Category: Books

There is no better reason to get out of a blog rut than a tag by a good friend. Thanks Chakli! Here are the rules of the tag –
Get the book closest to you. Open the book to page 123.Count to line five. Write the next three lines. Tag five people and acknowledge the person who tagged you.

I have a pile of books next to me, from the weekend shopping spree. Books are marginally cheaper in Johannesburg and I don’t need a better excuse. I pick the one on top and here we go:

“Well I wouldn’t. The less each group knows of the activities of the other, the better. But you are perfectly aware of that – you are. Particularly in the matter of recruitment to proceed outside. The people I work with won’t deal with that. There are others. She must have been with them – perhaps all these years and we didn’t know it.”

Reading three lines of a book can be frustrating. I can only guess it is about Apartheid. It is from the book My Son’s Story by Nadine Gordimer. Here is a synopsis of the book from Amazon:

Highly praised as a literate goad to South Africa’s conscience under apartheid, Gordimer here delivers her most perceptive and powerful novel in years. The story of a man’s evolution as a political activist and the toll it takes on his family and on him, it is also a picture of a marriage and of an extramarital affair, set against a backdrop of daily life in segregated South Africa, even as the winds of change begin to blow. An exemplary husband and father, a pillar of rectitude in the black community, Sonny is dismissed from his teaching job after he leads a political protest. Imprisoned, on his release he becomes a leader in the revolutionary underground; at the same time he is swept into an affair with a white woman, a worker in a human rights organization.

The intertwined events that lead to the breakup of Sonny’s family and the tragic end of his high hopes and ideals are partially narrated by his teenage son Will, bitter and cynical over his father’s marital betrayal. The novel is eloquent in its understated prose and anguished understanding of moral complexities in a land where blacks keep “rags . . . on their persons as protection against tear-gas as white people carry credit cards.” Tightly focused and controlled, expertly plotted, the narrative is replete with ironies; the tension increases almost invisibly, until the unexpected, jolting denouement. In the end, Will resolves to record “what it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free.” Which is exactly what this book does, honestly and memorably

And now it’s my turn to tag!

Edward Hyde
Riot of reasons
Varnam
Nanopolitan
Shoefiend

Picture: Pillars of the South African constitution from the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg

There is just something about the team “popular Economics” that is so paradoxical that I am usually tempted to stay away from any book that even slightly falls into this genre. But the rave reviews that Tim Harford’s Logic of Life had been receiving, combined with the fact that I have, on more than one occasion, enjoyed his FT columns, decided to give the book a try. I am far from disappointed – in fact, I confess that I am ready to replace my unreasonable distrust of the genre with a new found enthusiasm to read some of the titles referred to in this book, some of which may be heralded as icons of the genre. I promise you, true to my usual self, I will make a list of these books before I go about buying and / or reading them. But before that, let’s spare some thought for the book that affected this change of heart.

The fundamental concept in the book, unsurprisingly, is that human beings are rational – everything we do, however illogical it might seem – is founded in cold hard reason, if only you look hard enough. By the end of the first chapter, Harford has you pretty much convinced of this and you will be ready to believe that, from hookers to teenagers to criminals, everyone is endowed with a rational mind. The one caveat to this thesis that Harford himself admits to is that rationality is accentuated by experience. The way I see it, this is similar to conditional learning – the more times you have done something, the more likely you are to know the likely effects of a wide range of your actions and you will pick the one most likely to lead to positive gains for you – either now or in the future. Whether you call it good old common sense or logic, the end result remains the same, and can be explained rationally.

The beauty of the book lies in the wide range of examples that Harford has chosen to explain the logic of. Unlike many of the best sellers of the past years, which left you with the distinct feeling that one idea or concept, best suited for a long article, had been pulled and stretched in all possible directions to fill enough pages to call it a book – Harford introduces refreshingly new analyses chapter after chapter. His wand of rationality illumines the logic behind seemingly instinctive moves of seasoned poker players, emotion-laden decisions behind marriage and divorce and even tries to explain why your boss will always be overpaid and why your job sucks – obviously not a great ad for careers at FT considering that he does not even entertain the thought that some of us might like our jobs, but powerful analyses nevertheless.[…]

As they say, everyone has one story to write about – their own. But when you have a story like that of Waris Dirie, it will make a book truly worth reading. Last weekend while I was browsing at the local bookstore, I picked up Desert Flower. Waris Dirie grew up as a nomad in …

I still remember the time Philip Roth’s Everyman burst forth into our lives with a huge splurge of marketing and publicity – you couldn’t walk by the city without noticing the book was coming out. After the hype had died down and the paperback had pushed the prices to reasonable levels, but just before the …

It had been a long time since I had finished a book in one sitting, until I read Mohsin Hamid’s recently published The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It would be easy to attribute it to the rather short length of the novel, but it is much more than that. The narrative makes you feel like part of …

I went down to the Book Store early Saturday morn, to pick up a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. And have ever since been curled up in my sofa with loads of potato chips, cola and an occasional pizza. Talk about heavenly bliss! Click for more only at your own risk (spoilers …

I am gonna be confined to the four walls of my home for 10 whole days – don’t ask, its depressing enough. Anyways, that means I don’t have an excuse anymore not to open up the skeletons in my bookshelf. Nanopolitan has book tagged me! So here goes. Total number of books I own: In …

Came across a review for the book – “My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance” by Emanuel Derman. It apparently talks about the transition of a Physicist to a Wall Street Quant. Apart from a personal story, it talks about “the new revolution in the financial markets with engineers slicing and dicing …

The immortal words of Kahlil Gibran: They say to me, “A bird in the hand is worth ten in the bush.”But I say, “A bird and a feather in the bush is worth more than ten birds in the hand.”Your seeking after that feather is life with winged feet; nay, it is life itself.