Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Three upcoming books

Three books that will become available over the next few months and promise to make for interesting reading...
Thinking, Fast and SlowThinking, Fast and Slow (Kindle Edition) by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman, (Wikipedia link), Nobel laureate, along with the late Amos Tversky, is considered the father of behavioral economics through their work on how people make erroneous decisions using heuristics and cognitive biases, and which attempts to study how the economically rational man can make irrational choices as evidenced by the recent global economic meltdown, a discipline that has seen such bestsellers in recent times as Predictably Irrational, Stumbling on Happiness, How We Decide, Nudge, and several others. His new book, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", has gathered some pretty impressive advance praise from some pretty impressive people. Nassim Taleb , author of , The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness says, "This is a landmark book in social thought, in the same league as The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud."

That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come BackThat Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back Kindle Edition
Thomas Friedman, multiple Pulitzer prize winning journalist with the New York Times, is the gentle harangue, trying to persuade Americans to abandon the philosophy of the two extremes of political ideology and instead embrace a culture of achievement. In The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, he talked about the growing competition from emerging countries like India, which could now compete on an even footing with the developed wold because of the flattening influences of technology and telecommunications, in Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America he talked about American losing the race in green technology. This book promises to be more along the same lines - I look forward to reading it.

Kindle Excerpt:



Boomerang: Travels in the New Third WorldBoomerang: Travels in the New Third World (Kindle edition)
Michael Lewis is the irrepressible author of the wickedly funny bestseller, Liar's Poker, and more recently of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (see my review blog post).
This book seems to be quite similar in subject to Friedman's upcoming book, "That Used To Be Us", so it will be interesting how they are different, and same.

The cover image, of a US currency with a black eye, is very similar to Raghuram Rajan's earlier bestseller, Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists (see this image for an example).




© 2011, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.