Mr Fred
Interesting insights into the world of a flight attendant. The way their routes are assigned etc was very educational, since most of these details are usually hidden from us passengers. The book doesn't make any outrageous revelations, and at times her ramblings about her love life can get a little drawn out and boring, but all in all this is a very entertaining book and I enjoyed it.
Now as much as then, a fiercely anti war book. I bet modern war mongers would find a way to read it and pretend it does not apply to them, that modern wars are better, simpler, cleaner, but every human with a shred of empathy can tell that it's a lie. Today's armies still send their young to a futile, cruel, meaningless death, no matter how much we tell ourselves otherwise. Herein lies both the brilliance and the deep sadness of Remarque's book, that it has not aged in a hundred years, and probably never will.
A quintessential German coming of age story, about children in an all-boys boarding school discovering friendship, courage, empathy, and so much more.
I found it tremendously powerful because it conveys these concepts not with the raised finger of a preacher, but through the lived experience of the boys and their teachers themselves. As such, they are not perfect, they are loud, self-absorbed, boisterous, but when it matters they stick up for each other, they show bravery and kindness and gratefulness and mercy. It's like the reader finds themselves once again in school, reliving their own youth, recognizing their own failures and struggles and successes and learning once more what it takes to grow up a decent person.
Kästner writes beautiful German prose, observant and vivid and yet straight to the point. A wonderful book.
This was a blast from the past from my masters in economics, but I still enjoyed it cover to cover because it made a lot of concepts very tangible and puts decision shortcuts and effects like preference reversal into societal context as opposed to merely claiming irrationality. No wonder it is such a popular book.
A great book about open relationships in general and rejecting “mononormativity” in particular, and about the various flavors of n-dimensional relationships that exist and people make work for them. Highly recommended reading, whether you're dreaming of an 8-people polycule or even if it has just always irked you when random people want to tell you how to behave as a spouse, and you refuse to let it be anyone's business but you and your partner's.
