The Origins of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama – Book Review

Publisher’s write-up:

‘Nations are not trapped by their pasts, but events that happened hundreds or even thousands of years ago continue to exert huge influence on present-day politics. If we are to understand the politics that we now take for granted, we need to understand its origins.

Francis Fukuyama examines the paths that different societies have taken to reach their current forms of political order. This book starts with the very beginning of mankind and comes right up to the eve of the French and American revolutions, spanning such diverse disciplines as economics, anthropology and geography. The Origins of Political Order is a magisterial study on the emergence of mankind as a political animal, by one of the most eminent political thinkers writing today.’

When we look at political structures around the world, we would have several questions. Why do certain countries seem to be authoritarian for long periods of time in their history? Why are some regions politically unstable, whereas others have maintained liberal democracies for centuries? In this book, Professor Francis Fukuyama explains how political systems emerged in various parts of the world – from pre-historic times till the French Revolution.

The regions that the author discusses include China, India, Europe, the Middle East and to a limited extent, Latin America. The US is often touched upon, but the scope of the book ends at the French Revolution and thus, there is not much to cover about the US in this volume. The author explores how societies were initially organised tribally – which tended to be egalitarian and from there, multiple places have had different approaches to build institutions and the challenges that the community would face during this process. Political order has three components according to the author, being state building, rule of law and establishing accountability of the government.

The main points argued by the author is that the success or failure of a state is not often defined by resources that they have at their disposal or the battles won but the institutions that are built. To build on these – the author brings about several examples, the most profound being the ones centred around England – how they developed a strong state as compared to a weaker absolutist state in France and Spain. It was interesting that many of the references that the author had were books that I had read earlier, like Machiavelli’s Prince or Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

I was initially sceptical about this book over the neutrality of the author’s perspective considering his political leanings, having served in the Reagan administration and being a founder of what I consider a very toxic ideology – neoconservatism. To be fair to him, the author has distanced himself from these ideals and the Republican Party during the 21^st Century. But I would say that this book is neutral and does not aim at putting forth a particular manner of administration or ideology as superior to the other.

If politics and history interest you, this book provides a good insight to both of them. There are people who often believe that several government institutions are redundant; this book can provide with examples as to why those are necessary for effective state building and also why having an all-powerful authority at the top is not viable and if achieved, has hardly been good for the state.

This book could deter hyper nationalists / jingoists when their respective nation is evaluated and that their past was not all that glorious but then, I do not expect them to pick up a book of this kind. I might have liked a more dedicated section on Japan and their largely isolationist policy till the 20^th Century; and how they built such a state.

On the whole, I would say that considering my personal interests on both politics and history, I found this book very insightful. If you have similar interests, you would like this book too. This author has done enough to get me interested in the second volume and I shall be reading it soon. On that note, I award the book a rating of eight on ten.

Rating – 8/10

Have a nice day,

Andy 

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo – Book Review

Publisher’s write-up:

‘From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope . . .’

Girl, Woman, Other is a Booker Prize winning novel written by Bernadine Evaristo featuring twelve principal characters – all of them being Black British women. Each of these characters were connected to the other in some way or the other; inevitable the first two characters in a chapter being a mother-daughter relationship (or the other way round) and the third being a woman closely involved in the lives of one or both of them.

The book features people from different sections of the society – a well to do playwright and her rebellious daughter, an immigrant from Nigeria running a successful business and her daughter who gets admitted to Oxford and is losing her ‘Nigerian identity’, a teacher, a struggling teenage single mother, a self-identified ‘gender free’ character, etc. Through these characters, the author explores multiple themes, patriarchy, privilege, racism, one of intersectionality – wherein some of the characters would often be facing discrimination at three levels, that is, being a woman, being black and also being lesbian.

The book is written in an odd manner, I was initially wondering if there was a mistake in my version of the book or that there was a printing error throughout. The book is in a poetic structure wherein, there are hardly any complete sentences and there are paragraph breaks all the time. However, I got used to it within the first twenty pages and could then enjoy and start appreciating this style of writing.

