Month: June 2022

Book: Eva Mozes Kor “The Twins of Auschwitz”

No comments

Josef Mengele is one of the Nazis whose name is synonymous with the atrocities of the Hitler regime. He was not only personally responsible for sorting prisoners at Auschwitz but also conducted horrifying experiments in his camp clinic.

One of his “projects” was an attempt to understand the nature of twins. Because of this, twins had a slightly higher chance of survival—not being sent directly to their deaths—even if they were unfit for labor in the camp. However, Mengele never considered them human and subjected both adults and tiny children to monstrous experiments. To him, they were nothing more than test subjects.

Eva Mozes Kor was one such twin, destined to die so that Mengele could observe how it would affect her sister. But against all odds, Eva survived. After the war, she wrote her memoirs about her time in that hell.

Eva lived with her family in Transylvania when the war arrived. Her father wanted to escape to Palestine, where Jews were beginning to build their own state, but her mother couldn’t bring herself to leave everything behind and take the children into the unknown. Because of this, their once well-off family was among the first to experience the hatred and cruelty of their former neighbors. And when they finally decided to flee, it was already too late.

Read more

Book: Alex Krol “The Theory of Castes and Roles”

No comments

Alex (Alexey) Krol describes himself as an “entrepreneur, author, lecturer, and film producer.” Judging by his LinkedIn profile, he has had an impressive career, managing multiple companies before stepping back to take on roles at lower levels. Along the way, he also worked in game development.

Recently, he has been focusing more on writing and designing concepts, particularly in the fields of gaming and NFT mechanics.

However, I only learned about his professional journey after reading his book The Theory of Castes and Roles, which is what I want to talk about here. The book has received quite high ratings across various popular bookstores and review platforms. Moreover, several of my acquaintances spoke about it with great enthusiasm. While I take online reviews with a grain of salt (even though I write them myself), recommendations from people I know usually carry more weight—though, of course, tastes may differ.

The book itself is quite short and presents a theory developed by Alex Krol himself. The core idea is simple: in this world, resources are limited, and not everyone will have enough. You are either in the role of a “slave” (at the lowest level) or you secure a place among the powerful elite, with all the accompanying benefits—high salaries, yachts, villas, and so on. But between these two extremes, there are many intermediate positions that largely determine who you are and what you are worth.

Read more

Songs: Cheboza “Vasilki” & Eminem ft. Dido “Stan”

No comments

In today’s edition of “good songs”—a personal anthem to me as the biggest musical slowpoke.

I’ve already written about how much I love the work of Vasya Oblomov, whom most people only know for a single song—”Edu v Magadan” (“I am travelling to Magadan”). But at the beginning of his career, he had a band called “Cheboza,” and together they recorded the song Vasilki (Cornflowers). It’s written as a fan letter to Dima Malikov, a Russian singer.

On New Year’s Eve in the 2004 show Negoluboy Ogonyok, Cheboza performed it together with Dima Malikov, where he sang “his own part.” And I loved this song like crazy. It has been playing on repeat in my playlist of favorite songs for years.

So why am I a slowpoke? Because only yesterday, thanks to my beloved wife and eldest daughter, I finally realized why the chorus “V chistom pole vasil’ki…” (In the open field, cornflowers…) always reminded me of some well-known song. I’m sure 99% of people would have immediately recognized what it sounds like. Forget “reminds”—it’s practically a slightly altered version of Eminem’s Stan, in which he used the chorus from a completely separate song by Dido. And Cheboza’s lyrics? They’re almost an adaptation of Stan rewritten for Russian realities.

Read more

Book: Art Spiegelman “Maus”

No comments

A comic book about the genocide of Jews? Sounds unusual, but why not? The important thing is to convey knowledge, and the method is secondary. Some people read books, some only watch movies, and some consume information exclusively through comics. And it’s long been foolish to think that comics are just for kids or the unintelligent. As the history of manga shows (see my review of Frederik L. Schodt’s “Manga! Manga!: The World of Japanese Comics”), sometimes comics can convey more knowledge than a specialized encyclopedia.

So the existence of such a comic didn’t surprise me at all. What did make me slightly wary, though, was the prestigious award it received. I have this odd quirk—I tend not to trust overly hyped or award-winning works. It seems to me that these awards often follow their own internal logic, which doesn’t always correlate with actual quality.

Maus by Art Spiegelman is “the only comic book to win a Pulitzer Prize,” as proudly stated on the cover. And it tells the story of a Polish Jew, Vladek Spiegelman, who struggled to survive after Nazi has occupied Poland but ultimately ended up in a concentration camp with his wife.

Read more

Amazon: The Death of the MOBI Format?

No comments

No matter how hard competitors try, Kindle e-readers remain among the most popular in the world. A major factor in this is their seamless integration with Amazon’s vast library of e-books, making it incredibly convenient for users to buy and read books directly from the platform.

However, there has always been one frustrating limitation—Kindle devices have traditionally supported a very restricted set of formats. If we exclude image files, Kindles could only handle TXT, Microsoft Word documents (DOC), and Amazon’s proprietary e-book format, commonly known as MOBI (with file extensions like .azw or .mobi, depending on the version). This is where competitors have tried to outdo Amazon by offering support for a wide variety of formats. But in reality, do we even need an excessive number of formats?

Read more