《经济学人》| 2015年最值得阅读的书
你希望哪本书被译介到中国来？参与文末投票。
政治时事
《近邻远邻：苏联情报新史》Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence
作者：Jonathan Haslam
A detailed appraisal of how the Soviet Union handled undercover operations from the communist revolution in 1917 until the end of the cold war. The most gripping chapters focus on the chaos that was unleashed by Josef Stalin.
详尽评价了苏联自1917年革命到冷战结束期间在秘密战线的行动，最扣人心弦的篇章斯大林制造的混乱。
《我们的孩子：危机中的美国梦》Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis
作者：Robert Putnam
The most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. In a thoughtful and persuasive book, the former dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government analyses the growing gulf between how the rich and the poor raise their children, adding a liberal voice to long-standing conservative complaints about family breakdown.
今天美国最重要的鸿沟是阶级而非种族，最要紧的地方是家里。在这部思想深刻、令人信服的作品中，哈佛大学肯尼迪政府学院的前主任分析了穷人富人怎样抚养孩子时日益增大的差距。保守主义者长久以来对家庭分崩抱怨不断，这部作品增加了自由主义的声音。
《朝鲜秘闻：私人市场、时尚潮流、劳改营、异见者与叛国者》North Korea Confidential: Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors
作者：Daniel Tudor and James Pearson
Two knowledgeable journalists offer a bird’s-eye view of everyday life that teases out how the famine of the 1990s prompted unexpected change in the attitudes, governance and lives of ordinary North Koreans, giving the lie to the simplistic view that Koreans are a homogenous people under the thumb of a power-crazed dictator.
两位博闻强识的作者通观日常生活，找出上世纪九十年代的饥荒如何让普通朝鲜人的生活态度、政府治理和生活发生不期的变化，人们以为朝鲜人是一个嗜权独裁者股掌中的同质人，这一简单看法被证明是谎言。
《贫民窟：调查谋杀潮》Ghettoside: Investigating a Homicide Epidemic
作者：Jill Leovy
Black men are still dying at alarming rates in the toughest urban pockets even though, overall, America’s murder rate is down. A study of one neighbourhood in Los Angeles has the power to change how people think about policing in America.
尽管美国谋杀率整体下降，但最恶劣的城市环境中，黑人还是以惊人的速度死去。对洛杉矶一个社区的研究将改变人们对美国警察执法的看法。
《曾经辉煌：底特律往事》Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story
作者：David Maraniss
One of America’s finest non-fiction writers, a son of Detroit, offers a lively and meticulously researched account of how the city, once the engine room of America, began sputtering.
生于底特律的Maraniss是美国最好的非虚构作家，他详尽、栩栩如生地描述了这个曾经是美国引擎的城市如何开始分崩离析。
历史
《长崎：核劫余生》Nagasaki: Life after Nuclear War
作者：Susan Southard
The searing account of five teenage hibakusha (“explosion-affected people”): how they survived the atom bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, and the terrible price they paid in the aftermath of the war.
五个“受辐射”少年的经历令人心碎，1945年原子弹落在长崎后，他们怎么活下来的？他们在战后付出了巨大的代价。
《滑铁卢：四天三军三战史》Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles
作者：Bernard Cornwell
A great and terrible story of a battle that was fought 200 years ago, told with energy and clarity by a writer who has a deep understanding of men in combat and why they do what they do. “Waterloo” proves that Bernard Cornwell’s non-fiction is as fine as his novels, if not finer.
200年前的伟大战斗，如此磅礴、清晰。作者对战斗中的人和动机有着深刻的理解。《滑铁卢》证明Cornwell非虚构作品的功力不输于虚构作品。
《奥斯曼衰亡：中东大战》The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East
作者：Eugene Rogan
How a multinational Muslim empire was destroyed by the first world war, by a historian of the 20th century who is director of the Middle East Centre at Oxford University.
