Awesome Books and Audio

Book selections from the Guardian and downloadable author interviews

Recently, the Guardian newspaper highlighted some thought-provoking books written by several authors, which covered a variety of disciplines. According to the Guardian "These are febrile, unpredictable times, with society facing new challenges and quandaries each day, from the rise of populist politics to the migrant crisis to climate change..., people have a hunger both for information and facts, and for nuanced exploration of issues, of a sort that books are in a prime position to provide."

Nearly all of these have been big best-sellers, and the authors have been featured on various podcasts. These podcasts, which consist of interviews, lectures and discussions, make for stimulating audio listening (I find that sometimes it is not always possible to read as much as one wants, but in audio, particularly when an author speaks directly, the essence of many books can be conveniently appreciated). Accordingly, I pulled a selection from the Guardian's article and provided links to the books and related audio content below (the audio content, typically accessible in the first bullet in each of the items of the list provided, should be readily downloadable; if not, please email me). For some of the podcasts, I have provided RSS feeds.

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Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari
• Podcasts of Harari interviewed by Russell Brand, and by Jason Gots
• Write-up (from the Guardian):"It’s nearly a century since HG Wells published The Outline of History – a book that offered a panoramic perspective of how civilisations emerged. It went through many editions, sold in the millions, and was repeatedly revised (even in the 1960s, after its author’s death). Sapiens is a modern-day counterpart to Wells’s book. It’s another “epic” broad-brush history – tracing humanity’s origins back more than a million years. It succeeds through its eclectic scope, its readability, and its author’s willingness to offer ethical judgments."



Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World, by Tim Marshall
• Marshall gave this lecture at the London School of Economics around the time of his book launch
• Write-up:"Marshall, a British journalist, uses maps, essays and his own experiences as a foreign correspondent to explore how the physical geography of different regions – China, Latin America, the Middle East – has shaped major world events."
• Marshall's website "The What and the Why"



Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
• Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahnehan is interviewed by Krista Tippett on the 'On Being' podcast
• Write-up: "This book reveals how our minds are tripped up by error and prejudice".



Misbehaving, by Richard Thaler
• Richard Thaler is interviewed on the 'Big Brains' podcast (part of a series from the University of Chicago)
• Write-up: "Economists believe logic shapes human decisions, but what if humans are driven by their faults, as well as their rationality? Nobel prize winner Thaler explores what really motivates people to spend."



Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, by Carlo Rovelli
• Ian Sample and Nicola Davis of the Guardian interview Rovelli in this podcast episode
• Write-up: "Of the myriad books about the heavenly firmament none is particularly easy, because space is hard. The fusion of the astronomically big with the imperceptibly small world of quantum physics has generated the toughest but most fundamental ideas that humans have yet considered – relativity, gravity, time. The grandness to the consideration of spacetime in the works of Sagan, Feynman, Hawking and other stars sometimes masks the fact that the ideas within are barely comprehensible – we experience gravity all the time, but understand little of how it actually works. Rovelli’s sumptuous translated words are in this tradition, with even more poetry and opera than his forebears, but with one key difference: brevity defines Seven Brief Lessons on Physics – it’s not much more than a pamphlet. Instead, this is a kind of an amuse bouche for some of the ideas that are wrapped up in 20th-century astrophysics where it borders on philosophy. Millions have digested this little treat, and plenty will have gone on for a meatier second course."
• Rovelli's website on this topic



The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert
• Kolbert speaks at "Politics and Prose', brought to you via Slate
• Write-up: "There is something compelling about stories about neighbours from hell. What makes Kolbert’s version particularly chilling is the identity of those villains next door: Homo sapiens. Human beings, she emphasises with disquieting clarity, turn out to be appalling planetary co-residents, having already wiped out creatures from mastodons to Neanderthals and dodos to passenger pigeons. Nor do we show signs of stopping. “One-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater molluscs, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are now headed towards oblivion,” she tells us. This is a book written with rigour and restraint. It may be low on prescriptive action but its rich range of subject matter and its cool, unemotional prose make it a gripping narrative and a powerful warning of the biological danger we face today."



Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty
• French economist Thomas Piketty is interviewed on the 'Talking Politics' podcast (RSS feed)
• Write-up: "The appeal of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is clear. Here is an economist from the mainstream, not the heterodox fringe, who can not just assert but demonstrate that free-market capitalism makes the rich richer and the poor, in the developed world at least, doomed to levels of economic and social exclusion bordering on those described in Dickens or, for the French, Henri Mürger. Book industry folklore, surely apocryphal, says that most people don’t read beyond page 29, but that does not matter. Piketty shows in a financialised world how the rich get ever richer and the incomes of the poor stagnate. Unfortunately his main policy proposal, a global wealth tax, was presented on the eve of the collapse of the global system. There is more chance of the Earth being hit by an asteroid than a global wealth tax happening. Looking back on the heady days when Piketty was a rock-star economist who had discovered the magic potion that would cure capitalism, they seem from another era."



