Book Reviews

Some Books I Read in January and February 2023

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Reading Time: 15 minutes Perhaps February will always be difficult for me as that is the time of commemoration of a personal tragedy. This year, even more so, marked the one-year war commemoration in Ukraine. It was a month to forget about the world, if only for a few weeks. So I read incessantly in the morning, evening, and during my breaks. But it is March now, and I am writing this article wearing a chimney sweeper Romanian martisor for good luck. As an anecdote, the French poet Jean Cocteau …

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Address Unknown: an Anti-Nazi Storytelling Masterpiece

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Reading Time: 4 minutes At only 66 pages, Address Unknown by Kressman Taylor proves that you don’t need to write hundreds of pages to deliver a gut-wrenching story. This book can be borrowed for free and read online from the Internet Archive library.  Address Unknown tells the story of two friends that co-own an art dealing business. Max is a Jew living in San Francisco, and Martin is a German who returns with his family from California to Germany. The story is told in an epistolary manner, with letters dated …

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What Can We Learn from Sun Tzu on the Art of War

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Reading Time: 6 minutes One of the better discoveries of the last few months was Jonathan Clements’ books. From Wu: The Chinese Empress who schemed, seduced and murdered her way to become a living God to Mannerheim: President, Soldier, Spy, from An Armchair Traveller’s History of Finland to A Brief History of the Vikings: The Last Pagans or the First Modern Europeans? these books are tremendous efforts of introducing slices of history to laypeople. And the language is often witty:  The Russians were not particularly impressed with Finland. Since they already had trees, lakes and snow of …

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The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction

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Reading Time: 16 minutes Articles in this series: The Limitations of the Deep Work Hypothesis – Introduction How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 1) How Women Find Time for Their Work Projects (part 2) In his Deep Work bestseller, Cal Newport coins the term “deep work” as “professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.”   In contrast, Newport defines shallow work as “non-cognitively demanding, …

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Wise Ideas from Morgan Housel’s Book The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness

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Reading Time: 9 minutes One of the better books about financial education that I have read is Morgan Housel’s book, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness. This book started as a blog post that can be read here. Some sharp insights in this book struck me, and I will discuss them in more detail in the following paragraphs.  Investing is not the study of finance but how people behave with money The premise of this book is that doing well with money has little to …

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When the World Needs Dreamers: Marie Curie

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Reading Time: 9 minutes Marie Curie, born Maria Salomea Skłodowska, was a self-sacrificing genius with an incredible work ethic and a complete disdain for money. She was also radioactive. To this day, Curie’s papers (including her cookbooks) are considered too dangerous to handle due to their levels of radioactive contamination. Her notebooks are sealed in lead-lined boxes, and those who wish to check them must wear protective clothing.  Marie Curie was a person of firsts. She was the first woman in France to earn a PhD (in Physics, 1903). The …

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