Book of the day

The Undoing Project
Michael Lewis
(UK: Allen Lane, 2016; USA: W W Norton, 2016)

From Michael Lewis, the #1 bestselling author of The Big Short and Flash Boys, this is the extraordinary story of the two men whose ideas changed the world.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky met in war-torn 1960s Israel. Both were gifted young psychology professors: Kahneman a rootless son of holocaust survivors who saw the world as a problem to be solved; Tversky a voluble, instinctual blur of energy.

In this book, Michael Lewis tells the extraordinary story of a relationship that became a shared mind: one which created the field of behavioural economics, revolutionising everything from Big Data to medicine, from how we are governed to how we spend, from high finance to football. Kahneman and Tversky, shows Michael Lewis, helped shape the world in which we now live – and may well have changed, for good, humankind’s view of its own mind.

Available in the UK via ‘My Local Bookshop‘ search engine or Amazon (The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World)
Available in the USA via Amazon (The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds)

Facts of the day

4 December

1791 The first edition of The Observer was published. It was the world’s first Sunday newspaper and remains in circulation to this day, now part of the Guardian Media Group.

Iceland

In 1963 a new volcano appeared in the Atlantic close to Iceland. It grew to become an island now called Surtsey

Christmas

Carols weren’t sung in churches until they were introduced by St Francis of Assisi in the 13th century.

Book

The first book bought on Amazon was ordered by computer scientist, John Wainwright, on 3 April 1995. It had the title Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.

Writers birthdays

1555 Heinrich Meibom (Germany)
1595 Jean Chapelain (France)
1800 Emil Aarestrup (Denmark)
1835 Samuel Butler (UK)
1875 Rainer Maria Rilke (Austria)
1876 Dimitur Poljanov (Bulgaria)
1883 Katharine Susannah Prichard (Australia)
1895 Fritiofsberg Nilsson Piraten (Sweden)
1896 Nikolai S Tichonov (Russia)
1903 Cornell Woolrich (USA)
1907 Jo Boer (The Netherlands)
1912 John W Pritchard: writing as Ian Wallace (USA)
1916 Ely Jacques Kahn Jr (USA)
1947 Ursula Krechel (Germany)

Jokes of the day

Tim Vine: ‘He said “I’m going to chop off the bottom of one of your trouser legs and put it in a library”. I thought “That’s a turn-up for the books”‘

Cartoon: Rina Piccolo, book club discussion

Quote of the day

J W Eagan: ‘Never judge a book by its movie.’