My Top 6 Reads of "The Summer of 2020"

After publishing my earlier list of Dozen Good Books I read in the first half of this year, friends have been requesting me to list out my top reads for the 2020 summer.

For one, I haven't had too much time to read in between the continuous recasting of the plans exercise, both business and personal, that has gone awry due to the pandemic. Moreover, usually, I read most during my travels - at airport lounges and in long flights with few disruptions. That luxury has unfortunately vanished and has been invaded by video-conferences across time-zones. My promise to myself is to go back to my reading rhythm this fall, and hopefully, my winter-reading would be more fruitful.

Here's the list, in no chronological significance except they all are marvellous books (to me):

1) The Evolution of God: The Origins of Our Beliefs, by Robert Wright

Robert Wright's (Princeton prof) earlier books were my favourites, especially "The Moral Animal, and The Non-Zero". I had bought this book soon after reading the earlier two, but somehow never got to read it from cover to cover.

This summer I did and reconfirmed my faith on Wright's persuasive and original thinking, as he took a sweeping journey through the religious history from the Stone Age to the Information Age.

By referring repeatedly to evidence as evinced from archaeology, theology, evolutionary psychology and a careful reading of the scriptures, he repeatedly overturns the conventional assumptions about the faiths, especially of the monotheistic orders.

It is not an easy book and one needs to be diligent about reading it, preferably armed with a notebook to create cross-references, to be able to savour this extraordinary work.

2) The Blood Telegram - India's Secret War in East Pakistan, by Gary J. Bass

The book, although topically about the war and the subsequent liberation of Bangladesh by the Indian forces in 1971, it is actually a chronicle of what transpired in two of the world's great democracies - the USA and India, as they faced possibly the most terrible humanitarian crises of the 20th century.

I have early recollections of that war in terms of light-off curfews in Calcutta during my childhood, but this book brings out the sheer duplicity of the American leadership, who usually cared so little by their apathetic disengagements during a crisis (be it, Roosevelt, during World War II in not trying to save the Jews from the Nazis, or be it Clinton, staying idle as Rwanda turned into killing fields), here the American government led by Nixon and his diplomatic aid Kissinger actually aided with the killers knowingly as the West Pakistan murderous government mercilessly slaughtered the Bengalis in Bangladesh.

This act stands out as the worst moment of moral blindness in the US foreign policy. But this is also an account of India's motives and secret decisions, beyond the 'pure humanitarian motive' that was proclaimed by India at the UN.

This book reads like a historical thriller, of course, if one has an interest in history, and wants to understand the present as well as calibrate the future possibilities through the lens of the past.

3) Hunting and Gathering, by Anna Gavalda

Widely regarded as one of France's biggest literary star, I was introduced to Anna Gavalda's writing by one of my dearests.

This book is my re-read (I finally also managed to read the original one in French); I read it the first time over 10 years back, on the top deck of an Air Canada jumbo-jet flight back from Montreal to Paris. Chocked with emotion, my eyes were in tears. Well, it was the same this time too.

This novel is focused on the lives of four people living in an apartment house: a struggling young artist who works as an office cleaner at night - she wants to disappear, a young erudite aristocrat misfit - who stammers and sells postcards outside a museum, a foulmouthed yet talented young chef (cook) and his elderly grandmother. This bestseller was made into a film in 2007 by Claude Berri, with Audrey Tautou and Guillaume Canet.

In words of my introducer, this unexpected love story of the human race will remind us of the true value of friendship, far beyond any other formal relationships that we may have.

And I concur once again!

4) The End of Poverty: How can we make it happen in our lifetime, by Jeffrey Sachs

Prof. Jeffrey D. Sachs is considered to be one of the most important economists in the world, as per the New York Times. He is one of the leading experts on sustainable development, economic development, and the fight against poverty. Sachs is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He is an SDG Advocate for United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres on the SDGs. He is advising the UN Secretary-General since the term of Kofi Annan. He has travelled and worked in over 100 countries, advising leaders on economic development and poverty reduction.

This book discusses very plausible ways how we can end extreme poverty in the world's most desperate nations within our immediate lifetime, and change the world forever.

To beat the problem-triage of bad health, bad debt and bad luck that holds back more than a billion people, he takes leaves from the successful past experiences and lays out realistic and attainable steps of how these woeful billion can foster a gainful partnership with their wealthy counterparts, to escape the poverty trap.

What is important is how little it costs and how everyone can help. The more one looks at this issue with a rational approach and numbers, the question quickly shifts to from whether the rich can afford to help the poor, but whether they can afford not to. The task can be well achieved within the limits of what the rich world has already committed - 0.7% of the GNP of the high-income world.

PS: I read and re-read many of the chapters, still referencing them, to do the solution design for my current initiatives.

5) The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment, by Martin Ford

I am not a Luddite and in my entire professional life, I have thrived in the laps of technology. I am naturally biased to adopting new technology and firmly believed the mantra of technology to being a faceless, unbiased, all for good utility until I saw the unfurling of the disturbing episodes of Cambridge Analytica - Facebook, snooping of citizens WhatsApps by the government agencies, all aided by technology in the guise of national security, the Snowden exposes, and many more such trust-destroying acts, that made me pause and ask a question - Technology for What, Why and Who?

I have been avoiding this book, although I bought it in 2015, as I was apprehensive of Ford's 'hard-hitting facts' reputation. But finally, I had to read this book as too many of 'future-of-work' and of 'human livelihood' scholarly books, journals and reference Ford's work.