一个横跨多国的穆斯林帝国如何在第一次世界大战中毁灭？剑桥大学中东中心主任娓娓道来。
《黑土地：作为历史和警示的大屠杀》Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning
作者：Timothy Snyder
A historian at Yale University has made a detailed study of where Jews were in most danger during the second world war. In France and Italy, three-quarters of the Jews survived. In eastern territories, which suffered “double occupation”, first by the Soviets and then by the Nazis, at least 90% of them perished.
耶鲁大学历史学家详尽研究了二战中哪里的犹太人最危险。在法国和意大利，四分之三的犹太人存活了下来。在东部战场，被苏联和纳粹双重占领的地区，至少90%的犹太人死亡。
《元老院与市民：古罗马史》SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome
作者：Mary Beard
A masterly new chronicle, by Britain’s most engaging historian of the ancient world, about Rome from its myth-shrouded origins to the early third century. She shows that the key to its dominance was granting citizenship to so many people.
一部了不起的新编年史，英国最出色的古代史学家从罗马的神秘起源讲到三世纪早期。她证明统治的关键是给予更多人公民权。
《棉花帝国》Empire of Cotton: A Global History
作者：Sven Beckert
By focusing on a sector that until 1900 was the world’s most important manufacturing industry, Sven Beckert offers a fine account of 900 years of globalisation.
直到1900年，棉花都是世界上最重要的制造产业，作者专注于其900年的全球化历史。
《眼睛听到什么？踢踏舞的历史》What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing
作者：Brian Seibert
How tap-dancing entertained many, even as it had clear racist overtones. An engaging, warts-and-all history of one of America’s greatest creative inventions by a dance critic at the New York Times.
踢踏舞如何娱乐人民，尽管它有着显著的种族主义意味，这是《纽约时报》舞评家对美国最伟大创造毫无保留的精彩叙述。
《扑火：沙皇俄罗斯的帝国、战争与终结》Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia
作者：Dominic Lieven
How Russia went to war. A gripping, poignant and in some respects revolutionary contribution to European history by a distinguished British scholar who is descended from several of the protagonists he describes.
俄国人如何参战。出色的英国学者对几个主人公的描写，给欧洲史带来引人入胜、尖锐甚至革命性的贡献。
传记
《基辛格：理想主义者，1923-1968》Kissinger: The Idealist, 1923-1968
作者：Niall Ferguson
The magisterial first instalment of a two-part biography about a man who towered over American foreign policy for more than two decades, and still divides opinion as no one else does.
对一个主掌美国外交二十载的人的权威转机，对他的争议无人能及。
《天行者：与飞行员同行》Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot
作者：Mark Vanhoenacker
A highly readable account, as moving as it is unexpected, of what flying means, by an airline pilot with a gift for words.
飞行意味着什么？用精到的语言描写了一个飞行员的经历，读来亲切感动。
《泰德-休斯：未授权写作》Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life
作者：Jonathan Bate
It is hard to write a literary account of Ted Hughes without writing about the life, as many authors have found. Five years in the making, this biography began as an authorised life only to become unauthorised when the author fell out with Hughes’s widow, Carol, over how much personal detail to include, prompting the poet’s estate to withdraw its co-operation.
许多作者都发现，不写他的生活，就很难写泰德-修斯的文学史。这部历史五年的传记一开始是得到授权的，作者后来就个人细节问题与修斯的遗孀卡罗尔发生纠纷，终止了合作，结果成了一部未授权的传记。
《发明自然：洪堡的新世界》The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
作者：Andrea Wulf
Explorer, polymath, friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Jefferson and Simon Bolívar, Alexander von Humboldt was one of the greatest scientists of the 19th century. His ideas are as relevant today as they ever were.
探险家，博学者，歌德、杰弗逊和玻利瓦尔的朋友，洪堡是十九世纪最伟大的科学家之一，他的想法至今都没有过时。
经济
《国家的公共财富：公产左右经济》The Public Wealth of Nations: How Management of Public Assets Can Boost or Bust Economic Growth
作者：Dag Detter and Stefan Fölster
Governments have trillions of dollars in assets, from companies to forests, but they are often poorly managed. Two investment experts explain how things could be improved by ring-fencing assets from political meddling in independent holding companies. Professional managers could sweat them as if they were privately owned.