I liked how each of these characters were connected – which added an inadvertent element of suspense as to at what point is this character going to be connected to an earlier character (or characters). However, the relationship between the characters is not as important as the individuals themselves, as each of them had their own complexities. My favourite section was the chapter involving Bummi (the Nigerian immigrant mentioned earlier) and her daughter Carole, who looked down on most of her classmates and then, the story is presented from the perspective of one such classmate. It gets interesting when each character seems justified while narrating the stories from their perspective.

I was circumspect about the manner in which she conveyed some of her messages, perhaps to engage better with a global audience (for I am sure that the author is more aware of West Africa than I am). This was when she repeatedly used the word Nigerian – like Bummi telling Carole that she must embrace her Nigerian identity and marry only a Nigerian man, which is a very culturally diverse place with ethnicities having of little connection to each other. From their profile, I could infer that Bummi was an Igbo and every time she said ‘Nigerian’, she perhaps meant Igbo or a related ethnic group (and likely not a Hausa or a Fula who are also ‘Nigerians’).

I enjoyed every chapter, but some could feel that there is heavy repetition involved my most of the characters often repeating the same themes of patriarchy or intersectionality. I also felt that there could have been a bit more diversity in the book – with a less privileged White British character. There was a promising conversation between Yazz, the teenage daughter of a playwright and her Cornish friend about a ‘privilege olympics’ and I might have perhaps liked a story dedicated to this friend. But I do appreciate that not all characters were based in London.

On the whole, this book was a great read – was an engaging style of writing for various reasons (be it language or even the structure), the multiple themes that were explored and the engaging characters. On that note, I would award this book an eight on ten.

Rating – 8/10

Have a nice day,
Andy

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain – Book Review

 

Publisher’s write-up:

‘Our lives are driven by a fact that most of us can't name and don't understand. It defines who our friends and lovers are, which careers we choose, and whether we blush when we're embarrassed.

That fact is whether we're an introvert or an extrovert.

The most fundamental dimension of personality, at least a third of us are introverts, and yet shyness, sensitivity and seriousness are often seen as a negative. Some of the world's most talented people are introverts - without them we wouldn't have the Apple computer, the theory of relativity and Van Gogh's sunflowers. In Quiet, Susan Cain shows how society misunderstands and undervalues introverts while giving them the tools to better understand themselves and take full advantage of their strengths.’

What if everyone in the world had the same personality? I believe that would make the human race a lot less interesting, however, our societies do place higher importance on some personality types than others. And one of those misunderstood personalities are those who identify themselves as introverts, considering they are often associated with being sad, cold, depressed, ‘not living their life’, etc. It is possible that introverts might suffer from the above conditions but is not necessarily the norm.  Susan Cain tries to uncover introverts in this book – to put these people out in a world that can’t stop talking.

The book is split into four parts, the first explaining the ‘ideal extrovert’ the society tends to place an emphasis on, the second is the causes of personality types (biology, genetics, etc.), the third part is about how different cultures around the world view personality types (the author assumes that her reader is an American) and finally how to work with the introverted personality type that people have. The book is a mix of science – to what extent are they driven by genetics quoting from various studies and experiments; social norms – how much they influence personality types and also several anecdotes to explain various personal situations one might face (like a workplace situation) or social issues at large – such as the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the 2008 Financial Crisis.

I found the book insightful as well as useful. However, I am unsure as to how much of this is influenced by the fact that I could relate to the book considering I identify myself as one (and that is the assessment I receive from every personality test, including the famous Myers-Briggs test). The book also works on dispelling a lot of myths – that teams by default are more efficient and working alone is to be discouraged, that extroverted managers get the best results, etc. The author also acknowledges at the outset that no individual is a total extrovert, or a complete introvert and people often adapt according to surroundings and thus, has sections on how introverts could get the best out of their personality type given the value placed extraversion.

An issue I had with the book was that the author often indulged in what I would call ‘extrovert bashing’. She tried to not only prove that extraversion does not have any correlation with efficiency, performance, or competence (could have stopped there), but also tried to assert how introverts do most of the tasks better. This seemed to go against the initial premise of the book which emphasised the need on every personality type.

There were a lot of interesting points I noted, and the most interesting one I found was that babies who tend to be highly reactive grow up to be introverts and vice versa (my perception was quite the opposite). Something I would have been interested to know is how much environments and circumstances influence personality types, as I have read articles in reputed magazines such as The Economist which suggest that children from wealthy backgrounds tend to be extroverts as their position in the society gives them the confidence to be outspoken.

