Books

My Top-10 Books For 2007

by AJIT SINGH

 

 

This is my first submission to sikhchic.com. I began writing these reviews fifteen years ago, mostly as a year-end exercise of sharing amongst a few close friends who also happened to be very avid readers. In its early days, this book club mostly gravitated to "unusual" books - the ones least likely to make to a bestseller list. The selection is far less dogmatic now; you will find a few bestsellers in this list. The review for 2007 is reproduced in its original form below. Occasionally, I have taken the liberty of borrowing some text verbatim from other "professional" reviews.

 

 

In September 2006, I began my regular "commute" between New York and Frankfurt. In January 2007, Lufthansa shut down its in-flight wireless internet service. Once again, I had some time to read. Most of the books I picked this year are first-time reads. With no folded pages, book-marks or margin-scribbles to trigger old memories, the reviews below are mostly an outcome of reflection "in the now". 

Each one of the books is likely to end up on my read-again pile in the coming years. As the "regulars" on my mailing list would know, that's the only criterion for me to include a book in my Top-10 list. For the first-time readers, this is the 14^th review since I began the ritual while at Princeton University [U.S.A.].

The categories are a slight variation from previous years - Literature/Philosophy, Biology, Management/Economics, History/Politics, and Math/Science, as well as the "bonus" category - Notable author of Indian origin, first introduced in 2003.  

 

Literature/Philosophy

1. Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns, Riverhead Books, 2007.

As you might recall, Khaled Hosseini's first novel, The Kite Runner, was on my Top-10 list in 2005. It became a best seller largely based on word of mouth. It was somehow a modern-day variation on Conrad's Lord Jim, in which the protagonist spends his life atoning for an act of betrayal committed in his youth.  The "principal axis" of the storyline was fathers and sons, and friendships between men.

A Thousand Splendid Suns focuses on mothers and daughters and friendships between women. But the similarity between the two novels stops there. In the opening pages, the mother of one of the two heroines of the novel talks portentously about "our lot in life", the lot of poor, uneducated "women like us", who have to endure the hardships of life, the slights of men, the disdain of society. The book starts off very matter-of-factly and gains pace and emotional power as it slowly unfurls (which is quite a contrast to The Kite Runner, which  got off to a gripping start and stumbled into contrivance and banality).

The first protagonist of the book, the teenaged Miriam - the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man who is ashamed of her existence - suffers the death of her mother and is quickly married off to an older shoemaker named Rasheed. He treats her with ill-disguised contempt, subjecting her to scorn, ridicule, insults, even "walking past her like she was nothing but a house cat". Miriam lives in fear of "his shifting moods, his volatile temperament, his insistence on steering even mundane exchanges down a confrontational path that, on occasion, he would resolve with punches, slaps, kicks, and sometimes try to make amends for with polluted apologies".  

The life of the novel's other heroine, Laila, who becomes Rasheed's second wife, redefines the trajectory of the story. While the plot can seem predictable to anyone cursorily aware of Afghani culture, there is one thing quite unique - the relationship between the two wives. It is very well developed, and in my opinion, is a highlight of the book. Hosseini weaves Miriam's need for redemption beautifully with her jealousy of Laila (in her role), and her concern for Laila (in her person). Masterpiece!

I do have one disappointment: Hosseini's characters are simple and primary-colored. His success in evoking sympathy for them is rooted less in their personality and more in the circumstances in which they find themselves: contending with unhappy families, abusive marriages, oppressive governments and repressive cultural mores. Hosseini can do better!

On a personal note, my older daughter spent some weeks with me in Germany this summer. I read parts of the book for a second time with her. Some tears did flow as expected; our conjoined exploration of the perspective of the Diaspora - of Indians living outside of India, was an unexpected outcome.

2. David Leavitt, The Indian Clerk, Bloomsbury, 2007.

My fascination with prime numbers goes back to my high-school days (Riemann's Hypothesis was posted in my Top-10 list a few years ago, as was Number Theory in the Spirit of Ramanujan by Bruce Berndt).

The Indian Clerk is a work of historical fiction based on the relationship between G.H. Hardy and S. Ramanujan. As the New Yorker puts it, "... mathematics and its paradoxes provide a deep vein of metaphor that Leavitt uses to superb effect, demonstrating how the most meaningful relationships can defy both logic and imagination".

