Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America

Author: Joseph Kim

A few days after I completed this book, the world was rocked with the news that North Korea had detonated a Hydrogen Bomb in a test facility 50 miles from its border with China. It is impossible to comprehend how the country can spend millions of dollars to build a nuclear weapon when people are starving. While Joseph Kim’s book will not shed any light on North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, you will learn a lot about the hunger and starvation that has wracked the entire country. It seemed like things took a really bad turn with the fall of communism in Russia and it is heart wrenching to read about it in this book. Just reading about Joseph and his family’s struggles was painful enough for me. I just can’t fathom what it would be like to live in a country like this. Since the country is really inaccessible to outsiders, read this book to get a glimpse of what the average life of North Korean citizens is like.

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Author: Marlon James

The title of this book is misleading. It is neither brief nor are there only seven killings. This is one of the most difficult books that I read this year. It was even harder than “Capital in the Twenty First Century”, Thomas Picketty’s 700 page economic treatise. Marlon James makes liberal use of Jamaican slang and I had to consult the Urban dictionary for words like Bloodcloth, Sammie, Yardie, etc. The book is a long story written in different voices many of which I found hard to follow. Here’s an example 

Me take foot. Me walking, me foot moving faster but you getting louder, louder, louder and me take a stop and look and you nearer than before 

OR 

Me not me no more, me don’t sound like me only and no people deh ‘bout, only shadow and no sound dropping through the speaker, only the deep end of the ridden.

It’s one thing to read a single sentence like this. But when you have to wade through hundreds of pages of this, it gets tiresome. This book is also not for the faint-hearted. There are many many gruesome murders that are described in gory detail. I had always thought of Jamaican’s as a peace loving people. After reading this book, I understood that the truth was far from that, back in the 70s and 80s. Mr. James does a splendid job of immersing you in the ghettos in Jamaica in the 70s. You get a good sense for the birthplace of Reggae. Even though Bob Marley is not explicitly named in the book, it is very clear that “the Singer” refers to him. I am told that while this is a work of fiction, there are many elements that are based on events surrounding Bob Marley in the 70s.


While the book seems to meander along with what looks like senseless violence, it finally turns a corner in the latter part and things come together. You understand why there are all these seemingly unrelated stories being told and how they all fit together in the grand scheme of things. Mr. James does pull it together nicely in the end.

Go Set a Watchman

Author: Harper Lee

I can’t recall the last time the Wall Street Journal devoted a couple of pages of newsprint for a word-for-word reproduction of the first chapter of a novel. I guess it is not often that you discover something that is conveniently advertised as a “sequel” to a Pulitzer Prize winning American Classic more than 50 years after the novel was first published. Nevertheless, it did what it was supposed to do. I was intrigued enough to borrow the book from my local library and read it.

The book is set in Maycomb county some 20+ years after the events that Scout describes in “To Kill a Mockingbird”.  Harper Lee’s prose is so amazing that in a single sentence she can sum up the racial tensions that must have been prevalent in the South for a large part of the twentieth century. The view that African Americans are in many ways “lesser” than their white counterparts is almost taken for granted.  With this poignant background, the book stumbles along from describing a budding romance between Jean Louise Finch (Scout) and Hank Clinton to the radical views that Atticus Finch hold against the underprivileged black community.  She sums up Atticus behavior in this book quite well with this quote from her Uncle Jack “[A]ll over the South your father and men like your father are fighting a sort of rearguard, delaying action to preserve a certain kind of philosophy that's almost gone down the drain”. So it is not a hatred of black people, but rather an acceptance that they are not capable to think and manage their own affairs, so we have to limit the damage that they can do. Needless to say Jean Louise will have none of it!

What fascinated me the most was how the editor of “Go Set a Watchman” — Tay Hohoff —  saw the potential in Harper Lee and was able to give her feedback and guidance to create the very polished work that is “To Kill a Mockingbird”. She clearly identified the childhood stories recounted by Jean Louise Finch in “Go Set a Watchman” as the keepers and asked her to rewrite the novel with those at its core.  I would love to learn more about the editorial process and how it all went down.

