Tag: reading

Lyudmila Petranovskaya “The Secret Support: Attachment in a Child’s Life”

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As an experienced father, I hadn’t heard of Lyudmila Petranovskaya. Turns out, my wife has known about her for a long time and reads her articles. I discovered her book on the recommendation of a colleague, a man. That’s when I learned that L. Petranovskaya is a well-known child psychologist in the modern world. And her book The Secret Support: Attachment in a Child’s Life introduced me to her as an author.

The book’s main message is to show that children always need their parents and that they seek support from them. However, they do this in different ways during different stages of life, which is why certain behaviors and “problems” manifest.

What really stood out from the first pages is that the author doesn’t try to present her opinion as the only correct one. She immediately states:

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Laurence Rees “Auschwitz. The Nazis & The Final Solution”

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I have written more than once that the topic of the Holocaust is very important to me. I’m certain this is directly tied to the fact that the extermination of Jews during World War II personally affected my family. But this is also an example of something people must never forget so that it never happens again.

The book Auschwitz by Laurence Rees didn’t exactly fall into my hands by chance; modern algorithms recommended it to me because I had read other books on this topic. Until that day, however, I knew nothing about the author. Laurence Rees is a British historian who has devoted much of his career to studying Nazism, its causes, and its rise. Auschwitz: The Nazis & the Final Solution is just one of his books, in which he attempts to explain not only the history of one of the most infamous death camps but also the development of such a horrific concept as the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”

Before I share my thoughts on the book, I’d like to quote the author’s own words with which he concludes the book. I couldn’t put it better myself (I have read the book in Russian and couldn’t find the original quote so here I place the back translation from Russian, sorry):

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Jason Hanson “Spy Secrets That Can Save Your Life”

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How could I possibly pass up a book with such a trendy title these days—Spy Secrets That Can Save Your Life? And the subtitle—A Former CIA Officer Reveals Safety and Survival Techniques to Keep You and Your Family Protected—just grabbed my attention. I got really curious about what we could change in our lives, since I do have a bit of a paranoid streak in my personality.

However, literally on the first few pages, it becomes clear that the author, Jason Hanson, was indeed an officer, but not exactly with years and years of training and service—he worked for just under seven years before deciding to ditch it all and start his own business, where he now teaches people how to protect themselves using these “spy techniques.” To be fair, though, he has also appeared as a security expert for many well-known companies, including The Wall Street Journal.

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Henry Lion Oldie “The Grandson of Perseus”

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Most Soviet children of my generation were probably quite knowledgeable about Greek mythology. And we owe this to the magnificent book by Nikolai Kun, Legends and Myths of Ancient Greece. Moreover, after having spent quite a bit of time recently with real Greeks, it seems to me that we knew their mythology better than they did.

That said, even I don’t remember much now. So, what do we remember about Perseus? That he killed Medusa the Gorgon, who could turn people to stone with a single glance, and that he avoided looking at her directly by using her reflection in his shield. And that’s about the extent of my knowledge after all these years.

The same goes for many other characters. The book contained an enormous number of them, but we mostly focused on the feats of various heroes: Perseus, Theseus, Heracles, the Argonauts… That’s who was interesting. As for the rest, we left them behind. Can you remember the names of Perseus’ grandchildren? Or that he even had grandchildren? And do you know who was Heracles’ mortal father (since Zeus was his official dad)?

Well, Perseus’ grandson and Heracles’ mortal father were actually the same person—Amphitryon. It was he whom H.L. Oldie made the main character of their dilogy The Grandson of Perseus, the third book in their Achaean cycle. The first was A Hero Must Be Alone (dedicated to the story of Heracles), followed by the dilogy Odysseus, Son of Laertes. It was with the first of these that I began my acquaintance with Oldie’s books.

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Jason Schreier “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels”

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A month ago, I celebrated my 10-year anniversary working at the game company Wargaming.net. However, my entire professional career actually began with video games, back when I used to write out the program for a computer version of Monopoly in a notebook. I never finished it—making games is tough, especially when all your work can vanish due to a faulty audio cassette where it was saved. But even my first programs were related to games: business simulations, educational, and card games. So, you could say I’ve been in the industry, with breaks, for over 25 years.

That’s why it was especially interesting for me to read Jason Schreier’s much-talked-about book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, which, as its subtitle suggests, reveals “stories behind how video games are made.”

