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Darwin took the wind out of the sail of God. If God did not have to create life, what else was he meant for? Desmond and Moore’s biography of Darwin is one of the best biographies I have read. Darwin seems to grow and acquire the features and qualities that we believe he had, and with this grows his science too, in front of our eyes as we proceed with the book. Don’t be dissuaded by book’s girth. If you plan to read one biography of a scientist this year, I urge you to take this up. It won’t disappoint.

Iran is in news. Michael Axworthy, a British academic and author, headed Iran section at the British Foreign office once. He has written many books on Iran. I read his book Iran-The Empire of Mind many years back. As I read the review once again now, I realised the book had not impressed me much. I hesitated but then decided to post the review. Let the selection be eclectic in ‘star-rating’ too.

Till some time back, I had read no fiction in the genre of Magical Realism. I learned this word only when I picked up One Hundred Years ofSolitude. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one author I had rigorously avoided for years. What a fool I had been! The book blew my senses. I read it engrossed, as waves of rapture seized my mind continuously. I acquired many of his books. I read another of his famous books recently. More on it later.

I have read many fascinating books on human mind. Till about a decade back I knew nothing about this captivating organ of our body, a jelly-like mass of mere 1.2 kgs, but which within its intricate circuits hides not only that which I am but also what this world means to me. As I read these books, I was wonderstruck by the reach of science. Steven Pinker’s How Mind Works is one of the best books in this field. I read it again a few months back, after almost a decade, and enjoyed it immensely (needless to say I had forgotten the minute details in the intervening years, and this added to my joy as I read the book second time).

The greatest change in practice of medicine, my profession, in recent times (does 10-15 years qualify as recent!) is the advent of evidence-based-medicine. We practiced anecdotal medicine in past. There were some highly skilled and revered doctors. They had been in medical school decades back. Since then most medicine they practiced was based on the results they saw in their own practice. They had no clue about statistics, the false positives and the false negatives. If an anaesthetist came across a 29-year-old patient who suffered Myocardial Infarction (a form of heart attack) during surgery, he deduced that all patient above 29 years are prone for heart attacks during surgery. They based their anaesthesia care on such flimsy evidence. Today we know (or are supposed to know) that intervention outcomes in situations which are dependent on multiple factors such as health, economics, stock market, etc., can only be predicted by systematic analysis of probabilities. But human mind is not designed to understand statistics. It has evolved to learn from its experience. It weaves a tale of causes and effects from these and believes in their veracity unshakeably. Science has shown us how wrong and disastrous can be such biases of human mind. I read a few books on this strangeness of our minds. Hans Rosling’s Factfulness is one such fine book. It is a stimulating and joyful read.