Pratik
Nope, this isn't about Genesis. As quoted in the epilogue, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt once remarked that there are three phases of scientific discovery. The first is denial. The second is denial of importance. The third is crediting the wrong person. Anyone vaguely familiar with history of scientific progress is only too familiar with the premise of the quote. Mesler and Cleaves focus on the oft-ignored origin of life discoveries and dig into the history starting from Egyptians and the Greeks to Szostak.
Many of my biochemistry friends are well aware of the names mentioned in this book but it was revelatory for me and helped me understand treacherous path of discovery. Having studied philosophical debates in history of scientific progress, I haven't had the opportunity to read about the tussles within the science community. We all know about Darwin, Watson & Crick, etc. but the details of the work of Carl Woese developed on Darwin's primodial soup was unknown to me. The battles between Voltaire and Needham couldn't have been more interesting.
I highly recommend this book to all science and history fans.
A wonderful look into the history and use of modern materials that has shaped human civilization. Miodownik, a materials sciences & society professor starts by showing us a picture of him relaxing on the roof of his London home and then proceeds to dissect various materials in the picture by its origins, history, and its place in our world. Materials that we take for granted like paper, glass, steel, etc. have complex histories and its manufacture has been perfected over time and still continues to be.
Ever wonder why we do not taste the metal when you eat food with a stainless steel spoon? Of the ninety-four different types of atoms that naturally exist in our world, only eight make up 98.8 percent of the mass of earth leaving us with limited options to play with yet, as Miodownik shows us, we have managed to come up with nifty inventions. Whoever thought that by varying temperatures of fire we can drastically alter the nature of materials was a genius. The chapter on concrete was especially enlightening for me given my architecture background but it's impact on modern structures in the past hundred years cannot be understated.
It's a very short read at 228 pages and each chapter stands independent of the others. Highly recommend.
If your idea of a crime drama is CSI or even Law & Order, you may want to skip this book. But if you want a truer and a more vivid look at life of cops in NYC, you may like ‘The Whites' by Harry Brandt (a pseudonym of Richard Price). The ‘whites' is akin to ‘white whale' a la Moby Dick to signify the ones who got away and consider it your life's mission to pursue. The story follows the life of the protagonist, Billy Graves, who is now a sergeant at the Manhattan Night Watch, a small team of detectives charged with responding to all post-midnight felonies. This tale is deeply enmeshed with his time with an aggressive anti-crime unit known as the Wild Geese in the mid-90s. The toll it took on him and his colleagues during that time forms the basis of this crime drama.
However, I did not find it a page-turner in the traditional sense and it's less of a whodunnit and more of a whydunnit but nevertheless it's engrossing. You do have to keep up with being introduced to several characters which may be disproportionate to the size of the book. The ambiance of the book is very NYC and gritty and can be considered the urban drama of our times. Don't expect any #BlackLivesMatter angle to this tale though. It's a tale of a man fighting his conscience while dealing with the hard nature of his work and protecting his family.
Imagine if Hitler instead of being long dead unexpectedly wakes up in Berlin in 2011, what would he make of the world today and more importantly, how would he be received? Vermes' fictional satire often bordering on dark comedy is written from the first-person narrative of ‘Herr Hitler', as he asks to called by people around him. It's uncanny how timely the book is considering the inexplicable rise of Trump in America and the similar sentiments he espouses unabashedly to gain popular support among the right-wing. People often consider extremist views as an edgy art form and seem to revel but does it mask a underlying agreement with the sentiments expressed? Although Vermes' Hitler is never taken seriously as political opinion, you can see the mental gymnastics his acquaintances perform while laughing with him as he maintains a poker face. Also, news that Mein Kamf has been republished in Germany and sold out within a day doesn't exactly inspire confidence that we're past bigotry yet (or are people simply trying to understand it better?)
PS. I loved the book cover. Excellent design indeed.
Robert Lynch conducted a study that analyzed if when we laugh, we reveal what's inside us by exposing participants to very edgy stand-up routines from comedian Bill Burr. So are you laughing at seemingly racist or sexist jokes because you secretly agree? If not, what's makes us laugh? Food for thought, eh?
