JOHN CAREY

GOVERNMENT FAVORITE BOOKS TO TEACH The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell MUST-READ BOOKS IN YOUR FIELD The Federalist, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay Looking For History: Dispatches from Latin America, by Alma Guillermoprieto FAVORITE PLEASURE READ True Grit, by Charles Portis MOST RECENTLY READ Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson "I realize the Manifesto isn't a book—it's a pamphlet-but word for word, nothing had a bigger impact on the political history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Reading it with students I'm always struck by the degree to which it feels like a museum piece: These guys really believed you could change human nature by overturning property rights. At the same time it's full of passages that could be pulled from contemporary debates over trade policy, industrial policy, social welfare policy or the Greek bailout." "My field is the design of democratic institutions. There's a lot of good scholarship, but most of the debates still come back to themes that Hamilton and Madison weighed in on during their debates with the anti-federalists. The writing has that 18th-century formality that feels so bound up and stilted and then suddenly breaks into revelation. I wish I could write like that-the revelation part, anyway—which reminds me of True Grit. I saw the Coen brothers' movie from 2010 and the screenplay kept the language from Charles Portis' original novel, which is just amazing. It's worth reading aloud."