The Year in Books: What newsmakers have been reading in 2022 | Books and Literature News,The Indian Express
Politicians, policymakers, diplomats, writers, artistes, economists and doctors tell us about their favourite reads of the year
All the four deal with our horribly unhinged world. Employing different strategies that range from the carnivalesque to gentle irony and grim prognostication, the four writers do not let go of lightness of touch and retain hope amid the dark all around.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Penguin Random House) by Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari, along with its sequels, stood apart for me this year. I prefer reading non-fiction, and these books were technically sound, data-based and factual. Sapiens… traces a chronology of the human race and its evolution. It discusses how the evolution theory suggested by Darwin was natural, but now we are tampering with nature and life as we know it.
The books are a good overview of where we started from and where we are today and look ahead into the future. It was a mind-boggling read. Sometimes, we see what is obvious to us and miss what is actually going on. After reading the books, I pondered over the question that our generation may be the wealthiest in terms of resources and facilities but are we really the wisest in terms of what we are doing to ourselves or the way we are treating the planet? It makes us question our own decisions, and that of our ancestors and policymakers.
To survive and thrive in India requires resilience and optimism. Naushad Forbes’ The Struggle And The Promise: Restoring India’s Potential (Harper Business), lays out the tribulations we deal with every day as we seek, against quite remarkable and well-recognised odds, to grow into an inclusive and more prosperous society.
But moving beyond barriers, he uses data and exemplars to describe the state of India in the world, and charts a path forward with an agenda for action by government and business — for policy and participation to build the quality and scale of innovation India needs to lead the world.
Rating: 5