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.
Here you won't find the pages of a pedantic journal, praises to fantastic places or accounts of memorable encounters. This is a collection of stories, thoughts, images, and most of all odd stuff, even though to someone else it might actually look ordinary. To discern its bizarre side, in fact, special filters are needed: cynicism, fussiness, stubbornness, isolation, impudence, nosiness and nerdiness. All flaws that, in different measure, this semi-nomadic being has got embedded in his genes.
Wednesday, December 22, 2021
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.
Wednesday, November 3, 2021
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).
Wednesday, October 27, 2021
School blues - Daniel Pennac
Maybe not everyone knows that Mr. Pennacchioni, AKA Daniel Pennac, the world renowned French novelist, is also a school teacher.
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
Thursday, October 14, 2021
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.
Wednesday, October 6, 2021
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.
Thursday, September 30, 2021
Mythos - Stephen Fry
Tuesday, September 14, 2021
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?
Tuesday, September 7, 2021
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.
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
The order of time (L'ordine del tempo), Seven brief lessons on physics (Sette brevi lezioni di fisica) - Carlo Rovelli
Thursday, June 3, 2021
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.
Wednesday, May 12, 2021
Upheaval - Jared Diamond
Pandemic book list. 20th item.
Tuesday, May 4, 2021
Blink - Malcolm Gladwell
Pandemic book list. 19th item.
Tuesday, April 20, 2021
Helgoland - Carlo Rovelli, The way of Zen - Alan W. Watts, The Tao of physics - Fritjof Capra
Theme based parallel reading.
Wednesday, April 7, 2021
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.
Wednesday, March 31, 2021
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.
Wednesday, March 10, 2021
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.
Tuesday, March 2, 2021
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.
Thursday, February 25, 2021
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.
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
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.
Thursday, February 18, 2021
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.
Tuesday, February 16, 2021
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.
Thursday, February 11, 2021
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.
Tuesday, February 9, 2021
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).
Thursday, February 4, 2021
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?
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
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.
Thursday, January 28, 2021
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.
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
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.
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
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?
Monday, January 18, 2021
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?
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
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?