“To understand capitalism, we need to be able to see it.”
Sounds simple, sure. But when Sven Beckert shares this observation, just a few pages into Capitalism: A Global History, the Harvard professor is actually laying out a rather daunting challenge. Today’s dominant world order so thoroughly dictates the logic of our day-to-day lives, and operates on a scale so far beyond our personal lived experience — often even beyond our intellectual grasp — that you may as well ask a tuna to see the Pacific Ocean.
Hence Beckert’s hefty tome — which, at more than 1,000 pages before footnotes, cannot itself be accused of being difficult to see. In an effort to render capitalism visible, even legible, the decorated scholar traces the arc of this “most consequential revolution in world history” from its earliest burblings in the Middle East some 900 years ago, to the extraordinary concentration of wealth presently underway. There’s no better companion for Black Friday this year.
Still, it certainly isn’t the only new book worth checking out this week. Highlights from the publishing calendar also include fiction, biography and the checkered past of the venerable crossword.
Capitalism: A Global History, by Sven Beckert
It has been more than a decade since the publication of Beckert’s last book, Empire of Cotton, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The judges who awarded his history of the commodity the Bancroft Prize called it “a masterful achievement in the burgeoning field of the study of capitalism.” In Beckert’s new history, the subject is capitalism itself. Vast in scale, cogent in delivery, accessible enough to accommodate a non-economist like me, the book is that rare kind of project that can be described — unironically, no less — as magisterial.
Disinheritance: The Rediscovered Stories, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Before her death in 2013, at the age of 85, Jhabvala had been celebrated for her work on the page and screen alike, the only writer ever to win both the Booker Prize and an Oscar — two, in fact, for the adapted screenplays of A Room with a View and Howards End. The short stories in this posthumous collection offer a useful reminder of the Merchant Ivory scriptwriter’s talent for slipping into the perspectives of others, as a self-described “cuckoo forever insinuating myself into other’s nests.”
Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle, by Natan Last
There’s not much I can say about this one that the title doesn’t say for itself already. If you are, as I am, one of those hopeless degenerates with an interest in — nay, physical dependency on — doing crosswords every day, here’s an edifying portrait of the boxy tyrant devouring your free time. Last, who writes crosswords himself for The New Yorker, details the riddlers, dreamers and of course, Will Shortz, who have helped shape the game’s trajectory from its birth in a newspaper supplement more than a century ago to the conversations and controversy that color its virtual ubiquity today.
Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, by Carla Kaplan
The six aristocratic Mitford sisters and their wildly divergent paths — including communism, fascism and seemingly every pursuit in between — have furnished enough material already for a biography, a collected correspondence and a television series, not to mention the acclaimed 1960 memoir of the second-youngest, Jessica. It is Jessica’s implausibly eventful life of radical activism and muckraking journalism that takes center stage in this rollicking new history from Kaplan, a literary historian who previously made her bones with studies of Zora Neale Hurston and the Harlem Renaissance.
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