To conclude, I would say that this is a good book, and could be insightful especially when someone close such as a partner or a child is of an opposite personality type. On that note, I would rate this book seven on ten.

Rating – 7/10

Have a nice day,

Andy

Shalimar the Clown by Sir Salman Rushdie – Book Review

 

Publisher’s write-up:

‘Los Angeles, 1991. Maximilian Ophuls is knifed to death on the doorstep of his illegitimate daughter India, slaughtered by his Kashmiri driver, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the Clown. The dead man is a World War II Resistance hero, a man of formidable intellectual ability and much erotic appeal, a former United States ambassador to India, and subsequently America’s counter-terrorism chief. The murder looks at first like a political assassination but turns out to be passionately personal.

This is the story of Max, his killer, and his daughter – and of a fourth character, the woman who links them all. The story of a deep love gone fatally wrong, destroyed by a shallow affair, it is an epic narrative that moves from California to France, England, and above all, Kashmir: a ruined paradise, not so much lost as smashed.’

Shalimar the Clown is a novel from Salman Rushdie released in late 2000s, featuring four principal characters and a plot based in three different continents. As in most Rushdie novels, there is a story, featuring a particular family, with politics of the places involved in the background.

Coming to the plot – a former American diplomat is killed in the US by his driver. The story then moves back in time to Kashmir, featuring a rural Hindu girl Boonyi who is in love with Abdullah Noman, a Kashmiri Muslim who performs tightrope acts in the village. Despite their religious differences, the village elders are in favour of their marriage, which would also make the statement that they were Kashmiris before their religious identities.

On the other side, there is an ambitious man from Strasbourg, France – Max Ophuls. His tact and seductive skills make him a valuable asset for the French resistance against the Nazi regime during the Second World War. Following the war, he moves to the US and is posted to India as their ambassador, which is where Max’s love affair with Kashmir begins.

The story has four main characters and each of them have a segment named after them. The four are Max, India (Max’s daughter), Boonyi and the title character, Shalimar the Clown. This story moves across timelines and similar to the other Rushdie novels – with multiple complex characters – with some based in the West with ties to South Asia. The author often plays along people having multiple identities and acting accordingly – for instance, Max – a Frenchman from a region which has often shifted between France and Germany, with a British wife, and later becoming a US diplomat.

The political shift and radicalisation that took place in Kashmir was brought out well by the author – where a culture that encouraged an interfaith marriage and participated in social events together regardless of religion; were taken to violence and eventual doom. The effect the conflict had on civilians was brought out well – be it atrocities from the Muslim extremists or Indian army.

An equally interesting character was the title character – Shalimar the Clown, who was content staying in the village who had fallen in love with Boonyi, who had bigger ambitions and did not want to be ‘stuck’ in the same place and was looking for an opportunity to leave. However, the segment with both Shalimar and Boonyi was a tad long – with too many characters being introduced and beyond a point, it became difficult to keep track of them, especially considering that they were important in the subsequent phases.

The author being an atheist himself, did not have second thoughts in bringing out absurdities in religion, where a bit of dark humour was involved when a group of Muslim women pacify an extremist mob by using the religious limitations that the men have.

Without spoilers, I would say that I was not satisfied with the ending of the book. It was not particularly bad, but considering the way that the story was going, it was not quite what I expected.

On a personal level – this story was highly relatable for me, considering I have lived most of my life in India and a substantial portion in France (my current residence), and all the principal characters are from these places, and I really enjoyed the description of the city of Strasbourg, loved it as much as my visit to the city. So, if you could relate with the underlying themes, you could enjoy it better, but regardless, it is a great read.

To conclude – this could be classified as a cliched story involving love, ambition, jealousy and revenge but what makes it special is the narration, and the subtle themes going on in the background. If you have enjoyed other works of Rushdie, this would be an enjoyable read too – I would not place it quite at the level of Midnight’s Children or The Satanic Verses, but a notch below and on that note, I would award this book a rating of seven on ten.

Rating – 7/10

Have a nice day,
Andy

The Culture Map by Erin Meyer – Book Review

 

Publisher’s write-up:

‘Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd. It's no surprise that when they try and talk to each other, chaos breaks out.

