Tag: non-fiction

Book: Timur Aslanov “I Know What to Tell Them”

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On the recommendation of a good acquaintance, Anton Vert, I read Timur Aslanov’s book I Know What to Tell Them. In the blurb, the author promises to explain how to deal with negative comments about you, your company, and your products online. To do this, he introduces the concepts of the “Light Knight” and the “Dark Knight.” The latter is ready to act tough, respond rudely, and wipe out comments he doesn’t like. However, the greatest benefit comes from the “Light Knight,” who constantly monitors his emotional intelligence and knows how to respond to the substance rather than the tone.

My direct work has never involved responding to user comments; more often I’ve been on the other side of the barricades — and I’ll admit that at times I can be overly emotional in voicing my criticisms. Still, I’ve always tried not to stoop to personal attacks or mudslinging just for the sake of it.

At the same time, I’m active on social media, I have my own blog, and sometimes my position or certain statements can provoke negativity — both from subscribers and from people who just happened to drop by. So I was curious what exactly Timur Aslanov might advise, especially after such a strong recommendation from someone I know.

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Book: Henry Lion Oldie “Invasion”

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About a year and a half ago, I wrote about Pavel Filatyev’s book, which was essentially an account of the first days of Russia’s war against Ukraine seen through the eyes of a Russian contract soldier. Even then, I wanted to believe that all this horror would soon be over.

But two years have already passed since Russia attacked Ukraine, and there’s still no end in sight. As a child, reading about the Great Patriotic War, I used to think that four years of that war was a whole lifetime. By that measure, Ukraine has already been at war for half a lifetime.

The initial shock has long since faded, and any hope of a quick ending is gone for good. And then a book came out by the remarkable Ukrainian authors Dmitry Gromov and Oleg Ladyzhensky, whom all fans of sci-fi know under the pen name Henry Lion Oldie.

Both authors are from Kharkiv — a city where, before the war, Russian was heard far more often than Ukrainian, even though its residents considered themselves Ukrainian. Before the war, Oldie were seen as purely Russian-language authors. They wrote in Russian, a language they command better than most Russians do.

But on February 24, 2022, war came to their home; Russian missiles and bombs began to fall on their city. And both of them, Dmitry and Oleg, started keeping a diary.

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Book: Damien Mecheri, Sylvain Romieu “Dark Souls: Beyond the Grave. Volume 1: Demon’s Souls – Dark Souls – Dark Souls II”

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The term souls-like is now well established in the video game industry—players immediately understand what to expect from a game in this genre: it will be very hard, you’ll die many times, respawn, try again and again, learning your enemies and honing your skills along the way.

But just fifteen years ago, that wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone. “Souls-like” as in… like souls? What souls? Because it was only in 2009 that a game called Demon’s Souls came out and challenged the established rules of game design—at a time when the industry was increasingly trying to hold the player’s hand and help them at every turn. FromSoftware showed that if you kill the player from the very first minute and make it clear that their entire gaming experience means nothing in this world, it won’t just fail to scare people off—it can create a whole army of fans and, in essence, invent a new genre.

The book Dark Souls: Beyond the Grave promises to tell the story of how this series of games was created—starting with Demon’s Souls and continuing with its “offspring” in the form of the Dark Souls trilogy and beyond. And I was extremely interested to read how the creators came up with this approach, why they decided to bet on it, and how they built these games. First, this really is an entire subculture within gaming—and I’m not exactly its best representative as a player (I don’t like suffering all the time). Second, my team is currently making a game with similar mechanics, even if we want to push further (and who doesn’t?).

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Book: Allison Schrager “An Economist Walks Into A Brothel”

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Tell me—how can you possibly pass up a book with the title An Economist Walks Into A Brothel? And on top of that, it promised to talk about risk management. So I couldn’t resist. True, from the title you expect to learn about risks of a very different kind, but still…

In reality, the book is meant to explain the risks in our lives through examples of how people in completely different professions deal with them. And yes, the book starts with a description of how one of the largest brothels in Nevada operates: what risks sex workers face, and how a legal brothel helps address them compared to freelance sex workers.

I have to admit, it’s a genuinely unconventional approach, and Allison Schrager—who specializes in working with risk—managed to attract a lot of readers that way.

And besides sex workers, her examples include paparazzi, a professional poker player, surfers, horse breeders, and even the military. Using those examples, Allison tries to show both what risk is in itself and different sides of dealing with it, including insurance and hedging.

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Book: Yuri Voskresensky “Voskresensky’s Gambit, or How I Overthrew Alexander Lukashenko”

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When I started reading Voskresensky’s Gambit, my wife looked at me like I’d lost my mind. Like, do I really have nothing better to do with my time than read something like this. Because it was obvious that this creation has no documentary value whatsoever.

First, a few words about the author of this “book.” Yuri Voskresensky has been in politics for a long time: he served as a district council member in Minsk’s Pervomaisky District, he was involved in business (there are plenty of questions there too, but that’s not the point), and later he joined Viktor Babariko’s campaign team—until Babariko was arrested on fabricated charges in 2020 and thus removed from the presidential race in the Republic of Belarus.

Yuri Voskresensky himself was arrested as well; he spent some time in the “Amerikanka,” the Belarusian KGB detention facility, and then changed his views and set about building a supposedly democratic and positive opposition under the name “Round Table of Democratic Forces.” He also actively helped (by his own claim) secure the release of several political prisoners (who, in the view of the official Belarusian authorities, are not political prisoners). And the charges against Voskresensky himself were never fully dropped and still haven’t been to this day—which, however, doesn’t stop him from engaging in politics and publishing books that receive glowing reviews in the very first days after publication.