The novel builds on the true story of a strange relationship between an esteemed British mathematician and an unknown and unschooled mathematical genius from India. To add to the intrigue and complexity of the story, the author brings in D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as a young don named Neville and his wife Alice. The book takes a significant sliver of mathematical history and creates a breathtaking narrative on human relationships - their fragility, longevity, sensitivity and all. One of the best instances in the book is the intense but unexpressed chemistry between Alice and Ramanujan. The themes of homosexuality in British intelligentsia, with its secret societies, code languages and rules of conduct are also well explored and richly developed.

Whether you read the book for its fictional value, or to get a perspective on how Hardy and Ramanujan went about cracking some of the most intractable problems in number theory, you will not be disappointed. And if you are someone who found their thrills in finding a simple two-line proof for "... there is no such thing as the largest prime number", and have a week to spare, treat yourself to a copy of Collected Papers of S. Ramanujan by G.H. Hardy.

3. Jonah Lehrer, Proust was a Neuroscientist, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007.

Perhaps the best testimony to this book is the review by the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, whose works have featured on my Top-10 list several times over the past years.

"That deep thoughts about human nature come first to poets and artists, to be systematically explored by scientists only decades or centuries later, is not a new idea - but I have never seen it more brilliantly illustrated than in this amazing first book by Jonah Lehrer, who himself bridges "the two cultures" with ease and grace. His clear and vivid writing - incisive and thoughtful, yet sensitive and modest - is a special pleasure".

Drawing upon the works of painters, poets, chefs, composers, and writers, Lehrer illustrates how they discovered (better stated... experienced) some essential truth about the mind that neuroscience is only now (re)discovering. There are eight essays in the book - one each on Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Auguste Eschoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. My own personal favorite is the one on Gertrude Stein, "The Structure of Language". I am left dumbfounded by the fact that her insights predate the quantitative linguistics work of Noam Chomsky and the use of functional MRI for studying neurological centers for language by over half a century. But then, measurement is not the same thing as understanding. And this is what art knows better than science.

An unusual companion to this book would be Exuberance: The Passion for Life, by Kay Redfield Jamison. A professor of Psychiatry, Jamison studies the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir, Richard Feynman, and Winston Churchill, and asks the question: What's the neurological basis of "exuberance" - that exalted state that manifests itself in activities as wide-ranging as child's play, quest for learning, risk-taking, and perhaps survival itself. The book is a tour-de-force infusion of science and the spirit.

 

Biology:

4. Richard Lewontin, It Ain't Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions, New York Review Books, 2000.

I ran into this book in a rather strange way. I picked up a copy of Craig Venter's 2007 book on his work on the Human Genome Project. Some fifty pages into the book, I was so turned off by his egotism, pompousness and sheer arrogance that I went back to the bookstore and actually returned the book (this is a first for me). The bookstore is one of the few remaining independent shops in New York where the owner (who also happens to be the check-out clerk) takes the time to chat with you. I spent a few minutes complaining about Venter's book; she spent the next half hour introducing me to Richard Lewontin's work over a cup of coffee.

First, a quick one-line introduction to Lewontin: He is NOT a reductionist.

The book is a collection of nine essays on evolutionary biology that were all originally published in the New York Review of Books. The common thread across these essays is an attempt to "... not confuse the genetic state of an organism with the total physical and psychic nature as a human being". My own personal favorite is the essay, "Survival of the Nicest?". I wonder if the author ever waded through a corporate fiefdom; he would have had enough empirical evidence to support his hypotheses.

For those you drawn to the basics, The Way Life Works by Mahlon Hoagland and Bert Dodson would be a good start. It is essentially a cartoon-book version of college-level biology. If it helps pique your interest, the first chapter is titled "Life is Built Bottom-Up". Also of interest would be An Intelligent Person's Guide to Genetics by Adrian Woolfson.

 

Management / Economics:

5. Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence, The Penguin Press, 2007.

The author needs no introduction. The book is part autobiography, part textbook on macro-economics. It is also a lucid introduction to complexity theory - in how it applies to a flexible, resilient, fast-changing, and self-correcting global economy.

In Greenspan's own words, "I don't pretend to know all the answers. But from my vantage point at the Federal Reserve, I had privileged access to the best that had been thought and said on a wide range of subjects. I have not been inhibited in reaching for some fairly sweeping hypotheses".

