Oliver didn’t just exceed expectations; he steamrolled them. He and his team made brilliant use of the long-form segment, doing reports that were more like investigative journalism than sketch comedy, and displayed an Internet savvy that put even Jimmy Fallon to shame.What is the book from 2014, either from your list or not, fiction or non-fiction, that is most likely to join the canon, or still be discussed 20 years from now?What was the strongest debut book of 2014?
Phil Klay, “Redeployment.” It took American writers a few years to begin to fully reckon with our military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in books like “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” and “The Yellow Birds,” the war feels visceral but also a touch historical, like an event in our rearview mirror. The stories in “Redeployment” are as built to last as the wars that are now clearly long ones; the dark comedy and haunted soldiers that populate the book will be relevant for years to come.
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Pikkety which, like “The Sixth Extinction” by Elizabeth Kolbert, is about one of the two most pressing problems of our time: the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and the degradation of the environment.Your number one book of the year: In a sentence or two, would you explain why it leads your list?
“The Temple of Iconoclasts” came out in Italian in 1972, then in English around 2000, then disappeared — which is fitting, in a way, for a collection of bio-sketches about inspired lunatics whose ideas have been justly or tragically consigned to the dustbin of fictional history — but it feels wholly fresh and vital alongside today’s disrupters and demagogues. Plus it’s just routinely delightful; here’s the wraithlike utopian Armando Aprile: “It is most likely that I shall succeed in removing the water from the seas and leaving only what is necessary for irrigation, since they pose a great danger to the planet Earth. What if someone immersed gigantic blenders in the sea? We would all die in a wink.”
Here are our favorite segments from what was a great first season:Was there one book, either on your list or off your list, fiction or non-fiction, which seems to best encapsulate America in 2014?
On the surface Eula Biss’s “On Immunity” covers a narrow topic—the way childhood vaccination has been misunderstood and politicized in America. But Biss is our great poet of national fear—a very big topic—and as she did in her previous book, “Notes From No-Man’s Land,” she is superb as showing how our choice of words, from intimate conversations to cable-pundit airhorns, reveal our anxieties about children, race, and community.