Top reads of the week + next book-club book

Piazza dei Signori, Siena, Pyotr Konchalovsky, 1912

OK, Ethan Watters’ Crazy Like Us keeps coming in second (again and again and again) when we put books up for a vote, so this time I’m going to play the benevolent dictator and rule in its favor. You won’t be sorry. Among my many virtues as a dictator—and in addition to my aforementioned benevolence—I have a) exceptionally good taste and b) little interest in meddling in your lives beyond the domain of book-club selection.

It is well known that American culture is a dominant force at home and abroad; our exportation of everything from movies to junk food is a well-documented phenomenon. But is it possible America's most troubling impact on the globalizing world has yet to be accounted for?

American-style depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anorexia have begun to spread around the world like contagions, and the virus is us. Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

We’ll meet to discuss in a little over a month.