Also, as in any time travel tale (I'm a sucker for those), there are plenty of hilarious moments when Herr Hitler tries to wrap his head around things that have changed (“Herr Starbuck seems to have coffee houses everywhere”).
Unless you've been living under a literary rock, you've heard of or better still even read the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates. A journalist/writer for The Atlantic, his longform essays on race relations in today's turbulent times are the perfect recipe for those trying to sift through the jingoism. His profound understanding of African-American history is a revelation for someone who didn't grow up here. Heck, I'm sure people who were even born here are aware of much of the sordid history of race and how it permeates American society to this day.
This book is a long open letter to his teenage son who reads and sees the troubling news today and gets distressed. Coates doesn't sugarcoat his words on how ‘his body' i.e. that of an African-American is not really in his control and is subject to abuse not by a racist cop but rather by institutions that've thrived on subjugation of minorities and adds that history has been replete with such injustices. Perhaps we hear about them more often now than before thanks to the tech social networks. He doesn't proffer violence as the solution but his tone is of resigned anger that has festered over years thanks to countless incidences of being unfairly profiled.
Coates talks about the other side of white privilege which any non-white person doesn't need any explaining. The norms that have been set that we constantly try to fight against are dictated by what is expected of you. I cannot imagine what it is to be a black man or a Muslim in America as much as a white person can't imagine what's it be to a brown person trying to board an airplane just to get home.
Be warned that parts of the book will make you angry. Very angry. But it also instills you in a finer understanding of the world around you and all you can hope is to make it a slightly better place. As Obama often says, we strive to make it a more perfect union. But I don't think we're there yet. Far from it, in fact. But someday.
‘Quiet' attempts to dispel the notion that you've to be an outgoing & gregarious person that's the life of a party to be successful in life. As Cain backs up with several examples that many successful people have been avowed introverts, she leads you down the path of providing research-backed conclusions that dissuades you from trying to be whom you're not. Being an introvert is not the same as being anti-social. For the former, social interactions for a prolonged time can be mentally and emotionally exhausting and just as an extrovert thrives on more interactions, an introvert has an upper limit on the time he/she can spend with people before retiring into their own homes for peace and quiet.
The ideas on productivity including teamwork, brainstorming, and open-office collaboration are simply myths that research has proven to not yield results unless the collaboration is done online (creating Wikipedia, etc.) The best work is often done on your own before sharing it with others. I've often done my best work on my own even to the extent of doing my design dissertation in my architecture undergrad years when my peers took help of several of our juniors.
Cain offers plenty of strategies to introverts who may want to ‘act' as extroverts in a world where gregariousness is considered a must-have asset. Introverted people in professions that need you to be extroverts often tend to over-prepare which even makes them more reliable and better at their work instead of an extrovert who may decide to ‘wing' it.
That said, Cain doesn't consider being introvert a necessary attribute for success in life but she emphasizes that it need not be a debilitating one.
If there is one law that can be credited with my presence in the United States and subsequently meeting my wife, my marriage, and the birth of our son, it would be the 1965 Immigration Act. The Act abolished national quotas that heavily favored Europeans and kept Asians immigrants from moving to America. Gjelten weaves the story of several immigrants' and their children's arduous journey of legally immigrating to the U.S. with the political background of welcoming immigrants of a ‘different kind'. We're shown with examples through the years of history that bigotry is as American as apple pie but that hasn't prevented the equally strong pushback against such actions that inherently undermine the country's ideal.
The book is timely in the context of the immigration debates and the fearmongering amongst the conservatives toward immigrants who have nothing but hard work and entrepreneurship to offer. Perhaps the book would've been and will continue to be timely no matter the year it was published in. Gjelten convinces you that change is slow and hard but eventually will bend toward justice even though it may seem totally improbable at the time. John F. Kennedy's role in prioritizing the 1965 Act was pivotal but even more important was his brother, Edward Kennedy who was truly the ‘lion' in the debate leading up to the passage. Ultimately what worked for the Act was its unintended consequences because if they were known at the time, it would've never passed and kept America a predominantly white country and perhaps robbed of its competitive edge that now keeps it two steps ahead of the rest of the world.
