The best books on thinking

This is a book that is at once a biography, a testament to human genius in the face of imminent danger, and a story of human injustice. Alan Turing had an idea about a ‘universal machine’. A machine, when built at Bletchley Park, allowed the Allies in World War II to crack the German Enigma ciphers. This universal machine laid the foundations for modern computing and all the amazing advances we enjoy today. But at a price for Turing, he fought inner demons about his homosexuality and eventually paid the ultimate price.

I marveled at his genius, cheered his cryptographic successes with each cipher cracked, shouted against the tragedy of his arrest, cried at his untimely death. A death at his own hand at the age of 41. The world lost a genius due to a society’s labelling of homosexuality as a crime.

We still live in this world of labelling, bullying, division, and derision. Societies have learned little in the intervening decades, though we reap the benefits of his discoveries. Perhaps remembering this man and his contributions would be a starting point for change.

Wittgenstein is the key philosopher of how what we do and what we think combine to give us a view of the world and a set of things we take for granted – our ‘form of life’.  It is almost impossibly hard to read his book, Philosophical Investigations and, in any case, philosophers disagree about what it means.  But Monk entertainingly and interestingly explains his ideas through his biography: he makes Wittgenstein’s later philosophy readily comprehensible. 

Ever Since Darwin is a compilation of essays Gould published in the magazine Natural History. The beauty of the book for me is its multifarious subject matter. He writes of biological and socio-political oddities—from matricidal flies, whose young, conceived without a father, eat their mother from the inside, to anthropocentric bias. 

In the late nineteenth century, scientists were able to prove what they already believed—that white male humans were the pinnacle of life. They did this by pouring sand into skulls to measure brain size, taking meticulous measurements, and always managed to fit a little more into those of white males.

Another of his topics is the theory that humans evolved from neotenous apes—apes which never matured to adulthood and retained their juvenile form.

He talks of slime mold which has the capacity to move as individual spores or combine into one organism, depending on environmental conditions.

For me the overall effect of this book is enhanced by being a compilation of separate pieces written over four years. The sum is greater than its parts. Their combination is a new entity. 

It is easy to remain blinkered by quotidian mundanities and take things for granted.

This book makes me realize just how strange life is.