Pratik
Turns out I break most of the rules in the book. Explains a lot although no snacking is the one rule I follow.
A dark and at times creepy tale of small-town America. A sordid homecoming for the protagonist who isn't exactly on the up & up. No major mystery but with overly matured children and their antics is enough to worry you.
First time reading a book after I saw the movie. It was still a great read. Geeky and thrilling to the last page.
Nice mix of research and personal anecdotes. Also, glad to know that I'm not crazy to be thinking some of things mentioned in this book. A great read for new parents and to-be-parents. Helps you stave off the rainbow-filled perceptions of parenthood that pop culture imposes on us.
Imagine if Hitler instead of being long dead unexpectedly wakes up in Berlin in 2011, what would he make of the world today and more importantly, how would he be received? Vermes' fictional satire often bordering on dark comedy is written from the first-person narrative of ‘Herr Hitler', as he asks to called by people around him. It's uncanny how timely the book is considering the inexplicable rise of Trump in America and the similar sentiments he espouses unabashedly to gain popular support among the right-wing. People often consider extremist views as an edgy art form and seem to revel but does it mask a underlying agreement with the sentiments expressed? Although Vermes' Hitler is never taken seriously as political opinion, you can see the mental gymnastics his acquaintances perform while laughing with him as he maintains a poker face. Also, news that Mein Kamf has been republished in Germany and sold out within a day doesn't exactly inspire confidence that we're past bigotry yet (or are people simply trying to understand it better?)
PS. I loved the book cover. Excellent design indeed.
Robert Lynch conducted a study that analyzed if when we laugh, we reveal what's inside us by exposing participants to very edgy stand-up routines from comedian Bill Burr. So are you laughing at seemingly racist or sexist jokes because you secretly agree? If not, what's makes us laugh? Food for thought, eh?
Also, as in any time travel tale (I'm a sucker for those), there are plenty of hilarious moments when Herr Hitler tries to wrap his head around things that have changed (“Herr Starbuck seems to have coffee houses everywhere”).
I picked this book up on a lark after seeing it on the bestselling list at the bookstore. I admit that the first few chapters are engrossing and even make sense. It is, at best, an extended version of the serenity prayer i.e. focus on the things you can change and ignore the ones you can't. There are definitely some lessons in there that many of us need to be reminded about but nothing that can't be said in a longish blog post. The latter half of the book simply drags on and focuses mostly on the author's personal life and his life-coach blogging.
I would recommend reading the first 2-3 chapters of the book in couple of hours and then tossing it aside.
An entertaining and often enlightening read into America's modern history. Bryson covers a lot of ground pre-1927 and some past it to narrate a wonderful tale about events coming together in an eventful summer of 1927. From the race across the Atlantic via air that made Lindbergh a hero to his subsequent fall from grace, to Babe Ruth's record-breaking home run hits, to the various trials often tainted with overt racism and anti-semiticism, to the devastating floods of 1927 that got virtually no media coverage, and to the eccentric American presidents of that time.
No matter how much you know about American history, you'll definitely learn something new from this 528-page tome that's well worth your time. Don't skip the epilogue. It's like a series finale that ties up all the loose ends of all the characters you've read about.
The fascinating story of how the vaccine that probably saved my life and definitely did for several others out there was developed in a record 88 days. Immigrants get the job done!
Distinctly different from her usual immigrant experiential narrative. Of course, it still retains the cultural shifts but she has approached the immigrant experience more of freeing up from the shackles of the characters homeland. The Naxalite narrative may raise some hackles in terms of accuracy but it's merely the background strife that tears the family apart. It can easily be any other political upheaval in India that we don't seem to lack.
Jhumpa Lahiri's books have this tendency of making you poignant while and after you're done reading but somehow you seem to come back to her books; perhaps we do enjoy being sad
Anu is in a unique position of having had the experience of living in a Nordic country that's often blasted as being a welfare socialist nanny state by Fox News. She brings that experience when she moved after her wedding to the United States and busts several myths along the way. She tackles everything from healthcare, education, innovation, etc. that separates the two countries and touts the vast superiority of her home country, Finland. She makes a solid case as to why the Nordic way confers more freedom and individualism to its citizens, letting them focus on the things they consider important and yet achieve prosperity.
