Tag: non-fiction

Dmitry Brushko “Zmena. Sergei Brushko”

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I really love good photo albums, especially with photos of Minsk or Belarus. So, when someone I know shared a link in the spring of 2019 to a crowdfunding campaign for a book of photographs by Sergei Brushko, I had almost no doubts and immediately contributed. No, I didn’t know about photojournalist Sergei Brushko at the time, but I really liked several of the shared photographs and the theme of the book. And finally, my copy reached me, and I was able to look through it calmly and even read it (as it’s not just a photo album).

Sergei Brushko passed away in 2000, but during his career, he worked as a photojournalist for several Belarusian publications, and as a documentary photographer, he participated in several international exhibitions. His son, Dmitry Brushko, followed in his father’s footsteps, and it was Dmitry who initiated the release of this book and served as its compiler.

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Andrey Podshibyakin “Time of Games!”

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It seems that the book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels was quite successful in demonstrating that the public is very interested in stories about games and their creators. Suddenly, previously published books started being reprinted, and new ones began to appear quickly. One of these is a book by Andrey Podshibyakin, who started his career in the gaming industry as a journalist for the “GAME.EXE” magazine. Unlike Jason Schreier’s aforementioned book, Andrey focused only on Russian games and companies, including our very own “World of Tanks.”

Like Schreier, Andrey Podshibyakin selected a few games around which he built his book, giving it the subtitle “The Russian Gaming Industry in Faces and Dreams: from Parkan to World of Tanks.” The list includes:

  • “Parkan,” 1997
  • “Vangers,” 1998
  • “Hard Truck,” 1998 (and sequels from 2001 and 2009)
  • “Rage of Mages: The Seal of Mystery,” 1998
  • “Sea Dogs: The Curse of the Distant Seas” (actually, it’s called “The Curse of Far Seas”), 2001 (and the sequel from 2003)
  • “IL-2 Sturmovik,” 2001
  • “Silent Storm,” 2003
  • “Perimeter,” 2004
  • “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl,” 2007, and “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky,” 2008
  • “Cut the Rope,” 2010
  • “World of Tanks,” 2010
  • There are also several unreleased titles, such as “Vseslav the Sorcerer” and “The Adventures of Captain Blood,” among others.

Even this list shows that just text may not be enough for such a book. While Schreier covered globally recognized games, here are titles that many modern readers may not know, and those who do may not remember the details. Hence, illustrations would be very helpful. Memory is unreliable: you may recall that something was fantastic, but you still want to look back and compare those breakthrough graphics with today’s standards.

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Fred Van Lente, Ryan Dunlavey “The Comic Book History of Comics”

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I can’t say I’m a huge fan of comics, but there are some superheroes I quite like (in their more modern interpretations), and I have read a few comics. I don’t consider it a lowbrow genre—many comics, in terms of emotional intensity, are just as good as highly respected books. Still, my familiarity with the genre is fairly superficial. That’s why it was all the more surprising that I became interested in a book about the history of comics. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the book itself is made in the form of a comic.

Both authors, Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey, are comic creators themselves (not just this book), so they know the industry from the inside. In their book The Comic Book History of Comics, they set out to show where the essence of modern comics comes from, how they developed, became international, faced persecution, and evolved according to local traditions.

Initially, the book seemed light and purely entertaining, but it quickly proved that the authors were taking the subject very seriously. They draw constant parallels between comics and the animation industry, as these two art forms were closely connected in the early stages. Disney’s Mickey Mouse first appeared in a cartoon but quickly transitioned to comic book pages. The style of Disney’s animated films had a huge influence not only on American comics but also on the development of their Japanese counterpart, manga.

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Asya Kazantseva “The Brain is Material”

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Asya Kazantseva made a rapid entrance into the world of popular science in 2013 with her first book, Who Would Have Thought! While she had been involved in science popularization earlier, it was the release of this book that catapulted her to megastar status as an author of popular science literature. The book instantly became a bestseller, receiving praise and recommendations from the scientific community. What set it apart was its accessibility — it was easy to read, and even those far removed from science could grasp the ideas and conclusions with ease. The language wasn’t the typical dry, academic tone but rather felt like a close friend explaining complex ideas, sprinkled with humor. In Who Would Have Thought!, Kazantseva explored the science behind our bad habits, seasonal mood changes, and the “chemistry of love.” The book quickly won the “Enlightener” award for its contribution to popular science, and I was absolutely thrilled by it, recommending it to all my friends.

