Adam Tooze

Products they talk about

• Context Collapse👍 Recommends

  …book recommendations exploring poetry and the history of the form

  “And the third suggestion is poetry. I love poetry. I struggle to find time to read novels from start to finish. And I like the compressed power and energy of poetry. And this is by a friend, a Berlin friend, Ryan Ruby. It's called Context Collapse. And it is literally a poem containing a history of poetry. So it is an extraordinary long-form poem in which he in a... I was asking about it over drinks the other night. Why did he do it? It's this delirious effort to write in poetry, a history of the form and the collapse of its context in modern culture.”

  on The Ezra Klein Show

• Diary of a Madman and Other Stories👍 Recommends

  …book recommendations for understanding modern chinese history and society

  “So my first is a Chinese classic. Not an ancient classic, but a modern classic. Arguably the first modern Chinese novella, Lucian's Diary of a Madman, which is the most extraordinary kind of first-person account of the delirium of a person waking up into a world where they begin to convince themselves that it is a world of cannibalism. And it's a complex metaphor about Chinese society in the early 20th century.”

  on The Ezra Klein Show

• The Southern Tour👍 Recommends

  …book recommendations for understanding deng xiaoping and china's economic transformation

  “And my second suggestion is Jonathan Chatwin's book, The Southern Tour, which is an extraordinary account of Deng Xiaoping's tour of southern China in 1992. In the moment when, after the repression of Tiananmen Square in 1989, he revives the reform and opening up project. So this legendary moment in the economic reform process that has made modern China.”

  on The Ezra Klein Show