Book Review of "The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer"

What is your definition of a superhero ? Its the small town lawyer who decides to fight against the medical insurance behemoths because they didn't cover his sister's breast cancer treatment, its a pair of driven scientists who spent months walking the corridors of a giant Pharmaceutical company to convince them to mass produce a cancer medicine even though it was for a small variant of cancer and might not earn the company a lot of money, its the clinical researchers who stood their ground against the tobacco companies to push awareness about lung cancer and finally its the countless surgeons, hematologists and geneticists who spent their literal lifetime against a formidable foe and by solving a small piece of the puzzle saved thousands of lives.

"The Emperor of All Maladies" by Siddhartha Mukherjee is a brilliant masterpiece. It is superbly written and extraordinarily insightful. The research that must have gone behind writing this book is astounding - almost every page of this roughly 600 pages book has at least two references. 

It covers the history of Cancer starting from its first recorded occurrence in the Egyptian texts some 2500 years ago all the way to today's Cancer Genome Atlas. It has riveting accounts of numerous wins and losses by researchers against Cancer and how our collective understanding of this disease has progressed. The book mostly talks about the data from the US and western European countries and the writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee, openly admits to that. But that being said, this book will leave you speechless. 

IMO, everyone should read this, period.

Book Review of "Recursion"

A SciFi book that is action packed, fast paced with just a little bit of philosophical touch - is my guilty pleasure. "Recursion" by Blake Crouch fared perfectly on all of these fronts. It has won the GoodReads SciFi book of the year award for 2019. This combined with the fact that I had really enjoyed Blake Crouch's previous book "Dark Matter", made it an obvious choice to go for "Recursion". It didn't disappoint. Its fun & fast. You are not expected to think too much about the science in the story and that's ok. "Recursion" weaves an entertaining story around memory, time travel & some cop drama with a few well rounded & crisply defined characters. A solid 4/5. Perfect read for the holidays.

Book Review of "Selfish Gene"

A book that truly leaves you awestruck. Lucidly unravels the biological & genetic reasoning, accompanied by numerous examples of animal & plant behaviors, explaining how they evolved & survived. As an engineer, I was genuinely surprised by the simple probabilistic equations that can shed light on relatedness of two organisms & the likelihood or unlikelihood of "inheriting" a trait. Docking a star because it kind of rambles on in a couple of chapters. But overall, an informative & insightful read. 

Book Review of "निर्मनुष्य

"निर्मनुष्य" हा काही एक साधासुधा गूढकथासंग्रह नाही. प्रत्यक्ष आणि वास्तवाच्या पलीकडे लपलेले, थोडेसे भयावह पण तरीही थोडेसे उत्कंठावर्धक आणि काहीसे अनाकलनीय असे काल्पनिक विश्व लेखक रत्नाकर मठकरी प्रत्येक कथेत बिनबोभाट उभे करतात ! परंतु या कथांचा हेतू फक्त भय निर्माण करणे असा वाटत नाही, लेखक त्यातून काही भाष्य करू पाहतात कधी मानवी स्वभावाबद्दल, कधी राजकारणाबद्दल तर कधी सामान्य माणसाच्या हतबलतेबद्दल. "निर्मनुष्य" वाचताना स्टीफन किंग च्या लेखनशैलीची नक्कीच आठवण होते ! प्रगल्भ आणि तरीही मनोरंजनात्मक असा "निर्मनुष्य" ४/५ च्या नक्कीच तोडीचा आहे.

Book Review of "Crucial Conversations"

Reading "Crucial Conversations" is fun - for the most part. Some of the anecdotes, some real-life examples are quite eye-opening and frankly should be actively taught in schools and colleges. A few  rundowns of how even simple conversations can go haywire and ruin professional and personal relationships beyond repair do make you stop and rethink your way of engaging and conversing.  The authors have clearly done an extensive research and they have drilled it down to a bunch of nice-sounding "principles". 

But with all being said and done, "Crucial Conversations" seriously lacks editing. There are large portions of the book where essentially the same points are repeated and nothing new is put forth. This did cause me to essentially lose interest about halfway and it was an effort to pick it up again and finish it. The first 25% and the last 25% of the book basically has about 99% of the important points I felt. 

Still, definitely a 3/5.