Eli Bendersky's website - "Gandhi before India" by Ramachandra Guha - part 1 of MK Gandhi's biography, focusing on his early life and his time as the leader of South African Indians in their struggle for better rights and treatment from the government. Very detailed book, providing a strong foundation for Gandhi's later (and more historically significant) years. Gandhi was an unusual person in many respects, like his treatment of his family and attitude towards food. The most interesting part for me was learning about the Gandhi's initial experiences with nonviolent protest and how it developed during his South Africa years, long before he became really famous for it in India.
- "Toxic Parents" by Susan Forward - so many parenting books are written to tell you what to do; sometimes it's interesting to approach this from the other direction, by reading a book that clearly signals what not to do. While most of the behaviors this book describes are fairly extreme, it's still an interesting framework to think about the long-lasting damage parents can cause to their children's lives.
- "The Secrets of Consulting" by Gerald M. Weinberg - I was expecting more from this book. There are some useful insights hidden in there, but they're coated with thick layers of general truisms and quippy life advice. May be worth a more targeted review later on to evaluate specific scenarios.
- "The Psychology of Money" by Morgan Housel - a quick tour of personal finance advice in the spirit that has been fairly popular in the tech industry in the last few years: be frugal, careful with taking risks, invest long-term in index funds, and so on. Nicely written, but nothing too revolutionary here if you've been reading other books on the subject. It's a fairly short book, so not a bad use of one's time overall.
- "Never Home Alone" by Rob Dunn - a fascinating book focusing on the different living creatures we can find inside our homes and bodies: some insects, lots of bacteria and fungi. Descibes several interesting experiments the author's research group and collaborators performed, and overall a captivating account of the kinds of research biologists and applied ecologists do.
- "One World: A global anthology of short stories" by Adichie, Lahiri et. al - a collection of short stories from around the world, but mostly from Africa. The stories deal with family, relationships and general hardships. I enjoyed reading this - such hand-picked anthologies seem like a great idea.
- "Charlie Wilson's War" by George Crile - the story of American involvement in funding the Afghan freedom fighters' war against the Soviet invasion during the 1980s. The main characters are Charles Nesbitt Wilson - a Texas congressman who played a key role in procuring the funds, and Gust Avrakatos - the CIA agent responsible for running the operation. Amazing story that was recently made into a popular movie; the book is much better, of course. It offers a fascinating glimpse both into one of the key military contests of the late 20th century and into the inner workings of the CIA of those years. In the last third of the book the author went a bit overboard in detailed descriptions of internal CIA politics, IMHO, but overall the book is excellent.
- "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich - the author "went undercover" for a few months to work as a minimum-wage worker in various places and states, trying to figure out how such folks survive on their salaries. The book is interesting and important, but the shaky methodology combined with the preachy "proletariat vs. bourgeoise" tone are a bit grating.
- "Let's Go Further!" by Alex Edwards - a followup on Edwards' earlier "Let's Go!" book. In this one, the author covers more advanced topics, focusing on building a REST API with Go, including extensive DB interaction with best practices for schema migrations, sending email, metrics, user sign up and authentication. There's even a comprehensive tutorial of deploying the app to a VM behind a reverse-proxy. The slightly odd stylistic choices from "Let's Go!" remain in this book, as well as the propensity to use 3rd party packages for fairly small chunks of functionality, but overall the book is very good. The writing is clear, covering a wide spectrum of important topics. The code is clean and it's easy to follow along with the book, developing and testing the app locally.
- "Eyes on the Prize" by Juan Williams - a history of the American civil rights years, 1954-1965. Very good writing covering the major events of those years - the marches, sit-ins, court decisions, legislation and showdowns between the federal and local govenments in the South. As a standalone book it feels a little bit scattered because it was written as a companion to a PBS television series with the same name, but it still makes for a good read separately.
- "Rebel Cell" by Kat Arney - an interesting perspective on cancer as a natural outcome of evolution and multicellularity. This book goes deeper than usual for a popular science work into the biology of cancer and the latest research into cancer treatment. It's not a light read and takes a somewhat pessimistic view, though it's mostly focusing on the advances (or lack thereof) in the treatment of late stage metastatic cancer. I found the parts lambasting big pharma for "profit making" populist and annoying, especially right after the author describes the meticulous, expensive and failure-prone research involved in developing new treatments.
- "The Lost World" by Arthur Conan Doyle - I've read this book before - multiple times - but the last one was certainly more than 20 years ago, so it's time for a quick review. Nostalgia :-) Old-style adventure story in Conan Doyle's unmistakable dramatic style; it hadn't occurred to me as a kid, but scientifically this book is completely off, mixing different animals that could not possibly have coexisted. For a book written in 1912 (30+ years before carbon dating), it's hard to blame the author.
- "The Invention of Nature" by Andrea Wulf - a biography of Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian polymath and scientist from the early 19th century whose work and writing inspired the generation of 19th century scientists, explorers and authors that are better known today in the English-speaking world. The original traveling scientist who made an epic journey of South America, he inspired Darwin to join the Beagle, inspired Thoreau in his search of unity with nature, inspired John Muir to explore California, as well as many others. Beautiful writing; this book is a real pleasure to read.
- "PostgreSQL Up & Running" by Regina Obe and Leo Hsu - somewhat disappointed by this book. I was looking forward to something that could supplement just reading the docs, and this book didn't deliver. It provides a fairly shallow overview of many features, with incomplete code samples, no exercises, no projects and no extended examples. I may change my mind when trying to use this book as a reference guide later on (and in this case, will update this review), but for now it's not clear why anyone would read this book instead of the excellent PostgreSQL docs.
Re-reads:
- "The Wild Trees" by Richard Preston
- "Evicted - Poverty and Profit in the American City" by Matthew Desmond
- "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea" by Barbara Demick
- "The Code Book" by Simon Singh - I've read the full book before; this re-read is of the adaptation for young adults.