In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain in which people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together. She provides a field-tested model for decoding how cultural differences impact international business, and combines a smart analytical framework with practical, actionable advice.’

The Culture Map is a book explaining the cultural differences between various places and why it is important to understand them in order to make multicultural teams work. The book is from the American professor based in France, Erin Meyer, and she describes eight scales required to understand cultural differences and navigate through them.

The eight she describes are communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing, scheduling. And for each of these, the writer has a binary scale (example: for leading – egalitarian vs hierarchical) and the book is split into eight chapters for each of them. Most of them are supported by her own experiences in the corporate world and occasional references to books or studies.

The only takeaway I had from the book is that we need to be conscious that people behave in a certain way for cultural reasons or some other reason and not necessarily to offend the person the other person. This is a benefit of doubt that I believe people ought to be given regardless of cultural differences (even your next-door neighbour from childhood). It was interesting to note that cultural perceptions are relative – where in her book – she states how Germany is strict about timings, France relatively less and India is flexible and thus, a German feels that the French are too flexible with timings and Indians feel they are too rigid. Having been raised in India myself, I would say that for me, coming late for no reason is not good behaviour anywhere, including India.

There was an occasion where she mentioned that some of her observations are ‘dramatic oversimplifications’. I would go further and say that it was not some, but most of her book – building on stereotypes and biases. While it is true that some stereotypes could be true, acting on them as the author suggests could lead put oneself on a very slippery slope.

The book seemed low on research – no references on studies or the data or sample size she had used to build her eight scales axes for the various parameters. The book was entirely based on her personal experiences, while individual experiences provide valuable lessons, the conclusions she has drawn from these personal anecdotes are too strong. This is pertinent considering this was not a book recounting her experiences in the corporate world across geographies, but a book providing instructions on how to prepare presentations or engage in corporate negotiations to its readers.

Owing to her personal experiences, she appears to have knowledge on US and western Europe (particularly France, UK, Germany and the Netherlands). However, her knowledge of Asia seemed superficial and often contradictory, where on the one side, she refers to a supposed Confucian culture sphere which courts a very large territory from Vietnam, China, Korea till Japan and on the other side, talking about how different Chinese and Japanese cultures are.

Culture is a factor that is not solely influenced by nationality, it could play a large part but there is also the question of environment, rural or urban upbringing, etc. There could be various distinct cultures within the same sovereign state – where the author herself often refers to herself as a Minnesota mother, not an American mother or even the subnational Midwestern mother.

I would have been perhaps interested if she touched upon what enforces the culture among large groups of people – is it the family traditions? The school system? She does partially try to answer this by saying her son has a ‘French culture’ because of attending a French school but does not elaborate on that. While she comfortably puts people in boxes as per their passports, she does avoid placing multicultural states in Europe in any of the axes or even discuss them – like Belgium or Switzerland. For that matter, when France, Germany, Netherlands and the UK can be seen as being so distinct, it is rather naïve to paint large multi-ethnic countries like India or China with one brush.

While it could be important to navigate the cultural differences, this book does not provide solutions. I have met the equivalent of nearly every person in her anecdotes during my period in the corporate world and they were not necessarily from the countries that the author described and sometimes, from the ‘opposite culture’ (according to this book).

This book is largely targeted at Americans and plays on American stereotypes and biases, it could provide some insights to people who have hardly had interactions with people from other parts of the world. To those who have had, this book is inaccurate and does not help. On that note, I award the book a rating of four on ten.

Rating – 4/10

Have a nice day,
Andy

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel – Book Review

Publisher’s write-up:

‘Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people.

How to manage money, invest it, and make business decisions are typically considered to involve a lot of mathematical calculations, where data and formulae tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world, people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together.

In The Psychology of Money, the author shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important matters.’

The Psychology of Money is a collection of twenty essays from Morgan Housel – fund manager and former columnist to the Wall Street Journal. The author focuses on how staying wealthy is behavioural than the ability to earn.

To build his case, the book starts with the story of Ronald Read – who had a very different profile compared to other multi-millionaire philanthropists; that he was a janitor and gas station in a small town in Vermont, US. This was the result of frugal living and investing most of the savings in blue chip stocks resulting in compounded gains over the years. Most of us wish to be millionaires but the reasons why we wish to be millionaires in most cases is not for financial independence but rather, a desire to spend a million dollars, which is very different from being a millionaire.

