World 3.0

The Social Animal

A Hard Country

Book Of The Day

23 Things About Capitalism (An Index)

I bought this book today, just by chance.

The title wasn´t very attractive at the first glace to be honest, I don´t like much all this lit re conspiracy theories and so. But then, having a look, the content seems to be meaty - and an Uni Prof from Cambridge should know a thing or two about those things.

So have a look at the Index, I think it´s quite significant:

1. There is no such thing as a free market.
2. Companies should not be run in the interest of their owners.
3. Most people in rich countries are paid more than they should be.
4. The washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has.
5. Assume the worst about people and you get the worst.
6. Greater macroeconomics stability has not made the world economy more stable.
7. Free-market policies rarely make poor countries rich.
8. Capital has a nationality.
9. Wed do not live in a post-industrial age.
10. The US does not have the highest living standard in the world.
11. Africa is not destined for underdevelopment.
12. Governments can pick winners.
13. Making rich people richer does not make the rest of us richer.
14. US managers are over-priced.
15. People in poor countries are more entrepreneurial than people in rich countries.
16. We are not smart enough to leave things to the market.
17. More education in itself is not going to make a country richer.
18. What is good for General Motors is not necessarily good for the United States.
19. Despite the fall of communism, we are still living in planned economies.
20. Equality of opportunity may not be fair.
21. Big government makes people more open to change.
22. Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient.
23. Good economic policy does not require good economists.

Title: 23 Things They Don´t Tell You About Capitalism.
Author: Ha-Joon Chang.
Pages: 286

A Book To Read...

A Couple Of Books

Happy 90th Birthday!

Roberto Bolaño

A White Man in Viet-Nam

A terrible cover but a very hooking reading. Wolff is a master describing realities and especially the minds of his characters. Here we have the story of a young Wolff serving in Viet-Nam as an American soldier and we will find all the classical ingredients: The Viet Cong (VC), the Tet offensive, the rain, the ponchos, the mud, the cultural barriers... another book about Viet-Nam? Not at all - read it and you will tell me.

Life-Changing Books

I'm not sure that any book has ever truly changed my life in the sense of dramatically altering its course, but I can think of one that determined it, and that's Palgrave's Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. It was my mother's book and she read to me from it, as I imagine, in the dark. It was from Palgrave that I learned that literature had a sound, that language mattered more than story, that rhythm haunted the imagination, and that love and grief and loneliness interested me more than any other subject.

Zoë Heller

A couple of novels that I read in my teens - Middlemarch by George Eliot and Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens - made me want to be a writer. But the only book I can think of that effected a large and immediately felt change was My Secret Life, the Sex Diary of a Victorian Gentleman (author unknown). I discovered it on my grandparents' bookshelf at the age of 10.

Jacqueline Wilson

I'd have to choose Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, which I first read when I was 13. My dad bought it eagerly but gave up on it a few chapters in. My mum had a go then, but found Nabokov's baroque style irritatingly impenetrable. I asked to read it and my parents said absolutely not. I didn't waste my breath arguing. I simply waited till I had the opportunity to whip the distinctive yellow dustwrapper off Lolita and rejacket it with the Catherine Cookson novel I was reading. I spent the next week reading in the bath, in bed, at playtimes, at school. It was a total revelation to me. I hadn't realised you could use language in such a rich and elegant way, and I was amazed at the subject matter. I thought it the most wonderful and exciting book I'd ever read. I realised that literature could be outrageous and mind-stretching and utterly extraordinary.

Anthony Horowitz

It would have to be Dr No by Ian Fleming. It was 1967. I was about 12, trapped in the weird and miserable bubble of prep-school life where my experience of sexual desire and violence edging on sadism was largely restricted to my French teacher. The book introduced me to a whole new world. Even the Jamaican setting seemed impossibly exotic.

DBC Pierre

Forming an outlook on life isn't all beer and skittles. By the time you've wondered what parts of a world view should be instinct or intellect, asked yourself if all perspective isn't just a product of bias and dogma, and then worked out that, in any event, the viewpoint you ended up with is no longer in service, nobody can blame you for seeking strong drink. This was roughly my position when I came upon Lila - Robert Pirsig's follow-up to the 1974 classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig continues his philosophical exploration in the form of a yacht journey down the Hudson river, accompanied by an easy woman - though her virtue is also open to argument. Written in everyday language, with searing disrespect for academia, this meandering holiday was a life-changer for me, both as a novel and a thesis.

