Hump day recommendations 12/6/2022

Read: the best team that lost the World Cup. If you're a soccer nut like me, you’ll know that two teams have played the Beautiful Game almost to perfection — Pep Guardiola's FC Barcelona and Brazil in the 1982 World Cup in Spain. But why did a squad featuring magicians with the ball like Sócrates, Zico, Falcao, or Júnior fail to win the tournament with their futebol arte? Find out in this great book by Stuart Horsfield. — Carlos

Read: “Lessons in Chemistry,” by Bonnie Garmus. Think Julia Child meets feminism meets chemistry. This light read by Garmus follows the ups and downs of Elizabeth Zott, a young scientist struggling to be taken seriously in the male-dominated field of chemistry in 1950s and ‘60s America. Zott’s matter-of-fact approach to life, love, work, and cooking reflects her inner feminist. When she packs in her day job in the lab to teach America’s housewives how to cook, she also shows them how to believe in themselves. — Tracy

Confront: the lies that postwar Europe told you. In the aftermath of history’s most ruinous war, post-1945 Europe built the future on a foundation of myths about the conflict. They were useful lies about good and evil that obscured the uglier truths of collaboration, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes even by the “right” side. Written in 1992, when new vaults of memory were being uncomfortably cracked open, historian Tony Judt’s essay “The Past is Another Country” warned about the consequences of distorting history like this. And with 30 years of hindsight, his prescience about the return of rightwing nationalism is particularly chilling. — Alex