While the book lacks a cohesive story and structure, it is reasonably well written and is worth a read just so that you can participate in all the discussion about how the Mockingbird hero Atticus turns out to be a common Southern racist!

The Seven Good Years: A Memoir

Author: Etkar Keret

Reading Etkar Keret’s Memoir feels like you are having a conversation with the author and he is telling one good story after another. In fact, the book reads like a bunch of short stories that happen to have taken place during seven years in his life during which he had a son and lost his father.

I have visited Tel Aviv a couple of times, and very close friend of mine is from Israel so I have a good understanding and appreciation for some of the challenges that Israeli’s face on a day to day basis. Here Etkar fondly recounts a few of these personal eccentricities with a keen sense of observation that makes you hang on to every word that he writes. You can see that Etkar doesn’t take himself too seriously and invites you to laugh at him and the folks that he hangs out with.  As long as you can relate to the author you will find yourself in splits of laughter.

Read it and enjoy. It’s a short book and you will soon be begging for more.

Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice

Author: Adam Benforado

There’s plenty of memorable statistics in this book, but this one sums it up quite well. "America accounts for less than 5 percent of the world's population, but almost a quarter of all prisoners.” Clearly we are doing something wrong in this country.  In this book, Mr. Benforado takes aim at the US judicial system and highlights the many places where you may think we have a good system, but in reality, it comes up very short.

Take the case where our Sixth Amendment pretty much guarantees that “the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial”.  Mr. Benforado points out that in reality fewer than 10 percent of criminal defendants make it to trial. The adervsarial nature of a U.S. trial make it very expensive and the punishments so severe that most criminals end up getting a plea bargain. Mr Benforado points out that in a plea bargain the prosecutor is all powerful. The defendent does not have recourse to due process while the prosecutor takes on the role of accuser, investigator, adjudicator and sentencer. This high concentration of power in a single person is a recipe for unfairness. 

The chapter in "throwing Away the key" is very sobering and some of the data there on our prison population and experience is bound to make you reconsider your view on whether American Jails are unduly cruel and inhuman. Putting someone in solitary confinement is tantamount to messing with their mind and we end up creating bigger monsters of people than what they might have been when they were incarcerated. The author praises the prison system in Norway which is all about rehabilitating prisoners rather than punishing them. This Scandinavian country has a 10 times lower rate of incarceration (70 per 100,000) than the US and must be doing something right. The article in Business Insider gives a great description of their system which is summed up well by one of their prison governors, "If we treat people like animals when they are in prison they are likely to behave like animals. Here we pay attention to you as human beings."

Another statistic that stopped me dead in my tracks was learning that there are a greater number of black men in prison in the U.S. today, than there were slaves in 1850! Mr Benforado is unequivocal in criticizing the complex rules that the U.S. judicial system has created that give us the illusion of fairness. In describing procedural technicalities like reading someone his Miranda rights, Mr Benforado declares that in the U.S. "we are now all form, substance be damned". 

Read this for an eye-opening lecture on “Unfair" our Criminal Justice System can be in the US. 

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Author: Ashlee Vance

Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are three of the most visionary entrepreneurs of my generation. I have read biographies of Steve and Jeff and with this book I got a glimpse into the events that shaped Elon Musk.  While every one of them is hugely impressive, Elon clearly stands out as the one with most audacious vision.  The book opens with how the author, Ashlee Vance struggled to get Elon’s co-operation as he refused to give him editorial control on the manuscript. Only when Ashlee made it clear that he was not going to back down from his project of writing the book, did he get Elon’s support. Since Elon eventually cooperated with Ashlee Vance, I didn’t expect too many negative portrayals about him. Nevertheless Ashlee attempts to keep it balanced and includes the story of Elon firing his long time secretary Mary Beth Brown. Despite this and other instances of his lack of empathy with individual human beings, Ashlee attempts one last ditch effort to paint Elon in a good light. He says "Elon has the weirdest kind of empathy of anyone I've ever come across. He doesn't have a lot of interpersonal empathy, but he has a lot of empathy for mankind,"

Regardless of whether you like Elon or not, one thing is clear. This guy will have done more for humanity than anyone else in our lifetime. Read this as a small tribute to him!

Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now

Author: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

One of my very passionate neighbors was quoting from this book to make the case that Islam promotes violence. Rather than argue with him, I decided to read the book and make my own conclusions. Several years ago I read Ms Ali’s autobiographical work, “Infidel” and have a lot of respect for what she has accomplished in life.  However, in this book, she doesn’t quite score a home run in trying to convince the world that Islam needs a reformation. 

 

First, it isn’t clear if she is an observer on the side, or one who is leading this reformation. Actually, if I understood her right, she is neither. If she was an observer, I would have expected her to look at both sides of the equation and maybe spend some time understanding why Islam is one of the fastest growing religions in the world. They certainly have something right, and if we don’t understand what this is, it will be hard to reform it. On the flip side she does say that “I have no weekly congregation. I simply lecture, read, write, think and teach a small seminar at Harvard”. So she is clearly not championing the “New and Improved Islam” herself.  The best analogy I could find is that Aayan is serving as a “commentator” who has witnessed first hand, some of the atrocities in the name of Islam and is urging the faithful to reform their religion. 

In many cases she very naively compares Islam to Christianity. It almost seems like she is writing a guide for someone who is shopping for a religion, and this guide is mainly about why you shouldn’t “buy” Islam. Unfortunately religion is not something that we go shopping for. For most of us it is handed down by our parents and relatives. I would argue that the most likely course is for people to abandon their religion. That is probably the best bet for Islam. Making a transition to another one will require something compelling in the other religion to attract you. Unfortunately, that is not the focus of this book!

There are tons of examples of barbarian killings prescribed by Sharia Law. While these are gruesome to read, we are unfortunately numbed by their everyday occurrence.  To truly appreciate the absurdity of orthodox Islam, I highly recommend the movie “Timbuktu”.  It takes a novel approach at ridiculing some of the absurdity of the rule by muslim fundamentalists.

In her book, Ms. Ali often describes Islam as “Commanding right and forbidding wrong”. She wants  Islam to be less prescriptive on how you pray and what you do. While this is a noble goal, every religion on this planet comes with rituals. In early days we didn’t have a “userid” and “password”, so the only way folks could get access to the religious club, were by following the rituals. The more arcane the rituals the better the signature. Surely we can design a signature that is less imposing on the followers. Unfortunately, by definition, the signature is not up for discussion. 

In summary, the book urges Muslims from all over the world to reform, but has little by way of next steps of how to get there.

Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships

Author: Christopher Ryan and Cacida Jetha

A good portion of this book is aimed at questioning conventional wisdom on whether monogamy came “naturally” to prehistoric humans.  For the first several chapters, the authors quote numerous scientific works and poke holes in the claims there. Their primary targets are Darwin, Malthus and Hobbes, but there are several other respected names from the past that are quoted and then argued with. I was very impressed with the sheer number of these references and how the authors use a fine tooth comb to dissect their statements.  While I commend them for their strong stance, the argumentative style gets to be grating after a while.  Anyone suggesting that “war” or “fighting” comes naturally to humans is very quickly put to shame. One of their primary weapons in this debate is that our closest primate cousins, the bonobos are some of the most peaceful, cooperative and over-sexed animals.

Another theme that is consistent throughout the book is that agriculture is the root of all evil. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, typically lived peaceful, cooperative lives and shared their kill with their clan. In contrast, early farmers needed to fight, to protect  their property and crops and that is the underlying reason for all the strife that mankind faces today. The authors even question the research from Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, arguing that they too might have been peaceful, had she not presented them with bananas every day — something they felt the need to fight over! 

