Books

The Top-10 Reading List 2009

by AJIT SINGH

 

I wrote in the preface of my Top-10 Reading List last year, "2008 was a year of change for me - a vector pointing generally to adventure and uncertainty."

The year 2009 was a perfect validation that adventure and uncertainty are indeed soul mates. This was a year of utter disruption: a grueling and chaotic travel schedule that outdid my weekly trans-Atlantic commute of earlier years, a family split between three locations, and the bipolar character of start-up business - vacillating between the thrill of building a company and the agony of getting to understand the ecosystem around it (the agony was in the understanding part only... dealing with it was in fact quite entertaining!)

I have resolved to myself, "This is the new normal."

My reading-list for 2009 has the usual categories of the past years, namely Literature, Philosophy, Biology, Management/ Economics, History/Politics, and Math/Science.

For the newly initiated, this is the sixteenth such list since I started the year-end ritual in the early 90's while still at Princeton. As in all the previous years, the criterion for including a book in my Top-10 list is very personal: Is this a book that I am likely to read again?

 

Literature (Fiction / Non-Fiction)

1.    Carolina De Robertis, The Invisible Mountain, Knopf, 2009.

There were many reasons to read this book. First and foremost, it was recommended by a friend who is an avid reader... and who introduced me to the works of Sandor Marai and Andre Brink. Second, the setting of the novel is South America.  Finally, there was nothing new by Isabel Allende this year.

The Invisible Mountain starts in 1900 in a remote Uruguayan village with the disappearance of a baby and meanders through the lives and stories of three generations of women - strong willed, passionate, and vulnerable all at once. But this is where the apparent similarity with a Gabriel García Márquez story ends; the characters here are much more complex, and the differences among them are much more subtle.

As one reviewer puts it, "... provocative, heartbreaking, and ultimately life-affirming, The Invisible Mountain is a poignant celebration of the potency of familial love, the will to survive under the most hopeless of circumstances, and above all, the fierce, fortifying connection between mother and daughter."

De Robertis has an uncanny knack of punctuating her prose with pithy insights about her characters - one-liners that are descriptors of biting economy.

    "He had two goals: to survive, and to study the drums."

    "Once, years ago she had wanted to die; now she raged that there was not enough life."

However, such precision does not get in the way of detail when the story deserves it:

"One sweltering afternoon, as a hunchbacked woman who smelled of garlic confessed her infatuation with the new priest, Pajarita felt something stir inside her body. Her mind reached in to feel. She was pregnant. A girl. She was filled with the memory of conception, that final night, the clawing, Ignazio's torn and hungry skin. And he was gone. She almost imploded from the sadness."

The book is as much a lesson in the history, culture and political landscape of Uruguay, intertwined with the rest of South America, as it is an exploration of human spirit and love. A debut novel of epic scope!

 

2.    Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity, Vantage Books, 2003.

As some of you might remember from the Top-10 List of 2001, Dave Eggers' first book, Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was a Pulitzer finalist. That was a (semi) autobiographical work. Eggers has brought the same flair for bold, inventive and fluid writing to what I consider a profoundly original piece of fiction. Here's how the book begins:

"Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River in East Central Columbia, with forty-two locals we hadn't yet met. It was a clear and eye-blue day that day, as was the first day of this story, a few days ago in January on Chicago's North side, in the opulent shadow of Wrigley and with the wind coming low and searching off the jagged half-frozen lake. I was inside, very warm, walking from door to door ... I was talking to Hand, one of my two best friends, the one still alive, and we were planning to leave."

Why do I consider the plot so original?

Well, the narrator of the story has come across a large sum of money, and he wants to travel around the world  with his friend Hand to remote and not so well known places - to give away the money to people they consider most deserving. The two come up with many creative ways of deciding to whom to give, but without a solid set of criteria and a clear plan, this proves surprisingly difficult. Their reaction:  confusion and moral uncertainty. The story is alternatingly funny and poignant. I found Eggers playing with my expectations throughout the book ... and constantly moving, not allowing my mind to catch up.

He is as capable of crisp, canonical descriptions as he is of allegory. For instance, here's his take on multi-verses, a la quantum physics:

"The thing is, it's basically immortality for atheists."

Somewhere deep at the core of story is a satire on humanitarian aid, and on the process of determining who is worthy. Very reminiscent of the plays of Henrik Ibsen!

 

3.    Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Angel's Game, Doubleday, 2009.

