Category: Books

  • Takeover: Hitler’s Final Rise to Power

    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.

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  • The Worm at the Core

    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.

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  • Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic

    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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  • The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture

    Orlando Figes

    In The Europeans, a cultural snapshot of nineteenth-century Europe serves as the backdrop for the intertwined lives of three differently remarkable people – Pauline Viardot, her husband Louis, and the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. The result is the origin story of what is called ‘European culture’. During their lifetime and immediately after, the continent, for long fractured by language, politics, and geography, slowly began to imagine itself as a shared cultural space with a taste graph that extended across music, literature, art, travel, and performance.

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  • Mother Mary Comes to Me

    Arundhati Roy

    I have been an unabashed fan of whatever Arundhati Roy writes, and Mother Mary Comes to Me is no exception. This is a memoir, but I’d say it’s her love letter to her mother, and to some extent, others whom she loves, including characters in her works of fiction. It is also very Arundhati Roy – poignant and visceral to the point of tear-jerking, and yet funny – sometimes with wit – both the scathing and irreverent as well as the loving kind, and sometimes with the inherent hilarity of situations.

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