To me it seems rather simple. Man was peaceful until he had something to fight for. Since this book is about sex, one interesting way to look at it would be to see if man fought for sex before the dawn of agriculture. This would definitely have made the material much more readable and clear. However, maybe the evidence to support this wasn’t readily available and so the authors chose to argue about it instead :-)

The authors refute common myths about our prehistoric ancestors. Their average lifespan is typically quoted as somewhere in the 40s. They contend that this is due to the confusion between average life expectancy and typical life span. The former is averaged over all adults and children. Since infant mortality was much higher in prehistoric times, this significantly reduced the average life expectancy. In contrast there is significant  archaeological evidence that many prehistoric humans did live to the ripe old age of 80 years.

An interesting side-note is that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies to anthropologists studying primitive tribes. When they take residence with them, they are inherently altering their behavior. The author’s critique Chagnon’s research on the Yanomamo tribe, a society of indigenous Amazonians, saying that, "Chagnon fails to account for the effects of his own disruptive, rather Hemingwayesque presence among the people he studied".

It is only from chapter 15 and onwards, that the book stops arguing with dead and living scientists and starts getting down to making its own claims.  They look at the human reproductive anatomy and use the Darwinian principle of Natural Selection to put forth a theory that early humans lived in packs and lived promiscuously.  Apparently our human anatomy has evolved to select the survival of the fittest sperm! They do present convincing arguments  on how co-habiting with someone for long can make them seem more like a “sibling” thereby killing any sexual libido. After spending the whole book on prehistoric sex, the last couple of chapters offer some good advice on how to look at modern day marriage. Maybe sex is over-rated after all!

This is a must-read for anyone looking to broaden their views on Marriage, Relationship and Sex.

Americanah

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I watched this TED talk on “We should all be feminists”  by Ms. Adichie and I was blown away by how she was such a powerful feminist yet came across as rather balanced in her views. It left me craving for more and I decided I would pick up one of her novels and learn more from her.  Americanah seemed like just the right thing. It had won numerous awards including the “National Book Critics Award” and was on several Best-Seller lists all across the country. 

Americanah chronicles the journey of a young Nigerian girl, Ifemelu as she grows up into an adult and eventually immigrates to America. One of the main thrusts of the book is to educate the reader on what it’s like to be an “African” in the US and how different life is for them than their look-alike “African Americans”.  It is a distinction that most of us would not have labored too much on, but Ms. Adichie uses her keen sense of observation to bring out all the little nuances that separate the two. 

Ifemelu and Obinze are young lovers in High School in Lagos, Nigeria.  The country is struggling with its military dictatorship and the only viable option for most young people is to study abroad. Ifemelu heads to the US to study and Obinze finds himself stuck in the U.K.  The book covers a long period in time and takes you through their years growing up in Lagos followed by their life abroad and then back in Nigeria. I found their years growing up in Lagos most fascinating and the parallels with my own life in India were definitely on my mind. 

Ms. Adichie can tell a great story and the book is an epic in it’s own right. I couldn’t help but wonder how much of Ifemelu’s story is based on Ms. Adichie’s own experiences growing up in Nigeria and America. 

Read this and you will have a great appreciation for African immigrants in the US.

The Goldfinch

Author: Donna Tartt

It has been more than 2 years since I first laid my eyes on this book and wanted to read it. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014, and as a rule I read most of the Pulitzer prize winning books. Every time I picked up this book, I quickly put it down after I realized that it was almost 800 pages long. This time however, I had a long flight to India and back and was eagerly looking for some distraction to the cramped confines of the aircraft cabin. I promptly downloaded the book on my kindle and was all set to sink my teeth into the goldfinch.

