Optimism over despair - Noam Chomsky & C.J. Polychroniou

This is a collection of interviews to Noam Chomsky on US and world affairs, conducted by C. J. Polychroniou and published in the magazine Truthout. The topics are: American politics, neoliberalism, economics, social issues, environment, the war on terror, refugee crisis and many more.

Being a collection of separate interviews the book might not always been coherent or homogeneous, and is sometimes repetitive. However Chomsky always appears to be extremely informed and sharp minded. What he seems to be most concerned about is social inequality at various levels: those self fueling mechanisms whereby the richest tend to exert an ever stronger hold on politics, which in turn will operate in a way that will make them more rich, and therefore more politically influential, and so on.

Eating animals - Jonathan Safran Foer

When Jonathan Safran Foer, the American novelist, was about to become father for the first time, he started to wonder what the best way to feed his child would be, and particularly whether a human being born in the 21st century should eat animal products. Or what animal products they should eat. That question started a comprehensive research on the food industry, especially factory farming. Foer read lots of books and articles, interviewed factory farm employees, traditional husbandry farmers, slaughterhouse workers and activists. He even sneaked into a number of intensive farms to see for himself what was going on (the public is not allowed to enter the plants; his numerous requests to be admitted for visits were always ignored - not even turned down, outright ignored).

School blues - Daniel Pennac

Maybe not everyone knows that Mr. Pennacchioni, AKA Daniel Pennac, the world renowned French novelist, is also a school teacher.

In this book Pennac writes about his days as a school dunce. How frustrated this made him (and how upset his well educated parents were about it), how he finally managed to find motivation, become an educator himself and even achieve success as a writer. Four teachers actually “saved” him. One of them by asking him to write a novel, secretly, a chapter at a time, for the whole duration of the school year.

A man (Un uomo) - Oriana Fallaci

At the time of publishing this book was categorized as a novel. Well, it’s not: it is the real story of Aleksandros (Alekos) Panagulis, the Greek poet, revolutionary and politician who opposed the military junta that ruled the Hellenic country from 1967 to 1974.

The uninhabitable earth - David Wallace-Wells

This book about climate change - global warming in particular - is a tough one. Both because it’s not an easy read - especially the first part, so full of technical details, facts and figures, many, many of them - and because it’s a very alarmist text: the worst case scenario that it depicts is a grim one. And even if you take into account the base case scenario, well, it’s not a merry one either. Basically, we might be doomed. Damage has already been done, and that will hardly be fixed in the near future. Even worse, more damage is being added by the year, at a considerable speed. We might just have a few decades to reverse the tide before it’s too late, and judging by the global level of commitment and coordination, that could turn out to be an extremely long shot.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat - Oliver Sacks

Oliver Sacks is not just a physician who writes book: he’s a literary talent who happens to be a brilliant neuroscientist. The set of clinical cases he deals with are told with academic accuracy and a style worth of a talented short story author. Patient after patient, syndrome after syndrome, the reader learns how evolved and sophisticated the human nervous system is, and how catastrophic a minor glitch in one of its numerous components can be. We also learn how (fortunately) rare those glitches are, and how science can help cure the corresponding illnesses.

Mythos - Stephen Fry

Reading list. Item #25

I’ve read this book on a trip to the Greek Dodecanese archipelago. How appropriate.

You can find references to Greek mythology pretty much everywhere in Greece: names of islands, cities, restaurants, drinks, hotels, temples. Even the world renowned Greek hospitality has been interpreted as an Olympian sacred rule, any breach of which is punished by Zeus with mighty thunderbolt attacks.

Talking to strangers - Malcolm Gladwell

Why are we so bad at understanding whether a stranger is telling a lie? And why is misunderstanding or misinterpreting among humans so frequent? Why do we jump at hasty conclusions about others yet think of ourselves as complicated beings that deserve effort, empathy and lengthy analyses to be properly understood?

Freakonomics - Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

“A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.” That’s how Steven D. Levitt defines himself and his work. He’s one of the most famous economists in America and yet he admits knowing little or nothing about micro and macro economics, political economics, econometrics and all the other typical branches of the subject. What he’s good at and what he likes to do is asking any sort of interesting questions and using the best tools economics provide in order to find good answers to those questions.