The autobiographical element of the book is refreshing - unadulterated, real and vulnerable. The piece on his relationship with Ayn Rand is a treat.

6. Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion, Oxford University Press 2007.

Every few years, a title on poverty and the plight of the poor makes it to my Top-10. The last one was The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. Paul Collier's work is in stark contrast to that of Sachs, in that its treatment of the reasons of extreme poverty is much more comprehensive and it proposes mostly free market-based remedies.

Collier's title refers to the one billion people living in what he calls "trapped countries". Not all these people are Africans. Some live in Bolivia, Myanmar, Cambodia, Haiti, Laos, North Korea and Yemen. He argues that the world is no longer (as it used to be) one-sixth rich and five-sixths poor. Thanks to explosive growth in Asia, it will soon be more like one-sixth rich, two-thirds OK, and one-sixth poor. It is this last group, according to Collier, about which we need to worry. Average life expectancy for the bottom billion is just fifty years. Around one in seven children dies before the age of five.

According to Collier, there are four traps into which really poor countries tend to fall - the most difficult to undo being the vicious circle of civil war.

He writes with biting economy: "Growth is not a cure-all, but lack of growth is a kill-all". One of his key messages is that while outside aid is essential to enable the estimated fifty-eight bottom countries to drag themselves out of their economic state, sustainable solutions can come only from within. It is extremely important to choose the right moment to provide aid in manageable quantities. An essential condition for aid should be the presence of a relatively free media, because in societies where democracy is fragile, newspapers and radio offer the most effective checks on corruption.

I personally disagree with one of his recipes - the one of western military intervention. It can work, but only when we learn to provide essential civil and economic back-up to the commitment of military - people who can help run banks, sewage works, electricity plants. Until then, the commitment of western troops abroad will almost inevitably end in failure; British intervention in Sierra Leone is the only exception of which I know, and for the exact the reasons I cite above.

Paul Collier is the director of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, and a former World Bank economist.

 

History / Politics

7. Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition, Yale University Press, 2007.

The central theme of this book - the 1947 partition that created India and Pakistan - is of special personal significance to me; both my parents fled Pakistan and came to India as refugees in their early teens.

If you distill it down, Yasmin Khan's book explores two essential themes.

First, it focuses on the broad social context that spans the confusion, the uncertainties, the fear and eventually the horror faced by those who were soon to become citizens of the two new countries. This is a welcome change from the usual treatment of most of the books on this subject that focus on the political conundrums in the British Viceroy's palace and the well-documented political wrangling between Congress and the Muslim League leaders.

Secondly, she negates the propaganda lie that the transfer of power in India was an example of peaceful decolonization that the rest of the world could follow. The end of British Empire in India was "...a shock of epic proportions". It was ill-conceived, unplanned and managed only a very narrow escape from spiraling into the point of irreversibility.

August 2007 was the 60^th anniversary of the Partition. It marked publication of several books on the topic. Two that caught my attention were The Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, by Alex Tunzelman, and The Holocaust of Indian Partition by M. Godbole. My all-time favorite on this theme is a work of fiction: Train to Pakistan, by Khushwant Singh, published in 1956. At the core of the book is the relationship between a Sikh man and a Muslim woman during the time leading up to the partition.

8. Robert Kagan, Dangerous Nation, Vintage Books, 2007.

This is a must-read for anyone who liked Of Paradise and Power by the same author, featured in my Top-10 for 2004. As The Wall Street Journal puts it:

 "Most critics of the U.S. foreign policy will not need persuading that America is a dangerous nation... [this book] is not aimed at them. It is meant for the general reader, of course, and for those in sympathy with the projection of American power in recent times....".

There are three broad themes in the book. First, it is the premise that U.S. aggression is rooted in the very early stages of formation of the U.S. foreign policy, going as far back as the eighteenth century, and is not a new phenomenon. Kagan draws upon various original sources on U.S. foreign policy, as well as eighteenth and nineteenth century records from various countries, including Mexico, Spain, France, Russia, and England. Secondly, he focuses on the gap between American self-perception and the perception of others. He argues "...even as the United States has risen to a position of global hegemony, expanding its reach across the oceans, Americans still believe their nation's natural tendencies are towards passivity, indifference, and insularity". Finally, Kagan makes the (somewhat obvious) thesis that Americans would be better off if they understood their nation's history better, especially as it pertains to foreign policy.

