Books on the Beach

The Da Vinci Code is so last summer. And everyone has already devoured Freakonomics. So what’s the discerning international traveler to do? FP assembled a panel of movers and shakers to give you the inside scoop on the books to carry on your summer retreat. Richard Holbrooke Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Chinese ...

The Da Vinci Code is so last summer. And everyone has already devoured Freakonomics. So what’s the discerning international traveler to do? FP assembled a panel of movers and shakers to give you the inside scoop on the books to carry on your summer retreat.

The Da Vinci Code is so last summer. And everyone has already devoured Freakonomics. So what’s the discerning international traveler to do? FP assembled a panel of movers and shakers to give you the inside scoop on the books to carry on your summer retreat.

Richard Holbrooke
Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations

Chinese Lessons: An American, His Classmates, and the Story of the New China, by John Pomfret (Henry Holt and Co., $26)

A fascinating story of the turbulent lives of Washington Post journalist John Pomfret’s closest friends when he was a student in China.


Enrique Krauze
Mexican essayist and historian

Flaubert: A Biography, by Frederick Brown (Little, Brown, and Co. $35)

This should help me detox from politics and renew my sentimental education. It’s a first-rate biography — the genre of real lives — about the master of imagined ones.


Lionel Barber
editor of the Financial Times

The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and Identity, by Amartya Sen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26)

My first passage to India is this fall and I want to be prepared. Amartya Sen is a perfect travel companion.


Camille Paglia
Social and cultural critic

Italy and Its Invaders, by Girolamo Arnaldi, trans. Antony Shugaar (Harvard University Press, $19.95)

The book considers the clash of civilizations from the sack of Rome to the birth of the Italian nation-state. I see parallels to the tangled ethnic and sectarian history of Mesopotamia.

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