The story starts out with thirteen year old, Theo Decker who is living with his Mom in New York city after his delinquent Dad has disappeared from the scene. A problem at school results in Theo and his Mom spending the day visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Before you know it there is an explosion that launches the story into high gear.  The object at the center of the story and the title of the book is the “Goldfinch” painting by  the Dutch artist, Carel Fabritius.

From here on it is a non-stop ride that takes you to Las Vegas and back. Donna has written an epic that is compared to many a Dickensian tale for how well she develops her characters and the rich prose that describes their activities. Unfortunately, one of the main activities is doing drugs and while I am no prude, I have to admit that Theo and his friends takes this to an extreme. After reading this book I got the feeling that it is not uncommon for young people in New York and Las Vegas to be regularly ingesting vast amounts of prescription drugs.

Despite the gratuitous drug consumption, Goldfinch paints a wonderful story replete with interesting characters and high thrills.  I particularly liked the Russian kid Boris as he breezed through life with not a care in the world. Pippa, the object of Theo’s desire,  is rather enigmatic and flits in and out of the story. 

If you have time to kill and lots of it, you should definitely read this book. If you only have a couple of hours to spare, just wait for the movie which I am sure is in the works. 

Disgrace

Author: J.M. Coetzee

Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003 and this book one the Booker Prize in 1999. A quick research on Amazon revealed plenty of 4 and 5-star reviews. The book was only a couple of hundred pages with well spaced lines and I needed no more incentive to check it out.

When I started reading the book, I quickly realized why Coetzee is so well regarded in the Literary world. His prose is sparse but to the point. He can quickly move from describing a scene to something more metaphysical without skipping a beat. In Disgrace, the protagonist, David Lurie is a 50+ year old University professor in a South Africa. He is twice divorced and does not have any friends or companions.  He satisfies his sexual urges with a regular visit to a local prostitute. When that ends, he seduces one of his students. Both of these events are described in a rather clinical, without much pathos which makes you feel like a bystander watching someone self-destruct. And that is precisely what happens in the rest of the book. In describing this, Coetzee gets the reader to ponder on much weightier issues like post-apartheid race relations in South Africa and definitely gets you to look at it from an unconventional point of view. 

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

Author: Jon Ronson

I am a big fan of “This American Life” (TAL) radio show on NPR and stumbled on the episode where Ira Glass and the rest of the TAL cast take the Psychopath Test. I got a quick introduction to the famous PCL-R test created by Canadian Psychologist, Bob Hare and how it is in widespread use by the Prison system in deciding whom to let out on parole. While the episode was eye-opening, I was hugely impressed by the section where Jon Ronson narrates his interview with Al Dunlap, the former CEO of Sunbeam corporation, to make the connection on whether there were traits of psychopaths that were beneficial to business leaders.  I quickly decided that I had to read his book and was so drawn in by his narration, that I was determined to make it my first audio book.

When I first got the 6 CD-set from the library, I was concerned that with all the advancements in audio streaming, my new car may not be equipped with a CD player. On opening the glove compartment, I discovered that there was a DVD player in there and it hungrily accepted the CDs. Apart from the hassle of changing the CD while driving, the entire experience was a very pleasant one, with Jon Ronson’s paranoid voice walking me down the memory lane of psychologists attempt to detect and classify pschyopaths.

The cover very aptly describes the book as a "a wild romp through the madness industry”.  I highly recommend the audio book as Ron Johnson tell’s the story with that “fear” in his voice that reaches out through the speakers and grabs you. Apart from the Al Dunlap story, there are many that will make you wonder whether this is all really non-fiction. There’s the story of Tony who faked madness to escape a prison sentence and now can’t get the authorities at his mental hospital to be convinced that he is sane. When you listen to how hard it is for someone who is declared a psychopath to get out of a mental institution, you begin to wonder how many sane people might be trapped in there.  You hear about Ron’s interviews with the Haitian extremist Toto Constant the founder of a Haitian Death Squad that terrorized supporters of Jean Bertrand Aristide.  There’s also a story about David Shayler, an ex-MI5 operative who keeps raising the bar with more and more outlandish conspiracy theory claims. Most of these folks come across as fairly normal human beings and it is hard to reconcile their past activities. 

