David Quammen - The Tangled Tree - A Radical New History Of Life (Simon & Schuster, 2018) ****

In "The Tangled Tree", science author David Quammen gives a historical overview of how the visual image of the 'tree of life' evolved from a mythical concept into Darwin's biological concept of evolution, with one cause of life out of which all the different species branched out.

The discoveries and theories developed after the discovery of DNA, and this combined with the sequencing of the human genome at the beginning of this century, has given a totally new perspective. To put it simply, at the basis of the original "tree trunk", there may have been more species than anticipated, and secondly, DNA and other genetic material does not only replicate from one generation to the next, but evidence shows that genetic material also becomes incorporated through lateral 'infection', possibly through retroviruses. But even in earlier days, in their earliest life forms, the simplest bacteria probably became more complex not through evolution, but by absorbing other bacteria who transformed into useful ingredients with a new function and became part of the host's DNA.

Quammen did some very thorough research to write this book of recent finding in evolutionary biology, not only by making the published science also accessible to lay audiences - even if some basics are needed to grasp everything - but he also spoke to many of the actual scientists about their discoveries. And whether you like it or not, Quammen also spends a lot of time to present the fights between those scientists, their rejection of each other's ideas, their personal feuds and rivalries. It's probably the price you have to pay to receive a narrative such as this one, very readable and fascinating to follow, and I guess the personal and personality aspects of the stories play a good part of that.

Yuko Tsushima - Territory Of Light (Penguin, 1979) **½

"Territory of Light" is about a mother and her two-year old daughter, trying to build a life in Tokyo. The short chapters are all different stories from the same life, about the appartment itself, about meeting people in the park, about the neighbours ...

Her narrative is very descriptive, explaining what is happening and how things are happening, even if what is happening is very average and totally uninteresting. The struggle of a normal person in a modern city. It is not spectacular, it is not even memorable. I often wondered why I was reading this, and why I kept on reading. There is nothing special about this little book, except for Tsushima's elegant and economical writing. And it's only 119 pages long. So I finished it anyway.

Ian McEwan - Nutshell (Penguin, 2016) ***½

How wonderful when Ian McEwen describes human life in all its vulnerabilities, perversities, evil and goodness. How great when the characters are all too human, yet a little exaggerated to make the story compelling. How great when he makes these characters' desire for freedom and self-determination clash with conventions of marriage. How great to show the tragedy of humanity among people who are very close to each other: husband and wife and the husband's brother who is also the wife's lover. How great to put all the ingredients of a tragedy in place and one day: lust, betrayal, murder, greed.

... and how amazing when all this human toil is told from the perspective of the unborn child in the womb of one of the story's protagonists?

... and how attractive when the foetus narrator has this all-knowing, all savouring cynical streak about him, complaining as much about the dick entering his mother's vagina as he can savour the excellent wine she is drinking, and even able to tell from which château.

... but the whole human tragedy, however insignificant and small, has a serious impact on the little boy who's ready to strangle himself with the umbilical cord, the only thing he might be able to do in his little womb-world of powerlessness.

"Outside these warm, living walls an icy tale slides towards its hideous conclusion. (...) The cork is drawn from one more bottle, then, too soon, another. I'm washed far downstream of drunkenness, my senses blur their words but I hear in them the form of my ruin. Shadow figures on a bloody screen are arguing in hopeless struggle with their fate. Their voices rise and fall. When they don't accuse or wrangle, they conspire. What's said hangs in the air, like a Beijing smog".

McEwan at his best.

Martin Dougherty - Celts - The History And Legacy Of The Oldest Cultures In Europe (Amber Books, 2015) ***

Geographically, I could be a descendent of the Nervii, the Celts that lived in Belgium prior to the German and Roman invasion. But who were those Celts, and what more can I know than what I remember from the superficial things we learned in school? In this nicely illustrated book, Martin Dougherty gives many of the answers I needed, discerning myth from reality, leaving the question marks open when information is lacking.

Informative.

George Saunders - Lincoln In The Bardo (Random House, 2017) ****

Winner of last year's Man Booker Prize, and rightfully so. The book tells the story of the death of Abraham Lincoln's son Willy, who died of a fever at the age of twelve, during a banquet with two hundred guests the president and his wife were organising. Did they neglect their child? Should they have canceled the party? Why did he have to die alone in his room when his family was having fun?

