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Total Records: 43

Another sort of freedom

Another sort of freedom

Gurcharan Das, 2023, Penguin Random House; 9780670092710

Subject: Biography


Source: Telegraph

Review: Gurcharan Das admits he's a natural show-off, and prone to name-drop to gesticulate a wrinkle in time. But he tries to curb his instincts here. The former head of Procter & Gamble takes us through the 1960s and the 1970s in Boston and Oxford and describes uniquely how his feet remain rooted in Indian soil. He encounters Sanskrit, rhetorical questions, white women he wants to sleep with, his own ge...Read More

Before colors: where pigments and dyes come from

Before colors: where pigments and dyes come from

Annette Bay Pimentel, 2023, The MIT Press; 9781419757068

Subject: Science and Technology


Source: Strategy + Business

Review: Before Colors is a gorgeously illustrated and, of course, colorful book that introduces readers to the origins of different pigments and dyes used throughout history and in the present day. This may seem like a difficult topic to organize into a single narrative, but author Annette Bay Pimentel cleverly ties the stories of each color together. The book's discussion of the color brown, for example,...Read More

Blue machine: how the ocean shapes our world

Blue machine: how the ocean shapes our world

Helen Czerski, 2023, The MIT Press; 9781911709114

Subject: History


Source:

Review: Few scientific subjects are as vast as the ocean. Yet oceans often seem invisible, remarks physicist Helen Czerski Growing up in Manchester, UK, Czerski had access only to the freezing North Sea to the east and the grey Irish Sea to the west, neither of which much appealed. But why did her three physics degrees omit the ocean, she wonders Having finished a PhD in experimental explosive physics and...Read More

Body on the barricades

Body on the barricades

Brahma Parkash, 2023, LeftWord Books; 9789392018107

Subject: Social Science


Source: Economic and Political Weekly

Review: Towards the end of Vivek Shanbagh's (2023: 160) novel Sakina's Kiss, its compulsively self-exposing narrator observes, The intensity of a life can be measured in stupid decisions. I have always been envious of those who manage to be reckless.Stupid here does not mean thoughtless or banal; it means, instead, that which is uncalculated, spontaneous, without reck or care for one's own interest. ...Read More

Charlie Chaplin vs. America: when art, sex, and politics collided

Charlie Chaplin vs. America: when art, sex, and politics collided

Scott Eyman, 2023, Simon and Schuster; 9781982176372

Subject: Political Science


Source: Financial Times

Review: Scott Eyman's biography of Charlie Chaplin commences in 1952, a peculiar phase in the artist's life when he is unexpectedly barred from re-entering the United States due to opaque dealings in the US State Department. Chaplin, once considered the most famous man globally, finds himself on the RMS Queen Elizabeth, headed for England, facing the risk of becoming a reflection of his iconic tramp chara...Read More

Consciousness: how our brains turn matter into meaning

Consciousness: how our brains turn matter into meaning

John Parrington, 2023, Icon Books; 9781837730780

Subject: Science and Technology


Source:

Review: The material basis of human consciousness is one of the biggest unsolved issues in science, admits cellular and molecular pharmacologist John Parrington in his pithy addition to a vast literature dating from the time of ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. He considers many theories and proposes his own. Humans, he argues, are distinguished by conceptual thought and language, along with skills in ...Read More

Data sovereignty: from the digital silk road to the return of the state

Data sovereignty: from the digital silk road to the return of the state

Anupam Chander (Editor), 2023, Oxford University Press; 9780197582794

Subject: Information Technology


Source: Strategy + Business

Review: In an era of escalating global polarization, when jurisdictions enforce data sovereignty, imposing governance or control over the data produced within their borders, the news you see, the facts you see, and even the maps you see change depending on where you are, observes legal scholar Mark Lemley (1). And with the expanding role of artificial intelligence in society, constraints on access to the ...Read More

Democracy in a hotter time: climate change and democratic transformation

Democracy in a hotter time: climate change and democratic transformation

David W. Orr (Editor), 2023, The MIT Press; 9780262048590

Subject: Political Science


Source:

Review: Environmentalist David Orr writes in the introduction to this timely collection that the planet faces two interlinked crises: rapid climate change and potentially lethal threats to democracy. The US Constitution rigorously protects private property but does not mention ecological systems, he observes. Contributors, almost all US-based, from a wide range of fields examine the need for political ref...Read More

Descent into paradise: a journalist's memoir of the untold Maldives

Descent into paradise: a journalist's memoir of the untold Maldives

Daniel Bosley, 2023, Pan Macmillan; 9789389109825

Subject: General


Source: Telegraph

Review: Among the South Asian nations, the least is known about the Maldives. Its distance of over 2,000 km from India has allowed it to remain detached from the rest of its neighbours. To outsiders, the archipelago of the Maldives and its string of atolls spread over the Indian Ocean is a tropical paradise. For years, it attracted high-end European travellers who, until the pandemic, made up 50% of the t...Read More

Extinctions: how life survives, adapts and evolves: how life survived, adapted and evolved

Extinctions: how life survives, adapts and evolves: how life survived, adapted and evolved

Michael J. Benton, 2023, Thames and Hudson; 9780500025468

Subject: Science and Technology


Source:

Review: When palaeontologist Michael Benton learned about dinosaurs as a boy, he "loved the fact they were extinct". They were like real science fiction. Perhaps he also intuited that their extinction permitted his existence. As his deeply informed and readable book reveals, the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago allowed a new cohort of creatures - including mammals....Read More