Ron wavers in his quest to become the perfect Psychopath decoder, and starts questioning whether he himself might not be a little insane. Maybe we all have a bit of insanity in us and it is just a question of what is socially acceptable and what is not. 

A Kim Jong-Il Production

Author: Paul Fischer

When I first heard this story on This American Life, I just could not believe my ears. It was a fascinating and bizarre tale of kidnapping and movie-making in North Korea that seemed too outrageous for anyone to even make up as fiction. I had to learn more about this and I quickly found a book that described it all. I promptly searched my local library and checked out a copy of the book. 

As expected, this was a page-turner with Shin Sang-ok and Kim Jong-il taking center stage. You learn about the fascination that Kim Jong Il had with movies and how it influenced pretty much everything he did in North Korea.  He was very frustrated with the poor quality of North Korean films and decided to fix it by direct intervention. He found the most famous director (Shin Sang-ok) and actress  (Choi Eun-hee) in South Korean Cinema and had them kidnapped and taken to North Korea. As it turns out they were formerly married to each other, and he conveniently re-united them after the kidnapping.  Some of the early details after the kidnapping don’t make much sense and hopefully, one day, someone will discover a diary of Kim Jong Il that will shed some light on what his plans were in the first few years after the kidnapping. For a man who was obsessed by movies, he seemed to be in no hurry to put these two talented individuals to work.

The book gives you a good glimpse into the life of folks in the higher echelons of North Korean government. You will wince at the way people are treated in North Korean and the level of isolation they feel is something that is hard for us to comprehend in the western world. Especially in this day and age where once you have access to the internet, you pretty much have the ability to instantly acquire information from all corners of the world. 

In some ways Shin Sang Ok got to relive his dreams of directing movies even though he was always under the watchful eye of Kim Jong Il and his security guards. Read this book to learn all about the craziness of the North Korean Dictator, his obsession with making movies and the casualties in the process. 

All The Light We Cannot See

Author: Anthony Doerr

I was halfway through this book when it was selected as the Pulitzer Prize winner for 2015.  This was probably the least surprising Pulitzer Prize winner in recent history, given that it has already spent 50 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list.

Right from the start I could tell that I was reading an epic. The book narrates some heart wrenching tales from Germany and France during World War II.  The two main characters are both young adolescents,  growing up on different sides, during World War II.  Marie-Laure is a blind girl from France who is curious about everything around her that she cannot see. Werner Pfennig, is a gifted young orphan in Germany who is drafted for special training in one of the Elite Corps in Nazi Germany. While  this is categorized as a work of fiction, I won’t be surprised if many of the details in the book are uncomfortably close to the truth. The book is very well researched and is embedded with all kids of information from details of how wireless radios work to classifications of birds. One piece of trivia that I was surprised to learn was that John  Audubon, who is the father of modern bird watchers the world over, did not just paint  live birds that he saw in the forest. He shot and killed the birds and most often ended up eating them so that he could survive in the wilderness.

On reading the book, I was reminded of putting together a jigsaw puzzle. There are pieces of the story that unfold which don’t seem to fit anywhere. Rest assured that Mr. Doerr will find a way to make the pieces fit in the end. If I had one criticism about the book,  it is this very fact that takes away the suspense in the book. As you approach the latter half you can tell what is going to happen as the pieces of the puzzle that you have assembled clearly outline the missing pieces that you will uncover in the last few pages.

This is a book that should be read slowly and enjoyed. I always wonder if I have read enough books on World War II. This book is evidence that there is room for one more. 

