Brian Greene
Brian Greene’s Until the End of Time is ambitious in scope. It’s an attempt to tell the story of everything – from the Big Bang to the ultimate fate of consciousness. Almost like a biography of the universe through the lens of the species which is (in our understanding) the first to ask why and how it all happened – how physics, chemistry and biology led to matter, mind and meaning. And how all that will dissolve back in time.
(more…)Richard G. Wilkinson, Kate E. Pickett
The Spirit Level (2009) has been on my list for so long that it got relegated to unread. I didn’t want to repeat that mistake with The Inner Level, so I bought it as soon as it came up on my radar. 8 years after it was published, but hey! The authors provide a quick get-to-speed about the former whose core idea was that people in societies with bigger income gaps are more likely to suffer from a wide range of health and social problems. Not just the poor, mind you, but a vast majority of the population.
(more…)Timothy W. Ryback
Timothy Ryback’s Takeover is an absolute thriller, even though the outcome is known history, and it doesn’t let go until the nail-biting finale because even five minutes before President Paul von Hindenburg was scheduled to acknowledge Hitler as the Chancellor of Germany, the coalition partners were still in disagreement. It is fascinating to realise how differently things might have turned out for the world if even a small move from any of a bunch of personalities had slightly diverged.
(more…)Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski
A big theme of my reading in 2024 was around answering “why am I like this?” The Worm at the Core has given that understanding a paradigm shift. The basic premise of the book is that the awareness of our own mortality is the hidden engine of human thought, emotion, and culture.
(more…)Sam Quinones
Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic by Sam Quinones is a sweeping, deeply reported account (he is a journalist) of how the United States slid into the worst drug crisis in its history. The book is named after a private swimming pool that opened in Portsmouth in 1929, which became a community’s bedrock, and a symbol of a good American life, where generations transitioned through their life stages. It closed in 1993, once again a symbol – of a community crippled by a crisis.
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