Happy New Year!
I was lucky to read a great many wonderful books in 2024. Please do check out my mid-year 2024 summer list for more 2024 recommendations. As always, I am thankful to the authors who spend years (decades even!) researching innumerable sources, speaking to dozens - or hundreds! - of people and to their teams of fact checkers and researchers. They often invest a lifetime to become deeply informed about their particular topic. And we, the readers, just get to read the condensed wisdom of all that time and effort in just a week or two! Aren't books just wonderful? Or perhaps, as a resident of Silicon Valley, I should call books a "learning life hack"!
The Golden Road by William Dalrymple
As with some particular topics the impact of India on the world can sometimes unfortunately aggregate into one of two extreme camps. One is typified by the infamous - and typical - Macaulay quotation on the lines of a single shelf of a good European library is worth more than the entire wisdom of India and Arabia. The other holds that everything from plastic surgery to powered flight was invented in India thousands of years ago. And of course that most quoted fact about the concept of zero having been invented in India without which no progress in Mathematics would ever have been made. William Dalrymple (whose books I have recommended before) wades confidently into these currents with this book about ancient India and its impact on the world. Dalrymple's expertise has mostly been in the period of the British occupation of India but here he travels much further back. For example, trade between ancient Rome and ancient India led to depletion of Roman coffers to the extent that Pliny the Elder called India 'the sink of the world's most precious metals'. Dalrymple also writes extensively about the spread of Buddhism east of India so much so that ancient China looked towards India for philosophy, religion, and thought similar to how the world today looks to America for leadership in technology. He makes a compelling case for the soft or cultural power that India exercised on the world from Rome to China. I learned a lot from the book and it is a great read for anyone curious about this subject.
When The Sea Came Alive by Garrett M. Graff
Some years ago I read, loved, and recommended Graff's "The Only Plane In The Sky - an Oral History of 9/11". I was excited to pick this one up about the Normandy Landings on June 6th, 1944. This book is also an oral history in that different historical characters - famous leasders and ordinary people - narrate their experiences and this chronological arrangement of these narrations forms the book. While the bulk of the book is focussed on June 6th, 1944, Graff starts a few years before that day to better set the historical context of how dominant Nazi Germany had become across Europe and builds up the story with all the planning, preparation, and execution that led up to the landings on Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches on France's Normandy coast. Most of my visual imagery of the day came from the opening minutes of Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" and this book does a particularly evocative job of bringing the day to life from a great many more perspectives. Most definitely an audiobook you should listen to!
The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides
With the passage of time, impressions of Captain James Cook have gone from one of an intrepid explorer who was one of England's greatest naval heroes, to attempts to be more naunced and balanced with the legacy of colonial exploitation that his explorations begat, to more recent unconditional condemnations of the man and his actions. Hampton Sides' book attempts to share a perspective that places the man in the time and context in which he lived and as experienced by those around him at the time. Sides thankfully dismisses Captain Cook's "discoveries" of places that were already teeming with people and societies. Overall, this book is sympathetic to the man and looks to rehabiliate and redeem him as a person to some extent through his personal behavior on multiple voyages to map the oceans and particularly his life's quest to find the Northwest Passage. Certainly worth the read.
Genius Makers by Cade Metz
Few technologies have raced into and occupied the public imagination as quickly as has Artificial Intelligence. Cade Metz is a technology correspondent with the New York Times and has spent most of his career speaking to or interviewing tech luminaries. In this book he attempts to provide some of the history behind the work of the key people over the past several decades that have led up to the explosion of ChatGPT into our lives in November 2022. We get to meet Geoffrey Hinton, Jeff Dean, Demis Hassabis, Ilya Sutskever, Ian Goodfellow and others (yes, it's predominantly men). If some or most of these names seem entirely new to you, you should probably read this book. It's a very easy and breezy read.
Siege by Ben Macintyre
Some years ago I read another book called The Siege which was about the Nov 2008 terrorist attack on focussed on the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai, India. This book is about a different siege - one that happened in London in 1980. I am embarassed to say that I had never heard of this event and that made this book a particularly captivating read for me. Macintyre's speciality is espionage and special forces and the cold war and this feels right up his alley. In 1980 separatists from Iraq occupied the Iranian embassy and made demands of the UK and Iranian governments. If that isn't confusing enough, remember that this was the same year than the Iranian siege of the US embassy in Teheran had ended with the inauguration of President Reagan that January. All this of course leads to much confusion about who's behind the terrorists and what they really want. Add to the mix a few unfortunate visitors who were at the embassy that fateful day for some humdrum work and then the then relatively new UK PM Margaret Thatcher's tough guy stance and you get a sense for how hopeless of a mess it all ends up being. Still, it was a really enthralling read - and this was the event that led to the SAS going from a somewhat secret organization to hitting the prime time as it were.
