A Short History of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson
Economics in One Lesson - Henry Hazlitt
Here's Looking at Euclid - Alex Bellos
Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis
Neither Here nor There - Bill Bryson
The Age of Wonder - Richard Holmes
The Big Short - Michael Lewis
The Law - Frederic Bastiat
Tintin: Herge and His Creation - Harry Thompson
Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud
One of the world’s most beloved writers and bestselling author of One Summer takes his ultimate journey—into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer.
Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.
(http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21.A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Everything)Economics in One Lesson - Henry Hazlitt
A million copy seller, Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson is a classic economic primer. But it is also much more, having become a fundamental influence on modern “libertarian” economics of the type espoused by Ron Paul and others.
Considered among the leading economic thinkers of the “Austrian School,” which includes Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich (F.A.) Hayek, and others, Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993), was a libertarian philosopher, an economist, and a journalist. He was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education and an early editor of The Freeman magazine, an influential libertarian publication. Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson, his seminal work, in 1946. Concise and instructive, it is also deceptively prescient and far-reaching in its efforts to dissemble economic fallacies that are so prevalent they have almost become a new orthodoxy.
Too often math gets a bad rap, characterized as dry and difficult. But, Alex Bellos says, "math can be inspiring and brilliantly creative. Mathematical thought is one of the great achievements of the human race, and arguably the foundation of all human progress. The world of mathematics is a remarkable place."
Bellos has traveled all around the globe and has plunged into history to uncover fascinating stories of mathematical achievement, from the breakthroughs of Euclid, the greatest mathematician of all time, to the creations of the Zen master of origami, one of the hottest areas of mathematical work today. Taking us into the wilds of the Amazon, he tells the story of a tribe there who can count only to five and reports on the latest findings about the math instinct—including the revelation that ants can actually count how many steps they’ve taken. Journeying to the Bay of Bengal, he interviews a Hindu sage about the brilliant mathematical insights of the Buddha, while in Japan he visits the godfather of Sudoku and introduces the brainteasing delights of mathematical games.
Exploring the mysteries of randomness, he explains why it is impossible for our iPods to truly randomly select songs. In probing the many intrigues of that most beloved of numbers, pi, he visits with two brothers so obsessed with the elusive number that they built a supercomputer in their Manhattan apartment to study it. Throughout, the journey is enhanced with a wealth of intriguing illustrations, such as of the clever puzzles known as tangrams and the crochet creation of an American math professor who suddenly realized one day that she could knit a representation of higher dimensional space that no one had been able to visualize.
Whether writing about how algebra solved Swedish traffic problems, visiting the Mental Calculation World Cup to disclose the secrets of lightning calculation, or exploring the links between pineapples and beautiful teeth, Bellos is a wonderfully engaging guide who never fails to delight even as he edifies. Here’s Looking at Euclid is a rare gem that brings the beauty of math to life.
Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis
The time was the 1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liar’s Poker.
Michael Lewis was fresh out of Princeton and the London School of Economics when he landed a job at Salomon Brothers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment firms. During the next three years, Lewis rose from callow trainee to bond salesman, raking in millions for the firm and cashing in on a modern-day gold rush. Liar’s Poker is the culmination of those heady, frenzied years—a behind-the-scenes look at a unique and turbulent time in American business. From the frat-boy camaraderie of the forty-first-floor trading room to the killer instinct that made ambitious young men gamble everything on a high-stakes game of bluffing and deception, here is Michael Lewis’s knowing and hilarious insider’s account of an unprecedented era of greed, gluttony, and outrageous fortune.
Neither Here nor There - Bill Bryson
In the early seventies, Bill Bryson backpacked across Europe—in search of enlightenment, beer, and women. He was accompanied by an unforgettable sidekick named Stephen Katz (who will be gloriously familiar to readers of Bryson's A Walk in the Woods). Twenty years later, he decided to retrace his journey. The result is the affectionate and riotously funny Neither Here Nor There.
The Age of Wonder - Richard Holmes
A decade in the making, pre-eminent biographer Richard Holmes presents this marvellously original look of the early scientific movement in Britain at a time when the distinction between the arts and sciences had yet to be established, when religious faith and scientific endeavour worked hand in hand in pursuit of answers to life's more ineffable questions.As eighteenth-century Britain teetered on the cusp of modernity, Holmes shows how a series of remarkable friendships came to define an age, nurturing ideas that challenged assumptions about identity, morality and religious belief. The adventurer and leader Joseph Banks, the astronomers William and Caroline Herschel, the chemists Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday, and their contemporaries wrestled with questions as relevant to us today as they were to Coleridge's generation: What are the sources of creativity? In what sense is there a human soul? Is it a fundamental mistake to regard science as a purely rational pursuit, or must we also recognise it as an imaginative and emotional one? With his customary sense of place, personality and period, his unerring ability to lay bare the workings of the human heart and his immense authority, this accessible and hugely readable book is breathtaking in its originality and its intellectual significance.
The Big Short - Michael Lewis
From the author of The Blind Side and Moneyball, The Big Short tells the story of four outsiders in the world of high-finance who predict the credit and housing bubble collapse before anyone else.
When the crash of the U.S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn’t shine and the SEC doesn’t dare, or bother, to tread. Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages? In this fitting sequel to Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis answers that question in a narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor. (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26889576-the-big-short)
When the crash of the U.S. stock market became public knowledge in the fall of 2008, it was already old news. The real crash, the silent crash, had taken place over the previous year, in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn’t shine and the SEC doesn’t dare, or bother, to tread. Who understood the risk inherent in the assumption of ever-rising real estate prices, a risk compounded daily by the creation of those arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages? In this fitting sequel to Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis answers that question in a narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor. (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26889576-the-big-short)
The Law - Frederic Bastiat
Bastiat's The Law is the classic work which defines the right and just system of laws for a free people, and demonstrates how such laws facilitate a free society.
Tintin: Herge and His Creation - Harry Thompson
The little black-and-white cartoon figure of Tintin first appeared in Belgium in 1929 in a Catholic newspaper where his creator, Herge, worked. Harry Thompson looks at the story of Herge, of Tintin and his origins, and beyond to when President de Gaulle could call Tintin 'his only rival'.
(http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/301274.Tintin)Understanding Comics - Scott McCloud
Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, this innovative comic book provides a detailed look at the history, meaning, and art of comics and cartooning.
(http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/102920.Understanding_Comics)
All snippets/brief reviews are from Google books (https://books.google.co.in)
All snippets/brief reviews are from Google books (https://books.google.co.in)
