Category: Favourites

  • 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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  • 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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  • Reshuffle: Who wins when AI restacks the knowledge economy

    Sangeet Paul Choudary

    Reshuffle is a book I had been looking forward to reading ever since I started seeing Sangeet Paul Choudary’s excerpts and related posts. And despite reading all those posts, the book had sufficient meat to make it an excellent read. One that offers great perspectives on dealing with the influx of AI in work – at an individual and business level.

    I think I have a bias for the book because of a few reasons. One, it follows a clear systems thinking approach, and the logic and reasoning is robust. Two, it is a strategic and framework-driven exploration, which means it offers tools to think about this in one’s own contexts. Three, it’s not just theory. The book provides sufficient examples that can serve as starting points on how to think through this. That, as you’d notice is an elegant why-what-how approach.

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