"When the pupil is ready, the master will appear."

In a yacht. With a prostitute. Or is she?

Antonia Fraser

I was crazy about history from the age of four and a half when I read (to myself) Our Island Story. But I had no precise idea of how to direct this passion until I came across my parents' copy of Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey, at the age of 14. I had just become Catholic and was attending a convent. I was deeply excited by reading Strachey, especially the essay on Cardinal Manning. What the convent library did contain was the official two volume life of Manning - just the kind of Victorian number Strachey had written to debunk. Immediately I began to compare the two versions with critical zest, beginning to form my own third one: here it is, I thought, the life for me.

Kamila Shamsie

I don't remember who wrote the book that changed my life. I don't even remember anything about its plot or characters. But I remember vividly finding a musty old hardback novel called All Dogs Go to Heaven on my grandfather's bookshelf. And I remember weeping - copiously - as I read the book, weeping for my pet dog who had recently died. I also recall my best friend, Asad, coming over and, in response to my "You must read this - it's set in dog heaven", saying, "Why don't we write a book set in dog heaven?" So we did. It was called A Dog's Life, and After. I was 11, and I never stopped writing after that.

William Fiennes

I first read Moby-Dick on a bicycle trip round southern Greece. I was 21, on the brink of my last year at university. In the evenings I sat in tavernas writing my diary and reading about Ishmael, Ahab and the white whale. I found it exhilarating - not just the quest, but Melville's language, which was so alive and stirring, with the rhythms and image-richness I already loved in Shakespeare but had never encountered in prose before. I was giddy with it. I kept stopping to lean my bike on harbour walls and stare at the sea, looking for disturbances in the surface of the water.

Roger McGough

The Beat Scene didn't change my life, but rather it confirmed it. In the late 50s, I was at Hull University and I had decided to become a poet, but I wasn't quite sure what that involved. In 1960, I came across The Beat Scene. It was made up of poems and interviews from the New York and San Francisco poetry scene at that time. There were well-known poets such as Corso, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg alongside others I hadn't heard of. I realised just how big the world of poetry was. It showed them reading their work aloud to audiences in art studios, cafes, bars - a million miles away from my idea of poetry being something confined to a library. What was I doing in boring old Liverpool when I could be reading at the Gas Light Cafe in Greenwich Village with Diane di Prima?

Graham Swift

No book, I think, has really changed my life, but a few books, at different times of my life, have made huge and sometimes lasting impressions. Certainly among these was The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, which I read in my teens when I was an aspiring writer. The most important influences aren't those other writers who necessarily affect your writing in any material way, but simply confirm and fire your desire to write. Babel did this for me. One of his stories is called Guy de Maupassant and is effectively the story of how Babel himself was fired by Maupassant. That story, in particular, has always been special for me, and the full story of how I was fired by Babel is told in my new book, Making an Elephant.

Rowan Williams

I read Patrick White's Riders in the Chariot when I was about 19, and it has been decisive in shaping my sense of what faith and ethics are and aren't. It was the first novel I'd read that dealt directly with the Holocaust. It was a novel about mysticism that challenged me profoundly about what I meant by God, and forced me to see as never before the link between the artist and the contemplative - but not in any conventional way, because it also set out as starkly as possible the difference between the holy and the merely good. And it offered an unforgettably frightening picture of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil", the evil that comes from dead minds, cliches, lying pieties.

Giles Foden

Practically speaking, the book that had most direct influence on me as a writer was Paul Muldoon's volume of poetry Meeting the British. It taught me how to bring my own imaginative territory to bear on politics and history. Or was it the other way round? In any case, The Last King of Scotland was the direct result of that encounter with Muldoon's work. He is a rare bird, extraordinary, and I was fortunate to pluck the most modest of his tail feathers. The danger is, you find yourself ventriloquising him.