The story is probably well known to Americans, less so to non-Americans, I assume, but it's nevertheless tragic. Saunders uses the story for a fantasy novel that is partly a collection of quotes from existing publications about the tragic event, and partly narrated by the ghosts that live in the cemetery where little Willy is buried in the family tomb. You get dozens and dozens of narrators, who never actually tell anything of any length, excepts small quotes, sometimes offered as parts of dialogues, sometimes as somewhat longer monologues. All ghosts have their own character, their own story, their own time where they came from. They are waiting to be allowed to enter the next realm or not. They are as ignorant of their fate as people who are alive, and as fearful of the next stage they will move to.

The reading experience is totally unique, and by itself that makes it worth to read the novel. At the same time, Saunders is stylistically sufficiently masterful to make all these voices come to life with their own tone and vocabulary, their own character, full of flaws and unintended wisdom and stupidity. It's like a Greek tragedy without actual actors, but in which the choir is the only one speaking.

They weep and are in turmoil as they witness how the president returns to his son's grave at night, only to take him out of his coffin again, and to hold the corpse in his arms, lamenting his predicament, and he does this not only once, but several nights in succession, as if he cannot depart from his son, as if he cannot depart from his guilt.

Saunders manages to turn this tragedy into a long lament on life and death, in a very moving way, using the fantasy aspect to great effect: it is as horrifying as it is captivating and inviting to reflect about our own human existence.

A majestic performance.

David Reich - Who We Are and How We Got Here (Oxford University Press, 2018) ****½

Up until a few decades ago, knowledge of pre-historic humanity could only be collected from archeologic finds. Bones and artifacts only partly revealed their mysteries, but now genetics becomes a new method to allow us to get a better understanding.

David Reich and his teams specialise in paleogenetics, the science of genetics in ancient humans, which created a true revolution in our understanding of our past, overturning many standard theories about migrations and mixing of peoples around the globe.

Some of these findings include: the fact that most Europeans and Asians have a few percent of Neanderthal genes in their genome, demonstrating that interspecies sex occurred some 50,000 years ago or earlier. He also demonstrates how the early humans migrated out of Africa in different waves, with different outcomes in Asia and Europe, or how native Americans moved into the continent in three waves, some of which can be timed, others not. The insight generated by human population genetics also sheds some light on the interaction between peoples within the same continent. In Europe, it is clear that some peoples completely disappeared as the result of viral contamination by tribes that migrated into their geographic area (as in current Germany), or were exterminated, rather than the merging of cultures which was always assumed. In Iberia, for instance, it is clear that in some incumbent human tribes all men were killed, because the existing genetic traits could only be traced back through mitochondrial DNA - through the feminine lineage - meaning that women were kept alive. It also shows the importance of dominant men in history, including Genghis Kan, who through and power and wealth managed to have a substantially more than average offspring.

Reich's discoveries also led to quite some reaction from anthropology and archeology academia, which is not surprising considering the fact that many acquired ideas were undermined, but questions were also raised about the ethical aspect of conducting genetic research on ancient burial sites, with or without the consent of the tribes still living there. The issue became especially sensitive in the context of Native American tribes: genetic insights could confirm or disprove a genetic lineage between current tribes and the bones found in burial grounds.

The genetic findings also allow to measure the effect of the caste system in India, demonstrating that despite the thousands of years of cohabitation, genetic distinctiveness of brahmins and untouchables has remained.

On the positive side, this new technology allows for a much more precise understanding of how we as humans are all the same species, with lots of common ancestors, who often intermingled and migrated in ways that were never even considered a decade ago.

It is fascinating, illuminating and highly promising for even more research findings in the coming decades.

David Szalay - All That Man Is (Penguin, 2016) ***

I was halfway through the first story when I realised that it was familiar, and by mistake, I was reading it again. Is this possible? Described as "a triumph" (The Guardian), and "sad masterpiece" (Daily Mail), it was somewhat less than memorable to this guy. "All That Man Is" is a collection of nine short stories with men in the leading role.

Because it was the only book I took with me on a trip abroad, when I realised I had already read it, that I read it twice. Now, trying to review it again, all within the same year, I still seem not to remember it too much. Yes, I recognise some of the characters, some of the settings. I remember being irritated by it, not only by the stupidity of the characters, their painful ignorance and my lack of spontaneous interest in them, but also by the way non-Brits are described, and especially eastern Europeans, the kind of ignorant buffoons that barely surpass the conservative British cliché about foreigners.