政府有数以万亿计的资产，从公司到森林，可常常管理不善。两个投资专家解释了在对独立控股公司进行政治干预中，如何运用栅栏原则提升效率，让专业管理人团队像私营企业主一样卖力气。
《别人的钱：金融的买卖》Other People’s Money: The Real Business of Finance
作者：John Kay
If the world is to avoid future banking collapses, or at least limit their economic impact, people need to think clearly about what the finance sector is for. This book does the job.
如果世界要避免发生银行倒闭，或至少限制其影响，人们需要明白金融行业是干嘛的？这本书告诉了你。
《不公：何为？》Inequality: What Can Be Done?
作者：Anthony Atkinson
A crunchy book that analyses policy discussions in detail but avoids dullness, thanks to its unapologetic support for robust government intervention.
这本棒棒的书详尽讨论了政策却不令人厌烦，这是由于其对积极政府干预给予坚定支持。
《胡为：行为经济学的形成》Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics
作者：Richard Thaler
Why people don’t behave the way economic models predict lies at the heart of this brilliant intellectual history by the founder of this once-obscure blend of psychology and economics.
何以人们的行为与经济模型预测的不同，经济心理学的创始人告诉你其中的奥秘。
《经济法则：悲观科学的对与错》Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science
作者：Dani Rodrik
Economists still have a lot of explaining to do. Dani Rodrik reassures those outside the profession of the helpfulness of economists, and also removes some of the wishful thinking from his colleagues.
经济学家要解释的还有很多。Rodrik指出了经济学家没法解释的东西，剔除了同事们异想天开的东西。
《大竞技场：举办奥运与世界杯背后的经济赌博》Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the Olympics and the World Cup
作者：Andrew Zimbalist
Any country thinking of hosting an international sporting jamboree should read this book to see what a bad deal the IOC and FIFA seek to foist on them. Hamburg has just voted against bidding for the 2024 Olympic games. Clever move.
想要举办一场国际体育盛会的国家应该读读这本书，看看国际奥委会和国际足联如何捞钱。汉堡刚刚投票否决了申办2024年奥运会，太聪明了。
《文化、社会与旅行：性格之路》Culture, society and travel：The Road to Character
作者：David Brooks
The author, a columnist for the New York Times, clearly thinks people are too full of themselves. A thoughtful polemic on why the self-regarding Facebook generation should move from narcissism to thoughtfulness. They’d be much happier.
纽约时报专栏作者显然认为人们太自以为是了。自私自利的社交媒体一代为何该从自恋转向深刻，本书给出了深刻的讨论。他们本该比现在更幸福。
《交易未完：工作与家庭》Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family
作者：Anne-Marie Slaughter
Why organisations will have to change radically to make work-life balance a reality, by a respected foreign-policy expert who left her high-octane government job to spend more time with her two teenage sons. A rational, well-argued call to arms. Move over Sheryl Sandberg.
为什么机构应该大刀阔斧的改革，让工作和生活平衡成为现实？一个受人尊敬的外交专家必须离开令人激动的工作岗位，转而去照顾两个儿子。这是一部理性、充分的宣言。不该只有桑德伯格（脸书首席运营官）。
《世界与我之间》Between the World and Me
作者：Ta-Nehisi Coates
In a homage to James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time”, a father writes a warning letter to his teenage son about growing up black.
像詹姆斯·鲍德温的“The Fire Next Time”致敬，一个爸爸给他的少年儿子写了一篇警告信，谈谈一个黑人如何长大。
《舒伯特的冬日之旅：细说沉迷》Schubert’s Winter Journey: An Anatomy of an Obsession
作者：Ian Bostridge
One of Britain’s foremost tenors, Ian Bostridge has performed Schubert’s “Winterreise” more than 100 times. He knows every last nuance of the work and his book offers many fresh insights that will inform the enjoyment of both old admirers and newcomers to the music.
