By Edward Nawotka
Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Americans make 16 billion trips to the gas station and pump an average of 1,068 gallons per capita annually. Yet few of us understand the economic, political and cultural ramifications of such rampant consumption, Lisa Margonelli observes in ``Oil on the Brain: Adventures From the Pump to the Pipeline'' (Doubleday, $26).
After watching an Alaskan chemist use napalm to clean up an oil slick, Margonelli sets off on a 100,000-mile trek -- burning some 3,000 gallons of gas and jet fuel, she dutifully reports -- to explore ``petroleum culture'' and the global oil-supply chain.
Her chatty combination of reportage and travelogue serves up some fascinating facts: For example, China's booming car sales have resulted in traffic fatalities equivalent to ``a daily 747 crash.''
Other highlights this month:
``Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement'' by Brian Doherty (PublicAffairs, $35). Doherty, an editor at Reason magazine, offers an astute, entertaining history of thinkers as diverse as Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, who both believed that the best government was the one that involved itself least in the life of its citizens.
``The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters'' by Diane Coyle (Princeton, $27.95). Countering Thomas Carlyle's description of economics as the dismal science, Coyle shows how contemporary economists are bringing theory out of the classroom as they adopt a more pragmatic, humanistic approach to such problems as poverty and pollution.
``The Unwritten Laws of Business'' by W.J. King and James G. Skakoon (Currency, $14.95). This revised edition of the 60-year- old business primer ``The Unwritten Laws of Engineering'' (which helped inspire Raytheon CEO William Swanson's popular self- published pamphlet ``Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management'') is full of aphoristic advice -- for example, ``If you have no intention of listening to, considering, and perhaps using, someone's opinion, don't ask for it.''
``Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic'' by Chalmers Johnson (Metropolitan, $25). Following his bestselling ``Blowback'' and ``The Sorrows of Empire,'' Johnson powerfully demonstrates how the United States' costly attempts to install democracy abroad (too often with security as the real goal) have lured it into a permanent war economy that threatens to undermine the Constitution and bankrupt the nation.
``Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World'' by Margaret MacMillan (Random House, $27.95). The bestselling author of ``Paris 1919'' offers a fascinating look at the events surrounding that historic handshake of February 1972 and the important roles that Henry Kissinger, Pat Nixon, Chou En-lai and Jiang Qing also played.
``Gerald R. Ford'' by Douglas Brinkley (Times Books, $20). Ford, who died on Dec. 26, is largely remembered as the man unwittingly thrust into the presidency. Brinkley recounts key episodes in his brief tenure, most notably the signing of the Helsinki Accords, which, the author maintains, laid the groundwork for the end of the Cold War.
``The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression'' by James Mann (Viking, $19.95). Mann, a former Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times and the author of ``Rise of the Vulcans,'' shows why China's deeply embedded authoritarian culture is likely to persist despite the West's mistaken belief that economic reforms will inevitably lead to a humanistic democracy (``the soothing scenario'') or else revolution (``the upheaval scenario'').
``Planet India: How the Rise of the Fastest-Growing Democracy Is Transforming America and the World'' by Mira Kamdar. (Scribner, $26). Kamdar, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, weighs in on the Indian companies that have marshaled technology to transform the country into an economic dynamo that now imperils the West's economic and cultural hegemony.
(Edward Nawotka is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
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