cold feet.

They probably would have kept on like that, except Joy has disappeared. And hmm, now that you mention it, there was that weird con artist, Savannah (Georgia Flood), who ingratiated herself into Joy and Stan’s life under very dubious circumstances. She couldn’t have something to do with it, could she? Well, we better bounce between two timelines to make sure: The days since Joy’s disappearance tick ahead in one timeline as we excavate all the mean family dinners from eight months ago in the other.

The show hits its steady simmer with tense competence and with some good lines. “I didn’t know how to fix it, so I broke it,” Troy says of his marriage, though it applies to all the siblings and their behaviors pretty equally.

All the best scenes are fights, and each character has a little trump card stashed away. As with hammers and nails, when you have a piece of incriminating intelligence about a relative, everything looks like an opportunity to deflect negative attention from yourself and hurt someone else. The children learned this kind of rage distribution and mistrust from Stan, whose rigidity and cruelty, particularly as a tennis coach, fell largely on Troy. Troy thinks his father knows more about his mother’s disappearance, and he’s frustrated — nay, enraged! — by his siblings’ reluctance to see their father as a brute.

And if “Apples” were just a domestic drama, that would probably be enough to sustain a story. But the show is also a missing-person mystery that is nowhere near as mysterious as it seems to think it is. When Savannah rings the Delaneys’ doorbell one night, claiming that she was fleeing her abusive boyfriend and had run right to this very street, a grift is so clearly afoot that the tension is less “hmm, what is really happening?” than “wait, how dumb are these people supposed to seem?” Every scheme is so telegraphed and unsubtle that it is hard to buy into the characters’ capacities to reason.

Mysteries often rely on characters being good liars, on viewers being fooled. To hide in plain sight requires hiding, though, and the show does not deploy any other techniques to cultivate complexity. If anything, it does the opposite: The police officers use their investigation primarily to announce each plot point. (“Well, now we know [a suspect’s] motive!”) There is no humor and little sense of place — the most distinguishing visual feature is the abundance of high ceilings. Even the tennis seems stripped of any psychological resonance.

“Apples” is not selling anything you couldn’t buy elsewhere; it’s a department store, not a fashion house. You can get the exact same scene of “a terrified family of a missing person visits a coroner’s office but finds the wrong body” on the smarter, more provocative “Expats.” You can get the “a storm in Florida also represents a storm [ sagely points at heart ] in here” on the dumber, high-on-its-own-supply “Extrapolations.”

Or perhaps you prefer something from the vintage collection, in which case you can capture the show’s general vibe by heading over to Hulu and recreating ABC’s Sunday night block from 2006-2010: “Desperate Housewives” followed by “Brothers & Sisters.”

That “Housewives” helped inspire the “Real Housewives” franchise, which demonstrated the modern appetite for rich women (some of whom commit crimes) drinking wine and yelling at each other. That formula got classed up by “Big Little Lies,” and, well, here we are again.

Margaret Lyons is a television critic at The Times, and writes the TV parts of the Watching newsletter . More about Margaret Lyons

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Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire review – time to consign franchise to the spirit realm

Despite some decent gags there’s very little life left in the tired franchise – it feels like it’s run its course and it’s time to think of something new

T he ice age of intellectual property dullness shivers on … and on. The franchise frostbite is setting in; the limbs of once decent films are turning black, but not being amputated. Now the Ghostbusters series is limping back with a new and pointless movie, this one featuring a ghost whose purpose is that it basically freezes stuff (like, say, Batman’s Mr Freeze). It is effectively Ghostbusters 4 – or Ghostbusters 5 if you count the (funny) all-female reboot from 2016, which this franchise clearly doesn’t; the women of that movie are very much not among the legacy-oldsters now invited back for cameos. There are one or two laughs here and an attempt at a queer romance, but no real signs of life.

Well, at least one thing has been fixed. The previous film, Ghostbusters: Afterlife was boringly set in small town Oklahoma, not the big city which is this story’s natural home. Now the family of that movie, Callie (Carrie Coon), her new partner Gary (Paul Rudd) and her kids Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace), have moved to New York and are set up in the ghostbusting business, driving the iconic car and headquartered at the legendary former firehouse. The older generation are still around: Winston (Ernie Hudson) is the businessman who owns the building; Ray (Dan Aykroyd) has his own supernaturalist YouTube channel; Janine (Annie Potts) puts in an appearance; and so does the legendary Dr Venkman, in which role Bill Murray looks as if he’s thinking about something else, and not in an intentionally droll way.

It all starts to kick off when a roguish guy called Nadeem (Kumail Nanjiani) attempts to sell Ray an ancient orb belonging to his late grandmother, an occult object which is the only thing stopping humanity being subjected to the tyrannical rule of the above mentioned ice-powered phantom. There’s a good gag here about the Spin Doctors and one really excellent gag about Mary Todd Lincoln. Grace has sympathy and warmth as the ghostbuster developing feelings for a spirit. We get some new character turns: standup comic James Acaster is stuck with the dull role of a boffin called Lars Pinfield, and is given pretty much nothing in the script to allow his natural comedy style to flourish. (The same, sadly, is also true of Rudd.) Patton Oswalt does his best, playing a feisty scholar of the netherworld called Dr Wartzki.

But really among the new contingent the only person who actually brings the all-important comedy is Nanjiani, who has the correct spark of humour and subversion. The younger contingent are all too wide-eyed and innocent, while the senior class of 1984 are too detached. The time has come for Hollywood to allow the spurious Ghostbusters franchise to join Jurassic World and Aquaman in the bin and think of something new.

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• Comedy films
• Science fiction and fantasy films
• Ghostbusters
• Ghostbusters (2016)
• Ghostbusters: Afterlife

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