The Sunday Times (Sri Lanka) asked me to list the best book I’ve read in 2013 (and why); and also for the book I’d like to receive as a Christmas present.
I wrote a short piece in response, which is included in their feature titled ‘Leafing through the best picks’ on 22 Dec 2013.
Here’s my essay in full: it wasn’t easy to pick one good title in a year in which I read many enjoyable and mind-stretching books.
Words that Saved the World
By Nalaka Gunawardene
Although it lasted only a thousand days, John F Kennedy’s presidency was eventful and memorable in many respects. His legacy has inspired an estimated 40,000 books and films. This year, which marked the 50th anniversary of his assassination, I read an exceptional addition to this (still rising) pile.
To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace (Random House, 2013), by Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, revisits the extraordinary days from October 1962 to September 1963. That was JFK’s Annus mirabilis (Year of wonders) when he marshalled the power of oratory and political skills to achieve more peaceful relations with the Soviet Union and a dramatic slowdown in the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
During that year, which started with momentous ‘13 days’ of the Cuban missile crisis, JFK he gave a series of speeches where he argued that peace with the Soviet Union was both possible and highly desirable. One delivered to the American University in Washington DC in June 1963 is generally referred to as his Peace Speech. Sachs shows why it was one of the most important foreign policy speeches of the 20th Century – ultimately more consequential than any other by JFK.
If Winston Churchill “mobilized the English language and sent it into battle” during World War II, Kennedy used his mastery of the same language to talk the US and Soviet Union down from the brink of a planetary nuclear war.
What I’d love to get for Christmas is Madiba A to Z: The Many Faces of Nelson Mandela (Seven Stories Press, 2013) just written by my journalist friend Danny Schechter. We can count on Danny, who has spent 40 years chronicling the story of Mandela and South Africa’s struggle for freedom and equality, to provide plenty of depth, nuance and analysis.
Nalaka Gunawardene is a science writer and blogger.
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