Good Reads

Published On: September 14, 2018 09:11 AM NPT

21 lessons of the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

Price: Rs 1278

Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a probing and visionary investigation into today’s most urgent issues as we move into the uncharted territory of the future. Harari addresses the challenge of navigating life in the face of constant and disorienting change and raises the important questions we need to ask ourselves in order to survive. In twenty-one accessible chapters that are both provocative and profound, Harari builds on the ideas explored in his previous books, untangling political, technological, social, and existential issues and offering advice on how to prepare for a very different future from the world we now live in. Harari’s ability to make sense of where we have come from and where we are going has captured the imaginations of millions of readers. Here he invites us to consider values, meaning, and personal engagement in a world full of noise and uncertainty. Presenting complex contemporary challenges clearly and accessibly, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is essential reading.

American Sketches by Walter Isaacson

Price: Rs 798

In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Clinton and various other larger-than-life characters he has chronicled as a biographer and a journalist. Isaacson reflects on how he became a writer the lessons he learned from various people he met and the challenges he sees for journalism in the digital age. He offers loving tributes to his hometown of New Orleans which both before and after Hurricane Katrina offered many of the ingredients for a creative culture and to the Louisiana novelist, Walker Percy, who was an early mentor. Isaacson has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Leonardo da Vinci; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; and Kissinger: A Biography. He is also the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made.

Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood

Price: Rs 958

In this final volume of the internationally celebrated MaddAddam trilogy, the Waterless Flood pandemic has wiped out most of the population. Toby is part of a small band of survivors, along with the Children of Crake: the gentle, bioengineered quasi-human species who will inherit this new earth. As Toby explains their origins to the curious Crakers, her tales cohere into a luminous oral history that sets down humanity’s past—and points toward its future. Blending action, humor, romance, and an imagination at once dazzlingly inventive and grounded in a recognizable world, MaddAddam is vintage Atwood—a moving and dramatic conclusion to her epic work of speculative fiction. Atwood is an utterly thrilling storyteller and MaddAddam is wonderfully entertaining and just about everything you could want in a novel. Atwood certainly has the tone exactly right, both for the linguistic hypocrisy that can disguise any kind of catastrophe, and for the contemptuous dismissal of those who point to disaster. MaddAddam is at once a pre- and a post-apocalypse story.