Gjelten concludes with the backlash toward Muslims in wake of the 9/11 attacks and details the profound effect it had on people who had been living peacefully as citizens for many years. It shows that hatred can easily be preached and is often run counter to what you want to achieve.
Perhaps Gjelten could've included an Indian story as one of the anecdotes considering the high proportion of Indians moving to America compared to any other nationality. In delving into the Indian experience, he may have discovered that for Indians, the legal immigration continues to be a nightmare enough to make us cagey about our existence in this country. We're one bureaucratic mishap away from having our entire life torn apart. There is much work to be done in terms of legal immigration and unfortunately certain sections of the population that were earlier in support of welcoming immigrants are now the fearmongers. Forgive them for they know not what their country needs.
Overall, I would highly recommend this book to whoever is interested in the nuances of immigration debate. Sometimes you've to know how the sausage is made.
A perfect accompaniment for the newly-released ‘The Martian', this 2010 book by Mary Roach is both fun and insightful like her other books. Roach takes a look at behind-the-scenes (sometimes, literally) at the various machinations of space travel. She presents a lot of historical context and fun facts from the Gemini, Apollo, and the later Space Station missions.
Even wonder how astronauts poop in space? Well, wonder no more (spoiler alert! You need good aim). The more interesting parts are ironically the most boring parts of an astronaut's journey. The drudge work of research that went into finding out what happens when people don't bathe for 2 weeks in zero gravity or the kind of food they have to eat and even whether they do stir-crazy when propelled into space at mind-numbing speeds into the frontier that no man had ever been blasted into. Space travel is exciting but preparing for it may not necessarily be. The nerds on the ground and at mission control are just as committed as the guys that get to ride the rockets. Forget Columbus, these guys were the real pioneers.
Interestingly, I went from reading this book to Mary Roach's Packing for Mars. David McCullough's style, of course, is more descriptive from a historian's point of view. He dwells mostly on the period when the Wright Brothers worked tirelessly to invent their contraption that led to human flight.
He does offer painstaking details in documenting their efforts at developing their invention but Wright brothers didn't accord him much drama to get excited about. Perhaps that's a good thing but the Kitty Hawk experiments were vividly described and perhaps were the best part of the book; after which it starts to lag. I preferred McCullough's John Adams but perhaps that was the nature of the time period he was writing about. Getting excited by brothers who undoubtedly worked hard and by the dint of their labor and ingenuity gave us the greatest invention of all perhaps wasn't meant to be.
Overall, I would still recommend this book just so you can learn more about the process of invention which mostly isn't about one ‘Eureka' moment but hours of continually slaving over and perfecting your invention to solve one tiny problem. Rest may or may not fall in place. All said and done, they were still the Wright stuff!
A perfect accompaniment for my recent obsession with decluttering. Contrary to what most believe, decluttering is less about owning less and more about owning what really matters to you. As Kondo states repeatedly, keep only the things that give you joy and discard the rest regardless of how important it once was to you or even how important you think it may be sometime (codeword for never) in the future. Although she repeats herself a lot in the first few chapters, I think the subject demands that she do because unlearning what most of us consider normal behavior can take a little bashing in.
After stressing on the importance of discarding, Kondo spends the majority of the rest of her book by offering practical tips that let you discard more and often. Although she is at loss for words at times to explain her ways making her resort to spiritual reasons, her intentions are clear. As most Japanese, she anthropomorphizes inanimate objects but there is a method to her quirky obsessive methods. She even tackles the holy grail of book ownership that most bibliophiles put beyond debate.
Overall, it is an enlightening read and probably you may even chose to read it again to be inspired once more. I've definitely learned a lot and even implemented several of her techniques in addition to taking her advice to heart. My house is much more lighter now but definitely more airy and a pleasant space to be in.
As brilliant as his famous xkcd comic strip. Rich in scientific detail as he takes on insanely absurd hypotheticals. You may need basic knowledge about physics, chemistry, and biology to fully appreciate it but hey, if you completed high school and enjoy delving into “what ifs”, this is the book for you. I hope to read many more volumes of his work. Keep those questions flowing, people!