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Mike Pritula, Roman Zhikharev “Résumé for a Million”

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I have an interesting story connected with the book Résumé for a Million. I know both authors personally, as we worked together at Wargaming. I had already read some of Mike’s articles on résumés and hiring before, and as a manager who has conducted many interviews myself, I strongly disagreed with many of his conclusions and advice. We even had a few debates on the topic.

So, when it came to this book, I wasn’t just cautious—I was rather pessimistic. However, it’s not fair to criticize without reading. That’s why I decided to buy the book, read it, and then form my opinion.

From the title, you might expect the book to teach you how to write a résumé that will sell you for the highest price. This was, in fact, the general tone of Mike’s earlier articles on the subject. However, the book turned out to be much more than just about résumés—the authors themselves divided it into three parts.

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Fredrik Backman “My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry”

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Fredrik Backman was my discovery of 2018. As I mentioned earlier, his novel A Man Called Ove was the best fiction book I read that year. That’s why I decided that I definitely needed to read his other books—or at least give them a try, since sometimes an author writes one exceptional work, but the rest don’t live up to it.

Backman’s second novel is intriguing from the title alone—My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry. It immediately makes you curious about who this grandmother is and what she’s apologizing for.

The main character of the book is a girl named Elsa, and her grandmother is quite a character. If Ove—the hero of A Man Called Ove—believed that life should be orderly and by the rules, Elsa’s grandmother is the complete opposite. She doesn’t accept any rules or laws, and Elsa adores her for it. Partly because every night in their dreams, they fly off to the magical land of Miamas together. And her grandmother is always on the lookout for adventures. Even her final quest for her granddaughter promises many mysteries and discoveries.

The most interesting thing is that, despite my super positive attitude going in, the first part of the book didn’t flow as smoothly for me as A Man Called Ove did. With Ove, I couldn’t put it down. Here, the rhythm was different, and while the grandmother is a colorful character, there’s just so much fantasy and make-believe that she feeds to her granddaughter.

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Uladzimir Karatkevich “King Stakh’s Wild Hunt”

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It just so happens that I had never read any works by Vladimir Korotkevich (Uladzimir Karatkevich, if translated from Belarusian), even though my wife really enjoys his writing. I had been planning to for a long time, but I finally decided to start my acquaintance with the relatively short novella King Stakh’s Wild Hunt.

The novella tells the story of the main character, a collector of Belarusian folklore, who travels to distant marshy areas to find local folklore among the people. He’s kind of like Shurik from a famous Soviet film, but from an earlier time and in Belarus, not the Caucasus.

Luck smiles upon him, and he quickly learns about the legend of the Wild Hunt of King Stakh—phantom hunters who torment all the descendants of an ancient noble family. Since the last descendant is a lovely young woman, the main character decides to investigate the situation and protect the innocent victim. It’s a detective story with a blend of Belarusian motifs and constant reflections on the place of ordinary people in history. Initially, the narrative progresses slowly and measuredly, but after about a third, the pace changes, and events start to unfold more and more rapidly.

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Don Norman “The Design of Everyday Things”

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The book “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman absolutely did not meet my expectations. The reason for this was a misunderstanding of the synopsis on my part. I expected a book filled with numerous examples of good and bad design, a sort of entertaining read, and perhaps even colorfully illustrated. But the book turned out to be something entirely different.

This book is about proper design. And it’s not limited to just objects: it covers anything from the things around us to technological devices, rules, and procedures. The key idea is that the solution should best fulfill its purpose.

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Oleg Divov “Tech Support”

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A brand-new novel by Oleg Divov, fresh off the press, “was still running this morning.” The book Tech Support is presented as if it were a report about events that the general public is not supposed to know. Complete with all the necessary “confidential” and “approved for use” labels from the Schrodinger Institute.

The story takes place in the not-too-distant future (just a few decades ahead) when the Russians sold good-quality, but no longer cutting-edge, weaponry to an African country. Well, more accurately, they went there to sell it. And there, events took their own course, following a distinctly Russian-African trajectory.

The novel is written in a very light style, with a sense of irony and humor, generously seasoned with recklessness, nonchalance, and the typical Russian “let’s hope for the best” attitude. But it also carries a certain degree of political incorrectness that we’re familiar with: black people are called “negroes,” (which doesn’t care any negative attitude in Russian, by the way), cultural stereotypes are mocked, and so on. I can’t even imagine letting a Western audience read this novel—they’d tear it apart.

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