Books to Get You Thinking

It’s January and the festivities of the Holidays are slowly fading back in memory. There’s no place for the January blues as your public library is stocked with hundreds of interesting reads that are sure to liven up the long cold days of winter stretching out ahead. This month I picked out a selection of titles for you from the 2010 Best Books Lists published by the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. Though they cover a variety of subjects ranging from the financial crisis to historical milestones to biology and disease, they share a common thread of representing outstanding writing that has made a mark on the literary landscape.

Financial Times
Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan
The book, winner of the prestigious 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Book of the Year Award provides a thought provoking , brilliant analysis of the recent financial crisis. Rajan, a professor of finance at the Chicago Business School had foreseen the impending economic disaster way back in 2005. He traces the crisis as rooted in the growing inequality, stagnant wages and inadequate health coverage of the middle class in America in the face of rising costs of living and the government’s response in the form of easy credit. At the same time the financial industry leveraged the available credit into risky mortgage backed securities while the world continued its dependence on the American consumer through lower exchange rates and exports. Rajan discusses important changes and hard choices that must be made to prevent the future outbreak of economic catastrophes.

The Facebook Effect: The Insider Story of the Company that is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick
A fascinating look into the history and exponential growth of Facebook, a company started by a Harvard student in 2004 that grew over five years to a multibillion dollar company with over 400 million subscribers. David Kirkpatrick gives readers an insight into the history and progression of the company, its reclusive founder Mark Zuckerberg and the principal players and events that played a decisive role in the company’s evolution. At the same time the author also examines the larger social, cultural and political issues arising from the growth and spread of a networking system that has fundamentally transformed the way people interact with each other. Facebook has become a platform where ideas, news and even political movements are born and spread. Readers will emerge with new insights about the power of Facebook and disconcerting thoughts about how a database holding the information about millions of individuals lies in the hands of a single corporation.

Wall Street Journal
More Money than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite by Sebastian Mallaby
The author provides a vivid narrative history of the hedge fund business from its inception almost half a century ago through their spectacular performance under George Soros in the 1990s to the current financial milieu. Interwoven throughout the historical narrative are two distinct economic themes – the first one demonstrating the failure of markets and the second highlighting the conflict between the central bankers striving to maintain an unrealistic exchange rate for their currency and the speculators who stood to profit from this. The book sheds light on a business that is often little understood though it has transformed the face of the financial industry.

The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle by Michael Young
The author, who is the opinion editor of Lebanon’s English newspaper The Daily Star, explores the conflicting elements of violence and modernity that have uniquely characterized the Lebanese landscape. The book paints a vivid picture of Lebanon’s fifteen years of Civil War and the political strife and struggles that have inundated the country from 2005 to 2009. Martyrs Square in downtown Beirut, scene to the historic “March 14” movement, but also witness to assassinations and acts of violence, serves as a historic symbol of both hope and despair in a country of many contradictions.

New York Times
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddharth Mukherjee
An oncologist and researcher, Dr. Mukherjee currently practices and teaches at the Cancer Center at Columbia University. The book is a brilliant exposition of different facets of the disease interwoven to give readers a view of how this disease has been understood and treated over the centuries. Scientific discussions are juxtaposed with stories about real people, and the hope and despair that follow cancer patients. Mukherjee explores emerging genomic research and novel treatments and the important question of whether cancer can be completely eradicated. His answer is eloquent and disturbing at the same time, “We can rid ourselves of cancer, then, only as much as we can rid ourselves of the processes in our physiology that depend on growth — aging, regeneration, healing, reproduction.”

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
A deeply moving story covering half a century of the Migration and an epic saga of the six million African Americans who left the Confederate states between 1915 and 1970 in search of a better future and a new life in the North. Using the railroads, they travelled to towns like Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia, transforming the political, social and cultural landscape of America. The author follows the stories and journeys of three Black migrants who moved to different places at different time periods: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, who left Mississippi with her husband for Chicago; George Swanson Starling, who fled central Florida for Harlem to avoid being lynched; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a surgeon from northern Louisiana, who drove 2,000 miles to Los Angeles. In telling their story Wilkinson humanizes history giving it a distinct voice that echoes in the hearts of readers long after putting the book down.

- Nita Mathur