Through ‘Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China’, Leta Hong Fincher shares an important message and she deserves credit for this, but I have several problems with the book itself. Firstly — and I say this while I understand that gathering quantitative research data about China is difficult — this book takes cherry-picking […]
“All knowledge is a recognition of the mutual relationships between sense experience and/or things and events.” This is a dense book, packed with insights. Some of them so wise that they make you look at life in a different way. But others feel just plainly wrong or overly simplistic (“You are IT”) — or are […]
This story on understanding comes in the unexpected shape a science-fiction novel — although anyone who has read Orson Scott Card’s books before would not be so surprised. It’s very different from its prequel, Ender’s Game: Speaker for the Dead is about understanding others, be it different individuals, families or even alien races — and its meditative […]
Here’s a book I really want to love, as it’s lighthearted tale about how art connects time and space and its people. Even the form is highly original, telling about two motherless figures, six hundred years apart — one a troubled teenager, the other an Italian fresco painter. These perspectives draw you in. The book is marketed […]
A dish spinner keeps spinning disks on top of sticks afloat and needs to alternate spinning each dish before one of them slows down and falls, making the performance fail. An author’s role is similar in that he or she must keep characters alive before they fall from memory, so that the reader is not […]
‘How to build a car’ is a fascinating read that starts with a hard-to-educate boy hobbying in the shed with his dad, who picks up a study in aerodynamics. Much of Newey’s approach lays in these formative years, en route to becoming one of the most dominant car designers of Formula One. It’s interesting to […]
Despite 300-something pages, the book feels compact and leaves me wanting for more. Any of these chapters could be a fantastic standalone book, and any of them raises a lot of important questions — although not necessarily ‘Lessons’ as the title suggests. Nobody has these lessons, and while Harari sometimes over-simplifies or dramatises, he acts as […]
Helen Macdonald has written poetry before and it shows. She writes not just about things seen, but also things felt — intuitive thoughts and feelings turned into words. Macdonald writes about taming a hard-to-handle goshawk as an escape from the world and the loss of her father — and even though the subject is very […]
Libbrecht starts as a jovial old man, not too serious with modern life and its many quicks, but gradually pulls the book into other territories. Some gathered paragraphs: “I carry within me the whole past of the earth. I’m the product of everything that has preceded me, and in fact of the entire cosmos. However, […]
“If you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in which you—you so remote from the night of the first ages—could comprehend. And why not? The mind […]