Many, many thanks to Takshila Education Society for sponsoring the purchase of these books.

PS: A story about the Ponomarev’s book The Quantum Dice. The first time read about the book was way back in 1999 when I was still in college. I kept looking for this book finally got it after 25 years! I had thought it would be a small sized book (such as Science for Everyone) but it is a large one. Bonus, though not published during the Soviet era, I got another long awaited book last week The Biosphere by V. Vernadsky. This is the first time a proper English translation of the book was published. Though Lapo’s Traces of Bygone Biospheres and earlier Fersman’s Geochemistry for Everyone (thanks to @gnv64) helped spread ideas of Vernadsky in the West. I have been reading influence and impact of Vernadsky on our way of looking at world, our paradigm about evolution and our relation with our environment. Vernadsky’s work changes this perspective to ever further away from anthropocentrism. The impact of Vernadsky’s ideas is just getting started, hopefully leading to a much better understanding of ourselves and our only Biosphere.

PPS: Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan’s Microcosmos and What is Life? are must reads.