Year's End Reading - Bound as Books Edition

On the eve of the new year, some reflection upon good books read in the past year. Please share your own recommendations in the comments!

- No One Would Listen, by Harry Markopolos. This first personal account of a decade-long attempt to expose Bernie Madoff's staggeringly vast Ponzi scheme is readable and well paced. In places the author may seem a bit melodramatic, but then, perhaps his fears of retaliation in trying to bring down a $60 billion fraud were pretty warranted.

- Betraying Spinoza, by Rebecca Goldstein. This is some nice intellectual history, placing Spinoza in his Spanish and Dutch contexts and teasing out the peculiarities of religious tolerance.

- Sciences from Below, by Sandra Harding. The author works to bring neglected work in science and technology studies to those who at least should be receptive to it, and find it valuable, even if they/we have overlooked it to our peril. Harding offers careful critiques of mainstream STS and northern feminist philosophy of science, and illuminates postcolonial feminist STS. This has been a fruitful challenge for my own thinking on science studies methodology.

- Brother West and Race Matters by Cornel West. The first is a new-ish popular memoir by the philosopher and public intellectual, and really worth reading if only for the chapters on his early teenage and colleagiate life. The latter is pretty old now, but its early 1990s focus is for better or worse still quite relevant today.

- Feminist Theory and The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, by bell hooks. Neither of these is especially new, and both have been on my shelf for a few years, but for some reason I found both especially valuable this year as I had not before.