Two excellent books, completely different:
Search; How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.By John Battelle.
Great read, seminal to web 2.0. More on this one later (I bought a copy for all of our managers...)
Two Lives, by Vikram Seth
Vikram is one of the world's great authors (BBC audio interview here). China travelogue; gorgeous novel in sonnet form (utterly readable); poetry; his great multi-generational India saga, A Suitable Boy....
....Vikram is odds-on for the Nobel prize, before the coins are placed on all our little eyes...
(Full disclosure; Vikram's also a friend from college.)
Two Lives is a simple story with deep resonance. It is a memoir of his great-Uncle and Aunt whom he lived with in England for some time.
It is equally an angle of vision on unexpectedly interwoven strands of the 20th Century.
Shanti, his great-uncle, was Indian; trained in Germany prior to WW II, then an English officer, and onto a life near London.
Henny, Shanti's wife, was a Jewish exile from Berlin whose mother and sister were murdered by the Nazis.
Vikram weaves all this wonderfully together, and doesn't shy from considering the implications, with unintended echoes for life in America today;
...I felt compelled to try to work out my own thoughts about the country (Germany) that had been so central to both their lives...
...The techniques that the Nazis brought to the task included the classification through IBM cardfiles of large sections of their population; propaganda, including film propaganda, for the aggrandisement of one so-called race and denigration of another; state-organised hatred of designated groups in the population and the use of terror to ensure the acquiescence of the whole population, many of whom were non-complicit or even opposed to state policy, but few of whom dared actively to organize and resist...
...Many Germans believed that they, by virtue of what they perceived as their superior racial and cultural characteristics, had been chosen by the hand of history or fate or God. The great advantage of being a chosen people is that one can choose to decide who is unchosen and withdraw sympathy and equity from them.
The 'diversion' above doesn't do the book justice; better the words of one critic ;
Wonderfully composed and unutterably tender .... I cannot remember ever being quite so moved by a memoir ... Vikram Seth's achievment has exceeded all possible expectations.
