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.

LIFE OF A GENIUS - REVIEW OF WALTER ISAACSON'S "EINSTEIN"

I would not hesitate to say that Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007) is a stunning tour de force, even better than his recently published and much acclaimed biography of Steve Jobs.

Isaacson shows much affection and care towards his subject and has taken into consideration the new Einstein papers that became available in 2006.

SWIMMING AGAINST THE TIDE - REVIEW OF CROCA AND MOREIRA'S "NEW APPROACHES TO QUANTUM PHYSICS"

This book left me with an unsettled feeling. New Approaches to Quantum Physics: From Paradoxes to Nonlinearity (2015) has been written for the educated laymen by a couple of scientific dissenters - J R Croca and R N Moreira. In this book, the authors take on the entire physics establishment by attacking directly one of the most cherished thought structures of all time - The Copenhagen Interpretation (CI) of quantum mechanics.

GOING THROUGH THE LETTERS - REVIEW OF LAWRENCE A CUNNINGHAM'S "THE ESSAYS OF WARREN BUFFETT"

It was with some trepidation that I picked up Lawrence A Cunningham's The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Investors and Managers (3rd Ed. 2009). I had heard that the book was mainly a collection of excerpts from Berkshire Hathaway annual reports and I usually find annual reports dry and monotonous.

LIMITATIONS OF MAINSTREAM ECONOMICS - REVIEW OF MEGHNAD DESAI'S "HUBRIS"

A few weeks ago, I watched "How the Economic Machine Works" by hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio on YouTube (see video here). I must confess I found it incomprehensible. Dalio says that consumption drives the economy and for an economy to grow people must consume more and more. I had always thought (as per the Austrian view) that it was savings and investment that drives an economy.

THE INDIAN VALUE INVESTING OPPORTUNITY - REVIEW OF RAHUL SARAOGI'S "INVESTING IN INDIA"

There have been many political, social and historical commentators on India such as Mark Tully, Shashi Tharoor, V S Naipaul and Ramachandra Guha. But very few popular books comment on India from an economic or financial standpoint (One that I can think of offhand is Gurcharan Das's India Unbound (2000) which provides an economic history of post-Independence India).