Zafon's 2004 bestseller, The Shadow of the Wind did not make the cut (based on my totally random criterion of second-time-readability) for the Top-10 list ... but would have very likely been in the Top-11. If it weren't for my equally random tiebreaker, The Angel's Game would have a similar fate this year! For the curious, the tie was with Jose Saramago's Cave.

The protagonist of the book is David Martin, an author who agonizes over the mercenary temptations of his profession:

"A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price."

Faustian Bargain?

In some sense, the story does have the ingredients of a pact-with-the-devil, but the analogy is only superficial because of one reason: the protagonist actually enjoys the darker pleasure of the literary art - an uncanny thrill of storytelling without conscience.

The events in David's story are sandwiched between the final days of World War I and 1945, majority of them in the 1920's. After the early success of his "The Mysteries of Barcelona" and the "City of the Damned" series, David is struck by a deadly illness. He is given to understand that doing a writing project for an elegant Parisian, Andreas Corelli, might save him. The project ends up involving David in a full spectrum of deceptions and full-fledged crimes. Yet, he keeps giving in to Corelli:

"Everything is a tale, Martin. What we believe, what we know, what we remember, even what we dream."

"Emotional truth is not a moral quality ... it's a technique."

Zafon's characters are complex (and a shade darker than in The Shadow of the Wind) and are instinctively able to cope with contradictions. It is difficult to fully reconcile even with David's behavior. Zafon is adept at navigating the depths of human psyche, and at examining what motivates us to act the way we do. Some characters might get more sympathy for their circumstances but none for their moral compass. They are like normal people - with their own needs and their own self-interest, sometimes with a conjoined sense of doing good.

Bottom line: a gripping story told in beautiful prose. Definitely to be read again!

 

Philosophy

4.    Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: Evidence for Evolution, Free Press, 2009.

Almost everything that Richard Dawkins has written since The Selfish Gene in 1976 has been covered in one of my Top-10 lists over the past years. It was that book that made me a student of evolutionary biology in the mid-1980's, and an avid follower of his writings (despite the fact - or perhaps because of the fact - that I am not an atheist). 

There is an important distinction between everything Dawkins has written so far, and The Greatest Show on Earth. The earlier work up until now made the case for the theory of evolution; this book systematically presents the evidence for evolution, essentially attempting to overcome the objection that evolution is only a theory.

Dawkins draws upon developments in the fields of paleontology, embryology, anatomy, genetics, artificial breeding and geography and synthesizes them into a cogent, logical hierarchy of arguments. All the while, he is a consummate teacher: his style is as didactic as it is evocative.

The problem with the book is the usual one - the hallmark of everything Dawkins: his relentless "hounding" of the Creationists (the use of the upper-case "C" is mine, and intentional). As David Ogilvy himself said about advertising, "It does not convert anyone; it only reinforces to the already converted."  Dawkins needs to realize: a book on evolution does exactly the same.

If you like the book, and would like to read something that (scientifically) reconciles evolutionary biology with a notion of the spirit and consciousness, try Stuart Kauffman's Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion posted on my Top-10 last year.

 

Biology

5.    Douwe Draaisma, Disturbances of the Mind, Cambridge University Press, 2009. 

There were several reasons to read this book. First, Oliver Sacks has not written anything new since Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain in 2008 (he is working on a piece on Visual Hallucinations). Second, here's what Oliver Sacks has to say about this book:

"One can open this book at any chapter - but having done so, one cannot put it down. Disturbances of the Mind, combining deep learning with beguiling narrative, and full of fascinating information and ideas, is one of those rare books that will delight professionals and public alike." Finally, I had a chance meeting with Douwe Draaisma in Athens in 2007; he was speaking at a conference on History of Psychology, and I was vacationing there with my daughters.

To refer to Draaisma's book as a ‘History of Brain Research' will not be an overstatement: it covers the work of twelve scientists whose names have become synonymous with a neurological disorder. The list includes Bonnet, Parkinson, Gage, Broca, Jackson, Korsakoff, de la Tourette, Alzheimer, Brodmann, Clérambault, Capgras, and Asperger.

From the way the chapters are named, e.g., A Tormenting Round of Tremors (for Parkinson's Disease) and Little Professors (for Asperger's Syndrome), to the seamless amalgamation of history, science, and case studies - the book is richly engaging. Especially lucid is Draaisma ‘s treatment of the circumstances surrounding the discoveries.

