Just in time for New Year’s, we are pleased to announce the 2023 Octavian Best Book List, our annual selections for the best books we read this year. Best wishes for a happy, healthy and prosperous new year, and happy reading!
National Book Award finalist Ackerman sets his latest novel in an alternate 2004, where Al Gore is President and scientists have discovered how to do away with death. We follow Martin Neumann, a recently divorced historian, who rents the guesthouse of Robert Abelson, esteemed lawyer, WWII vet, and family man. As Martin’s life becomes entangled with that of the Abelson family he discovers their complicated connections with the new scientific discovery, bringing everything he thinks he knows about the past (and by extension, the present and future) into question. A frightening, funny, and thought-provoking meditation on the roles of history and memory in American life.
ASSYRIA: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE WORLD’S FIRST EMPIRE by Eckart Frahm
Yale Professor of Assyriology Frahm chronicles for the general reader the fascinating rise and fall of the Assyrian empire, which at its height nearly twenty-seven centuries ago spanned from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, after emerging out of modern-day Iraq. This is at heart a book about the power of networks: of how civilizations are built through people, goods, technology, and ideas flowing in perpetual motion. It’s refreshing to encounter such a vivid and enjoyable modern historical account of a subject largely known from biblical and classical texts. A highly readable work on a fascinating civilization.
PAX: WAR AND PEACE IN ROME’S GOLDEN AGE by Tom Holland
Epic history at its best. Holland returns to the Roman Empire with a third installment, following his magisterial Rubicon, which traces the civil wars, and Dynasty, which narrates the founding of the Imperial state by the Julio-Claudians. Here he picks up the story with the fall of Nero and the end of Octavian’s bloodline, chronicling the century when Rome was at the height of its power, ruling over some forty percent of the world’s population, and when many epochal events took place: the sack of Jerusalem, the building of the Colosseum, the conquests of Hadrian, the destruction of Pompeii, the spread of Christianity. We see wealth of unprecedented grandeur. We see ultimate power. And we see great cruelty. Holland adds to his reputation as the great contemporary popular chronicler of Rome with this fast-paced and deeply researched book.
COBALT RED: HOW THE BLOOD OF THE CONGO POWERS OUR LIVES by Siddharth Kara
The heart of darkness still exists in Congo, and its latest manifestation is powering the electrification of the world we are told is needed to combat climate change. Little known is that this green revolution is built on the backs of children who lose limbs, are exposed to radiation, suffer extreme poverty, and perish to provide the blue material, cobalt, essential to our devices and electric cars. Kara, an expert on modern forms of slavery, writes that he has never “seen more extreme predation for profit than [he] witnessed at the bottom of the global cobalt supply chains.” His thorough investigation of cobalt mining in the Congo—source of roughly 75% of the global supply of this vital component in the lithium batteries powering so much modern technology—reveals a web of brutality and duplicity linking militias, corporations, governments, and consumers, much of it centered on Chinese interests. While drawing attention to the voices of the Congolese who suffer worst under this system, Kara tells a story of global import, confronting us with our shared responsibility for the human and ecological toll wrought by dependence on our cobalt-fueled devices.
CONFLICT: THE EVOLUTION OF WARFARE FROM 1945 TO UKRAINE by Gen. David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts
General Petraeus and historian Roberts (Napoleon), major figures in their respective fields, have teamed up for this accessible masterwork, offering both wide-ranging historical synthesis and fine-grain analysis of roughly seventy-five years of conflict, including first-hand observations by Petraeus. Conflict is also a study in strategy and effective leadership, in which the authors highlight the need for leaders with grand vision and ability to implement “big ideas.” They end with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—with Zelensky presented as a “truly Churchillian leader”—serving as encapsulation of past conflicts and potential harbinger of what’s to come.
THE SLIP: THE NEW YORK CITY STREET THAT CHANGED AMERICAN ART FOREVER by Prudence Peiffer
In a soaring debut, Peiffer, an art historian and Director of Content at MOMA, chronicles how a motley group of artists— including Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, and Robert Indiana—lived and worked in Coenties Slip, an out-of-the-way pocket of Lower Manhattan. By focusing on this place rather than on a single artist, movement, or style, Peiffer veers from traditional approaches to writing about art, yielding a book that is at once a warm and thoughtful portrait of a bygone moment of New York history and a careful examination of the intersections between art, money, and real estate.
MAKING IT SO: A MEMOIR by Patrick Stewart
Stewart, a natural storyteller, writes candidly about his tough early life in Yorkshire, England and of the twists and turns that brought him unexpectedly to the Shakespearean stage and eventually on to screen fame as the inimitable U.S.S. Enterprise captain Jean-Luc Picard, which came for him only in middle age. One of our era’s great stage actors, Stewart has given us one of the most entertaining celebrity memoirs in years. Filled with self-deprecating humor, fascinating anecdotes and cameos, and a sweep of both popular and high culture stretching over fifty years, Making It So is absorbing and well-written. You don’t have to be a trekkie to be engaged by Stewart’s life story, which is one of tenacity, patience, and grace.
As anyone familiar with the Thalidomide scandal would expect, this is a tough read. All the more so because Vanderbes has unearthed a forgotten American chapter to add to this international tragedy. She painstakingly recounts how in the 1960s, even after the FDA rejected the so-called wonder drug, several American pharmaceutical firms continued to push Thalidomide in trumped up trials, leading to birth defects. And yet along with eliciting rage and shock at the ignorance, deception, and greed on display, Vanderbes also succeeds at foregrounding the yeoman-like work of pediatricians, epidemiologists, parents, journalists and others determined to push back against the forces of corporate greed and government negligence.
AN HONORABLE EXIT by Éric Vuillard, translated by Mark Polizzotti
Vuillard’s The Order of the Day, about the Anschluss, won France’s 2017 Goncourt Prize. Its English edition, sharply translated by Mark Politzzotti, attracted international attention. Now Vuillard, with the same translator, turns to the last years of the First Indochina War (1946-1954), crafting a pointillist account of this humiliating debacle of French colonialism. Carefully chosen vignettes heighten the absurdity and hypocrisy of a doomed-from-the-start war fought for control of Vietnam’s precious resources while falsely justified as a “civilizing mission” - an exit that set the stage for America’s own experience in Vietnam.