A couple of years later, her second book, Someone on the Internet is Wrong, was published. This time, Asya focused on hot-button topics that spark fierce debates online: vaccines, GMOs, homeopathy, and the mortality of HIV. While this book also became a bestseller, I personally found it slightly weaker than the first. And then, in 2019, her third book, The Brain is Material, was released.

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Sasha Galitsky “Don’t Be Afraid!”

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I can’t say I was over the moon about Sasha Galitsky‘s first book, Mama, Don’t Worry!, but it offered a very interesting perspective on aging, with unconventional thoughts and advice. It was definitely worth reading, and I even added it to my recommended list.

Almost immediately after, I found out that Sasha had written a second book on the same theme—Don’t Be Afraid! But this time, instead of talking about how to get along with the elderly, he focuses on how not to fear aging yourself, as reflected in the subtitle: How to Grow Old Without Losing Your Mind.

The first book was based on the author’s blog posts, which was quite noticeable, but the second book really disappointed me. It feels like an attempt to recycle the same theme and material for a second time.

Once again, it’s filled with brief sketches and thoughts, presented in the form of micro-chapters. It even seems like the thoughts were written first, and only later was there an attempt to come up with clever titles for them.

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Lyudmila Petranovskaya “If It’s Difficult with a Child”

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The book If It’s Difficult with a Child by Lyudmila Petranovskaya is part of the “Close People” series. I decided to read it almost immediately after finishing the first book in the series, The Secret Support: Attachment in a Child’s Life. The first book focused on the various stages of a child’s development and how their behavior changes significantly during each stage. In this new book, the focus shifts to something else—how to deal with challenging situations when “it’s difficult with a child.” Both I and Lyudmila Petranovskaya are careful not to say “a difficult child” because it’s usually the situations that are difficult, while the child often becomes difficult due to the circumstances.

In this book, the author also addresses various situations, but one of the main messages is to try to see things from the child’s perspective and to understand why they act the way they do. Often, once you do, their behavior seems much more logical and even obvious.

This applies to many situations where something is forbidden for the child but allowed for adults. There are countless examples, starting with “you have to go to bed at 9 PM” or “you can only play on the computer for half an hour.” The child sees that their parents don’t go to bed that early, so why should they? Or if their father spends most of his time in front of a monitor (regardless of what he’s doing), why should the child be limited to just half an hour? Simple prohibitions no longer work in such cases, as the child doesn’t see any logic behind them.

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Yuval Noah Harari “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”

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A few months ago, I got the impression that everyone in my reading circle had gone crazy over “Sapiens” by the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari. Nearly everyone either read the book or expressed their intent to do so.

The reviews from those who had read it were overwhelmingly positive (for example, on Goodreads, the book currently has an average rating of 4.45 out of 5, based on almost 300,000 (!) ratings). And since I love history, I couldn’t pass it by.

Jumping ahead a bit, I’ll say that my rating turned out to be significantly lower than the average. Here’s why.

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Boris Akunin “The Life of Remarkable People and Animals”

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Boris Akunin is an extraordinary author. Whatever he writes, it always turns out to be interesting. True, some of his books may not be great overall, but they are always engaging to read. In much the same way, I used to follow his posts on LiveJournal, where Boris Akunin would share notes about people and events that piqued his interest.

The book “The Life of Remarkable People and Animals” is essentially a collection of those posts, gathered under one cover and published in book form.

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Sasha Galitsky “Mama, Don’t Worry!”

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Interestingly, the book Mama, Don’t Worry! by Sasha Galitsky was given to me by my wife. Not with any specific intent, she just liked the description, and she knows that in recent years I’ve been very interested in the topic of growing up (see my previous post, which touches on this as well—We Will Sing With the Voices).

The book has a subtitle: How to Learn to Communicate with Elderly Parents Without Losing Your Own Mind? It’s not that my parents are elderly yet (may they outlive us all), nor that I’m losing my mind when talking to them. But it’s interesting to explore why this issue might arise at all, and where I might end up in my own “development.”

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Patrick Lencioni “Death by Meeting”

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Before diving into the book Death by Meeting, I’d like to share how I first became acquainted with the author’s work.

Patrick Lencioni is a very unconventional business writer and consultant. He is best known as the author of the bestseller The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. This isn’t a typical management book—many refer to it as a business novel. I’m not sure if Lencioni invented this style or if someone else had done it before him, but when I read the book, I found the approach intriguing. It’s a book about management, but written as a work of fiction about the life of a team. Essentially, he takes a business problem, “creates” a company and characters around it, and tells a story that illustrates how to solve the problem in question.

I read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team about five or six years ago, and I really liked it. That’s when I realized the author had earned his own spot on my “to-read” list.

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