Considering this paradox where to be wealthy, you should not be spending it; the author builds the case for saving money over the many essays. Most of it was behavioural advice which is simple to follow in personal life.

This book was well presented and was simple to read. As promised by the author, each of these essays were short; the 20^th essay being his own journey of accumulating wealth. Some of the observations were important, being an economics graduate myself – one of the fundamental assumptions we have is that financial decisions are rational; though from the perspective of personal economics, it is difficult to be fully rational (need to be only reasonably rational). To elaborate on that, when debt is available cheap and the market returns are higher than the cost of debt – an absolutely rational decision would mean to buy the car or house with debt; however, what is not valued is that people like being debt free and that leads to the decision of buying a major asset at once if the means are available.

The book had the following takeaways – that it is important to save, staying wealthy is largely behavioural and that it is easy to embrace some of these behaviours. A statement from the book, that is very true is:

‘The hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving.’

This book could be read by all – but if you are looking for ways to make quick money, this book is not for you. That is perhaps the drawback of the book – that it focuses more on savings and compounding of savings and many who live paycheque to paycheque often do not have a choice when it comes to savings.

There were also times I felt that the book could have been better researched; in the notes, the author had stated their source to be ‘Quora’; which is a question-and-answer website where anyone could write an answer; hardly a reliable source. While the author’s point greed was well made, so was the example of Rajat Gupta, former CEO of McKinsey convicted for insider trading; there seems to be a temptation to portray any person with an Indian origin as having had a ‘rags to riches’ story. While Gupta did achieve enormous riches in the US, he certainly was not from the slums of Calcutta as the book described but from a privileged Indian family.

To conclude, this is an easy to read, well researched book and could be read especially by those who still have a long way to go before retirement, as they are the ones who have the maximum potential to tap into the strategies presented by the author. On that note, I would award the book a rating of six on ten.

Rating – 6/10

Have a nice day,
Andy

The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks – Book Review

Publisher’s write-up:

‘In this extraordinary book, Dr. Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients struggling to adapt to often bizarre worlds of neurological disorder. Here are people who can no longer recognize everyday objects or those they love; who are stricken with violent tics or shout involuntary obscenities; who have been dismissed as autistic or retarded, yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales illuminate what it means to be human.’

This is a book with description on 24 different clinical cases of Dr. Oliver Sacks during his career. Sacks was a neurologist from the UK who practised in the US. It needs to be mentioned that the book was published in 1985 and thus, some of the terms used are not appropriate today (eg. retarded).

The book is split into four parts – losses, excesses, transports and the world of the simple. Each of these sections had clinical cases related to the main theme – the title story The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat was under the section of ‘losses’, which was about a music professor who was suffering from visual agnosia. Transports included stories (for lack of a better word) where the patients felt transported to another location based on their past memories. In most of these clinical tales, the author also added a postscript – of similar cases the author learnt of in the future or how their patient dealt with their difficulty.

To put it bluntly, this book was neither interesting nor informative. In any non-fiction, it is reasonable to demand who is the intended audience – the public at large or those involved in the field of neuroscience? However, I felt this book pleases neither; to someone like myself with no background in the subject – this book was very technical with several technical terms thrown at me as though it was a given that an average reader would understand them. On the other hand, for someone actually in the field might feel that they do not learn anything new from this book. Moreover, I thought I was in for a scientific reading and I was disturbed by the author’s use of the word soul as though it was a medical concept; I can understand the intent – that the author wants to bring out the human in his patients and is thus randomly throwing this word around like any philosopher does, but that just makes this book lose direction.

I did mention initially that the book was published in 1985 – but at the same time, there is a foreword from the author published in 2001. Considering that, the least that he could have done was to revise some of the words that he had used so casually in this book (like ‘retard’).

My only takeaway from this book was there are several rare neurological conditions which could lead to difficulties / advantages (in some cases) – this was something that I already knew, and this book added no further information to that.

The author was perhaps a great doctor, but writing is certainly not one of his skills and this could have been a better book if there had been a co-author. On that note, I would award this book a rating of two.

Rating – 2/10

Have a nice day,
Andy