Goat Days by Benyamin
I picked this book up on a casual recommendation with no real expectations from it. It turned out to be a gripping read of an Indian migrant worker in the Saudi Arabia. I had read (and heard first and second hand) some rather unbelievable tales of what happens in the middle east to unsuspecting workers who go there in search of a good living. But this book's protagonist, Najeeb Muhammed, goes through unimaginable hardships. I strangely found this slim book unputdownable though nothing really new happens chapter to chapter. I found it hard to believe that this was a work of fiction and not a memoir. Turns out it is based on a true story. I later tried to watch the movie on Netflix and found it far less compelling and didn't even get through it. A short book that's worth your time - and one that makes even the struggles of migrant workers in Saket Soni's "The Great Escape" seem like a walk in the park.
The Day I Became A Runner by Sohini Chattopadhyaya
On the surface, this book is about various female atheletes in India. From the well known such as PT Usha to the relatively obscure such as Duttee Chand and Santhi Soundarajan. Some such as Santhi had their identity/gender questioned. Others were proud representiatives of a newly independent but poor India that could barely afford the athelete's flight ticket to the Helsinki Olympics, never mind the cost of coaching, training, and equipment. But it is also about the author's own journey as a female athelete and what that experience was like growing up in a male dominated field. It is a mix of interviews with the atheletes and the author's own experiences. For each woman's story she narrates, she also provides (sad) commentary on the state of affairs in India for their struggles as women atheletes. It is quite well written and an engaging read.
Challenger by Adam Higginbotham
Midnight In Chernobyl by the same author was one of my top reads in 2020. This book is about another disaster - the explosion of Challenger minutes after its launch in 1986. Higginbotham's book is a detailed account of the events leading up to the disaster and the aftermath. In hindsight, many saw this disaster coming and though it was hard to tell from the book how much was hindsight being 20/20 it was clear that read flags were ignored and risks taken. I wouldn't rate this as highly as his Chernobyl book but this is still very good.
Iru by Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa
This is a biography of Irawati Karve, an anthropologist well known in her home state of Maharashtra, India but not so much outside of it. One of the authors, Deshpande, is Karve's granddaughter and the other, Barbosa, is a Brazilian anthropologist from Germany. The books starts and immediatelygrabs your attention with Karve working in a) 1920s Berlin when b) Nazism in Germany was just gathering steam, and c) under the advisorship of Eugen Fischer. Fischer was himself an anthropologist (though perhaps that word should be put in quotes in his case) who was a member of the Nazi Party and whose theories of racial differences endeared him to, among others, Adolf Hitler. In fact Karve's PhD project was to glean the differences in skulls between German and other Europeans compared to those from other parts of the world and try and come up with systematic differences to form the foundation of Fischer's racial theories. Karve eventually found that there were in fact no such differences and bravely said that in her report and still managed to get out of Germany with Fisher's unwilling approval for her PhD findings! How is such an amazingly courageous woman not better known?! The rest of the book then goes back starting from her birth in Burma and her move to Pune in India and her supportive husband and family to her pioneering work in anthropology. While the story is interesting, it was hard to top the drama of the opening chapter. However, the writing and language is absoutely wonderful and I look forward to more books from these authors.
Seeing Like A State by James C Scott
I'll be the first to admit that this is not a thrill-a-minute book! Far from it. It's a topic I find super interesting which is how governments come up with schemes to improve the lives of their citizens and how in more cases than not they fail. One of Scott's conclusions seems to be that central governments and central planning oftentimes do not understand the intricacies of societal structures 'on the ground' and that many plans that look logical on paper turn out to be abysmal failures in reality. I'll admit the book can sometimes be a bit of a slog to get through but it's worth it. After reading the book, it does seem remarkable that anything at all actually works especially large centrally devised and executed projects - such as the NHS in the UK or the 401(k) retirements plans in the USA or the UPI infrastructure in India. We should be suprised not that most schemes fail but rather than some go on to become so successful!