Two fine books I have read recently were both suggested by a friend with whom I exchange such notes.
Peter Watson published A Terrible Beauty: The People and Ideas that Shaped the Modern Mind — A History in 2000. Either this book is not as widely talked of as it deserves, or maybe it is and I missed out because the subject does not make for casual browsing. In any event, it is surely a very significant work. It is a history of the 20th century, but treated quite differently. Watson takes a decade at a time, starting with the 1900s and working up to the 1990s, which is quite usual. But his worldview springs from ideas, and the interplay of ideas across disciplines, to sketch out a narrative of the last century like a story. I was amazed by the range of ideas the author must have had to deal with, from psychology and pop art to mathematics and physics, from poetry and philosophy to genetics, et alia. It is an extraordinary feat of scholarship for an individual to span these divergent areas of human thought, to distil and then synthesise their interplay in a very readable narrative.
Any work of this nature has to flit from idea to idea. So one misses digging one’s teeth into a favourite subject. Also, I was unable to absorb the smorgasbord of ideas thrown up at a first reading. Which suits me just fine, because I like books I can read again after a while.
The other book, The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today by Ted Conover, was published just this year . After A Terrible Beauty, this is a much lighter read. It reads like a travelogue, which in a sense it is. Conover writes of six big roads, from South America to East Africa, the West Bank, Ladakh, Tibet and Nigeria. He lives for weeks on end among the people who travel and work on these roads. It is as much a story of these people and their lives, written with warmth and affection. In doing so, the larger story of roads, and how they change lives and livelihoods of humans, and the transformation of both animal and plant species just happens to emerge. The book makes no attempt to take sides. The unparalleled, in fact, inescapable capacity of roads to unite the world and provide progress, coexists with wrenching change in other spheres.The book can be read for pure pleasure. It also provides a sensitive and nuanced take on the development-versus-environment debate, richer perhaps than a dozen seminars.
Sanjeev Aga, MD, Idea Cellular, the views expressed here are personal