So, no, not really memorable.

Which book?

John Banville - Mrs Osmond (Viking, 2017)

I really liked Banville's "Frame" trilogy, "The Sea", and "Ancient Light", but less so this one. How many pages do you read before you realise you're wasting your time on a book that you're not interested in, that's not captivating enough, or not resonating with you. You can admire Banville's stylistic mastership of writing a sequel to Henry James's "Portrait Of A Lady", or even his courage to attempt it, but then it just does not manage to get my attention, concentration and emotional engagement. You read the sentences, the old-fashioned style, the petty concerns of the characters. I read till page 50, which is the minimum of pages when I decide it's worth putting the effort in it or not.

Stanley Redgrove - Johannes Baptista Van Helmont (William Rider & Son, 1922)

Jan Van Helmont was a Flemish alchemist, physicist and philosopher, as the subtitle of this biography explains. He lived in the 17th Century, not far from where I live.

He termed the word 'gas', as he discovered that there were more gaseous substance apart from air. He was a true experimentalist, which was very new at that time. He not only observed things that were happening, but he set up experiments to check and double-check whether his intuitions were right or what would happen if he mixed certain things. The fact that he was also an alchemist and believed in the existence of the Elixir of Life, may have helped him in his endeavours.

He also understood the importance of other agents to help digestion, such as enzymes, even if he did not know about how this actually worked.

Interesting how science and ignorance and superstition look from a distance. In some centuries people will look back at us in the same way, and wonder why we could not see what is so obvious.

David Grossman - A Horse Walks Into A Bar (Penguin, 2016) ***

This one of those books which gives very mixed feelings. It is painful, irritating, ridiculous ... but that's how it's meant to be. The story's main character, Dovaleh G, is an older stand-up comedian whose humour goes beyond sarcasm and cynicism even, it goes beyond the acceptable, exposing his own's life story on stage in a way that both intellectually, emotionally, and even physically results in rejecting by his own audience. There is no fun anymore, no humour, no smiles are generated, not even sympathy. How do you react when the story's main character only creates antipathy? You put the book aside, and go on with your life, or you keep reading, regardless, taking the unpleasantness with you. I did, even if I hesitated more than once. And that's exactly the effect Grossman intended: as a reader, you are part of the audience. Do you stay on to be insulted and morally aggressed by the unrelentless political incorrectness? Do you keep listening to someone whose obsessions are immoral and rejectable?

The main character has summoned the narrator to join one conference, as an older friend who once also participated in summer camp. The little history that binds them will become clear as the 'novel' develops, as is the actual reason why the narrator has been invited to attend. It's the kind of mystery that kept me going: you want to understand ...

It's a book about life, about the limits of divulging your own personal obsessions and fears with the outside world, about the cruelty of emotions that keep dominating people's lives for decades, about what is attractive and repulsive about it, about moral limits of emotions, thoughts and even physical integrity.

It's not fun too read.

Cormac McCarthy - All The Pretty Horses (Picador, 1992) ****

One of the classics of modern American literature, it had to be read, and I can highly recommend it to anyone who likes good prose, real characters and narratives that question the current world.

Two young men, John Grady Cole and his friend Lacey Rawlins, leave their hometown in Texas, and decide to move south to Mexico to find jobs as horsemen, which is their only skill. Both friends are 'true' characters, and the voice they receive from McCarthy is one of the real pleasures of the book. They are naive and experts, boys and already men, real friends but with questions for each other.

They meet a third, even younger man, skilled at shooting, out there on his own, needing help in a way, but without clear intentions or history. They travel together and encounter people, visit towns, come across natural challenges like rivers and storms, they get drunk, they find work, they get robbed, ... But below the surface, something more ominous is taking place: a world is changing. We are in 1949. We enter a new era. The old world is disappearing and a new world is opening up: the old western cowboy world with the new one, but also geographically, between the north and the south, between the local and the global.

A rich Mexican farmer expands: "They went to France for their education. He and Gustavo. And others. All these young people. They all returned full of ideas. Full of ideas, and yet there seemed to be no agreement among them. How do you account for that? Their parents sent them for these ideas, no? And they went there are received them. Yet when they returned they opened their valises, so to speak, no two contained the same thing. ... People of my generation are more cautious. I think we dont believe that people can be improved in their character by reason. That seems a very french idea". The solid foundations of simple community ideas seem to be shaken. What was taken for granted suddenly becomes shaken.

