Must-Read Books of 2017

Top profs says all students should tuck into these books in the new year
By Linda Hervieux,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 28, 2016 9:36 AM CST
Must-Read Books of 2017
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What are the most important books to read in the new year? Business Insider posed that question to professors at some of the country's most prestigious universities. Their picks, while hardly beach reading, ranged from drone warfare to race in America. Yale's Harold Bloom said simply, "all of Shakespeare." Highlights:

  • The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter. Former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson, now of Harvard University, says it's "everything you need to know about the root of Donald Trump's rhetoric and fake news."

  • Orfeo by Richard Powers. Yale's James Berger says the "story of music and genetics in our contemporary age of terror and surveillance" will teach you "a hell of a lot about music, science, politics."
  • The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis, selected by both Harvard's Eric Maskin and Maurice Schweitzer of the University of Pennsylvania.
  • The Strategy of Conflict by Thomas Schelling is "probably the best book ever written about conflict," says Princeton's David B. Carter.
  • A Theory of the Drone by Gregoire Chamayou is "a very intelligent assessment" of, you guessed it, drone warfare, says WJT Mitchell of the University of Chicago.
  • Racecraft: The Soul of Inequity in American Life, by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields. The book deserves a look "given the resurgence of questions about race in American society," says Kenneth Warren of the University of Chicago.
(Creative people love these eight books.)

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