The Son

Author: Jo Nesbø

After reading the “Girl with a Dragon Tattoo” series, I suddenly started noticing Swedish Crime Thrillers everywhere. For a country with less than 10 million people, Sweden has more than 40 major crime fiction writers (source wikipedia). Much has been written about the “Scandinavian Crime Wave”. Fortunately for the Swedes it is all fiction as Sweden has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world. 

“The Son” opens up with scenes of the perfect prison and some really depraved inmates. However, it quickly transforms into the classic crime thriller with murders popping on every other page. The violence and murders are gruesome and in typical Swedish noir, take place in bucolic and peaceful settings. Sonny Lofthus is the son whose father was a police officer and in whose footsteps Sonny was destined to follow. However, he was killed when Sonny was very young in some mysterious circumstances that made it look like a suicide. Sonny wakes up one day and his rampage occupies the latter half of the book. You will find it hard to stop turning the pages and reading about the inevitable revenge killings that ensue. There is an interesting twist in the end that will make you appreciate the complicated plot that Jo Nesbo is weaving for you.

Vitamania: Our Obsessive Quest For Nutritional Perfection

Author: Catherine Price

More than 50% of Americans take some kind of Vitamin supplement. However very little is known about the beneficial effects of the same. There are some very clear diseases like scurvy, beri beri, pellagra, etc. that are caused by Vitamin deficiencies, but most of these are uncommon in the US today. Time and again the author drops into her oft-repeated story of how, by default, most people assume that Vitamins are beneficial and blindly take them with an almost religious belief. 

I learnt a few things from this book. First, that vitamins are barely a 100 years old. Their initial discovery seemed elusive as the early scientists were convinced that diseases like scurvy, beri beri, etc. were caused by germs. Now that they are easily available in developed countries we have a different problem. Vitamins and the general class of supplements have mushroomed into a large unregulated industry making all kinds of false claims and suggestions. The author goes into quite a bit of detail to describe the failed attempts of the FDA to tame the food supplement industry. 

I was disappointed that despite all the research that the author conducted she didn’t try to distill it and provide the reader with a birds-eye view of the current understanding on the benefits and dangers of each of the major vitamins/supplements in the market. Maybe there is really no definitive picture and that is why she was not able to draw one! Overall, it felt like each of the chapters were independently constructed and then patched together without a storyline to weave through it.

The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe

Author: Romain Puertolas

This is one of those small magical books that transport you to a completely different world. This one has an Indian Fakir — combination of guru and magician — ikea store, gypsy taxi driver and a french woman looking for love. With this rather unlikely combination of characters Romain weaves a farcical tale that will have you in splits of laughter. The many different takes on Ajatashatru’s name itself is hilarious. I wish I knew enough French to read this novel in the language it was written in. Judging by how well the humor is conveyed, I can confidently say that Sam Taylor has done a great job in the translation. Read it and you will not be disappointed.

Girl on the train

Author: Paula Hawkins

This is a plain and simple block-buster. You don’t have to take my word for it, just see what people are buying week after week. As of today (April 17th) “The Girl on the train” is running 13 weeks as number 1 on the NY Times best seller list. Now that I have read it, I can see why. 

 There are just a handful of characters in the book and Paula Hawkins starts slow with a peek into the sad life of Rachel who takes the train back and forth each day. Rachel wistfully looks out the window and focuses her attention on the inhabitants of one particular house along the way. Paul tells the story from different perspectives and time periods just like the book “Gone Girl”. This one however sucks you in, twists you around and spits you out with your head spinning. I loved it.

Big Little Lies

Author: Liane Moriarty

It is not often that I get to read about life on the country that is its own continent — Australia. Liane tells a tale of three women and the school events that form the center of their lives. Even though this is set half a world away, I can relate this to the elementary school parent behavior in the US. I found the parallels very though provoking and was absorbed in the characters that Liane develops so well. 

