Educated

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”

I picked up the book after hearing a lot about it. I started reading and realised this is one of the most shocking and intriguing biographies I’ve ever read. No wonder why Barack Obama mentioned it as Remarkable, and Bill Gates commented, It’s even better than you’ve heard! It is indeed.

Educated is the memoir of Tara Westover. She never went to school. Her parents were against formal education. They believed that education corrupts people. She talks about her life in the valley of Idaho, which was her whole world until the age of seventeen. When she started her formal education, it was the beginning of her transformation. She narrates her experiences, struggles, and how her perspective about the world changed over the course of a decade.

My father and I looked at the temple. He saw God; I saw granite. We looked at each other. He saw a woman damned; I saw an unhinged old man, literally disfigured by his beliefs. And yet, triumphant. I remembered the words of Sancho Panza: An adventuring knight is someone who’s beaten and then finds himself emperor.

I quire enjoyed reading the book. I realised there are people whose lives are very different than what I could ever imagine. Life is sometimes not a choice of one’s own. The sheer courage and determination of Tara helped her to be what she is right now.

When Breath Becomes Air

The physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.

When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir by Paul Kalanithi, who was a neurosurgeon, husband and father. Paul was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of 36. He was just completing his residency and was planning a life ahead with his wife Lucy. He came up with the idea of writing a book after the diagnosis, and he died before publishing it.

As a doctor, Paul had witnessed many births and deaths. He’d seen the life of a patient from the other side. He narrates how his life, perspectives and priorities changed during his transition from a doctor to a patient, with the realisation that his time is limited. This is not a story of bravery. He was afraid to die like any other dying patients, and was forced to embrace it without a choice.

Life of Paul Kalanithi is both heartbreaking and beautiful. It made me think about the choices we make during the critical moments of our lives. The book may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I loved it. 

Factfulness

Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.

Factfulness is one book I would recommend to anyone who wants to have a clear perspective about the world based on facts. It was written by Hans Rosling; a medical doctor, professor of international health and a public educator. I recently found this TED video; and interesting one which will help you know him better: The best stats you’ve ever seen. The book is a compilation of his years of research and experience, and is co-written by his son Ola Rosling and daughter-in-law Anna Rosling. I heard about it first when Bill Gates mentioned this book in his blog. He explains how it helped him not to talk about ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries.

We live with misconceptions about the current state of the world. We hear the bad side of everything everyday and we think the world is slowly deteriorating. This over-dramatic view is what Hans Rosling demystifies in Factfulness. He presents why and how we are wrong through a simple quiz and explanations. It doesn’t end there. He further dives into what causes these distorted views, how to look out for the warning signs, and how to avoid them.

He describes ten instincts, in ten chapters, which are responsible for this. Although these one line explanations is nothing compared to the chapters in the book, if you do not like spoilers, you can skip this part.

1. The gap instinct: the natural tendency to divide everything incorrectly into two groups
2. The negativity instinct: which always makes us see the negative face than the positive one
3. The straight line instinct: the assumption that a straight line will always continue like the same in the future when we look at graphs
4. The fear instinct: frightening things that get in our way and blocks rational thinking
5. The size instinct: when lonely numbers are presented to us, we wrongly assume the severity of the issue
6. The generalisation instinct: which makes us think something that works for someone, works for others too
7. The destiny instinct: when people think something will never change because they don’t observe gradual progress
8. The single perspective instinct: the problem of a single perspective limiting our imagination
9. The blame instinct: when we find comfort in pointing fingers rather than finding the root cause
10. The urgency instinct: which makes us act fast without thinking, by creating a sense of unnecessary urgency

He presents every one of these with case studies and beautiful bubble charts. All the facts are backed by data, which are compiled and verified by international organisations. Also, the author is not afraid to admit how he had these instincts in the past, some of which are quintessential and resulted in terrifying repercussions.

The chapters are clear, concise and well structured with explanations and data. There was never a dull moment reading this book, and I enjoyed it all of it! I can count the non-fictions I loved from cover to cover on the fingers (The last one was Delivering Happiness, by Tony Hsieh)

“The world cannot be understood without numbers. But the world cannot be understood with numbers alone.”  – Hans Rosling

This book was an eye-opener for me. Also, this is not about optimism. The author himself says he is not an optimist, but a ‘possibiist’; someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. It doesn’t say the world is good. It says the world is both good and bad; they coexist together. The learnings from the book can be applied in about everything in our daily life.

Zen Pencils — Creative Struggle: Illustrated Advice from Masters of Creativity

And that’s what separates the pros from the hobbyists, the ability to create when you don’t feel like creating. The ability to “master their disinclination”

Zen Pencils always lift my spirits. They are good for a quick shot of inspiration. The latest book is no different. Like Zen Pencils: Cartoon Quotes from Inspirational Folks and Dream the Impossible Dream, Creative Struggle is yet another collection of inspirational comics, most of which are available to read for free in zenpencils.com. I love to keep hardcopy versions because they are worth it, and are good for gifting.

Gavin Aung Than gives colours to these magnificent and inspirational quotes by famous personalities and transform them into stories. He illustrates the struggles they went through, how they conquered the fears and created their best pieces of work. He also gives a glimpse of the unexplored sides of these famous personalities we know.

Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot

Famous American writer and cartoonist, Theodor Seuss Geisel once said:

You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.

When I read Skyfaring – The Journey with a Pilot, I saw a man who set forth to accomplish his dream of flying despite the hurdles. In his late twenties, he started flight training, leaving his several years long career as a management consultant. The story of Mark Vanhoenacker is an inspiration for anybody who presuppose some dreams always remain as dreams.

I’d be woken by an alarm in the 4 a.m. darkness of Helsinki or Warsaw or Bucharest or Istanbul, and there would be a brief bleary moment, in the hotel room whose shape and layout I’d already forgotten in the hours since I’d switched off the light, when I’d ask myself if I’d only been dreaming that I became a pilot.

The book, in simple terms, is a memoir where the author sketches his experiences through years of flying. It includes information to an extent; facts that everybody loves to learn about the airline industry. He has done it well without going deep into technical details. There are simple acts of caring, joy of finding new people, places, times, weather, cultures and occasionally the curiosity of a child who is amused by everything.

It was quite unexpected how I found out about the book. I came across this article, In Flight – The New York Times, written by Mark Vanhoenacker. Check this out if you need inspiration to start.

Read the book as a lover of fiction, because if you’re just a fact seeker (who prefers only non-fiction books), you will end up with frequent longueurs and might get disappointed. The well crafted and lyrical narration shows the prowess of the pilot, who is a regular contributor to the New York Times and a columnist for Slate.

We may be pleased by the still-glinting wings of an airliner high above us, leaving a contrail soaked in crimson light, while at street level the sun has already set. We see the plane we are not on, bound for a place we are not, in the last light of a day that has already left us.

Experiencing a story vicariously through an author is fascinating; it offers a vivid collection of ideas that transport the reader from a fictional setting to the reality that our world offers. Rarely do authors allow the readers to experience the beauty of dreams through reality.