英国最重要的男高音Bostridge演唱舒伯特的“Winterreise”超过百次。他知道作品的每一个细节。音乐的新老发烧友都能从本书获得新的启迪。
《拔毛史》Plucked: A History of Hair Removal
作者：Rebecca Herzig
Most of Earth’s mammals possess luxuriant fur. Only one seeks to remove it. A curious account of hair-erasing, and why people have tried clamshell razors, lasers, lye depilatories, tweezers, waxes, threading and electrolysis to try and free themselves from hairiness.
大多数地球上的哺乳动物都有豪华的皮毛。只有一种动物拔毛。剃毛的历史引人入胜，人们为什么要用蛤壳、激光、碱液、镊子、蜡和电针去脱除体毛呢？
《天罚：一个男人和里约之战》Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio
作者：Misha Glenny
How Antonio Francisco Bonfim Lopes, better known as Nem of Rocinha, became a drug-dealer after his daughter was diagnosed with a rare disease and he needed the cash—and how he eventually took over an entire Brazilian shantytown.
安东尼如何在女儿患怪病后因为缺钱而变成一个毒贩子，他最终如何统治整个巴西的棚户区。
科技
《超级预测的艺术与科学》Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
作者：Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
A scientific analysis of the ancient art of divination which shows that forecasting is a talent; luckily it can be learned. You need a healthy appetite for information, a willingness to revisit predictions in light of new data, and the ability to synthesise material from sources with very different outlooks on the world.
对古代占卜艺术的科学分析显示预测是一种禀赋，我们有幸从中学习。你需要对信息有嗜好，愿意根据新的数据调整预测，有能力用世界上不同的观点综合材料。
《神经部落：自闭症的遗产和神经多样性的未来》Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
作者：Steve Silberman
The descriptions of how autistic children were treated in the 20th century is especially shocking.
自闭症的孩子在二十世纪的遭遇，令人惊骇。
《重要问题：生活何以如是？》The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?
作者：Nick Lane
A persuasive and demanding attempt, by a thought-provoking British scientist, a biochemist at University College London, to answer some of the most fundamental questions in biology. It posits a new theory of how life came to be.
一个生化学家回到了生物学中一些最基本的问题，答案令人信服、引人深思。作品指出了生命何来的新理论。
《人无需适用：人工智能时代的财富与工作指南》Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
作者：Jerry Kaplan
An intriguing, insightful and well-written look at how modern artificial intelligence, powering algorithms and robots, threatens jobs and may increase wealth inequalities, by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and AI expert.
现代的人工智能、强大的算法和机器人如何威胁了你的工作，并加大财富的不平等，一个硅谷企业家及人工智能专家的讲述生动且深刻。
《在第四维要做什么？》Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension
作者：Matt Parker
This is an unusual, in-depth but highly accessible popular-maths book by a member of the London Mathematical Society who also has a sideline in stand-up comedy.
伦敦数学学会的一本数学科普书，就像在说相声。
《物理学七讲》Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
作者：Carlo Rovelli
A startling and illustrative distillation of centuries of science by an Italian theoretical physicist.
意大利理论物理学家来梳理几个世纪以来的科学史，丰富且生动。
《新荒野：入侵物种何以拯救自然》The New Wild: Why Invasive Species Will Be Nature’s Salvation
作者：Fred Pearce
A carefully researched, analytical look at the effects that new species have on different environments into which they are introduced. The book debunks poor science and the cherry-picking of statistical examples to feed hysteria about keeping invasive species out and protecting an imaginary perfect past.
本书对新物种被引入不同环境后带来的后果进行了细致分析。本书驳斥了科学和统计样本选择行为中的谬误，后者认为要抵制入侵物种，保护想象中的完美过去。
《人体冒险》Adventures in Human Being
作者：Gavin Francis
A Scottish doctor takes a delightful journey closer to home, through the wondrous human body, from top to tail, inside to out.
苏格兰医生让你走进奇妙人体，从头到脚，从里到外。
《时间螺旋：探秘海贝的生前身后》Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells
作者：Helen Scales
A marine biologist-turned-science writer describes coming face-to-shell with a giant clam on the Great Barrier Reef, enjoying a bag of smoked oysters in Gambia and meeting a sea-silk seamstress in Italy. She makes an impassioned and convincing argument that, contrary to expectations, molluscs have much to teach us.
