From gender equality to privacy rights: 5 non-fiction books to understand the world

Looking forward to gaining some insight into all that is happening around you? Below are the top five non-fiction books that are bound to enlighten you.

Seek And Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy by Amy Gajda
Amy Gajda, a law professor at Tulane University, New Orleans, US, examines the history of privacy, from the concerns of America’s Founding Fathers, to the concerns of those who carry an ever-larger trove of personal data in our pockets every day. In recounting the long history of debates over privacy, Gajda differentiates between everyday citizens and the press, and explains the hazards of both too little privacy and too much privacy

A Brief History Of Equality by Thomas Piketty. Translated by Steven Rendall

Piketty, economist and author of the 800-page Capital in the TwentyFirst Century, here synthesises his ideas about the persistence of economic inequality in a shorter form. But as the “equality” in the title suggests, he also emphasises the ways in which progress has been made. “In the long term, the march toward equality is very clear,” he recently said. “I really want to insist on that.”

The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold by Sam Knight
What are those foreboding visions that people sometimes have? Are they, in fact, real? This is the fascinating story of psychiatrist John Barker, who invited fellow Britons to share their premonitions with him after becoming convinced that the 1966 Aberfan disaster — in which an avalanche of coal slurry buried a Wales school and other buildings — had been foretold by supernatural signs.

Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist by Frans de Waal
De Waal — w h o s e sprightly, intelligent, utterly compelling studies of bonobos and chimpanzees have taken on such topics as empathy, grief and compassion — here turns to gender and sex. “Whereas it is true that gender goes beyond biology, it’s not created out of thin air,” he writes. “There is every reason, therefore, to see what we can learn about ourselves from comparisons with other primates.”

Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim
“The act of writing about Hong Kong has become an exercise in subtraction,” says Lim, a journalist and author who was raised there. With this book, Lim set out to put Hong Kong citizens at the centre of the story, weaving together portraits of citizens with major historical moments — the British takeover in 1842, the transfer of sovereignty to China in 1997, and the pro-democracy protests in recent years.