(I am currently working through the author's previous book, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older, published by Cambridge University Press in 2004).

If this genre is of interest to you but you lack the patience, check out this video on TED:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/oliver_sacks_what_hallucination_reveals_about_our_minds.html 

If, on the other hand, you are of the opposite ilk and want something truly comprehensive, try Kurt Goldstein's The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man, a 1995 publication by Zone (originally published in Holland in 1934). While the title already gives a cue, it is important to point out that Goldstein is not a reductionist. His work focused on the failure of central controls during catastrophic illness and injury, as well as on the exceptional ability of the organism to adapt to such catastrophic losses. The Organism is his magnum opus, and earliest pre-cursor to the works in this category - by such scientists as Gerald Edelman, Oliver Sacks, and V.S. Ramachandran. 

 

Management/ Economics

6.    Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw, and Other Adventures, Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

The previous three books of Gladwell - The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers - have all appeared in my Top-10 in the previous years. In his latest book, he addresses questions such as: why there are dozens of varieties of mustard - but only one variety of ketchup, and what football players teach us about how to hire teachers.  He also explores issues like intelligence tests and ethnic profiling.

My compliment and criticism of Gladwell remains the same as for his earlier books: He is a masterful story teller, but he rushes too quickly to extrapolate sparse data into a theory.

Why do I keep reading his books? He evokes the right (and the important) questions. In that, he is a great teacher. And a prolific communicator.

And why is this book in the Management / Economics section? There is a chapter on the work of Nassim Taleb in the book.

 

7.    Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, Penguin, 2009.

"Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret ... it was Nathan Roth­schild as much as the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo."

Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, is a just-in-time guide to the history of finance and financial crisis. Both gifted and thorough, Ferguson weaves anecdote, metaphor, and theory with a command reminiscent of Jacob Bronowski.

The book covers a very wide ground. At one end of the spectrum is role of money in ancient Mesopotamia, the denarius in Roman society, and gold and silver in the civilization of the Incas. At the other end is a crisp, logical (and prescriptive) treatment of the current financial crisis. He uses relevant events - past and present - to explain the critical role of financial instruments: especially noteworthy is his explanation of the un-sustainability of the financial "arrangement" in which China saves and America spends, and in which China's savings are used to enable America to spend even more.

Ferguson is rich in metaphor. In describing the events leading up to the French Revolution, he speaks of the actions of John Law, a Scotsman in-charge of Public Finance for the French Monarchy as follow:

"It was as if one man was simultaneously running all 500 of the top U.S. corporations, the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve ... fatally set back France's financial development, putting Frenchmen off paper money and stock markets for generations."

In his 2001 book The Cash Nexus Ferguson wrote: "The greatest disappointment facing the world in the 21st century is that the leaders of the one state with the economic resources to make the world a better place lack the guts to do it."

Less than a decade after accusing the U.S. of ‘imperial under-stretch' for failing to flex its muscles, Ferguson prophecies in the current book that the U.S. is on a path to succumb to financial overstretch.

Unfortunately, Ferguson comes short on a being prescriptive about how to un-spool this crisis.

(If the topic is of general interest to you, you will find his earlier book, The Cash Nexus: Economics and Politics from The Age Of Warfare Through The Age Of Welfare, 1700-2000 extremely valuable).

 

History/ Politics

8.    Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill, Bantam Books, 2008.

Arthur Herman is well known for work on British history, most notably his 2001 book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World. 

Writing a conjoined history of two larger than life personalities of the 20^th century is no ordinary feat, especially as the two men held their convictions to two exactly opposite outcomes - one to preserve the British Empire, and the other to dismantle it. Herman not only succeeds at this (primary) objective, he also paints a very well researched and richly chronicled account of nearly one century of Indian Independence struggle. This requires a very wide canvas - stretching across events, locations, personalities as diverse as the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the 1884 revolt in Sudan, the Salt March of 1930, to name a few.

Of the various books on Churchill, Martin Gilbert's biographical account Churchill: A Life is viewed as the most comprehensive. Likewise, Louis Fischer has managed to put forth the most balanced portrait of Gandhi in The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (Richard Attenborough relied heavily on Fischer's work for his movie).  Reading the two books separately leaves ample "white space". That gap is aptly filled by Arthur Herman.

An excellent companion to this book is Peter Clarke's The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, published in 2007.

 

9.    Jonathan Engel, Poor People's Medicine: Medicaid and American Charity Care since 1965, Duke University Press, 2006

I read this book not for it historical value, but in light of its relevance to the current debate on Healthcare Reform in the U.S., especially as it pertains to universal health coverage.

