Rules of Civility

Author: Amor Towles

I had read far too many non-fiction books in a row and was eager to find something light and goodreads.com came to the rescue. This book was written by a new author who made a living as an investment banker, and this was his first foray into the land of literature. Some of the reviews indicated that this was written in the vein of a Scott Fitzgerald novel.

The book doesn't disappoint. It is a lively romp through New York in the pre-second-world-war era, and follows the progress of two young ladies and their many affluent suitors. The book is very well written and makes you experience the romance in the air in New York in the late 1930s.

The storyline seems a little contrived and there are many chance encounters that are very conveniently peppered throughout the book. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that New York in the 1930s was a small town where everyone bumped into each other at restaurants and bars. Towards the end the characters seem to drift away and the author seems at a loss to bring the book to a logical conclusion. Nevertheless, the book is a quick read and is certainly entertaining.

The minds eye

Author: Oliver Sacks


Oliver Sacks is a neurologist, and practicing physician at Columbia University, New York, where he holds the title of "Columbia Artist". This is well earned, as he has had quite a prolific career writing more than a dozen books and magazine articles, many of which have been translated into multiple languages. He writes about his experience treating patients with rather exotic neurological conditions and in this book the focus is around vision and how we actually make sense of the sights that we take in with our eyes.

We often associate our ability to read and recognize objects with our eyes. However, this book got me thinking about the connection between seeing and recognizing and made me appreciate how the brain takes in the visual patterns that we see and makes the association with objects that we can relate to.

This book educated me on "aphasia" which means loss of speech, in either expressive or receptive form.  A few years ago my father-in-law suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed on one side. However the more debilitating part was the severe impairment of his language skills and this book gave me a better perspective and explanation of his struggle expressing himself. It taught me how "in some patients, even if they are totally unable to speak or understand speech, there may be perfect preservation of intellectual powers - the power to think logically and systematically, to plan, recollect, to anticipate, to conjecture. "

There are some very nice nuggets of information in the book which are certainly not new discoveries but are nice to appreciate. For instance, I am sure that many of you know that "Predators, in general, have forward facing eyes, with much overlap of the two fields; prey animals by contrast, tend to have eyes at the sides of their heads, which gives them panoramic vision, helping them spot danger even if it comes from behind."

The last two chapters are meandering and went on for too long. In "Persistence of Vision" Sacks describes the problems that develop in his right eye. I admire the detailed notes that he kept during this period, however, this is way too much information for someone like me. Similarly in the last chapter that is also titled "The Mind's Eye",  he goes through several different cases from history, only to conclude that everyone's internal visualization is different. I got the point with the first couple of examples and the additional accounts didn't add much to demonstrate how little we understood about the functioning of the visual cortex.

Overall, this is certainly an enlightening book and it educates you about the subtleties of how visual stimuli are processed in our brain. There are many types of impairments that you will learn from the book, including the author's own "prosopagnosia", which is an inability to recognize faces.  Read this book if you are curious about how the brain processes visual information.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Author: Michael Lewis


There were many times when this book appeared onmy radar, but each time I dismissed it saying "do I really need another look at the sub-prime meltdown?".

At the outset, it is important to note that this book is very different from the pack of books and articles that describe the macro-economic effects of the financial crisis that led to the collapse of several Wall Street institutions and wiped out many large investors and investment banks in the first decade of this millennium. 

Michael charts out the few maverick investors who not only spotted the anomaly in the mortgage lending business way back at the turn of the century, but were confident enough in their belief that they put a substantial portion of their investments into short positions on mortage bonds and derivatives.  These pioneers also had to invent new instruments and insurance to take these positions and the history and culmination of these investments is well described in the book.

Leading up to collapse there was a general herd mentality into the mortgage backed security business which provided the air that filled the balloon that was ultimately going to burst. While the book is well written and provides a balanced view of the handful of folks that made out like bandits in the crash, it doesn't do real justice to the inflation of the bubble. Specifically, leading up to collapse there was a general herd mentality into the mortgage backed security business and Michael provides a very limited insight into what fueled that. Nevertheless, Michael's writing style is really fluid and entertaining and before you know it, you will be done with the book and come out with a different perspective of the crash that rocked our world.