The order of time (L'ordine del tempo), Seven brief lessons on physics (Sette brevi lezioni di fisica) - Carlo Rovelli

My reading list is back. It won't be called "Pandemic reading list" anymore though.

I’ve already introduced Carlo Rovelli when I talked about my theme-based parallel reading experiments (Rovelli's Helgoland along with The Tao of physics and The way of Zen).

“The order of time” is a sort of return trip to "Time city": we could call it “time traveling”, even though it’s not exactly what we mean by that expression. 

The grand design - Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow

Pandemic book list, 21st item. This might well be the last one. I’ll keep reading, of course, but I hope I won’t update a pandemic-related list anymore.

I remember Stephen Hawking's appearance on the TV show “The Big Bang theory”: he was witty, self-ironic, clever, opinionated and self-confident. He totally SheldonCoopered Sheldon Cooper himself!

Upheaval - Jared Diamond

Pandemic book list. 20th item.

In “Guns, Germs and Steel” and “Collapse” (see previous posts), Jared Diamond explains why civilisations respectively rise and fall. In “Upheaval”, on the other hand, he tries to understand how countries cope with momentous crises.

Blink - Malcolm Gladwell

Pandemic book list. 19th item.

The year is 2005. The location is Borders bookstore, Wheelock Place, Orchard Road, Singapore. A store that, for all I know, might not exist anymore. I’m leafing through a copy of Blink. I’ve just read a review which tickled my curiosity. After skimming through a couple of passages I close it and think: “Nice introduction! Interesting subject! I won’t buy it!” Just like that.

Helgoland - Carlo Rovelli, The way of Zen - Alan W. Watts, The Tao of physics - Fritjof Capra

Theme based parallel reading.

I’ve already tried parallel reading before: I used to switch between novels and non fiction, or poetry and prose. This time I went a step further: I chose three books based on a common theme.

The power of now, A new Earth - Eckart Tolle

A good thing about the current pandemic is that I’ve had plenty of time to read. I'm currently updating a list of the best books I’ve come across so far. Please see my home page for the previous entries.

17th item: a pair of books.

In his most famous works the spiritual teacher Eckart Tolle, drawing from his own experience and various mystical traditions, addresses an old theme: how to deal with emotional problems and improve one’s life.

O Jerusalem - Dominique Lapierre & Larry Collins, From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas, L. Friedman

A good thing about the current pandemic is that I’ve had plenty of time to read. I'm currently updating a list of the best books I’ve come across so far. Please see my home page for the previous entries.

16th item on the list.

The Arab-Israeli conflict, besides defining the personal histories of the millions of people directly involved in it, has had a strong impact on many aspects of the life of pretty much anyone living anywhere for the past 70 years.

Enlightenment now - Steven Pinker

A good thing about the current pandemic is that I’ve had plenty of time to read. I'm currently updating a list of the best books I’ve come across so far. Please see my home page for the previous entries.

This 15th item reminds me of Hans Rosling’s “Factfulness”, a book that we saw together a few weeks ago. The topics and the goals are similar, even though the former is somehow more challenging and philosophical than the latter.

The art of happiness - The Dalai Lama

A good thing about the current pandemic is that I’ve had plenty of time to read. I'm currently updating a list of the best books I’ve come across so far. Please see my home page for the previous entries.

#14. Few people will deny that Tenzin Gyatso, also known as the Dalai Lama, is one of the most charismatic and amazing people alive. He’s the political leader of Tibet, the most popular Buddhist spiritual guide and an inspiration to people from all walks al life.

Collapse - Jared Diamond

A good thing about the current pandemic is that I’ve had plenty of time to read. I'm currently updating a list of the best books I’ve come across so far. Please see my home page for the previous entries.

Item no. 13. Jared Diamond, once again. If “Guns, germs and steel” (see my home page for a dedicated chapter) was about the buildup of human societies, this is about the opposite problem: societal collapses (or barely avoided ones).

Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh

This list seems to suggest that I’m not much into novels. It’s not true: I’ve read hundreds of them. It’s just that these recent months have been more of a “not fiction” period for me. Let’s talk about a novel then, for a change.
This is a cult. Everybody has seen the movie. I’m not gonna get into the typical dispute: “The book is better!”, “No, the movie is!” What I can say is that they surely are quite different.