The three women in the novel are polar opposites of each other. One is beautiful and married to a rich business-man. The second one is an in-your-face mom who is happy married for the second time but struggling raising kids from both marriages. The third is an introverted single-mom who doesn’t want to cause any ripples in the world, but has problems with self-esteem.  The story revolves around some key events in their children’s classroom and is literally a first-grade whodunnit.  As the story unfolds you realize that there is more going on in the parent’s lives than you would have ever imagined and Liane tells a great story.  Immerse yourself in it and you will not be disappointed.

No god but God : The Origins and Evolution of Islam

Author: Reza Aslan

Reza Aslan knows how to write well. After all, he is a Professor of Creative Writing at UC Riverside. What he does so well in both this book and “Zealot” is transport you into a time and place where history was being made. In this case, it is the birth and life of Prophet Mohammed the founder of Islam. Reza makes sure you understand the prevailing customs and culture of the times so you interpret some of the actions and writing in the context that they were made in. 

The book is a breeze to read as Reza seamlessly blurs the line between the narration of historical facts and storytelling. There are parts where you will find him saying “Muhammed pondered these..”  I feel this is a small price to pay for a much more readable book and it takes little away from the history. However, it does leave you wondering how much of the book is made up.  

Towards the end Reza takes the liberty to make some convenient interpretations of the Quran to show that Prophet Mohammed was very tolerant of Judaism and Christianity. While it is definitely a possible interpretation, it is unfortunate that it is not universally accepted by all those who follow the Muslim faith. 

Overall this book is a great primer for someone curious and interested about the Muslim religion. It was well worth the two/three hour investment to get a better understanding of some of the tenets that make this religion so popular.

The Churchill factor

Author: Boris Johnson

I knew Churchill was good. But on reading this book, I learnt how truly awesome he was. Let’s start with his written word. He delivered 8700 speeches and wrote more than a million letters and memos. Unlike politicians of today, he was his own speechwriter. He had a factory of assistants who were with him around the clock and wrote down every word that came from his mouth. This prompts Boris Johnson to muse that Chartwell house, Churchill's abode, was the worlds best word processor!

Apparently he read a lot too. Johnson estimates that he read 5000 books in his lifetime and could recite passages and poetry from memory. When he visited Roosevelt, he entertained him with the nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear.  Apparently Churchill also loved summits and was an incessant traveller. In 4 years (1939 - 1943) he logged 111,000 miles with 792 of them at sea and 339 in the air.  Johnson employs a conversational style in the book that will go well with a peg of whiskey. You will encounter phrases like “[Churchill] was truly a Marlborough and not just a Marlborough lite”, as page after page, Johnson can’t stop gushing about Churchill’s prowess.

Johnson’s one-sided portrayal of Churchill gets tiring after a while and I almost abandoned the book after the first hundred pages. However, the book gets interesting again when Johnson starts talking about Churchill's mis-steps in Chapter 15. Note that Johnson still can’t give up the hope that even in these follies there is an air of “brilliance” and desperately tries to hint at how things could have turned out differently if some element of history or the people in charge were altered. 

Despite all the criticism, you can’t help appreciate Churchill’s major contributions at what must have been a pivotal time for Europe and the world. Johnson sums it up well when he says “no normal family man produces more words than Shakespeare and Dickens combined, wins the Nobel prize for literature, kills umpteen people in armed conflict on four continents, serves in every great office of state including Prime Minister (twice), is indispensable to victory in two world wars and then posthumously sells his paintings for a million dollars”. 

Zero to One

Author: Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

Reading this book is like having a conversation with someone really smart. What you should do is really shut up and listen! From page one it is clear that Peter Thiel is both brilliant and well-read and he shares his perspective on everything under the sun including the Unabomber’s Manifesto. 

Most of the book pertains to what you should look for when you join a startup, or choose to start your own company. It is very clear that Peter’s bar is very high. He firmly believes that a startup that does not have it’s eyes on achieving monopoly status in its space is not worth starting. I might have to read this again to remember all the good advice!