Melvyn Bragg

The book that changed my life is one of those questions that send me into a panic. Was it the illustrated Kidnapped, The Tales of Robin Hood, the feast of comics, Wizard, Rover, Hotspur, Adventure? The best I can do is to offer the King James Bible. I started to go regularly to the local Anglican church when I was about six and joined the choir. At school there was a morning assembly, which consisted of readings from the Bible and hymns and psalms. Parables, wars, agonies, revelations - the panoply of history, metaphor, ecstatic literature and the words of a great faith seem to have accrued, and a good number of them are still there. It was the sweetest possible learning, because if did not come through as teaching.

Alain de Botton

Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon opened up a whole new way of writing for me. It's a piece of reportage about the 1969 Nasa moon landings, in which Mailer adopts a freewheeling tone that enables him to discuss himself, his recent divorce, fascism in America, race and technology - all with huge intelligence, humour and a crazed energy. The book showed that the barrier between being a novelist and a reporter are in the end rather flexible and that you can take the stuff of ordinary newspaper stories and turn them into something resembling art and philosophy. I couldn't have written my most recent book without this great book as inspiration.

Kate Atkinson

Looking back, I realise that probably the books that had the greatest influence on my imagination and sensibility were the fairy stories that I read as a child.I read them obsessively in my formative years and they introduced me to the idea that literature was transformative and magical. They also, at their heart, convey the message that girls are strong and wise and morally triumphant. The message that real justice always prevails in the end may not be true, but it provided me with a pattern for travelling hopefully through life.

Simon Schama

I'm someone who likes to look at footnotes or endnotes first when I pick up a history. This one began, "Bretons are said to be drunken and prone to use their fists or broken glasses or bottles ... Men from the Mediterranean will stab using knives or stilettos." This was Richard Cobb's idea of a report from the archive. This was the bloody and bloody-minded world of his French Revolutionary masterpiece The Police and the People. I had never read anything like Cobb's exercise in total immersion; the historian sunk into the world of ne'er-do-wells, vagrants, informers, runaways, suicidal pregnant girls. It smelled of humanity. That was the kind of history I knew I wanted to write. I still do.

AC Grayling

I'll reluctantly limit myself to three: Immanuel Kant's Critique Of Pure Reason in philosophical respects, Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in political respects, and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina for what literature can mean and do. I first read the latter two when young and although I did not then, and do not now, agree or sympathise with everything in them, they stimulated ideas that have remained permanently significant to me. Kant came later, and although I do not accept most of his arguments, they likewise contributed greatly to the study of some of philosophy's deepest problems. None of them would mean what they do without their connection to dozens of other books that matter to me also.

Martin Jacques

Reading Antonio Gramsci's Selections from the Prison Notebooks transformed the way that I understood the exercise of power in western societies, indeed in any society. It remains enormously rich, offering a battery of new concepts. Although written in an elusive style, partly to avoid Mussolini's censors, it is like a treasure trove; each new reading yields fresh insights and a bunch of new thoughts.

I can suggest no better place to start if you want to understand the nature and role of politics and culture. Hegemony, civil society, post-Fordism, passive revolution, organic intellectuals, it's all here and much more besides. Brilliant.

Paddy Ashdown

The book that has accompanied me all my life is John Donne's Collected Works. My wife gave me a copy when we got married. I was 20. It fell apart in the jungles of Borneo. But I've always had a copy since and it gives me continuing pleasure and solace.

Ed Miliband

At junior high school in the US I remember reading a book called Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, about someone who is white and pretends to be black. As a kid living in America in a relatively integrated part of the US, it was an amazing insight into racial discrimination in America.

Nicholas Stern

India changed my life and RK Narayan is a writer who captures what's so fascinating about India in all its difference and pain and complexity of life. I give his wonderful book The Financial Expert to all my banking friends. It's a story about a guy who stands on a box outside a bank and always gives better terms than the bank. He's very nice and very reliable. Then one day he just suddenly disappears, with all the funds.

Mark Radcliffe

At the risk of sounding dull and predictable, though those who have heard my radio work may think it's a little late to start worrying about that, the book that changed my life would have to be The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger. And it has changed my life twice. When I first read it at university in 1976, the difficulty Holden Caulfield had in fitting into the world mirrored exactly the angst and ennui I felt in those life-changing, full-grant, debt-and-responsibility-free days. When I re-read it 10 years ago I found the hero, and therefore myself, irritatingly self-obsessed and shouted out loud: "For heaven's sake, Holden, grow up!" I took that to mean that I had.

