Month: September 2018

Auschwitz: A History in Photographs

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auschwitz

In 2013, my wife and I took a road trip through Poland. One specific stop on our itinerary was Auschwitz, not the town, but the museum located on the site of the former concentration camp. This was a place I absolutely wanted to visit. The genocide of the Jews is part of my family’s history.

I won’t talk about the museum itself right now, that’s a subject for another conversation. But before leaving, I bought a photo album titled Auschwitz: A History in Photographs from the shop near the exit. It’s one of the few books I took with me when we moved to another country. However, for some reason, I only started to study it in detail five years later. I don’t quite know how to write about this book, but I still want to.

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Olivia Judson “Dr.Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation”

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It’s not often that you start reading a book after hearing it advertised on the radio. That’s exactly what happened with Olivia Judson’s Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation. While driving to work, I heard it being praised in a morning show, where they essentially read out the book’s synopsis. I fell for it right away.

Strangely enough, the book is indeed about sex. But not about family life problems and how to overcome them (the ever-popular topic), but about how it all works among different species that inhabit our planet.

The book is a popular science work, but it’s different from others in that it’s structured as answers from the fictional Dr. Tatiana to readers of her column. And the readers are not humans.

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David J. Anderson “Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business”

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Kanban is a flexible management tool that originated from Toyota. Over the past few decades, it has become very popular in the IT industry, alongside other agile methodologies. David Anderson has worked in IT for 30 years and has been an advocate of the Kanban methodology for many years. The title of the book, Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business, suggests that we’ll learn both about the methodology and the best ways to apply it. At least, those were my expectations. Especially since it’s praised by various experts in the annotations.

However, I found the book difficult from the very first pages. I pushed through to the end to form a complete opinion, but it only confirmed my initial thoughts rather than changing them.

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