Books to Get You Thinking

Each December, it has become a tradition for major newspapers and media to delve into all the outstanding books that have been published over the last year and select the top ten books of the year. 2020 has seen some outstanding titles covering a wide range of topics, and there are some books that have made substantial contributions to expanding our awareness of specific facets of scientific, socio-political, or cultural phenomena. This month’s column features some of the titles that have been selected by the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times in their lists of the Top Ten Books of 2020. All titles are available for your reading pleasure at the Mercer County Library System!

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier is the winner of the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, and has also been named “Best Book of the Year” by Fortune, The Financial Times, The Economist, and NPR. In this fascinating book, author Sarah Frier tells the story of Instagram's incredible journey from small startup in Silicon Valley with a dozen employees to becoming a dominant social media platform with over a billion users. Through extensive interviews with founders, employees, and platform influencers, the author explores factors that have shaped the explosive popularity of the Instagram app and the enormous leverage it exerts on marketing and social networking. The success of Instagram lies in its simplicity and the elegance with which it facilitates the visual experiences captured by mobile phones. Its popularity is also driven by the insatiable human urge to connect with others, a desire to seek validation of what we see around us, events that inspire us, and experiences, big and small, that shape our daily lives. The book provides an insight into the events leading to the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook, and on how the founders fought hard to preserve the platform’s identity after its acquisition. Anchored within Facebook, Instagram has grown rapidly, now generating a revenue of over $20 billion. It has also created a large influencer community leveraging the Instagram platform to launch new products and services with a global impact. The book is a riveting story of technological innovation, business entrepreneurship, the power of social media, and the intricate, intimate relationship we now have with intelligent apps.

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald has been featured in Washington Post’s List of top 10 books of 2020. Helen Macdonald , naturalist and an affiliated Research Scholar at the University of Cambridge, pens this collection of forty-one essays about nature – a few have been previously published in the New York Times magazine, while many of them are new . It follows the 2015 publication of H is for Hawk, her bestselling and highly acclaimed book about adopting and raising a wild goshawk that won the 2014 Samuel Johnson and Costa Awards. In her new book, Vesper Flights, the author shares her love for nature through exquisitely crafted short essays centered on her different experiences with the non- human world. The book is based on the premise that, as humans, we look at the natural world around us as a reflection of ourselves, mirroring our thoughts, views and hopes. The author raises questions about such assumptions through many of the essays in the book, making a compelling argument that it is only through appreciating the complexity of the world around us, which is not all about us, that we can hope to save it. She writes with a sharp poignancy about the things lost – meadows and trees that are gone forever and replaced by housing developments; birds she had watched nesting around her house now vanished and gone. Through her essays, Helen Macdonald brings to the fore the value of recognizing the importance of all living things and to preserve the natural habitat that is home to the animals with whom we share our planet.

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker Featured in the Top 10 books of 2020 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, as well as the Wall Street Journal, Robert Kolker, an investigative journalist, tells the extraordinary story of Don and Mimi Galvin and the twelve children they raised between 1945 and 1965 in the rugged and beautiful Gunnison National Forest area of Colorado. Their lives are slowly torn apart as Don and Mimi discover that six of their twelve young children were afflicted with schizophrenia. With remarkable compassion, the author reveals the disruption and dislocation the Galvin family had to endure and their struggle to cope with the pain and grief. The author skillfully brings to the surface the complex interplay of intense feelings of love, suffering, grit, courage, and resilience within the family. At one point in their lives, a glimmer of hope emerges when Lynn DeLisi, a pioneer in the field of genetics, learns about the Galvin family and initiates an extensive research study, examining their genetic data to identify a pattern that could track down the molecular origin of the disease and lead to the discovery of a novel treatment. However, soon all their hopes are shattered, and the terrifying consequences of the progression of mental disease continues to inflict unbearable suffering. Based on numerous interviews with the Galvin family, relatives and therapists, the book brings into sharp focus the agony that mental disease can inflict on a family. At the same time, the author provides us with an overview of the science and treatment of schizophrenia over time. Despite tremendous advances in modern science, little progress has been made in the treatment of this medical condition.

If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore features in the Financial Times’ Top Ten Books of 2020. Jill Lepore, professor of American History at Harvard and a New Yorker staff writer, authors this fascinating story of the rapid rise of a data analytics company, Simulmatics, founded by the charismatic business leader Ed Greenfield in 1959. Simulmatics had a bold vision of analyzing massive amounts of data with their novel computing system called "People Machine", with which they could make accurate predictions about the outcome of presidential elections, create highly successful marketing campaigns, anticipate behavior of retail consumers, and even provide advanced warning of impending large scale global conflicts. Within a short time, the company attracted huge attention from government agencies, behavioral scientists, and large business firms aspiring to explosive sales and profit growth. However, the company did not have the technical capability or an efficient management system to deliver its vision. It collapsed within a decade, without having any lasting impact. The author recreates the tumultuous events leading to the rise of the company and how organizations began to recognize the strategic importance of a "mass communication platform" - and how it could influence politics, business, and international trade. After many decades, big data and AI platforms invented by Google, Facebook, and Amazon are delivering on the promise of the "People Machine". Jill Lepore provides a historical perspective on the perils of massive data analysis and reminds us that increasing predictability will invariably have consequences in terms of the erosion of privacy, amplification of divisive rhetoric and an unchecked quest for the concentration of power and corporate influence. The title of the book is inspired by a programming feature “If Then”, used in the FORTRAN language invented by IBM in 1957, extensively harnessed by NASA in moon landing voyages, and still used in scientific simulations.

- by Nita Mathur, West Windsor