Isabel Fonseca

I published my first book, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, and then straight afterwards had two children: I was thrilled. But as I patrolled the sandpit or stood beside yet another swing, I also knew a secret despair, at times amounting to panic, that I'd never find my way back to writing. Around then I read Far Away and Long Ago – WH Hudson's intensely evocative 1915 account of his wild Argentine boyhood, which he wrote in London at the age of 74. You might think: nothing very cheering here for the writer by the swing – will I have to wait that long? But his enchanted pampas vibrate so vividly through those pages; the sights, the smells and sounds: the finches in the peach trees, at first "throaty but growing clearer and brighter towards the end ... the effect on the hearing being like that on the sight of rain when the multitudinous falling drops appear as silvery grey lines on the vision." If it is yours, I understood, not only will it wait, it will ripen, growing clearer and brighter. Thirteen years later, I published my first novel, Attachment.

Sophie Dahl

It was the first book I read by myself when I was about six. It made me long for bedtime, even though it was summer and still light outside. The Faraway Tree was buried deep in an enchanted wood, at whose edge lived the children Bessie, Fanny, Jo and later, cousin Dick (in his new PC incarnation unfortunately renamed Rick). One day the children stumble upon a magical tree inhabited by a clutch of fairy folk, among them Moon Face, Silky the fairy, Dame Washalot, the Angry Pixie and the Saucepan Man, a creature rendered deaf as a post because of the constant clang of the saucepans he wears. As with most Enid Blyton books, food is integral to the story, and the children are incessantly eating delicious sweets and biscuits and having picnics. As an immensely greedy child, my plump imagination was on overload due to the graphic descriptions of said feasts, and it was probably my first exposure to food writing, which has stuck with me ever since.

The Enchanted Wood fueled my imagination, appetite (for food and reading), and perhaps most importantly, uncovered a lifelong voracious leaning towards happy endings.

David Adjaye

When I was a late teenager, a friend of mine recommended a book called In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki. It examines darkness and shadows in Japanese culture at the turn of the early 20th century. It's a very simple book – a fiction where a traveller experiences numerous cultural encounters, all of which are informed and narrated through his experience with light, or the lack of it. It uses incredibly simple language, but is a very intellectually provocative book. It informed my thoughts on physical beauty in the world – forcing me to question and look at it in a way I had never done before. It has had a direct impact on the way I think about architecture – how you understand and reveal space. My friend never knew what an impact this book had on me – perhaps now they will.

Jo Brand

The book that changed my life was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. I read it as a teenager and instantly became completely absorbed by it. It is one of those genius books that eclipses the film, brilliant as that was. I suppose it changed my attitude towards those with mental health problems and the voice of the Native American narrator stayed in my head for a long time afterwards. I read it in a few days, and when I got to the final page was immensely pissed off to discover someone had torn it out ... the torturer. I couldn't "gather" (to borrow a Kate Winslet word), until I'd got my hands on another copy some days later.

Frank Skinner

I was in my early 20s when I bought Lenny Bruce's How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. I think I mistook it for a self-help book. For me, it became one. Although Lenny Bruce was a standup comedian, the book's influence on me was more to do with my everyday attitudes than my work. I didn't become a comic until about 10 years after I read it. It was Bruce's honesty, his raw openness, that changed my life. I immediately became less guarded about my insecurities, my longings, my secret thoughts. I think it spooked my friends at the time. I'd always loved talking dirty but now I dropped the male bravado and the talk became both dirty and painfully true. When I did finally become a comic, my act was an expression of the mindset I'd developed since reading the book.

Richard Madeley

I saw the film The Cruel Sea as a schoolboy and didn't realise it was based on a novel by Nicholas Monsarrat. But when I was about 13 I found a copy in a secondhand bookshop, and bought it at once. I have probably re-read it roughly once every three years ever since. I believe it to be quite the best work of fiction to come out of either the first or the second world war, and I include Catch-22 and Birdsong in that. Monsarrat's beautiful, thoughtful and sometimes shocking prose inspired me to write. His ability to simultaneously communicate detachment and profound emotional involvement in his story – based on his own harrowing experiences of convoy work during the battle of the Atlantic – is, to use a much overused word these days, awesome. His subtle and gentle revelation, as the novel progresses, of the love that develops between the men aboard ships fighting U-boats and mountainous seas – fights to the death – is deeply moving. I'm currently writing my first novel. If it is one twentieth the work Monsarrat created, I'll be a happy man.

by Howard Jacobson

Do you have any book that changed your life, at least a bit?