海洋生物学家、科普作家描写大堡礁的贝壳，尝一包冈比亚烤生蚝，采访意大利的海丝女裁缝。她不动声色却令人信服的表明，与我们想象的不同，软体动物能教会我们很多东西。
《怎么讨论可视化游戏？》How to Talk about Videogames
作者：Ian Bogost
Some say video games are the great sport of the 21st century, the summit of art and entertainment. Others call them mindless. Meditative essays on the meaning of gaming, by a game designer and professor of interactive computing.
有人说可视化游戏是21世纪最伟大的运动，艺术和娱乐的巅峰。有人却认为无脑。一个游戏设计师和交互计算机教授对游戏的意义进行思考。
虚构
《七次谋杀简史》A Brief History of Seven Killings
作者：Marlon James
A failed assassination of Bob Marley becomes a prism through which to see Jamaica’s history from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. Violent, lurid, scabrous, hilarious and beautiful, this novel teems with life, death and narrators.
对Bob Marley一次失败的谋杀成为七十年代出初到九十年代初牙买加历史的镜子。暴力、夸张、猥琐、放浪却又美丽，这部小说洋溢着生与死，有众多讲述者。
《捕鱼者说》The Fishermen
作者：Chigozie Obioma
A lyrical retelling of the Cain-and-Abel story in which four Nigerian brothers play truant from school, go fishing and meet a soothsayer who predicts that one brother will kill another. Not yet 30, Chigozie Obioma is a writer to watch.
该隐杀弟的重演。四个尼日利亚兄弟逃课、打渔，碰到了一个算命者说一个兄弟要杀死其他三个。作者不过三十岁，他的作品大有看点。
《下面的西王母》Seiobo There Below
作者：Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Translated by Ottilie Mulzet
Seventeen stories by a Hungarian modernist whose sentences wind and unwind and rewind, creating what one translator described as “a slow lava-flow of narrative, a vast black river of type”.
匈牙利现代主义者的十七个故事，文辞婉转，译者称之为“a slow lava-flow of narrative, a vast black river of type”。
《投降》Submission
作者：Michel Houellebecq
No other French novelist knows how to stir trouble quite like Michel Houellebecq. This account of France under Muslim rule is set in 2022. It came out on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack and has been called scaremongering. Its fans say it speaks to France’s deepest secret fears.
没有哪个法国小说家比Michael Houellebecq更会挑事儿。他假想法国在2022年被穆斯林占领。这发生在《查理周刊》事件后，被指为兜售恐慌。其支持者则认为其道出法国最深处的恐惧。
《小生活》A Little Life
作者：Hanya Yanagihara
On the surface a story about four university graduates trying to make it in New York, at heart Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel is a fairy-tale about child abuse, pitting good against evil, love against viciousness, hope against hopelessness.
表面上是四个大学毕业生在纽约谋生活的故事，实质上是作者关于儿童虐待的童话：正对邪，爱对恶，希望对无望。
《亲历者回忆伟大奥克的衰落》An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It
作者：Jessie Greengrass
Restraint and a formal writing style, by a philosophy graduate from Cambridge University, give a tone of melancholy to this spectacularly accomplished, chilly debut collection of short stories about thwarted lives and opportunities missed. The strongest are also the most ordinary.
剑桥大学哲学毕业生的首部短篇小说集风格端正，格调忧郁，讲述了被扼杀的生命和失去的机会。最炽烈的也是最平淡的。
《丢失的孩子》The Story of the Lost Child
作者：Elena Ferrante. Translated by Ann Goldstein
This four-volume narrative, with all its operatic overtones, is a tribute to feminism and female friendship in mid-20th-century Naples.四卷本的故事行文如歌，讴歌了二十世纪中叶那不勒斯的女性主义和女性友谊。
投 票
你希望哪本书被译介到中国来？