BUNGLING TOWARDS INSIGHTS - REVIEW OF MARIO LIVIO'S "BRILLIANT BLUNDERS"

Science is obviously a very human endeavor and is riddled with mistakes along the way. What makes it an enduring structure is that the mistakes are weeded out in due course by competing investigators. This mistake-making is the theme of Mario Livio's delightful book Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein (2013). Livio himself is an astrophysicist with wide-ranging interests and is well suited to delve into the creative forays of the scientific mind.

AMAZING AMAZON - REVIEW OF BRAD STONE'S "THE EVERYTHING STORE"

Brad Stone's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (2013) won the 2013 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award which is a superlative achievement. This book, however, is not like other FT-Goldman Sachs award winners such as Raghuram Rajan's Fault Lines (2010) or Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo's Poor Economics (2011) which were more formal and academic. Stone's book reads more like a popular yarn, something that Walter Isaacson would be proud to write.