David & Goliath

David & Goliath

By Malcolm Gladwell

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Malcolm Gladwell champions the underdog in this, his most recent book, a collection of stories about people saddled with various handicaps who somehow put apparent drawbacks to good use and go on to defeat a much stronger foe. He explains how an Englishman named T.E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) was able to incite a disparate band of Arabs to revolt against the far superior forces of the Ottoman Empire and, against all the odds, win; and why a man from Mumbai was able to coach a gaggle of unskilled 12-year-olds to a level where they beat every basketball team they met in court. In Gladwell's opinion, the dyslexia that Gary Cohn, former senior executive at Goldman Sachs, had battled since childhood could account for a personality that resorted to a little trickery to pull off coups on Wall Street. Gladwell notes that Londoners who survived near-misses during the Blitz in the early 1940s emerged from the rubble of bombed buildings feeling much stronger than before.

Through various self-empowering tales, he presents the alluring thesis that adversity can actually act as a springboard to great achievements; that being a small fish in a big pond is actually better than the reverse. Gladwell's spin on these stories may not necessarily be correct or be backed up by any scientific proofs, as many critics of his have pointed out, but this book definitely makes you feel good about the endless possibilities this world of ours has to offer.

_ Pimrapee Thungkasemvathana

The Lonely Planet Guide To Experimental Travel

By Lonely Planet

In this offbeat, half-winking, half-serious guidebook, Lonely Planet gives readers 40 experimental travel missions to try out (or just read about and imagine trying). Each mission comes with a hypothesis and a "method". For instance, experiment No.17, "Ero-tourism", comes with the hypothesis "discover a city while looking for love"; the method calls for you and your lover to travel separately to an unknown city _ and then try to find each other without making any special arrangements in advance to do so.

No.31 is called "Rent a Tourist" and involves you standing in a busy square in a foreign country with a sign advertising yourself as a "tourist for rent" to attract locals who might need extra help with their work. No.29 might be more generally applicable _ it suggests you take a journey inspired by a work of literature or cinema _ while for the truly avant-garde there's No.20: "Exquisite Corpse Gad About". An experiment totally dictated by the unconscious, this calls for one friend to write down a destination on a piece of paper and pass it to another person, who writes down an activity; then the next friend specifies the duration of the activity, and so on, until the final details of the putative expedition are worked out.

Crazy as it may sound, this is an entertaining book that ponders deeply on the philosophy that underlies travelling and the joy of discovery.

_ Kong Rithdee

How To Create A Mind

By Ray Kurzweil

Our first invention was the story: spoken language that enabled us to represent ideas with distinct utterances," writes inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. In How To Create A Mind: The Secret Of Human Thought Revealed, he argues that the principle behind the process of thinking is relatively simple (even if the complexity of human thought can be vast). He proposes that the pattern-recognition theory for how our minds work, which describes the hierarchical nature of learning, a process that occurs in the neocortex region of the brain, can be, and is, replicated in sophisticated AI machines. Even Siri on the iPhone is capable of learning from its environment. Technology is advancing at an exponential rate. As the subtitle of the book suggests, Kurzweil explicates the workings of the brain by reference to a project which is trying to recreate the human mind and replicate human intelligence. While clearly written and organised, this book does demand of its readers a basic grounding in science.

_ Pimrapee Thungkasemvathana

The Accidental Apprentice

By Vikas Swarup

When Sapna Sinha, a lowly salesgirl, is offered the post of CEO at a billion-dollar business empire by the current incumbent, Acharya, as long as she passes "the seven tests from the textbook of life", Sapna's mind begins "spinning faster than a CD". The Accidental Apprentice, the third book from Indian novelist and diplomat Vikas Swarup, does not venture far from the plot devices used in Q&A, his first novel which pushed him into the spotlight after it was adapted into Slumdog Millionaire, the Oscar-winning film directed by Danny Boyle. Those seven tests, rather predictably, revolve around concerns in modern-day Indian society, the first being a forced marriage between a girl and a much older man. Swarup introduces us to child-labour mafia bosses and a trio of school bullies nicknamed the Spice Girls, passes on a lesson from Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, touches on the dark business of illegal organ transplants and a very real threat to life and limb: "I don't want him to cut me up piece by piece, to slash, slash and slash with his knife till I am a whimpering mass of blood and bones." Sapna Sinha is the reincarnation of a saint and Archarya, the CEO, is all-knowing. There are good guys and bad guys here, and lots of preachy lessons on morality.

_ Pimrapee Thungkasemvathana

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