Tag Archives: Books

In My Hands Today…

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The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich – Evan Osnos

The ultra-rich hold more of America’s wealth than they did in the heyday of the Carnegies and Rockefellers. Here, Evan Osnos’s incisive reportage yields an unforgettable portrait of the tactics and obsessions driving this new Gilded Age, in which superyachts, luxury bunkers, elite tax dodges, and a torrent of political donations bespeak staggering disparities of wealth and power.

With deft storytelling and meticulous reporting, this is a book about the indulgences, incentives, and psychological distortions that define our economic age. In each essay, Osnos delves into a world that is rarely visible, from the outrageous to the fabulous to the a private wealth manager who broke with members of an American dynasty and spilled their secrets; the pop stars who perform at lavish parties for thirteen-year-olds; the status anxieties that spill out of marinas in Monaco and Palm Beach like real-world episodes of Succession and The White Lotus; the ethos behind the largest Ponzi scheme in Hollywood history; the confessions of disgraced titans in a “white-collar support group.” A celebrated political reporter, Osnos delves into the unprecedented Washington influence of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, drawing on in-depth interviews with Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires, about their power and the explosive backlash it stirs.

Originally published in The New Yorker, these essays have been revised and expanded to deliver an unflinching portrait of raw ambition, unimaginable fortune, and the rise of America’s modern oligarchy. Osnos’s essays are a wake-up call—a case against complacency in the face of unchecked excess, as the choices of the ultra-rich ripple through our lives. Entertaining, unsettling, and eye-opening, The Haves and the Have-Yachts couldn’t be more relevant to today’s world.

In My Hands Today…

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Revolutionaries: The Other Story of How India Won Its Freedom – Sanjeev Sanyal

The official narrative of India’s freedom struggle has almost entirely been about the non-violent political movement led by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. However, it is Sanjeev Sanyal’s contention that there was a continuous parallel armed struggle against British colonial rulers that can be traced to the very beginning of colonial occupation. It abated for a while after the First War of Indian Independence in 1857, but re-emerged from the beginning of the twentieth century.

It is not that people are unaware of Rashbehari Bose, Chandrashekhar Azad, Bhagat Singh, Sachindra Nath Sanyal and Subhas Chandra Bose, but the impression one gets from reading historical accounts is that theirs were individual acts of courage that did not have an impact on the larger Independence movement. However, this is not the entire picture, as the revolutionary struggle operated through a conscious network that sustained armed resistance against the British for over half a century. They had well-developed institutions, thinkers and wide popular support. Indeed, as Subhas Bose demonstrated, they were capable of defeating popular candidates in the Congress’s internal elections.

In Revolutionaries, Sanyal examines India’s freedom struggle from the revolutionary perspective, how the baton was passed from one generation to the next, and, ultimately, why the British were forced to leave India. The book presents an exciting story that interweaves intrigue, high drama, assassination, global espionage and treachery with the courage and heroism of the revolutionaries.

In My Hands Today…

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Ocean: Earth’s Last Wilderness – David Attenborough, Colin Butfield

Through personal stories, history and cutting-edge science, Ocean uncovers the mystery, the wonder and the frailty of the most unexplored habitat on our planet – and the one which shapes the land we live on, regulates our climate and creates the air we breathe. The book showcase the oceans’ remarkable resilience: they are the part of our world that can, and in some cases has, recovered the fastest, if we only give them the chance.

Drawing a course across David Attenborough’s own lifetime, Ocean takes readers on an adventure-laden voyage through eight unique ocean habitats, through countless intriguing species, and through the most astounding discoveries of the last 100 years, to a future vision of a fully restored marine world, even richer and more spectacular than we could possibly hope. Ocean reveals the past, present and potential future of our blue planet. It is a book almost a century in the making, but one that has never been more urgently needed.

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Abundance – Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

To trace the global history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of growing unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, the entire country has a national housing crisis. After years of slashing immigration, we don’t have enough workers. After decades of off-shoring manufacturing, we have a shortage of chips for cars and computers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean energy infrastructure we need. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.

Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the environmental problems of the 1970s often prevent urban density and green energy projects that would help solve the environmental problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions in matters of education and healthcare have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.

Progress requires the ability to see promise rather than just peril in the creation of new ideas and projects, and an instinct to design systems and institutions that make building possible. In a book exploring how can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and how we can adopt a mindset directed toward abundance, and not scarcity, to overcome them.

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The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World’s Oldest Writing – Joshua Hammer

It was one of history’s great vanishing acts.

Around 3,400 BCE—as humans were gathering in complex urban settlements—a scribe in the mud-walled city-state of Uruk picked up a reed stylus to press tiny symbols into clay. For three millennia, wedge shape cuneiform script would record the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the great Mesopotamian kingdoms of Sumer, Assyria, and Babylon and of Persia’s mighty Achaemenid Empire, along with precious minutiae about everyday life in the cradle of civilization. And then…the meaning of the characters was lost.

London, 1857. In an era obsessed with human progress, mysterious palaces emerging from the desert sands had captured the Victorian public’s imagination. Yet Europe’s best philologists struggled to decipher the bizarre inscriptions excavators were digging up.

Enter a swashbuckling archaeologist, a suave British military officer turned diplomat, and a cloistered Irish rector, all vying for glory in a race to decipher this script that would enable them to peek farther back into human history than ever before.

From the ruins of Persepolis to lawless outposts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, The Mesopotamian Riddle whisks you on a wild adventure through the golden age of archaeology in an epic quest to understand our past.