Fire weather: a true story from a hotter world

Fire weather: a true story from a hotter world

John Vaillant, 2023, Knopf; 9781524732851

Subject: Enviornment


Source: The New York Times

Review: "Is fire alive?" the journalist and author John Vaillant asks early in his new book, "Fire Weather." I rolled my eyes, even as Vaillant ticks off a dozen lifelike characteristics - it grows, it breathes, it travels in search of nourishment - because the answer seemed so obvious: No. Of course not.... Vaillant tells the story of a colossal wildfire that, in the spring of 2016, torched much of Fort...Read More

Flowers, guns, and money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the paradoxes of American patriotism

Flowers, guns, and money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the paradoxes of American patriotism

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, 2023, University of Chicago Press; 9780226829609

Subject: Political Science


Source: The Wall Street Journal

Review: In the winter of 1828, Joel Roberts Poinsett, the U.S. minister to Mexico, was exploring a tropical forest about 100 miles southwest of Mexico City. He was in the habit of sharing unfamiliar species of plants with his far-flung correspondents, hoping the plants might be useful in agriculture or gain him diplomatic favor. Along the slopes of the forest's steep canyons, he came across a bush that wo...Read More

For the love of mars: a human history of the red planet

For the love of mars: a human history of the red planet

Matthew Shindell, 2023, University of Chicago Press; 9780226821894

Subject: Science and Technology


Source: The Wall Street Journal

Review: When it comes to Mars, humanity's conceptions of the "angry red planet" have been surprisingly mercurial. It has been seen variously as a deity or an oracle; a world rife with life or hopelessly sterile; a setting for utopias, dystopias, even Ziggy Stardust. For many, though, such imaginative possibilities from the past are irrelevant. Mars's rosy future is what beckons now: a new frontier awaitin...Read More

Gardening Can Be Murder: How Poisonous Poppies, Sinister Shovels, and Grim Gardens Have Inspired Mystery Writers

Gardening Can Be Murder: How Poisonous Poppies, Sinister Shovels, and Grim Gardens Have Inspired Mystery Writers

McDowell, Marta, 2023, Timber Press; 9781643261126

Subject: Science and Technology


Source: The Wall Street Journal

Review: 
"One of these days (please God), I shall retire from catching thieves, and try my hand at growing roses." So says Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins's 1868 detective novel, "The Moonstone." According to Marta McDowell, Cuff was the mystery genre's first "horticulturally inclined investigator," but he was hardly the last. Ms. McDowell's delightful "Gardening Can Be Murder: How Poisonous Poppies, Siniste...Read More

Good food, bad waste: let's eat for the planet

Good food, bad waste: let's eat for the planet

Erin Silver, 2023, Orca Book Publishers; 9781459830912

Subject: Enviornment


Source: Strategy + Business

Review: In recent years, the Western world has seen a proliferation of food-based entertainment in the form of social media content, TV shows, books, podcasts, magazines, and more. However, very few resources are invested in educating people on the consequences of food waste. In Good Food, Bad Waste, author Erin Silver takes young readers on an emotional journey through the overaccumulation of food and th...Read More

I kick and I fly

I kick and I fly

Ruchira Gupta, 2023, Simon and Schuster; 9780861546961

Subject: Biography


Source: Telegraph

Review: Daruma dolls are a popular part of Japanese culture. Round, hollow, and weighted at the bottom, they are seen as symbols of perseverance. No matter how often they are put down, their constitution is such that they spring back up. The same holds true for Heera, the 14-year-old protagonist of "I Kick and I Fly" (published by Rock the Boat), Ruchira Gupta's debut novel, which alternates between despa...Read More

India's experiment with democracy: the life of a nation through its elections

India's experiment with democracy: the life of a nation through its elections

S. Y. Quraishi, 2023, HarperCollins; 9789356993655

Subject: Political Science


Source: Telegraph

Review: Conscious that his personal life coincides with that of politically-independent India, the former chief election commissioner, guitar player, the first Muslim officer of the Indian Administrative Service from "old Delhi" after 1947, born into a family of Islamic scholars and the son of a man who insisted that his children be benefitted by "modern education," Shahabuddin Yaqoob Quraishi is a public...Read More

Mapping the darkness: the visionary scientists who unlocked the mysteries of sleep

Mapping the darkness: the visionary scientists who unlocked the mysteries of sleep

Kenneth Miller, 2023, OneWorld Publications; 9780861545162

Subject: Science and Technology


Source:

Review: Sleep and dreaming are human universals. Yet only in the past century has science begun to appreciate how centrally important they are for many facets of our health and well-being, and to address the many, profound questions that sleep and dreaming pose. Why do humans sleep, and what happens when they don't? What is happening when someone dreams? What constitutes "good" sleep, and how can physicia...Read More

Most delicious poison: from spices to vices: the story of nature's toxinsn

Most delicious poison: from spices to vices: the story of nature's toxinsn

Noah Whiteman, 2023, Simon and Schuster; 9780861544523

Subject: Science and Technology


Source: The Wall Street Journal

Review: The plants in "Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature's Toxins-From Spices to Vices" come off as very smart, even cunning. They deploy chemicals to repel herbivores or attract animals that will spread their pollen. Tobacco plants produce nicotine as an insecticide that deters predators; skunk cabbage and corpse flowers emit the stench of death to trick carrion-feeding insects into becoming the...Read More

Putting ourselves back in the equation: why physicists are studying human consciousness and ai to unravel the mysteries of the universe

Putting ourselves back in the equation: why physicists are studying human consciousness and ai to unravel the mysteries of the universe

George Musser, 2023, Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 9780374238766

Subject: Science and Technology


Source: The Wall Street Journal

Review: "Popular science often feels like a kind of voyeurism. Those who can't manage the real thing are given a thrilling glimpse of its intrigue and excitement but kept at a distance. So a book that tackles the mind-boggling triad of physics, consciousness, and artificial intelligence might be expected to provide little more than intellectual titillation. The science journalist George Musser even says a...Read More

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