Books like Freedom at Midnight — picked by fans

Any book by Michael Lewis is fun and educational, but this one I couldn’t put down. In 2002, for the first time, the Nobel prize for economics did not go to an economist but to a psychologist—Daniel Kahneman—who had single-handedly (with his genius collaborator Amos Tversky) disrupted the economics profession and its core theories—much like Einstein had transformed our understanding of reality and Freud of ourselves—and created an entirely new field called behavioral economics.

This is the story of a remarkable partnership of two eminent scientists who brought about this revolution. Tversky and Kahneman had such a close relationship that even their wives became jealous. This book might make you laugh and cry. And you might learn much about cutting-edge economics and our chronic biases.

This is one of those books that stayed with me long after I finished it.

I connected deeply with the way it explores friendship, guilt, and what it means to carry your past with you. What stood out to me most was how human it felt.

It reminded me that behind every journey and every label, there are relationships and moments that shape who we become. It does not simplify anything, and that honesty is what makes it powerful.

Albert Einstein transformed our understanding of reality. In 1905 alone, the annus mirabilis, he published four different papers that were going to shake up the foundation of physics. But who was the man behind the special and general theories of relativity? The man who, albeit a genius, could not find a job as a professor in Switzerland because he was Jewish? The man who wrote a contract that forbade his wife from being in the kitchen when he was there? The man who married his cousin?

If you want to find out Einstein’s life story and what made him who he was, read this delightful biography by Walter Isaacson (who also penned biographies of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk).

Even though this love story is set in very tragic times–The Spanish Civil War and the troubles in Chile–we follow the journey of two refugees, Victor and Rose, whose forced marriage gradually deepens into true love.

The author, herself an immigrant in the USA, meaningfully draws out questions facing so many migrants and refugees: Where do I belong? Where are my roots? Is my heart divided, or has it grown bigger?

Set in former Yugoslavia, this powerful novel follows a girl whose only chance of survival is to escape war and rebuild a life elsewhere.

I found the way the author tells this story beautiful, even though the story is tragic, and describes the complexities of civil strife as well as their impact on ordinary people living in a country that is now split into Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia.

“Fiction does give you a capacity for empathy,” says the author. It should–and I found that this one does.

It has become fashionable to bash Elon Musk as an inhuman, dictatorial control freak. But what is at the source of who the co-founder of PayPal, SpaceX, and Tesla, and currently the world’s richest man, is? Why does (almost) anything he touches turn to gold?

It all became clear to me when I read the shocking revelations of how he grew up under a dictatorial father, a suspected con-man who created an alternate reality for Elon and his siblings; how he had to spend summers in the South African Veld and beat up other kids so they wouldn’t beat him up and send him to the hospital to stitch his face back together; how he treated his collaborators and competitors, his wives and ex-wives. What is Musk’s secret sauce? Read this book and find out. 

I so easily identified with the lead character, Salim, who is caught between two cultures–his country of origin, Zanzibar, and his adopted country, England.

The author provides detailed and satisfying descriptions of Zanzibar in the 1960s and of London in the 1990s, portraying effectively how he is pulled by both and yet part of both. He confronts the vexed questions of ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where is home?’

The colourful description of life in a Zanzibar village is delightful, reminding me so much of Mombasa, where I was born, especially as both places share the language, Kiswahili–which I still remember!

This is another book (or better, a trilogy) that made me laugh and cry. If you don’t believe me, just read Winston Churchill’s stirring love letters to his wife—he called her “Cat,” she called him “Pug”—in the first volume. They are a deeply moving and eloquent testimony to a devotion that continued unabated throughout Churchill’s life.

No wonder he was the only head of state awarded the Nobel Prize, not for peace, but for literature. And William Manchester writes so powerfully that he rivals Churchill’s prose. If you want to know what made Churchill tick and how he became one of the transcendent leaders of our time, read this book. 

Markowitz starts with the iconic images of Gandhi – Father of the Indian Nation, the modern saint, the apostle of nonviolence, and so on – and unpicks them to show how selective they are. He examines with great insight the way that Gandhi’s image was created in the West from the 1920s onwards, with him often being compared to Christ. Attenborough’s influential film on Gandhi is reviewed in revealing ways. He also examines the many biographies of Gandhi, showing how they have tended to focus on aspects of his message and fail to bring out the huge complexities of the man. 

He shows how Gandhi’s reputation as a serious political and economic thinker was shaped in the West first by pacifists and alternative thinkers, and much later by academic social scientists. He also provides some excellent analysis of Gandhi’s career in South Africa and India. The book is full of… show more.

Although I contributed to this volume, I am recommending it not because of that but because it has a couple of excellent chapters on Gandhi. Best known is Shahid Amin’s, "Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-2". In this, he examines Gandhi’s fleeting visit in February 1921 to Gorakhpur District, a largely rural area close to the border with Nepal – showing how this visit was understood by the local peasantry. Many tales circulated, many of which involved the idea that Gandhi had the power of rewarding those who accepted his message and punishing those who did not in supernatural ways. The chapter provides a superb analysis of the ways in which his message was filtered and changed in ways that Gandhi himself not only had no part in, but which he – when brought to his notice – repudiated. The chapter by Partha Chatterjee, "Gandhi and the Critique… show more.