If you like the book and are also interested in the complementary topic - U.S. domestic policy - The Conscience of a Liberal by Paul Krugman is an excellent read - much less provocative, but every bit as insightful.

 

Science / Math

9. Mark Buchanan, Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks, Norton, 2003.

This is the second book on Complexity Theory in this list (the first one being Greenspan's). That should come as no surprise to the regulars who have seen at least one book on this subject each year in my Top-10. Just for the record, I first got introduced to this topic at a Princeton restaurant in the summer of 1995.

The book uses formal network analysis to understand and explain the workings of complexity. It does so, however, in a very readable and non-intimidating prose.

It begins with some well-known effects of human networks - such as the "six degrees of separation". I was unfamiliar with the instance that the author uses: a few years ago Die Zeit took the challenge of connecting a Turkish kebab-shop owner in Frankfurt to his favorite actor, Marlon Brando. Somewhat predictably, it took six links of personal acquaintances.

The book then works through an interesting example: in a swarm of 10,000 insects, the level of synchronization achieved if each insect exchanged signals with four or five other insects, is almost the same if each insect could exchange signals with every insect in the swarm. The author uses this example to motivate the idea of a "Small World Architecture". The rest of the book formalizes the "operations" that can be applied to (and by) such an architecture. Buchanan is able to do it with a very graceful balance of formalism, and real life examples.

For me personally, the most interesting chapter in the book was "Consciousness as Complexity".

If you are a complexity buff and are sometimes clueless about the workings of your organization, try Organizations as Complex Adaptive Systems, by Marguerite Schneider and Mark Somers. You might still be clueless, but at least you will understand why.

10. Douglas Hofstadter, Goedel, Escher, Bach, Basic Books, 1979.

More commonly known as GEB, I got introduced to this book in 1986 by an Israeli friend who studied cryptology at Columbia University. It took me a full year to read it then. I ventured into it for the second time this year during a brief summer vacation. The book was every bit as delectable as the first time. Here is a quote from Martin Gardner's review of the 20^th Anniversary Edition: "Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event". This is such a work.

Here is what this book is NOT. It is not about a mathematician, an artist, and a musician. It is also not about how math, art and music are interrelated.

The book is about the basis of existence, or life itself - how animate can beings come out of inanimate matter. GEB approaches this question by building simple bottom-up patterns - arrangements of "symbols" into "loops". Hence the reference to Goedel, Escher, and Bach.

Beyond this imperfect intro, the book is difficult to "summarize". It is a highly non-reductionist rendition, you see.

 

Notable author of Indian Origin:

11. Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006.

Built around the fate of a few powerless individuals, Kiran Desai's second novel manages to explore just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence - zipping back and forth between Kalimpong, a small town on the Indian side of the Himalayas, and the streets of New York.

The story opens with a teenage Indian girl, an orphan called Sai, living with her Cambridge-educated Anglophile grandfather, a retired judge in Kalimpong. Sai is romantically involved with her math tutor, Gyan, who happens to fall in with a group of ethnic Nepalese insurgents. In a parallel narrative, Desai introduces Biju, the son of Sai's grandfather's cook, who belongs to the "shadow class" of illegal immigrants in New York and spends much of his time dodging the authorities, moving from one ill-paid job to another.

What's common to these seemingly disparate characters is a shared historical legacy and a common experience of impotence and humiliation. Even the beginnings of an apparently leveled field in global economy serve merely to scratch those wounds rather than heal them. Desai's greatest virtue lies in her being able to infuse a sense of sympathy for each of these characters. These are lives filled with human failings, ones that have not been able to exorcise their ghosts, leaving them stranded in time, living in a warp, perhaps the only way they can know happiness.

Of course I am biased, but like all of the postings in this section since 2003, the book is a beautiful piece of prose.

 

[Dr. Ajit Singh lives in New York with his wife Princy and his daughters Pavita and Gunita. He works in Germany as the CEO of the Medical Imaging IT business of Siemens. He has a doctorate in Computer Science from Columbia University. He likes to travel and read. He can be reached at Ajit.Singh@siemens.com.]

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