The Price of Inequality, by Joseph Stiglitz
• Stiglitz at the LSE. (RSS feed)
• Write-up: "The former World Bank chief economist makes a convincing argument as to why the 1% should care about inequality – their fate and prosperity is threatened by it."



We Should All Be Feminists, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Adichie with Zadie Smith on the New York Public Libary podcast podcast. (RSS feed)
• Write-up: "'My own definition of feminist,' writes the author at the end of this pithy, punchy book, “is a man or a woman who says, yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it. We must do better.” The award-winning Nigerian author then anoints a man – her brother Kene – as the best feminist she knows. That flourish is typical of Adichie’s talent for finely calibrated provocations, and also reveals the ambition of this short book to trace the outlines of a truly universal movement. She explicitly reclaims feminism for African women, arguing that it isn’t a western imposition, and grounds her argument throughout in stories from her own life. Above all, Adichie has the intellectual confidence to speak plainly. No wonder the TED talk on which the book was based has 4.9m views."



Women and Power, by Mary Beard
• Classics professor Mary Beard joins Charlotte Higgins of the Guardian on this podcast.
• Write-up: "Beard attempts to explain, rather than call out, misogyny, by tracing back to its roots in ancient Athens and Rome. Retracing how powerful women have been muted, Beard suggests how women can now find their voice."



The Examined Life, by Stephen Grosz
• Grosz on NPR's "On Point".
• Write-up: "Drawing from more than 25 years of practice, psychoanalyst Grosz uses intimate accounts to showcase how the much-maligned therapeutic practice can actually change lives."
• Grosz's other interviews



Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain
• Cain has her own podcast although there don't appear to be new episodes after April 2016 (RSS feed).
• Write-up: "This book was a cry of pain from the hidden camp of introverts against the extrovert culture that we live in. Suddenly someone was standing up and saying, we’re not freaks or weirdos. In fact some of the most – if not most of – the creative people in society are introverts: they sit around and chew things over at length and don’t want to talk about the football. Cain talks about how some introverts live their lives acting out extroversion, which isn’t them at all, and that was certainly my experience."



The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin
• Rubin has her own podcast.
• Write-up: "Rubin’s year-long expedition in search of happiness sees her cleaning out closets and focusing more on her marriage. The book pairs this with scientific research and lessons from popular culture to ask what it truly means to be happy."



The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee
• Mukherjee with Sam Harris on the 'Waking Up' podcast.
• Write-up: "There’s no better guide to cancer than Mukherjee, doctor, oncologist and “lab rat”. Shocking, humane and brilliantly framed, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a riveting glimpse of a battle that has raged since ancient times against the most insidious enemy of all: our own cells, when they rebel against the body."



Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande
• Gawande with Elizabeth Alexander on the New York Public Library podcast.
• Write-up: "Death is such a universal topic, but Gawande writes about it in a way that isn’t at all scary. He brings in personal insights about his mother and father, the patients he’s had and the mistakes he’s made."



Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, by Reni Eddo-Lodge
• Eddo-Lodge has her own podcast, featuring interviews with anti-racist activists
• Write-up:"In recent years, we’ve read excellent nonfiction on race in the US, courtesy of writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Claudia Rankine and Jesmyn Ward. Reni Eddo-Lodge’s superbly accessible book was a great addition to the British canon. It is impressively intersectional in its approach, talking about class and gender as well as reframing the conversation to be Britain-focused. The title alone is arresting, and can sort out those who judge a book by its cover from those willing to interrogate and investigate their own privilege. While it does look at whiteness as a concept and the very notion of privilege, it acts as a comfort read for British people of colour, who will see themselves and arguments they’ve made in the past in those pages. And because Reni’s style is unfussy, pragmatic and confident, it is one of the most important books about the subject in the country at the moment."



This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein
• Klein gives a talk, and has a conversation with Katherine Viner on the Lannan Foundation podcast.
• Write-up: Klein "turns her attention to climate change, exploring how it has been fuelled by capitalism. To save the planet, she argues, we must throw away the free-market rule book, and follow the optimistic examples of communities who are already doing so."