Tag: non-fiction

Auschwitz: A History in Photographs

No comments
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.

Read more

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

No comments

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.

Read more

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

No comments

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.

Read more

Simon Sinek “Leaders Eat Last”

1 comment

The book Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek initially caught my attention because of its title. It immediately sparks different images in your mind, and you start imagining what the author meant by such a title… so it was worth reading to find out.

I read it almost in one go and took more notes than with any other book I’ve read. However, I struggled for a long time to decide what rating to give the book, as well as what I really liked and what still needs further thought. That’s why I’m writing this review three weeks after finishing the book.

The book is about what it means to be a leader and what the right company culture should look like.

Read more

Edward Ross “Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film”

No comments

How badly I wanted to read this book! And how great my disappointment turned out to be! It’s much easier to list what’s wrong with this book than to find anything good about it.

In Russian the book is titled How Film Works: Theory and History of Cinema and was marketed as “an extensive study presented as a stylish and engaging comic.” But contrary to the title and description, it’s not about how cinema works at all. Frankly, the translators share some of the blame here, as the original title is Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film, which didn’t claim to be about how cinema works, nor about theory or history.

So what is it actually about? If I were to sum it up briefly, I’d say this: it’s a collection of completely unrelated paragraphs that try to appear as a scholarly article with deep insights. More often than not, these “insights” come from other people, whom the author frequently quotes throughout the book. This is criticism in its worst form, where the writer attempts to explain what the filmmaker intended to convey, or what they were thinking. But reality shows that often the filmmaker wasn’t thinking about anything of the sort (there’s a great example with the horse in the film Afonya, which Georgiy Daneliya wrote about in his memoirs).

Read more

Eugene Rogan “The Fall of The Ottomans”

No comments

Living in Cyprus, where the island has been divided into two parts for the past 40 years and the topic of the Turkish occupation is very painful, I suddenly found myself increasingly interested in the history of these lands. At some point, I realized that I actually knew very little about the Ottoman Empire, whose influence on the local way of life would be foolish to deny. Then, I randomly came across a book by Eugene Rogan titled The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East.

I must say, that most people from Soviet and post-Soviet backgrounds know more about the Great Patriotic War. Even about World War II as a whole — less so (for example, in school we didn’t really study the war in the Pacific that the Americans fought). And as for World War I — even less, with only the basic clichés: gas attacks, trench warfare, Archduke, and revolution ending the war. I personally had no idea that there were battles in the Middle East at the time. That’s why I found it extremely interesting to learn about life there and why the war led to the collapse of the once-mighty Ottoman Empire. From Soviet history, I remembered that Russians had fought the Turks for centuries. But I knew much less about the details. Here, however, a Western author painstakingly reconstructs the history of that time, also relying on Turkish sources that are now available.

Read more

Richard Rumelt “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy”

2 comments

Some books come into your life at just the right time. I first noticed Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy a few years ago and bought it immediately. I didn’t get around to reading it right away, but once I started, it suddenly became very popular among my colleagues, which gave me the chance to discuss various points with them.

A year passed, my thoughts settled, and I realized that the book was so good that it deserved a more thoughtful re-read. So that’s what I did this time.

So what is this book about, and why did I read it twice in roughly a year and a half?

Read more

Mark Manson “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”

1 comment

I always thought that the midlife crisis was something out of the realm of psychological fiction, until this “fiction” overwhelmed me personally. And then I began to think about a lot of things and to reconsider much.

That’s when I came across the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. No, it’s not about middle age or even about its crisis. It’s more about the values we set for ourselves and how we do so. What we pay attention to, and what we SHOULD be paying attention to.

Some points are debatable, but overall, the author explains in a rather laid-back manner that many of the goals we set for ourselves, the things we strive for, are not actually what we truly need. Society imposes its values on us, preventing us from living happily and growing personally.

On the one hand, the author shows that we shouldn’t beat ourselves up for who we haven’t become or never will be. He demonstrates that it’s often necessary to accept ourselves as we are and not stress over failures. And here lies the second important thing — mistakes and failures allow us to move forward. Self-doubt is a crucial part of our personal growth. In other words, we should doubt ourselves, but we shouldn’t worry about it.

Read more

Michael Harris “The End of Absence”

No comments

Just the other day, my daughter asked me which achievements of humanity I consider the most important and significant. I thought about it, and then I said the Internet. It has truly transformed our lives.

The book The End of Absence piqued my interest primarily because of its subtitle: “Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection.” And indeed, our children don’t understand how we lived without all of this.

However, the book turned out to be quite strange. At first, it draws you in when the author starts talking about how things used to be one way, but now they are another. I’m exaggerating, but that’s the essence: the author shows how the Internet and related services have changed our habits, our pace of life, and so on.

Read more