And then at an even deeper level below the narrative, other forces are at work.

When the boys drink to much and are vomiting their hearts out: "In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool".

When lying in pain at night in the desert "He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits".

Describing nature after a storm: "The horses stepped archly among the shadows that fell over the road, the bracken steamed. Bye and bye they passed a stand of roadside cholla against which small birds had been driven by the storm and there impaled. Gray nameless birds espaliered in attitudes of stillborn flight or hanging loosely in their feathers. Some of them were still alive and they twisted on their spines as the horses passed and raised their heads and cried out but the horsemen rode on. The sun rose up in the sky and the country took on a new color, green fire in the acacia and paloverde and green in the roadside run-off grass and fire in the ocotillo. As if the rain were electric, had grounded circuits that the electric might be".

Or deep insights into the nature of horses: "Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal. He said that if a person understood the soul of the horse then he would understand all horses that ever were".

Or ranchers' truths: "There were two things they agreed upon wholly and that were never spoken and that was that God had put horses on earth to work cattle and that other than cattle there was no wealth proper to man".

Talking about the very poor Mexican children: "Their intelligence was frightening. And they had a freedom which we envied. There were so few restraints upon them. So few expectations. Then at the age of eleven or twelve they would cease being children. They lost their childhood overnight and they had no youth. They became very serious. As if some terrible truth had been visited upon them. Some terrible vision. At a certain points in their lives they were sobered in an instant and I was puzzled by this but of course I could not know what it was they saw. What it was they knew".

It is a western, with cowboys and horses, with a simple narrative that you read like a real page-turner, but don't go too fast. Cherish McCarthy's wonderful characters, and appreciate that below his style a whole world is lurking, poking holes in the surface fabric.

Tim Harford - Messy - How To Be Creative and Resilient In A Tidy-Minded World (Abacus, 2016) **

Financial Times journalis Tim Harford explains why "being messy" is an integral part of the creative process, and also helps in generating unexpected business results. On the other hand, he also gives examples of how mechanical thinking can lead to catastrophes.

Of course he is right on both accounts, but also possibly wrong. It seems critical to me to allow for lateral thinking and hence to break through the mechanistic concepts of thought, but at the same time you should also allow for some systematic approaches, and be very selective in which level of messiness you can endure. His elaboration on the dangers of automated systems without human intervention to avoid incidents, has in fact nothing to do with 'messiness', but it operates on a totally different plane.

There's a lot of name-dropping in the book, either of people Harford visited (such as Brian Eno), or whose works he read. Unfortunately, many of those quotes are only relevant at surface level. They don't add to the argument, but just serve as illustrative purposes.

In his endeavour to merge many different thoughts of sociology, business, art and psychology, he also tends to mix things up at the same time.

What you would have expected to find the right balance between messiness and order, not only that the former is important, because that's too obvious.

On the positive side, the book offers a lot of interesting anecdotes and stories. I only wish they were linked with a more rigid logic, instead of just beying a messy heap of unrelated events.

Neel Mukherjee - A State Of Freedom (Penguin, 2017) **

There is a lot of interesting and great literature coming from India, but this book is not part of it, despite the general acclaim. It's a book with five 'sections' or stories, talking about the challenges of life in rural villages and cities in India.

One of Mukherjee's stories is about the world of difference between the "americanised" young Indian visiting his parents in Mumbai and the servants working in the same house, one about a father visiting India with his six-year old son who was born in the US, one about a man training a bear to earn a living, despite the new law that forbids this kind of animal exploitation.

I read halfway through the book, then stopped because it's a waste of time. The writing is average, the stories not really gripping, the tensions between the worlds do not come to life, and since the book did not show any evidence of improving, my decision was made.

Leïla Slimani - Chanson Douce (Gallimard, 2016) ****

"Chanson Douce" is nothing short of a modern tragedy. It starts with the startling sentence: "The baby is dead", and then describes in detail the suffering of the other child and the bloody crime scene. The rest of the novel explains how this came to be, and gradually the story unfolds of a young mother who decides to pick up her professional life again after having stayed with the children for some years. They look for a nanny and find the ideal one, Louise, who indeed initially appears to be perfect, but as we all know and suspect: that is not the case.