From Carver To Wolff

I discovered Raymond Carver thanks to a good friend. Reading Carver I discovered Tobias Wolff whose Old School impressed me very much indeed. Now I am reading In Pharaoh´s Army, about his "service" in Vietnam and I suppose the next step will be to read his This Boy´s Life... always a pleasure how he writes in this formally casual manner when you know behind each line there is a hard work of thinking, writing and rewriting. As Mark Twain said: "You need two weeks to make a good improvisation".

Buying Books

Run To Japan! (or Sweden)

We are rich enough. Economic growth has done as much as it can to improve material conditions in the developed countries, and in some cases appears to be damaging health. If Britain were instead to concentrate on making its citizens' incomes as equal as those of people in Japan and Scandinavia, we could each have seven extra weeks' holiday a year, we would be thinner, we would each live a year or so longer, and we'd trust each other more.

The Spirit Level : Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
331pp
Allen Lane

Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett don't soft-soap their message. It is brave to write a book arguing that economies should stop growing when millions of jobs are being lost, though they may be pushing at an open door in public consciousness. We know there is something wrong, and this book goes a long way towards explaining what and why.

The authors point out that the life-diminishing results of valuing growth above equality in rich societies can be seen all around us. Inequality causes shorter, unhealthier and unhappier lives; it increases the rate of teenage pregnancy, violence, obesity, imprisonment and addiction; it destroys relationships between individuals born in the same society but into different classes; and its function as a driver of consumption depletes the planet's resources.

Wilkinson, a public health researcher of 30 years' standing, has written numerous books and articles on the physical and mental effects of social differentiation. He and Pickett have compiled information from around 200 different sets of data, using reputable sources such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the US Census, to form a bank of evidence against inequality that is impossible to deny.

They use the information to create a series of scatter-graphs whose patterns look nearly identical, yet which document the prevalence of a vast range of social ills. On almost every index of quality of life, or wellness, or deprivation, there is a gradient showing a strong correlation between a country's level of economic inequality and its social outcomes. Almost always, Japan and the Scandinavian countries are at the favourable "low" end, and almost always, the UK, the US and Portugal are at the unfavourable "high" end, with Canada, Australasia and continental European countries in between.

This has nothing to do with total wealth or even the average per-capita income. America is one of the world's richest nations, with among the highest figures for income per person, but has the lowest longevity of the developed nations, and a level of violence - murder, in particular - that is off the scale. Of all crimes, those involving violence are most closely related to high levels of inequality - within a country, within states and even within cities. For some, mainly young, men with no economic or educational route to achieving the high status and earnings required for full citizenship, the experience of daily life at the bottom of a steep social hierarchy is enraging.

The graphs also reveal that it is not just the poor, but whole societies, from top to bottom, that are adversely affected by inequality. Although the UK fares badly when compared with most other OECD countries (and is the worst developed nation in which to be a child according to both Unicef and the Good Childhood Inquiry), its social problems are not as pronounced as in the US.

Rates of illness are lower for English people of all classes than for Americans, but working-age Swedish men fare better still. Diabetes affects twice as many American as English people, whether they have a high or a low level of education. Wherever you look, evidence favouring greater equality piles up. As the authors write, "the relationships between inequality and poor health and social problems are too strong to be attributable to chance".

But perhaps the most troubling aspect of reading this book is the revelation that the way we live in Britain is a serious danger to our mental health. Around a quarter of British people, and more than a quarter of Americans, experience mental problems in any given year, compared with fewer than 10 per cent in Japan, Germany, Sweden and Italy.

Wilkinson and Pickett's description of unequal societies as "dysfunctional" suggests implicit criticism of the approach taken by Britain's "happiness tsar" Richard Layard, who recommended that the poor mental health of many Britons be "fixed" or improved by making cognitive behavioural therapy more easily available. Consumerism, isolation, alienation, social estrangement and anxiety all follow from inequality, they argue, and so cannot rightly be made a matter of individual management.

