About a week ago or so, Newsweek devoted quite a few pages of the magazine to listing and briefly describing “which books—new or old, fiction or nonfiction—open a window on the times we live in, whether they deal directly with the issues of today or simply help us see ourselves in new and surprising ways.”
It was a surprisingly eclectic list of fifty, opening with The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope before moving on to Lawrence Wright’s book on “how 9/11 happened, and why.” We can’t take responsibility for any of the titles on the Newsweek list (though we do have the best edition of the book at #24, Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley).
A couple of our authors do have books on the list, however: David Hickey at #15, and Edmund S. Morgan at #20.
Beyond the gaze of Newsweek, we have a fairly clear idea which books we’ve published are opening new windows for our readers, because they are surging in sales beyond expectations. Lots of readers are looking for perspectives on socialism (The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek], on capitalism (Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman), and on America’s role in the world (The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr). That’s the zeitgeist so far as we can see it.