I've my issues with some of the things she said including the fact that she ends up becoming a U.S. citizen in spite of the differences that she touts as being superior in her home country. Immigration is something the Nordic countries are new to and with the recent trends, not everything is going well. Once we see how the Nordic countries handle immigration, we'll have something to compare it to the U.S.
Someday I'll follow in his footsteps. Until then we wait for the day that those who cross borders are not considered criminals by those whose ancestors did the same years ago.
Couple of months ago at work, as we were writing a grant proposal, I seemed to interpret a sentence contrary to how everyone else was interpreting it. Eventually, I asked the one person I trust the most in terms of proof-reading - my wife - and she agreed with the others. So I decided I had to up my game and improve what I thought was one of my strengths - writing intelligibly and better reading comprehension. Luckily, I found this book by Mary Norris available to download at our public library.
Yes, she is a copy editor at The New Yorker and yes, her job is just as nerdy as you imagine it to be. Partly a biography and mostly a primer on common writing rules at The New Yorker, she does get into the weeds on some aspects of grammar. There are entire chapters devoted to just one punctuation mark and as the title suggests, she also busts several myths on what people consider correct grammar (It is Between You & Me and not Between You & I). She even has traced the origins of a hyphen. To be fair, it was a famous one. Did you know, Moby Dick is used to refer to the whale but Moby-Dick is used to refer to the book? Well, now you do. The books out there without the hyphen have it wrong; at least according to the copy editor who inserted the hyphen after Melville wrote it.
It can be a dense and at time boring read especially at 11pm but for some crazy people like me, it can be captivating. However, the downside is that, now I find myself doubting myself each time I use a comma or a semi-colon and I'm sure Mary would mark up this review in her favorite No.1 pencil if she could. So don't judge me just yet. I've tons to learn.
Unless you've been living under a literary rock, you've heard of or better still even read the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates. A journalist/writer for The Atlantic, his longform essays on race relations in today's turbulent times are the perfect recipe for those trying to sift through the jingoism. His profound understanding of African-American history is a revelation for someone who didn't grow up here. Heck, I'm sure people who were even born here are aware of much of the sordid history of race and how it permeates American society to this day.
This book is a long open letter to his teenage son who reads and sees the troubling news today and gets distressed. Coates doesn't sugarcoat his words on how ‘his body' i.e. that of an African-American is not really in his control and is subject to abuse not by a racist cop but rather by institutions that've thrived on subjugation of minorities and adds that history has been replete with such injustices. Perhaps we hear about them more often now than before thanks to the tech social networks. He doesn't proffer violence as the solution but his tone is of resigned anger that has festered over years thanks to countless incidences of being unfairly profiled.
Coates talks about the other side of white privilege which any non-white person doesn't need any explaining. The norms that have been set that we constantly try to fight against are dictated by what is expected of you. I cannot imagine what it is to be a black man or a Muslim in America as much as a white person can't imagine what's it be to a brown person trying to board an airplane just to get home.
Be warned that parts of the book will make you angry. Very angry. But it also instills you in a finer understanding of the world around you and all you can hope is to make it a slightly better place. As Obama often says, we strive to make it a more perfect union. But I don't think we're there yet. Far from it, in fact. But someday.
If your idea of a crime drama is CSI or even Law & Order, you may want to skip this book. But if you want a truer and a more vivid look at life of cops in NYC, you may like ‘The Whites' by Harry Brandt (a pseudonym of Richard Price). The ‘whites' is akin to ‘white whale' a la Moby Dick to signify the ones who got away and consider it your life's mission to pursue. The story follows the life of the protagonist, Billy Graves, who is now a sergeant at the Manhattan Night Watch, a small team of detectives charged with responding to all post-midnight felonies. This tale is deeply enmeshed with his time with an aggressive anti-crime unit known as the Wild Geese in the mid-90s. The toll it took on him and his colleagues during that time forms the basis of this crime drama.
However, I did not find it a page-turner in the traditional sense and it's less of a whodunnit and more of a whydunnit but nevertheless it's engrossing. You do have to keep up with being introduced to several characters which may be disproportionate to the size of the book. The ambiance of the book is very NYC and gritty and can be considered the urban drama of our times. Don't expect any #BlackLivesMatter angle to this tale though. It's a tale of a man fighting his conscience while dealing with the hard nature of his work and protecting his family.
