Rutger Bregman
On one hand, I really hoped Humankind would be meaningful, and on the other, I am quite a cynic. Bregman writes towards the end of the book that cynicism is just another name for laziness, an excuse not to take responsibility. I am not sure I agree completely because I do feel the rage against injustice, and do take action sometimes, but largely my question has been ‘what is the point?’
(more…)I have to admit that I began reading Nexus with a bias – courtesy Harari’s earlier works. While I liked them when I first read them, further reading and critical takes reduced the good impression considerably.
So, while I really liked the first two chapters, I did find irony in him writing about information and truth after bring rebutted by experts on agricultural revolution and various other things he is not an expert on. And while I really like reading history, his meandering on Niall Ferguson mode in the first part of the book didn’t endear himself to me at all.
(more…)Anna Funder
Stasiland had me hooked on Page 4, when Anna Funder nailed (in the GDR context) my fascination – why I keep reading about (and visiting) Eastern Europe. She calls it horror-romance. “The romance comes from the dream of a better world the German Communists wanted to build out of the ashes of their Nazi past: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. The horror comes from what they did in its name.“
After WW 2, when the victorious Allies were divvying up the spoils, Russia began directly controlling the Eastern part of Germany, and in 1949, GDR was established as a satellite state of the USSR. The rhetoric of Communist brotherhood was established, which had liberated East Germans from fascism. The idea was to project GDR as those who were the innocent of Nazism, and that all the Nazis had gone to West Germany! The GDR, in its 40 years of existence tried to create a Socialist German Man, different from Nazi German Man, and from western (Capitalist Imperialist) German Man.
(more…)Manu S Pillai
The alternative title of Gods, Guns and Missionaries should be Bharat Ek Khoj – the Hindu Nationalism edition. But seriously, the amount of research that seems to have gone into this book is staggering – over 220 pages of this 549 pager consist of Notes.
(more…)Oliver Sacks
The River of Consciousness is the final collection that Oliver Sacks oversaw, assembled just two weeks before his death in 2015. Ten essays across diverse subjects such as botany, chemistry, evolution, medicine, neuroscience, and even the arts. They are connected by the title – an exploration of how the river of consciousness has moved through evolution, and how it continues to manifest itself in ways beyond what we normally look at.
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