Pick Your Antidote

It is hard to imagine a more dreadful year in the post-war period than the one the world has just been through. Of course there have been human-made catastrophes in all-too-familiar places: Congo, Afghanistan, Gaza, Sri Lanka. And there have been the usual natural and environmental disasters in Italy, Mexico and China. But the global economic meltdown, triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States last fall, possessed the uniquely unsettling power to undermine the well-being of almost every person on the planet—except for those lucky Wall Street brokers still collecting their bonuses.

LRC readers need a break from all this, but trying to recommend some good beach reading for this particular summer presented unusual challenges. How can books help to relieve the trauma? For some, mindless escape fiction could be the way to go, so we have included some of that...