In this book, he argues that the growth of automation threatens many highly educated people, like lawyers, radiologists, and software designers, a continuing theme from his 2009 book The Lights in the Tunnel that predicts that AI is the next "killer" app, and would become a central focus of Silicon Valley - which it did. Rise of the Robots is a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into 19 languages, and is the winner of the 2015 FT-McKinsey & Company Business Book of the year.

Ford's argues that widespread automation could potentially lead to a deflationary spiral because jobs are the primary mechanism for distributing purchasing power to consumers. Income may get concentrated into the hands of a tiny elite (visible today), when the bulk of consumers will eventually lack the income and confidence to continue supplying demand to the mass market industries that form the backbone of the modern economy.

To deal with the rise of unemployment and to ensure that consumers have sufficient purchasing power to continue driving economic prosperity, he is in favour of a basic income guarantee.

He cites the Peltzman effect (or risk compensation) as evidence that the safety net created by a guaranteed income might well result in increased economic risk-taking and a more dynamic and entrepreneurial economy. He postulates for incorporating explicit incentives, especially for pursuing education, into a basic income scheme, suggesting for example that those who graduate from high school (or complete an equivalency exam) ought to receive a somewhat higher guaranteed income than those who drop out. Without this, many marginal or 'at-risk' students would have a perverse incentive to drop out and collect the basic income.

I am looking forward to reading his latest book Architects of Intelligence: The Truth about AI from the People Building It (2018) that consists of conversations with the most prominent research scientists and entrepreneurs working in the field of artificial intelligence, including Demis Hassabis, Geoffrey Hinton, Ray Kurzweil, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Nick Bostrom, Fei-Fei Li, Rodney Brooks, Andrew Ng, Stuart J. Russell and many others. These conversations delve into the future of artificial intelligence, the path to human-level AI (or artificial general intelligence), and the risks associated with progress in AI.

6) The Judgement of Paris: The revolutionary decade that gave the world impressionism, by Ross King

I am a great fan of Ross King's writing, especially the elucidation of the crucial episodes in the history of art and architecture. I re-read this book with the intensity of any first-time read, made new discoveries as well as rejigged my memories of the French impressionist masters.

This book chronicles the art-revolutionary decade (1863 - 1874) during the rule of the Emperor Louis-Napolean III, when the French preference moved from the liking of its academic painters (the Raphaelites) like Delacroix and Meissonier to the motley group of new artists who were far from being the perfect image of accomplished painters, led by the likes of Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Courbet, Degas and Morisot. The paintings of the latter group were not fit for display at the annual Salon authorised by the state and the Ecole de Beaux Art, and under public outcry of 'Egalite et Liberte', found its way to the 'Salon des Refuses'. Today, most of these paintings are priceless masterpieces that ordain the walls of the world's most coveted museums, galleries and billionaire art collectors. If you could turn these pictures around somehow at their gallery, you could still see the Refuse stamped at their back in red ink.

Who were these painters and why did their seemingly unfinished, relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of natural light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matters, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles as styles, create an artistic revolution?

Radicals in their time, the Impressionists violated the rules of academic painting. They constructed their pictures from freely brushed colours that took precedence over lines and contours practised by the classicalists. They also painted realistic scenes of modern life, and often painted outdoors. Previously, still-lifes, portraits and landscapes were all usually painted in a studio. The Impressionists found that they could capture the momentary and transient effects of sunlight by painting outdoors or en Plein air. They portrayed overall visual effects instead of details and used short "broken" brush strokes of mixed and pure unmixed colour, not blended smoothly or shaded as was customary, to achieve an effect of intense colour vibration.

The Impressionists developed new techniques specific to the style that encompassed a different way of seeing, an art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions, and of the play of light expressed in a bright and varied use of colour.

The public, at first hostile, gradually came to believe that the Impressionists had captured a fresh and original vision, even if the art critics and art establishment disapproved of the new style. By recreating the sensation in the eye that views the subject, rather than delineating the details of the issue, and by creating a welter of techniques and forms, Impressionism became the inflexion point in the world of art and a precursor of various painting styles, including Neo-Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism.

The first thing I would do is now to reserve a ticket to Paris at the earliest possibility and get lost on the top floor of the Musee d'Orsay.

And I will make this list as my Baker's Half-Dozen by throwing in a really wonderful 7th book.

7) The Swerve: How the world became modern, by Stephen Greenblatt

I was introduced to Prof. Greenblatt's writing through his NY Times bestseller Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. This book, a Pulitzer Prize awarded for Non-Fiction book, makes me now lookout for his next work. The book has a gripping start right from its preface, where Greenblatt describes his own chance discovery of a two-thousand-year-old poem On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), which he found in an unwanted book sale at the Yale Co-op and bought for ten cents.

The book chronicles how in the winter of 1417, Poggio Bracciolini - one of the greatest book hunters of the Renaissance, discovered Lucretius' ancient poem On the Nature of Things, which had been lost to history for more than a thousand years. It was a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that universe functions without the aid of Gods, that religious fear is damaging to human life, that pleasure and virtue are not opposites but intertwined, and that matter is made up of very small material particles in eternal motion, randomly colliding and swerving in new directions.

The discovery of this poem turned a new leaf and changed the course of history. The poem's vision would shape the thoughts of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein, and also influenced Thomas Jefferson to the Declaration of Independence.

The book describes beautifully how that leaf was turned; from the gardens of the ancient philosophers to the chambers of monastic scriptoria during the Middle Ages to the cynical court of a corrupt and dangerous pope. This book captures the precise moment when 'humanism' in its first sense, the quest for meaning in our pleasure.

In the words of Adam Gopnik, author of The Table Comes First, this book truly puts the "epic back in Epicurean".

Happy reading and I look forward to your comments and suggestions. Stay well and take care. I hope to share my Fall List in December in (pray) a little better time.