Sandler cites extensive evidence (sometimes a little too much) to dispel typical myths that surround “onlies” (only kids). Research shows, they aren't aloof, selfish, or maladjusted and in fact do better in life than kids with siblings. Of course, I had selfish reasons to read this book since I want ample ammo whenever I'm asked by a relative on when (not whether) are we having another kid. Even the most educated of us believe in the myths even when told about ample evidence to the contrary.
Dear parents of just one kid, do yourself a favor and read this before you decide to have another kid “just to keep your existing one” company. You may want to having more kids but perhaps this book will make you less judgmental of those who choose not to.
Sandberg stretches what could be a longish blog post into a book-length narrative. Raises good point but belabors them to the extent of knocking you over with it. It doesn't help that she isn't that good of a writer (if she indeed wrote this book). Also, she has a penchant of dropping names of her rich and famous friends whom we know aren't exactly women-friendly (Hi, Tim Armstrong)
I got the recommendation from Obama's 2018 book list and ‘read' it during my commute over the past two weeks. It offers a general understanding of the current status of AI technology and its potential and threats (real or perceived). As with every technical field, some threats are exaggerated but our limited knowledge in terms of its extent temper any attempts at dismissing most fears. I like that Tegmark delves into the ontological debates and poses the “should we” questions. I particularly liked the 7 potential scenarios that AI can lead to.
The delivery is a tad dull and it would've helped if the reader didn't spell out the ‘colon' and ‘backslash backslash' in URLs that are peppered throughout the book.
Interestingly, I went from reading this book to Mary Roach's Packing for Mars. David McCullough's style, of course, is more descriptive from a historian's point of view. He dwells mostly on the period when the Wright Brothers worked tirelessly to invent their contraption that led to human flight.
He does offer painstaking details in documenting their efforts at developing their invention but Wright brothers didn't accord him much drama to get excited about. Perhaps that's a good thing but the Kitty Hawk experiments were vividly described and perhaps were the best part of the book; after which it starts to lag. I preferred McCullough's John Adams but perhaps that was the nature of the time period he was writing about. Getting excited by brothers who undoubtedly worked hard and by the dint of their labor and ingenuity gave us the greatest invention of all perhaps wasn't meant to be.
Overall, I would still recommend this book just so you can learn more about the process of invention which mostly isn't about one ‘Eureka' moment but hours of continually slaving over and perfecting your invention to solve one tiny problem. Rest may or may not fall in place. All said and done, they were still the Wright stuff!
Five stars may be a one star too many given the criticisms faced by this book. While understandably, this book is aimed at the upper-middle class of parents (and the author admits that!), it contains plenty of advice and truth-telling that is applicable to most parents, unexpected circumstances notwithstanding. In fact, if life takes an untoward turn toward the unexpected that results in a significant loss of net worth or a downgrade in life style, your kids may be better prepared to handle the turn of fortune.
Even if most of the advice is geared toward the rich families e.g. like the kids from the 2-million-dollar home halving their footprint to a million-dollar-home and donating the difference in value to charity, it sets a precedent among the rich that may address several social ills prevalent today.
For most, the whole ‘rich kids of Instagram' and the opulent lifestyle they project on social media has a more deleterious effect on the other 99% who then try to emulate their lifestyle by going into debt or resorting to resentment that can manifest physically health-wise. Most of us don't resent the ultra rich but we do detest the obnoxious and privileged offsprings who seem to flaunt wealth while lecturing us about merit. If the advice in this book is heeded even by that segment of the population, it would make the world a much better place.
I give 5-stars mostly because of handy and pointed advice with plenty of real-life examples that apply to my current status. We've been subconsciously following most of the advice by having frank conversations with our son about money matters and even answering questions about buying price of our home. We do inculcate the role of budget and trade-offs when choosing gifts and we are definitely not shielding him from the realities of life. At times, we thought we may be going overboard and causing him to think we are pinching pennies but the book puts my mind at ease in suggesting that we may be on the right track. It may be better to err on the side of more financial management-oriented thinking than not.