Engel starts at the expected place: an overview of charity medical care, the creation of Medicaid and the compromises struck to allow its federal funding. As he ploughs through four decades of development, he details the many political battles waged over Medicaid, particularly in relation to larger discussions about comprehensive health care and social welfare reform.

This book was a pleasant surprise for one simple reason: unlike most works on social welfare that are highly politicized, this one is devoid of the usual ideological diatribe. Instead, Engel manages to be fair, accurate, and "finely granular."

It is not surprising that Engel discovers that some of today's Medicaid programs are as good as private health plans in offering coordinated, high-quality medical care, while some others barely make the cut for to qualify as "developed world medicine." A little additional research reveals that the first category is highly correlated with systems that are more efficient overall, in that they have superior outcomes on a sustained basis, at a consistently lower cost.

If the macro issues surrounding healthcare delivery are of interest to you, this is a very insightful book. And a mandatory companion is Paul Starr's Social Transformation of American Medicine, first published in 1984. It is as relevant today as it was when it first came out over two decades ago. Finally, Elisabeth Teisberg and Michael Porter's Redefining Healthcare completes the portfolio with a more current, analytical and prescriptive treatment of the subject.

 

Science / Math

10.   Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour, Oxford University Press, 2009

Every single one of my Top-10 Lists over the past years has covered at least one book on Complexity.

Why this particular book?

For one, Melanie Mitchell was a Ph.D. student of Douglas Hofstadter of the Gödel, Escher, Bach and I am a Strange Loop fame. She also teaches at the Santa Fe Institute. I heard her speak earlier this year at the University of Michigan, where she gave a public lecture in honor of John Holland's 80th Birthday. She has an exceptional understanding of the subject, and is a brilliant speaker. Finally, her book is targeted at the Undergraduate level. This is extremely important because it will help put students in a non-reductionist mindset early in their education.

Mitchell draws her examples from the usual suspects: evolution, neurobiology, ant-colonies, stock markets and such. Her true value is in induction, in synthesis, and most importantly, in didactics - at most one iteration away from being high-quality textbook material.

The one weakness of the book: there's no chapter focused on emergence.  For that, Stuart Kauffman's At Home with the Universe still remains the most compelling read. Finally if you are looking for something a shade more prescriptive, Harnessing Complexity by Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen is your best bet. Both of them have appeared on this Top-10 list in the past.

 

Notable Authors of Indian Origin

11.       Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger, Free Press, 2008

This novel received standing ovation in the Western World, and horrible reviews in India. Here is a passage to help you decide which camp you gravitate towards.

"The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian. That's what I ought to call my life's story.

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep - all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.

The story of my upbringing is the story of how a half-baked fellow is produced.

But pay attention, Mr. Premier! Fully formed fellows, after twelve years of school and three years of university, wear nice suits, join companies, and take orders from other men for the rest of their lives.

Entrepreneurs are made from half-baked clay."

Adiga's extraordinary debut novel is in the form a series of letters to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, from Balram Halwai, a self-styled entrepreneur from Bangalore who managed to escape poverty through a series of acts of sheer opportunism - some borne of moral ambiguity, some outright criminal. Yet, it is hard to dislike him. His tirades on corruption, the humiliation he suffers at the hands of his bosses, and his wit and sarcasm constantly manage to endear him to the reader.

As Publisher's Weekly puts it, "It's the perfect antidote to lyrical India."

 

Author's Bio

Ajit Singh, Ph.D., President and CEO, BioImagene

Ajit is currently the President and Chief Executive Officer of BioImagene, a Silicon Valley based Cancer Diagnostics Company specializing in Digital Pathology. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of Max Healthcare based in New Delhi, India. Prior to joining BioImagene, Ajit spent nearly twenty years at Siemens in various CEO roles in Oncology and Healthcare IT related businesses, as well in Research and Development. Ajit has also served on the Faculty at Columbia and Princeton Universities.

Ajit is a frequent speaker in the Healthcare, Life Sciences, and Economics communities, as well as in Philosophy and Business Management. He has published two books and numerous articles and patents. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University, a Master's degree in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University and a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Banaras Hindu University, India.

Ajit is married and has two teenage daughters. He and his family live in New York, NY and Palo Alto, CA. In his spare time, he likes to read and travel.

 

December 28, 2009

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