River out of Eden - Richard Dawkins

As I already mentioned when I reviewed Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The gene”, we live in an increasingly science-driven society, and one can’t really understand much of it without some basic knowledge of biology.
In this book Richard Dawkins compares life to a river of genes, flowing through time using organisms (including humans) as temporary vessels. The title is obviously quoting a Biblical passage, and that’s not a coincidence.

21 lessons for the 21st century - Yuval Noah Harari

We already met Yuval Noah Harari twice. If “Sapiens” is about our distant past and “Homo Deus” tries to explore what lies ahead of us, “21 lessons for the 21st century” focuses on the missing segment: the one that sees us, rather than our ancestors or descendants, as main characters: the present.

Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell

Have you always thought, like myself, that in order to excel in any one field you must be wonderfully talented, extremely skilled and very persevering? Well, it’s true, you need all that, but unfortunately it’s not gonna be enough. What else, then? That’s what this book is about.
We already know that Malcolm Gladwell’s trick to writing a good book is…examples, examples, examples! Very revelatory examples. And here are a few good ones.

Wherever you go there you are - Jon Kabat-Zinn

A good thing about the current pandemic is that I’ve had plenty of time to read. I'm currently updating a list of the best books I’ve come across so far. Please see my home page for the previous entries. Eighth item. For those of you who are interested in, curious about, already into, or even skeptical of meditation, this is a great read. It’s a very serious dive into the realm of mindfulness, offering the best of both worlds (meaning East and West) about the topic: Jon Kabat-Zinn is an American professor emeritus of medicine and has been a student of some of the world's most famous Buddhist teachers (the Dalai Lama, Thích Nhất Hạnh, Seungsahn).

Factfulness - Hans Rosling

A good thing about the current pandemic is that I’ve had plenty of time to read. I'm currently updating a list of the best books I’ve come across so far. Please see my home page for the previous entries.
The seventh item on this list is an eye opener, and very encouraging at that.
Hans Rosling spent the last decades of his life asking people a set of very simple questions about the state of the world. For example: in all low-income countries across the world today, how many girls finish primary school? What share of the world’s population don't have enough food to meet their daily needs? How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters change over the last hundred years? In 1996, tigers, giant pandas, and black rhinos were all listed as endangered. How many of these three species are more critically endangered today? How many people in the world have some access to electricity?

Homo deus - Yuval Noah Harari

A good thing about the current pandemic is that I’ve had plenty of time to read. I'm currently updating a list of the best books I’ve come across so far. Please see my home page for the previous entries.
Yuval Noah Harari strikes back. If his "Sapiens" (introduced here along with Jared Diamond's "The third chimpanzee") answers the "Where do we come from?" question, "Homo Deus" addresses the "Where are we going?" one.

The gene - Siddhartha Mukherjee

What a nice book is the fifth item on this recommendation list. See my home page for the previous entries.
In his masterpiece Siddhartha Mukherjee traces the history of genetics, from the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel’s experiments on pea crops to 21st century scientists’ human genome mapping. It is like a crash course in history of biology, minus all the complicated organic chemistry details, plus a bit of suspence, insights, drama and family history.

The tipping point - Malcolm Gladwell

Item number four. Let’s look at epidemics from a different, non health-related angle. 
In “The tipping point” Malcolm Gladwell explains how ideas, messages, products and services can spread like viruses do.

Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari, The third chimpanzee - Jared Diamond

Third item on the list. This is actually a pair of volumes. As usual, see my home page for the previous entries.
Do you want to know why we - as in "we, humans" - are the way we are? What makes us similar to other living beings (hence "the third chimpanzee")? What makes us different? Why our brain works the way it does (hence "sapiens")? Why we do the things we do? And why some of us do those things a little differently? Most importantly, do you want to know how we evolved to be what we currently are?

Guns, germs and steel - Jared Diamond

Time for the second item on the list. See my home page for the first one.
In "Guns, germs and steel" Jared Diamond (one of my favorite authors) tries to answer one of the most debated questions of modern times: why have some Eurasian civilizations managed to conquer others, and not the other way around?

Spillover - David Quammenn

A good thing about the current pandemic is that I’ve had plenty of time to read. Over the next few weeks I’m gonna post about some of the best books I’ve come across so far.
Here's the first one.
Are you fed up with the Covid related schizophrenia?