What We Are Reading Today: WHY

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Updated 19 April 2022
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What We Are Reading Today: WHY

Human curiosity has pushed human beings to extraordinary feats and remains an important factor in achieving success in life and career.
This is the focus of this 160-page self-help publication, “WHY-Reason for Every Action,” written by Abdul Ghaffar, an Indian expat working in Saudi Arabia. The book is aimed at students, teachers and the general reader seeking motivation to go about their daily routines or reach some goal. It attempts to allow young people to answer the question: “What am I going to do with my life?”
“I wrote the book to encourage, motivate, and help people achieve their goals,” the author told Arab News.
“The focal point of the book is the importance of ‘why,’ which is the axis point of your life,” Ghaffar said.
He said many people have become successful because they determined the “why” in their lives.
Ghaffar also points out in the book which part of the brain is responsible for action, particularly the role of the frontal lobe in helping to think strategically.
Ghaffar said that it was his “passion” for academia that led him to write. “This is a self-help book that is written in simple language, with a simple message,” he said
The book is divided into eight chapters and encourages readers to find the reason for every action. It ends with poetry which attempts to help readers stay in the “why mode,” to counter procrastination.
“Traveling in many countries and meeting various types of people forced me to think that imparting knowledge is far better than getting something for myself. That is why I decided to write a self-help book to encourage, motivate and help people to achieve their goals,” said the author.
The world would not have known why apples fall to the ground had it not been for Newton, Ghaffar writes at the end of the publication.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘When the Bombs Stopped’ by Erin Lin

Updated 18 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘When the Bombs Stopped’ by Erin Lin

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tonnes of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country.

What began as a secret CIA infiltration of Laos eventually expanded into Cambodia and escalated into a nine-year war over the Ho Chi Minh trail fought primarily with bombs.

Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In “When the Bombs Stopped,” Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across post conflict Cambodia.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘When the Bombs Stopped’

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Updated 18 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘When the Bombs Stopped’

  • Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land

Author: ERIN LIN

Over the course of the Vietnam War, the United States dropped 500,000 tonnes of bombs over Cambodia—more than the combined weight of every man, woman, and child in the country.

What began as a secret CIA infiltration of Laos eventually expanded into Cambodia and escalated into a nine-year war over the Ho Chi Minh trail fought primarily with bombs.

Fifty years after the last sortie, residents of rural Cambodia are still coping with the unexploded ordnance that covers their land. In “When the Bombs Stopped,” Erin Lin investigates the consequences of the US bombing campaign across post conflict Cambodia.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Spike’ by Mark Humphries

Updated 17 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Spike’ by Mark Humphries

We see the last cookie in the box and think, can I take that? We reach a hand out. In the 2.1 seconds that this impulse travels through our brain, billions of neurons communicate with one another, sending blips of voltage through our sensory and motor regions.

Neuroscientists call these blips “spikes.” Spikes enable us to do everything: talk, eat, run, see, plan, and decide. In “The Spike,” Mark Humphries takes readers on the epic journey of a spike through a single, brief reaction.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Lost Souls’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick

Updated 16 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Lost Souls’ by Sheila Fitzpatrick

When World War II ended, about 1 million people whom the Soviet Union claimed as its citizens were outside the borders of the USSR, mostly in the Western-occupied zones of Germany and Austria.

These “displaced persons,” or DPs—Russians, prewar Soviet citizens, and people from West Ukraine and the Baltic states forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939—refused to repatriate to the Soviet Union despite its demands.

Thus began one of the first big conflicts of the Cold War. In “Lost Souls,” Sheila Fitzpatrick draws on new archival research, including Soviet interviews with hundreds of DPs, to offer a vivid account of this crisis, from the competitive maneuverings of politicians and diplomats to the everyday lives of DPs.


What We Are Reading Today: Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant

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Updated 15 November 2024
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What We Are Reading Today: Leibniz in His World: The Making of a Savant

  • Drawing on extensive correspondence by Leibniz and many leading figures of the age, Audrey Borowski paints a nuanced portrait of Leibniz in the 1670s, during his “Paris sojourn” as a young diplomat

Author: Audrey Borowski

Described by Voltaire as “perhaps a man of the most universal learning in Europe,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) is often portrayed as a rationalist and philosopher who was wholly detached from the worldly concerns of his fellow men. Leibniz in His World provides a groundbreaking reassessment of Leibniz, telling the story of his trials and tribulations as an aspiring scientist and courtier navigating the learned and courtly circles of early modern Europe and the Republic of Letters.

Drawing on extensive correspondence by Leibniz and many leading figures of the age, Audrey Borowski paints a nuanced portrait of Leibniz in the 1670s, during his “Paris sojourn” as a young diplomat and in Germany at the court of Duke Johann Friedrich of Hanover. She challenges the image of Leibniz as an isolated genius, revealing instead a man of multiple identities whose thought was shaped by a deep engagement with the social and intellectual milieus of his time. Borowski shows us Leibniz as he was known to his contemporaries, enabling us to rediscover him as an enigmatic young man who was complex and all too human.