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Tag: Nobel laureate

  • Thinking, Fast and Slow

    Thinking, Fast and Slow, published in 2011, distils the research of Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel memorial prize in economics, and his long collaboration with Amos Tversky. Its organising device is a contrast between System 1, which is fast, automatic and intuitive, and System 2, which is slow, effortful and deliberate.

    Kahneman shows how System 1 relies on shortcuts that usually serve us but produce systematic errors. Chapters explain anchoring, the availability heuristic, overconfidence, the planning fallacy, the neglect of base rates and the illusion of understanding. A central section presents prospect theory, which explains why losses loom larger than gains and why people's choices depend on how options are framed.

    The final part distinguishes the experiencing self from the remembering self, with surprising implications for happiness and well-being. Dense with experiments readers can try on themselves, the book reshaped behavioural economics, public policy and management thinking. Some studies it cites have not replicated well, which later commentary has acknowledged.

    Book details

    AuthorDaniel Kahneman
    First published2011
    Original languageEnglish
    GenrePsychology
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)500

    Themes

    • Cognitive biases
    • Intuition versus deliberation
    • Prospect theory
    • Decision making
    • Well-being

    Who should read it

    Anyone who makes decisions under uncertainty and wants to understand where their judgement goes wrong.

  • The Argumentative Indian

    Published in 2005, The Argumentative Indian collects and expands essays by the Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen on Indian history, culture and identity. Its central claim is that India has a long, often neglected tradition of argument, scepticism and tolerance of dissent, visible in the Upanishads and the epics, in Buddhist councils, in the debates at Akbar's court and in the writings of Tagore and Gandhi.

    Sen uses this tradition to contest narrow religious nationalism, which he argues misrepresents India's past as uniformly Hindu and spiritual. He also challenges Western stereotypes of India as mystical and irrational. Later essays address gender inequality, caste, poverty, the nuclear question, the relation between India and China, and the calendars and scientific achievements that reveal cultural exchange.

    The book is learned but accessible, written in Sen's characteristic patient, carefully qualified style. It is as much a defence of reasoned public debate as a reading of history, and it has been widely discussed as a statement of a liberal, pluralist idea of India. Readers should expect essays rather than a single continuous argument.

    Book details

    AuthorAmartya Sen
    First published2005
    Original languageEnglish
    GenrePhilosophy
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)410

    Themes

    • Public reasoning
    • Pluralism and secularism
    • Indian identity
    • Heterodoxy
    • Social justice

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in a liberal, historically grounded case for Indian pluralism and democratic debate.

  • Klara and the Sun

    Klara is an Artificial Friend, a humanoid robot companion sold to keep children company, and she narrates from her place in a city store. Unusually observant, she studies passers-by and the movements of the Sun, which she regards as a benevolent force that nourishes her and perhaps everyone else. She waits to be chosen.

    Eventually she is bought for Josie, a lively but chronically ill girl living with her anxious mother in a remote house. Josie's illness is linked to a procedure many families undergo to give their children advantages, and her neighbour and close friend Rick has not had it. Klara devotes herself to Josie's welfare and forms her own logic about how she might help.

    Ishiguro's first novel after his Nobel Prize returns to the territory of Never Let Me Go: a narrator with a limited view of a disquieting world. Through Klara's literal, generous perspective he raises questions about love, loneliness, artificial intelligence and whether a person can be replicated. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021.

    Book details

    AuthorKazuo Ishiguro
    First published2021
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreScience fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)303
    SettingAn unnamed American city and a rural house, in the near future

    Themes

    • Artificial intelligence
    • Love and devotion
    • Loneliness
    • Faith
    • What makes a person unique

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a gentle, thoughtful novel about AI and human attachment.

  • Never Let Me Go

    Kathy H., now in her early thirties and working as a carer, recalls growing up at Hailsham, an apparently idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. The students are encouraged to make art and poetry, guarded closely by their teachers, called guardians, and told very little about the outside world or why they are there.

    Her memories centre on two friends: Ruth, bossy and eager to belong, and Tommy, a boy prone to rages who struggles with art. The three form a lasting triangle of affection and rivalry that carries on after they leave Hailsham for a run-down farm called the Cottages, and as adults they piece together the truth about their own purpose.

    Ishiguro reveals his premise gradually, through Kathy's calm, matter-of-fact narration, which makes the book's speculative element more unsettling rather than less. It is less a story about science than about how people accept the lives they are given, and about memory, love and mortality. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into a 2010 film.

    Book details

    AuthorKazuo Ishiguro
    First published2005
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)288
    SettingHailsham boarding school and rural England, late 20th century

    Themes

    • Mortality
    • Friendship
    • Acceptance
    • Memory
    • What makes us human

    Who should read it

    Readers who like quietly devastating literary fiction with a speculative edge.

  • Beloved

    Sethe escaped slavery on a Kentucky farm called Sweet Home and now lives at 124 Bluestone Road outside Cincinnati with her teenage daughter Denver. The house is haunted by a furious, grieving presence that has driven away her two sons. When Paul D, another survivor of Sweet Home, turns up after years of wandering, he forces the spirit out and tries to build a life with Sethe.

