If Bill Gates, Barack Obama, NPR, Amazon and big and small publications can name their best books of 2020, so can I. Everyone in the Biden administration and Congress -- and you, too -- should read these two: Fareed Zakaria’s “Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World” and Robert Putnam’s “The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again.”
Both are bad-news/good-news books about America’s troubled and deeply divided society, with ideas on how to repair it.
Zakaria looks forward to the challenges of new pandemics, runaway technology, worsening inequality, climate catastrophe and a possible U.S.-China cold (maybe even hot) war. He suggests smart fixes that can be boiled down to four: better leadership, more public investment, systematic preparation and international cooperation.