Tag: reading

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: Robert A. Heinlein “Orphans of the Sky”

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Well, since we’re on a classics streak, after the Soviet Those Who Survive it’s time to talk about Robert A/ Heinlein’s novel Orphans of the Sky.

Originally, the book was written as two separate parts, published independently as novellas in Astounding Science Fiction magazine back in 1941: Universe and Common Sense. Only twenty years later, in 1963, were the two novellas published together as a single work under the title Orphans of the Sky. Russian readers know the book as Stepsons of the Universe, as it was rendered as Stepsons by its first Russian translator, Yuri Zarakhovich.

For Soviet readers, the novel was first published in Zarakhovich’s translation in 1977 (incidentally, the year I was born), serialized across five issues of Vokrug Sveta (Around the World) magazine. I don’t know the exact reason, but for that magazine publication Zarakhovich produced an abridged translation. Nevertheless, it was this version that became the canonical one for many years and continued to be reprinted right up until 2003. Only in 2003 did a complete Russian translation of the novel appear, by Elena Belyaeva and Alexander Mityushkin. Neither of them were professional translators, yet their work still received an award. In addition to restoring the full text, they also slightly revised some terminology that had become “familiar” over decades of reprints of Zarakhovich’s version.

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Book: Kir Bulychev “Those Who Survive”

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Kir Bulychev is most often regarded as a children’s science-fiction writer. When people hear his name, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the adventures of Alisa Selezneva.

However, Kir Bulychev wrote many works that are anything but children’s literature. Among them, probably the most well-known is the novel Those Who Survive, originally published in Russian under the title Posyolok (The Settlement in English). Initially, Bulychev wrote only the first part of the story, titled The Pass, which was published as a standalone novella in 1980. Only eight years later, in 1988, he wrote the second part, Beyond the Pass, and only then did the book become a single novel known as Posyolok.

The story is built around a spaceship that crashed on a distant planet many years ago. The planet is not exactly hostile; rather, it is simply what an alien world should be — not Earth. It has its own flora and fauna, which were never meant to coexist with humans. As a result, survival is extremely difficult for the crash survivors. The entire world is against them, and after the catastrophe almost none of the technological marvels of the future remain. Those who avoided immediate death are forced to focus solely on survival in this unwelcoming environment — and even that does not always succeed.

Over the years, they have become increasingly primitive in terms of everyday life, yet they have learned how to survive. Children born on this planet know nothing of any other life; they learn about it only through lessons in the small school of the Settlement. Even those who were born before the crash were very young at the time and remember almost nothing of life “before.”

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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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Book: Fredrik Backman “Things My Son Needs to Know about the World”

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Before Fredrik Backman became world-famous — and before Tom Hanks himself starred in a film based on his book — he was a blogger. And in the same year his debut novel A Man Called Ove was published, a small book titled Things My Son Needs to Know about the World came out.

And it’s not a work of fiction at all. This is Backman the early blogger, pure and unfiltered. The book is made up of several sections-posts focused on a single theme: what the author, as a young father, wants to tell his son about life in this world. What he believes should matter to him.

But all of this is written in the form of letters — a monologue intended for his son, who will one day be the reader. In fact, Backman opens the book by apologizing to his son in advance for the next 18 years (until he comes of age).

I honestly don’t know whether I would have been able to write something like that 22 years ago when my first daughter was born. Probably not — I simply didn’t have enough life experience yet. And now I understand that my list would be enormous, spanning several volumes.

Backman, however, chooses to outline the main topics right away — the things his son absolutely must know. These include:

  • Motion-sensitive bathroom lights
  • IKEA
  • Soccer (football)
  • Stuff (whether possessions are worth worrying about)
  • Being a Man (that’s literally what he calls the chapter)
  • God and Airports (don’t ask why they’re in the same topic)
  • The Singing Plastic Giraffe (and similar toys gifted to young parents by well-meaning childless friends — friends who will soon cease to be friends)
  • Clashes with other parents on playgrounds (ah yes, those “experienced mothers of one child”)
  • Good and Evil (how could he skip that)
  • Starting a Band (an essential stage for every teenager)
  • Love
  • And “When I Hold Your Hand a Little Too Tight”
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Book: Patrick Lencioni “The Truth About Employee Engagement”

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Among some of my colleagues, it became fashionable to poke fun at Patrick Lencioni, since at one point he was practically turned into a cult figure. Nevertheless, I “got hooked” on his books from the very first one I read — a book I’ve now gone through almost three times. And all the others consistently earn the highest praise from me as well. For me, he’s probably business author number one — the writer whose books every manager should have on their desk.

In his book The Truth About Employee Engagement: A Fable About Addressing the Three Root Causes of Job Misery, written in Lencioni’s signature genre of the business fable, Patrick touches on the topic of job satisfaction.

All of us work in one way or another. And those who don’t “go” to work are most likely doing work at home: taking care of children, feeding the family, keeping things in order. That’s work too.

And sometimes people don’t even realize how sick and tired they’ve grown of their daily routine, how reluctant they’ve become to deal with it. A lack of motivation leads to falling engagement, productivity, and proactivity. And it’s unlikely that any leader wants their team — and their product — to be, at best, mediocre, if not outright sliding into a hole.

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Book: Pavel Volotovich, Alexey Kovalyov ‘From Panikovka to the Puck’

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Photo albums about my hometown, Minsk, are my weakness. I try to buy almost every one that comes into my sight. So when the book From Panikovka to the Puck came out in December, I managed to order it through friends.

The book was “written” by the same authors who previously produced the biography of the Belarusian band Neuro Dubel. This time, they set out to show where and why the city’s youth hung out in the 1990s — what those places with names like “Panikovka” and “Puck” were, and what actually went on there. I put the word “written” in quotation marks because there’s hardly any real authorial text here. It’s mostly a collection of photographs and quotes — memories from various “scene” regulars of the time — with only very brief introductions by the authors here and there.

Unfortunately, the selection of respondents is very limited. Some are well known to many Belarusians, but most belong to a very narrow circle of people few have ever heard of — mostly the so-called bohemia: musicians, journalists, DJs, artists.

The book gives a certain snapshot of that era. After reading it, you’re left with the aftertaste of those years. At the same time, there are several issues that kept the book from meeting my expectations. Roughly speaking, they fall into two categories: the “places” described and the people chosen to comment on them.

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