The book's geography is almost limited to the flat of the young couple. It describes the intimate relationships between the three adults and the children, and the changing nature of those relationships and of the characters themselves. They all circle around each other with changing perceptions, intentions and moods, all asking questions about their place in life, to the level of being suffocated in their limited space. In a way, the end was inescapable. The space in the novel as well as the possibilities of each individual to grow and expand, slowly contracts as the story evolves, and the moments of trust, and joy, and personal development, are inexorably reduced to a small point in space, not because of some grand happenings, but rather to a multitude of little things that keep tightening the plot to its inevitable end.

Leïla Slimani is both highly acclaimed and denounced. For this novel she received the prestigious "Prix Goncourt", and several other literary prizes, and rightly so. On the other hand, her first novel "Dans Le Jardin de L'Ogre" received lots of negative reaction from the conservative (Moroccan) community because of its open sexual nature, including female sexual desire, which was then even exacerbated by her book " Sexe et Mensonges: La Vie Sexuelle Au Maroc" ("sex and lies: sex life in Morocco).

"Chanson Douce" is not very uplifting as far as the story goes, but it's uplifting to read a new voice in French literature.

Benedict Wells - The End Of Loneliness (Sceptre, 2018) ***

It's already a best-seller, translated in ten languages, 200,000 copies sold in Germany alone, winner of the European Union Prize for Literature, and more than 30 weeks in Der Spiegel's best-seller list. I don't need to add much to that. The original German title is "Vom Ende der Einsamkeit", and the author's name may sound English, but it is a nom-de-plume. The "Wells" is taken from the character of the orphan Homer Wells in John Irving's "The Cider House Rules". Benedict Wells was himself sent to boarding school when he was six years old, and spent his entire youth away from home, even though his parents were alive. Not so in this novel, where three children, two boys and a girl, are sent to boarding school after their parents died in a car crash. They have to find their way in school, and later in life. Even if all three lives bifurcate in different directions, at crucial points in life they meet again and help each other if needed. The narrator, the youngest of the three, recounts his story when meeting Alva again, a girl he was once in love with. The renew their friendship when adults.

The novel is of course partly based on true emotions and experiences: the loneliness of a child, the urge of the children to each get accepted as full individuals with their special character traits and personalities in the often hostile world of children and the ununderstanding world of adults. Even later in life, this craving to be loved remains one of the main driving forces of the narrator, as well as his biggest frustration.

It is sentimental. It is very emotional ... but to Wells's credit, he tries to stay on the right side of good taste, he does not overdo it.

Reza Aslan - God: A Human History Of Religion (Corgi, 2018) **

Reza Aslan is an Iranian writer, best know for his books on the life of Jezus, Islam, and fundamentalism. In "God", he gives an overview from early religions to today, obviously not in great detail, but with a grand sweep through history.

Aslan himself is a believer, switching from the Islam of his parents to the Christianity of his friends in the United States where he grew up, then abandoning official religion to currently believe in a 'dehumanized' god, a kind of spiritual presence, a pantheistic god.

You get the full history, from the depiction of gods in early caves dating back to 18,000 BCE, over the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians and Greeks, to our more 'modern' religions such as Islam and Christianity.

Aslan is not a historian, and also not a scholar, even if he presents himself as such. He makes a lot of claims in this book that are unsubstantiated and unreferenced.

For instance, I would be interested to know how many "villages (existed) with booming populations, building giant temples, creating great works of art, and sharing our technologies (with other villages), before it occurred to us to grow our food". This quote, without reference, should reinforce his claim that the Göbekli Tepe site in Turkey was no exception but rather the rule. But who says that? Where is it written?

He also claims that people that "the ancients simply accepted the idea that the world of the dead is just a continuation of the world of the living". The "ancients"? As if they are all the same. Again, who wrote this, who demonstrated this, and where is it published? Having read a lot of the "invention of heaven", this is clearly not correct. Another example: "When we organized ourselves in small, wandering packs of hunter-gatherers united by blood and kinship, we envisioned the world beyond ours to be a dreamlike version of our own, bursting with hordes of tame animals, shepherded by the Lord of Beasts for our spirit ancestors to stalk with ease". What? Really? Says who? Claims such as this one - and there are many examples - are ok in fiction, but not in a book with a claim to scientific (even if popular) evidence.

On the positive side, there are some interesting and factual stories.

