Books 2020: Part II

Gazettabyte asks industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In Part II, Maxim Kuschnerov, Professor Roel Baets and Yves LeMaître share their favourites.

 

Maxim Kuschnerov, Director of the Optical & Quantum Communications Laboratory, Huawei

Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Physic is Different by Philip Ball is one of my favourite books about physics. It offers an intuitive and math-free view on the beauty of quantum mechanics, which, in its approach, is almost philosophical.

As the author states, one of the problems that people have with the inherent unpredictability of quantum effects is the lack of analogies from real life that would make quantum phenomena relatable.

Although I didn’t last four weeks on my quantum course at university due to the mathematics, I find my world full of quantum analogies. As planners, we always need to think about a running project in terms of the possible outcomes mitigating future risks until the deliverables materialise. Also, it’s clear to every marketing person that a product’s success is partly due to its features and in part (and maybe even more so) due to customer perception. So, in that sense, one should be puzzled that observation changes the state of a quantum system .. or the next smartphone’s success.

John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir provides an open view into the daily work of President Donald Trump and his security advisors. It’s surprising that seemingly solid and experienced advisors like Bolton still act like it’s the 1980s and, en passant, suggest to bomb North Korea. While Bolton dedicates himself to criticising a still-sitting president, he is a relic and one should be glad that he is no longer in politics.

After binge-watching The Last Dance, the 10-part Michael Jordon documentary during the first lockdown, I ordered the legendary book from the 1990s, Jordan Rules, which described the tough, win-at-all-costs persona of a then young Michael Jordan.

Having discovered that the only copy of this book that I found and ordered on Amazon was in Polish (yikes!), I settled for the next best historical basketball account of how Larry and Earvin “Magic” Johnson made basketball into primetime television in the 1980s.

Larry Bird and Magic Johnson’s book When the Game Was Ours is a joint biography by two formerly bitter rivals. It provide a compassionate view of their relationship, which saw Magic call Larry to inform him about being HIV positive before telling the press, a reflection of the respect the two competitors held for each other.

Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As if Your Life Depended On It is a true highlight for all the occasions in life where you need to make a deal. This is a highly psychological book, what is required is to develop a deep sense of empathy for the other party as a foundation for any agreement. And if the author can negotiate with terrorists and bring the ransom down by two orders of magnitude, this book should prepare you well for your next salary review.

Professor Roel Baets, director of the multidisciplinary Centre for Nano- and Biophotonics at Ghent University, Belgium.

Two books, both non-fiction, impressed me a lot in 2020. The first is Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. I read both in Dutch but one English translation exists and the other is coming next year. Bregman’s book is thought-provoking. The second book, Bart Van Loo’s The Burgundians: The Vanished Empire is history narrated in a sublime way.

Yves LeMaître, president of Rio Lasers, an Optasense business.

Well, I guess there is always a silver lining. The new working-from-home COVID world allowed me to discover more books than I had in ages, turning the daily mindless and soul-destroying commute on Highway 101 into an opportunity to learn about California and US history.

Let me start with Junipero Serra: California’s Founding Father by Steven W. Hackell. From his statue pointing an accusing finger at me on my drive to San Francisco to his name present all across California missions, streets, cities and schools, Father Serra is hard to ignore. I had heard about his critical role in the first Spanish expedition into Alta California in 1769 and establishing the Mission system but knew little beyond that.

Serra became a highly controversial figure due to his role in creating a system that fostered harsh repression of Native American cultures. Serra was canonized in 2015 and is one of the two Californians selected to represent the State in the US Capitol Statuary Hall, the other being Ronald Reagan. As part of the 2020 cultural and social debate surrounding historical figures and their roles shaping race relations, the biography by Steven Hackell could hardly be more relevant and is a must-read to get a deeper understanding of the colonisation of California by the Spanish empire and the role of Serra and his Franciscan religious order in establishing modern California.

Imperfect Union: How Jessie and John Frémont Mapped the West, Invented Celebrity, and Helped Cause the Civil War by Steve Inskeep is my next recommendation. The book is about one of the most famous men of his time; so famous that he was compared to Jesus, Christopher Columbus and George Washington. His name was John Charles Fremont and his wife, the daughter of a US senator, became major celebrities in the 1850s. Think of them as the Kardashians of the times, albeit with accomplishments like mapping the road to the Pacific and leading the US army in its conquest of California during the Mexican-American war. The book covers the fascinating life stories of Fremont and his wife that led him to be the first Republican Presidential candidate, four years before Lincoln was elected.

Another book read is Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times by H.W. Brands. What could be more relevant these days than learning about Andrew Jackson, another controversial US figure, the President pictured on the $20 bill and who made a recent comeback in the public interest as part of the 2020 US presidential election. Much has been written about Jackson but this book by H.W. Brands is an easy-to-read, one-volume biography of a man widely considered to have been the most popular US president and who remains a polarizing figure almost two hundred years later.

Lastly, there is Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the Sky by Cormac McCarthy. This is a bonus for readers who prefer fiction and want to get a sense of life in the West in the 19th century. A masterpiece by Cormac McCarthy although not one for the faint-hearted.