There's an almost pleading quality to some of Wilkinson and Pickett's assertions, as though they feel they've spent their careers banging their heads against a brick wall. It's impossible to overstate the implications of their thesis: that the societies of Britain and the US have institutionalised economic and social inequality to the extent that, at any one time, a quarter of their respective populations are mentally ill. What kind of "growth" is that, other than a malignant one?

One question that comes to mind is whether the world's most equal developed nations, Japan and Sweden, make sufficient allowance for individuals to express themselves without being regarded as a threat to the health of the collective. Critics of the two societies would argue that both make it intensely difficult for individual citizens to protest against the conformity both produced by, and required to sustain, equality. The inclination to dismiss or neuter individuals' complaints may, Wilkinson and Pickett suggest, go some way towards explaining the higher suicide rates in both countries compared with their more unequal counterparts. Those who feel wrong, or whose lives go wrong, may feel as though they really do have no one to blame but themselves.

What Japan and Sweden do show is that equality is a matter of political will. There are belated signs - shown in the recent establishment of a National Equalities Panel and in Trevor Phillips's public pronouncements on the central place of class in the landscape of British inequality - that Labour recognises that its relaxed attitude to people "getting filthy rich" has come back to bite it on the rear.

Twelve years in power is long enough to reverse all the trends towards greater social and economic stratification that have occurred since 1970; instead they have continued on their merry way towards segregation. Teenage pregnancy rates have begun to rise after a period of decline; there is a 30-year gap in male life expectancy between central Glasgow and parts of southern England; and child poverty won't be halved by next year after all (though it wouldn't make as much difference as making their parents more equal).

There are times when the book feels rather too overwhelmingly grim. Even if you allow for the fact that it was written before Barack Obama won the US presidency on a premise of trust and optimism, its opening pages are depressing enough to make you want to shut it fast: "We find ourselves anxiety-ridden, prone to depression, driven to consume and with little or no community life." Taking the statistics broadly, they may be correct, but many readers simply won't feel like that.

However, the book does end on an optimistic note, with a transformative, rather than revolutionary, programme for making sick societies more healthy. A society in which all citizens feel free to look each other in the eye can only come into being once those in the lower echelons feel more valued than at present. The authors argue that removal of economic impediments to feeling valued - such as low wages, low benefits and low public spending on education, for instance - will allow a flourishing of human potential.

There is a growing inventory of serious, compellingly argued books detailing the social destruction wrought by inequality. Wilkinson and Pickett have produced a companion to recent bestsellers such as Oliver James's Affluenza and Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety . But The Spirit Level also contributes to a longer view, sitting alongside Richard Sennett's 2003 book Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality , and the epidemiologist Michael Marmot's Status Syndrome , from 2005.

Anyone who believes that society is the result of what we do, rather than who we are, should read these books; they should start with The Spirit Level because of its inarguable battery of evidence, and because its conclusion is simple: we do better when we're equal.

The (Neo) Cons

The last book I have finished reading is called "After the Neocons - America at the Crossroads" by Francis Fukuyama, the guy who wrote "The End of History". Published by Profile Books in paperback, it has just 226 pages so it's a quick read.

A Frank Hawk

A couple of books I grabbed last days:

This is a classic I haven't read yet. The young girl hidden from the Nazis in an Amsterdam warehouse... I think she spent, with all her family, two years just to be captured and die in a concentration camp.

The diary of a youn girl
By Anne Frank
Published by Puffin
427 pages.


I read this book almost 20 years ago when at university. Now I am reading it again, in paperback. I remember being totally hooked and amazed with Hawking's prose plus the weird feeling about this titanic mind in such a fragile body. I think he is the Newton of 21st century... but maybe someone can say this is a too high title.

A brief History of Time
From the Big Bang to Black Holes
By Stephen Hawking
Introduction By Carl Sagan
Published by Bantam Books
220 pages

So many books, so little time...

Few books I am enjoying lately:

The Stories of Raymond Carver.
Picador.
447 pages.


The Foundation – A great American secret.
How private wealth is changing the world.
By Joel L. Fleishman.
Public Affairs.
357 pages.


The Shadow of the Sun
By Ryszard Kapuscinski
Penguin
325 pages