If you're interested in the history of religion, I recommend you to find more reliable and scientific sources.

Mario Livio - Brilliant Blunders (Simon & Schuster, 2013) ***

"Brilliant Blunders" is not about how blunders turned out to true, and the subtitle "Colossal Mistakes By Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding Of Life And The Universe" is clearly erroneous. It should actually read "Colossal Mistakes By Great Scientists Who Changed Our Understanding Of Life And The Universe", or in other words, the mistakes were mistakes and they didn't change our understanding of life and the universe.

Yet despite these semantics, the Mario Livio's book gives a deep insight into the theories of well-renowned scientists, and their emotional attachment to them, which often resulted in initial rejection when new theories were brought forward that went against the ones that made them so famous and renowned.

The scientists under review are not of the least: Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Linus Pauling and Albert Einstein. On top of the explanation of their core theories, the blunders look like blunders from our own current perspective, but could not in all truth be called 'blunders'. The stupidity of it only depends on clinging to one's own insights and intuitions, which in hindsight appeared to be wrong. More importantly, it shows that science is a journey with many bifurcations and dead ends, with theories exploring new possible explanations, only to be proved false by new evidence or more coherent theories.

An interesting book.

Mike McCormack - Solar Bones (Canongate, 2016) **

In the span of one hour, engineer Marcus Conway reflects on his life, his work, his family, the joys and the tensions, presented as one long 'monologue intérieur' without punctuation, as one endless sentence. Conway's life is disintegrating, his wife left him, his son lives in Austrialia with an uncertain future, his daughter is close yet he does not understand her, and then he gets hit professionally too.

Reading the story with its good cadence and rhythm quickly turns it into a mesmerising experience, but of course a novel is too long to read in one session, so you have to break it up and get into it again, and unfortunately, the story itself and the main character did not really resonate with me, and as the narrative progresses, I did seem to care less and less about Conway's predicament.

Paolo Cognetti - The Eight Mountains (Harvill Secker, 2018) ***

Like Henry David Thoreau in "Walden", Italian documentary maker Paolo Cognetti decided to leave his city life and move to the mountains in the north of Italy. The story in "The Eight Mountains" is partly autobiographic, and it describes the friendship of Pietro, a young Milanese boy who goes on holidays every year to the same place in the mountains, with Bruno, the only boy in the remote and half-deserted village. Even if they only meet once a year, their friendship becomes solid, not based on words or common interests, but at some deeper understanding of life. Their worlds could not be more different, including the relationships with their parents, although both boys, as can be expected do not understand the whims and strange character traits of their parents, for Pietro primarily his father, for Bruno his mother.

Efforts for both worlds to meet in a more structural way, and outside of the holidays, fail, as if there is a border that cannot or should not be crossed. Pietro's universe becomes the world, including frequent stays in Nepal, whereas Bruno never actually leaves his village. The mutual understanding of both boys and later as young men, is maintained despite the changes in their lives, both personal and professional.

Cognetti writes in a very accessible and balanced way, well integrating memories and reflections in the action, yet he's most convincing when describing nature and the ambiguity of relationships. It's a story about leaving the rat race, and about getting a deeper understanding about the beauty and harshness of nature. It is a little mellow at moments, but somehow that only emphasises the authenticity of the writing.

Hans Rosling - Factfulness (Flatiron, 2018) ****

If you don't know Swedish epidemiologist Hans Rosling, it's high time you find out about him on the internet, via his Gapminder Foundation, or through this book, which was published posthumously. 

Rosling is an incredible educator and big picture thinker, who managed to show the state of the world through very interesting visualisations of the evolution of poverty and wealth, of diseases and of demographic changes. 

"Factfulness" describes in a comprehensive way all his teaching, youtube presentations and TED Talks. 

This book should be mandatory reading in all schools across the world. It will bring both humility and hope for everybody. He demonstrates that most countries in the world are currently having the same living standards as the richest countries somewhere in the middle of last century. He shows how things improve for many people across the world, and how our categorisation of the world in "developed" and "developing" countries is completely outdated. 

One of the best things about his lectures, is that Rosling always submitted his audiences to a quiz before his presentation, only to show how most of us have completely wrong assumptions about the state of the world. And these audiences included politicians, journalists, WHO and IMF collaborators, who in general and with great majority gave the wrong answers. 

And that includes both you and me. So you'd better read this book too!