Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

This is one of those books that you will either really enjoy or get really offended by. Glennie, the author, argues that government aid to Africa actually has many very harmful effects. He claims that aid has often meant more poverty, more hungry people, worse basic services for poor people and damage to already precarious democratic institutions. He is not just saying this from the top of his head. Through an honest assessment of both the positive and negative consequences [...]

So many books have been written about Churchill, in particular about the wartime years, that another biography might be needless. However, Max Hastings presents a wonderfully balanced portrait of the man, the politician and the statesman. While in no way a revisionist history, Hastings has used distance and time to place Churchill’s immense contribution in historical perspective. It is fascinating to compare the Churchill revealed in the “War Diaries of Field Marshall Lord Alanbrooke” (from which Mr. Hastings quotes) with [...]

Caves and caving fascinate me, so when I saw there was a book about supercave exploration, I had to read it. I am so glad I did. I was absolutely glued to this book from the first page to the last. The only thing it lacked was a section of pictures, but that’s the price I pay for reading an advance copy–the published edition has several pages of them. Even so, I was able to look those up on the [...]

I have to say from the start that I am disappointed in this book. I was hoping for a detailed look into the science of aging in the world today, but only got glimpses of it as we moved through the book. A great deal of time and space is devoted to the musings of Bacon, Shakespeare, Dante, Keats, various mythological figures, the Bible and other writers from generations past. There was also a great deal about the musings of [...]

The author tells the stories of people over 65 years of age who lived during the pre-independence times. Told in first person, he reveals small aspects of their lives, those he thought today’s readers would find interesting. He manages to bring out the unique tones of the people who talked to him. Each of the stories make for interesting-easy reading but embedded at the back of my memory are the stories of Hussein Warutere (the last story in the collection). [...]

I would recommend this book to anybody involved at all stages of creating, implementing, and monitoring Social Media efforts. I was one of the privileged people to get an Advanced Copy from Charlene Li. I had listened to the Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies Audio Book and was intrigued by the content and the ideas presented in her previous book. For this reason I started following her on Twitter where I got the opportunity to request [...]

Robert Wright is an intellectually curious journalist and a fine writer whose previous books (The Moral Animal & Nonzero) I enjoyed. Wright’s new book explores the character of religion through history, and, marshalling scholarly research, shows how religious ideas developed in response to changing social and political circumstances. The explanations make no appeal to the supernatural. But Wright sees progress (however haphazard and intermittent) in the moral dimension of religion through time, which leads him to speculate that this phenomenon [...]

Tracy Kidder’s book, briefly, is the non-fiction tale of Deogratias. Raised in Burundi, Deo lives a nearly idyllic life until the outbreak of ethnic violence in his country replaces Wordsworth’s “of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower” with a living hell that makes Dante’s Inferno look like a pleasant winter destination resort. Deo, a Tutsi third year medical student, flees Burundi, arriving at age 24 in New York City with $200 in his pocket, the clothes on [...]

This book describes the neuroscience behind decision making, and in particular the various parts of the brain that are involved in different parts of problem analysis. It is filled with interesting examples from real world situations such as airplane near-disasters, poker playing, and Parkinson’s patients, and uses these examples to illustrate various parts of our brain machinery. The book is an easy read, interesting, and informative. It is, however, a lightweight read. Do not expect great depth into any of [...]

From Robert Ruark’s “Something of Value” of 50 years ago to John le Carre’s “Constant Gardner,” popular literature about Kenya has been visualized through the point of view of white people making their way there. Halperin’s non-fiction book is a first. It’s a story of the land, compiled from the viewpoint of very many actual Kenyans, mostly female: It is about what’s really been happening there over the past half century. How the society has changed, sometimes for better, often [...]