An entertaining and often enlightening read into America's modern history. Bryson covers a lot of ground pre-1927 and some past it to narrate a wonderful tale about events coming together in an eventful summer of 1927. From the race across the Atlantic via air that made Lindbergh a hero to his subsequent fall from grace, to Babe Ruth's record-breaking home run hits, to the various trials often tainted with overt racism and anti-semiticism, to the devastating floods of 1927 that got virtually no media coverage, and to the eccentric American presidents of that time.
No matter how much you know about American history, you'll definitely learn something new from this 528-page tome that's well worth your time. Don't skip the epilogue. It's like a series finale that ties up all the loose ends of all the characters you've read about.
Distinctly different from her usual immigrant experiential narrative. Of course, it still retains the cultural shifts but she has approached the immigrant experience more of freeing up from the shackles of the characters homeland. The Naxalite narrative may raise some hackles in terms of accuracy but it's merely the background strife that tears the family apart. It can easily be any other political upheaval in India that we don't seem to lack.
Jhumpa Lahiri's books have this tendency of making you poignant while and after you're done reading but somehow you seem to come back to her books; perhaps we do enjoy being sad
If you couldn't digest Roach's Gulp! (get it?), you should probably stay away from Bonk. This book is even better than the travails of your alimentary canal as it aims at a much lower level i.e. your genitals. No other physiological occurrences have been more important yet have been studied so less often.
Citing heavily from Masters and Johnson (BTW definitely watch ‘Masters of Sex' on Showtime), Kinsey, et al., Roach brings her inimitable humor to the science of sex. Some chapters will have you clenching the pages a little too tightly especially for men as she describes the bravery of some men to go the extra mile for science so that we would learn. Or maybe they just didn't have any option coz they screwed up (I'm full of puns today). If you've checked out the early part of ‘Orange is the New Black', you'll be not be surprised to know that women are equally unaware of their nether regions. In their defense, it's much more complex. Just like their minds.
So if you aren't a prude and can get thru lines such as ‘...if you thought defecation-induced orgasm was gross, think of the other way around' and didn't throw up your dinner, then you should definitely read Bonk. Perhaps you can impress the lady with science if not with your charms.
Informative and hilarious. Not meant for the easily grossed-out. Roach approaches topics that you wouldn't otherwise discuss in polite company (burps, farts, poop, etc.) although they're as natural as our existence, not to mention, pivotal.
PS. Don't miss her footnotes. Some of her best humor is hidden among those.
Written in her usual self-deprecating style of humor, I found the latter part of her life more interesting than her earlier pre-college days. I'm sure she can write an entire book on her parenting experience in her style of humor. I would read that. I hear that her audio version of this book is way better.
Sandler cites extensive evidence (sometimes a little too much) to dispel typical myths that surround “onlies” (only kids). Research shows, they aren't aloof, selfish, or maladjusted and in fact do better in life than kids with siblings. Of course, I had selfish reasons to read this book since I want ample ammo whenever I'm asked by a relative on when (not whether) are we having another kid. Even the most educated of us believe in the myths even when told about ample evidence to the contrary.
Dear parents of just one kid, do yourself a favor and read this before you decide to have another kid “just to keep your existing one” company. You may want to having more kids but perhaps this book will make you less judgmental of those who choose not to.
A welcome addition to the India-themed books hitting the market. Sidin offers a different more-serious look into the common myths of ‘India facts' and yet sprinkles in enough of his typical humor to keep you going. A worthy read not only for anyone obsessed with forwarding those ‘India is always great' emails and Whatsapp messages but also for those who're tired of receiving those messages. But don't worry, it's not an India-bashing book either but be prepared for some truths. The last chapter offers plenty of lessons and we all will be better off if half of our countrymen heeded even half of those.
Sandberg stretches what could be a longish blog post into a book-length narrative. Raises good point but belabors them to the extent of knocking you over with it. It doesn't help that she isn't that good of a writer (if she indeed wrote this book). Also, she has a penchant of dropping names of her rich and famous friends whom we know aren't exactly women-friendly (Hi, Tim Armstrong)
