Evan Osnos
Winner of the National Book Award and Author of The Age of Ambition
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Evan Osnos
“Richard Reeves has the rare combination of writerly flair, analytical skill, and unflinching focus on problems that partisans would rather dismiss. Just as Dream Hoarders forced Americans to question our mantras about social mobility, his work on men and boys is provocative, timely, and rich with real-world solutions.” (from Amazon)
The book that Sparked a National Conversation Boys and men are struggling. Profound economic and social changes of recent decades have many losing ground in the classroom, the workplace, and in the family. While the lives of women have changed, the lives of many men have remained the same or even worsened. In this widely praised book, Richard Reeves, father of three sons, a journalist, and now the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, tackles the complex and urgent crisis of boyhood and manhood. He argues that our attitudes, our institutions, and our laws have failed to keep up. Conservative and progressive politicians, mired in their own ideological warfare, fail to provide thoughtful solutions. Reeves looks at the structural challenges that face boys and men and offers fresh and innovative solutions that turn the page on the corrosive narrative that plagues this issue. Of Boys and Menargues that helping the other half of society does not mean giving up on the ideal of gender equality. In the updated paperback edition, Reeves provides good-faith, fact- based analysis and offers a positive vision for masculinity in a more equal world.
Recommended by Evan Osnos
“Nothing short of a masterwork of illumination. . . . This is Sapiens for the seas; there is true knowledge on every page.” (from Amazon)
From a brilliant Brookings Institution expert, an “important” (The Wall Street Journal) and “penetrating historical and political study” (Nature) of the critical role that oceans play in the daily struggle for global power, in the bestselling tradition of Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography. For centuries, oceans were the chessboard on which empires battled for supremacy. But in the nuclear age, air power and missile systems dominated our worries about security, and for the United States, the economy was largely driven by domestic production, with trucking and railways that crisscrossed the continent serving as the primary modes of commercial transit. All that has changed, as nine-tenths of global commerce and the bulk of energy trade is today linked to sea-based flows. A brightly painted forty-foot steel shipping container loaded in Asia with twenty tons of goods may arrive literally anywhere else in the world; how that really happens and who actually profits from it show that the struggle for power on the seas is a critical issue today. Now, in vivid, closely observed prose, Bruce Jones conducts us on a fascinating voyage through the great modern ports and naval bases—from the vast container ports of Hong Kong and Shanghai to the vital naval base of the American Seventh Fleet in Hawaii to the sophisticated security arrangements in the Port of New York. Along the way, the book illustrates how global commerce works, that we are amidst a global naval arms race, and why the oceans are so crucial to America’s standing going forward. As Jones reveals, the three great geopolitical struggles of our time—for military power, for economic dominance, and over our changing climate—are playing out atop, within, and below the world’s oceans. The essential question, he shows, is this: who will rule the waves and set the terms of the world to come?