    Soon afterwards a young woman who calls herself Beloved appears, soaking wet and seemingly from nowhere, and attaches herself to Sethe with an almost ravenous need. Her presence draws long-buried memories to the surface for each member of the household, and the novel slowly pieces together what happened at Sweet Home and in the days after Sethe's escape.

    Morrison drew on the true story of Margaret Garner, who fled slavery in 1856, to write about memory that refuses to stay buried. The narrative is fragmented and poetic, circling events rather than stating them. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize and is often named among the greatest American novels; it confronts the psychological legacy of slavery with unflinching intensity.

    Book details

    AuthorToni Morrison
    First published1987
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)324
    SettingOutside Cincinnati, Ohio, 1873, with memories of a Kentucky plantation
    AwardsPulitzer Prize for Fiction 1988

    Themes

    • Slavery and its aftermath
    • Motherhood
    • Memory and trauma
    • Haunting
    • Freedom

    Who should read it

    Readers prepared for a demanding, haunting novel about the inner scars slavery left behind.

  • The Remains of the Day

    Stevens has served as butler at Darlington Hall for more than thirty years. The house now belongs to a genial American, Mr Farraday, who lends him a car for a few days off. Stevens sets out for the West Country, ostensibly to persuade the former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, to return to work, and along the way he reminisces about his years under Lord Darlington.

    His memories centre on the interwar period, when Darlington hosted unofficial conferences of diplomats and politicians and drifted into sympathy with appeasement of Nazi Germany. Stevens recalls these events through the lens of professional duty and his ideal of dignity, and in doing so he skirts his relationship with Miss Kenton, whose warmth he repeatedly deflected.

    Ishiguro's achievement is the narrating voice: formal, self-justifying and quietly evasive, so the reader learns what Stevens cannot admit. The novel examines loyalty, emotional repression and the cost of devoting a life to someone else's judgment. It won the Booker Prize in 1989 and became an acclaimed film with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.

    Book details

    AuthorKazuo Ishiguro
    First published1989
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)245
    SettingDarlington Hall and the English West Country, July 1956, with memories of the 1920s-30s
    AwardsBooker Prize 1989

    Themes

    • Duty
    • Emotional repression
    • Regret
    • Dignity
    • Self-deception

    Who should read it

    Readers who appreciate subtle, restrained novels where what is left unsaid matters most.

  • One Hundred Years of Solitude

    Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula Iguaran found the town of Macondo in a remote corner of Colombia, a place so new that many things have no names yet. Over a century the town grows from an isolated village into a place touched by gypsy inventors, civil wars, a banana company and a railway, and the Buendia family's fortunes rise and fall with it.

    The family repeats itself across generations: sons named Jose Arcadio tend to be impulsive and strong, those named Aureliano withdrawn and intense. Colonel Aureliano Buendia leads dozens of failed uprisings; Ursula lives for well over a century holding the house together; a beautiful girl ascends to heaven while folding sheets; an insomnia plague wipes out memory. The extraordinary is narrated in the same calm tone as the everyday.

    Garcia Marquez blends Colombian history, including political violence and the 1928 massacre of banana workers, with myth and family legend. Gregory Rabassa's English translation was praised by the author himself. The novel became the defining work of the Latin American Boom and is a key reason Garcia Marquez received the Nobel Prize in 1982.

    Book details

    AuthorGabriel Garcia Marquez
    First published1967
    Original languageSpanish
    Translated byGregory Rabassa
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)417
    SettingMacondo, a fictional town in Colombia, over roughly a century
    AwardsRomulo Gallegos Prize 1972

    Themes

    • Solitude
    • Cyclical time
    • Family
    • Memory
    • Colonialism and history

    Who should read it

    Readers ready for a dense, dreamlike family saga that changed world literature.

  • Love in the Time of Cholera

    In a Caribbean port city in Colombia around the turn of the twentieth century, a shy telegraph clerk named Florentino Ariza falls hopelessly in love with Fermina Daza, a proud schoolgirl. They conduct a secret courtship through letters, but Fermina's ambitious father intervenes, and she eventually marries Dr Juvenal Urbino, a respected physician who leads the fight against cholera.

    Florentino never stops loving her. Over the following decades he rises through a river shipping company, conducts hundreds of discreet affairs, and keeps waiting. The novel moves back and forth through the long marriage of Fermina and Urbino, with its comforts and quarrels, and through Florentino's parallel life, examining what love looks like in youth, middle age and old age.

    Garcia Marquez drew partly on his own parents' courtship. The book is less fantastical than One Hundred Years of Solitude, but just as sensuous, full of humid streets, river steamers and decaying colonial houses. Edith Grossman's translation brought out its humour. Readers debate whether Florentino's obsession is romantic constancy or something more troubling, which keeps the novel lively in discussion.

    Book details

    AuthorGabriel Garcia Marquez
    First published1985
    Original languageSpanish
    Translated byEdith Grossman
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)348
    SettingAn unnamed Caribbean port city in Colombia, late 1800s to 1930s

    Themes

    • Enduring love
    • Ageing
    • Marriage
    • Obsession
    • Time

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy sweeping, sensual love stories that take decades to unfold.