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Book: Maxim Katz “The History of the New Russia”

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Russian history—past, present, and future—is being discussed a lot right now, and in completely different terms. I’m also interested in how exactly we all ended up at the point we’re at now. Boris Akunin wrote an entire series about the history of the Russian state from ancient times all the way up to 1917. Alexander Yanov tried to make sense of the history of the ‘Russian Idea‘. And the blogger and politician Maxim Katz constantly discusses current events, projecting them into the future, while still keeping historical realities in mind.

You can feel differently about Maxim Katz, but he’s definitely a pretty interesting storyteller. I respect his opinion, even though he’s often overly wordy, suffers from heavy self-repetition in his blog, but at the very least he tries to be objective and not lean too hard into emotions (which, for example, I’m very far from always managing).

Recently, Maxim released a book, The History of the New Russia, in which he laid out his view of how the Russian Federation developed starting from the late Soviet Union.

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Book: Egor Yatsenko “IT Recruitment”

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In recent years I’ve been reading quite a lot about hiring specialists, and I find it interesting to look at the topic from both sides. I interview candidates myself, and I’m constantly trying to get better at it. At the same time, when reading books about hiring, I always try to recall how I was interviewed, how I behaved as a candidate, and what I liked or disliked about the people doing the hiring.

About a year ago, Alpina released a new book on IT recruitment. I wasn’t familiar with the author, Egor Yatsenko, but the reviews were generally quite positive, so it would have been a shame not to pick it up.

With this kind of literature, though, it’s always important to understand the qualifications of the “trainer.” Egor Yatsenko is the co-founder of the recruitment agency Wanted: Profi, which specializes in hiring for the IT sector. In addition, he’s well known as a frequent speaker at various industry conferences, regularly giving talks, and he’s also involved in teaching sourcing (a professional term that essentially means targeted candidate search across different platforms).

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Book: Alexander Yanov “The Russian Idea: From Nicholas I to Putin”

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In recent years I’ve often come across discussions about what exactly the “Russian idea” is — what Russia’s mission is supposed to be. And with the start of the war in Ukraine, this question began sounding from absolutely everywhere. And suddenly it turned out that there is a major scholarly work by Alexander Yanov devoted specifically to this topic — an attempt to explain what this “Russian idea” actually is, what it consists of, and how it has shaped and continues to shape Russian history.

First, a few words about who Alexander Yanov was. Alexander Lvovich Yanov was a Soviet and later American historian, political scientist, and publicist. Having received a history degree in 1953, he simultaneously began working as a journalist, traveling around the country and writing for many magazines, including Novy Mir, Molodoy Kommunist, and others.

He was deeply interested in Slavophilism, defended a dissertation on it, and later wrote a monumental work on the history of Russian opposition. By his own account, he was essentially pushed out of the USSR, and in 1975 he emigrated to the United States, where he continued developing his favorite subject while teaching at various universities.

For decades he debated (often in magazine columns) many prominent figures — for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Alexander Dugin. Many of those polemical texts later became parts of his books.

So the history of the Russian idea, and Slavophilism more broadly, was his core topic for many decades.
Between 2014 and 2016, the publishing house Novy Khronograf released his four-volume work The Russian Idea: From Nicholas I to Putin, in which he set out to explain how the very concept of the Russian idea emerged, how it evolved, how it clashed with alternative views, and how all of this influenced the history of the Russian state — and even its neighbors. In the later volumes he increasingly reflected on where the current regime was heading, essentially describing and explaining why Russia rejects the idea of an independent Ukraine.

Yanov died on February 18, 2022 — one week before Russia invaded Ukraine.

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Book: Boris Akunin “Remarkable People of Ancient Rus’”

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It feels like it wasn’t that long ago that I wrote about the final book in Boris Akunin’s nine-volume epic on the history of the Russian state — and yet here the author is launching a new cycle, which will apparently offer a different perspective on the same subject matter.

Not so long ago, Akunin wrote that he began the Russia-history cycle partly to understand how the country ended up in its current condition. And already by the third volume he had found his answer and continued to follow that line throughout the entire series (which is noticeable — though at times it feels as if he’s forcing the pieces to fit).

But why, then, did he start a new cycle, titled Illumination of History — and starting essentially from the same point as the previous one? In principle, the answer is already hinted at in the title of this first book: Remarkable People of Ancient Rus’. While narrating the history of the state, the author naturally highlighted the key players of that history. But he felt that he had not gone deep enough into them.

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Book: Ilya Varlamov, Maxim Katz “100 Tips for a Mayor”

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Ilya Varlamov has been talking about urbanism in his posts for years, urging mayors of various cities to listen to him. And Maxim Katz, better known as a politician and political blogger, actually did a lot together with Ilya on improvement and city-planning issues. In 2020 they joined forces and published a joint book, 100 Tips for a Mayor. So they wouldn’t have to repeat themselves over and over again, as the saying goes. It’s easier to write everything down once in a book and then hand it out as an instruction manual.

And the book really does contain exactly one hundred tips—one hundred chapters. Yes, some are a bit superficial, and at times there are small repetitions. But what won’t you do for a nice round number in the title.

At the same time, the authors chose a structured approach. The entire book is divided into several sections:

  1. Development
  2. Transport
  3. Public spaces
  4. Semi-public spaces

And many chapters are phrased explicitly as advice. For example, “Create mixed-use neighborhoods,” or “Don’t make one-way streets.” In each chapter-tip, they first develop and justify their idea, richly illustrating everything with photographs (so the book can easily be considered a photo album — there’s more photography here than text). After explaining the idea comes a section titled “How to do it right” — recommendations on the best approaches, as well as “Successful solutions” — examples of where, when, and by whom things were done well. More rarely there’s a chapter “Where this has been done here” (meaning in Russia, of course). Yes, there aren’t many success stories in the authors’ home country, but each one shows that with the will to do it, it can be done.

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