Category: Non-Fiction

I was introduced to the idea of Orientalism five years ago. Since then, I have read a few times of this book and most recently last month. Orientalism refers to discourses that construct fixed and unchanging characteristics, most typically those interpreted as backward, childlike, and illogical, to the East to justify their domination by British colonizers. It was a revolutionary idea introduced by the famous post-colonialism scholar Edward Said who was a Palestinian American and a professor of literature at Colombia University.

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The first thing that comes to mind usually when we talk about the Nazi regime is their brutal treatment of the Jewish people in Europe during their reign in Germany. We know so much about the infamous concentration camps in Dachau and Auschwitz, the mass extermination in Treblinka, and the cyanide gas chamber as the final solution to the “Jewish Problem.”

Continue reading “The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans”

Anarchism for me seems to be an extreme and radical form of government. I am interested in reading what is it all about only because Noam Chomsky, being called an anarchist, is everything but radical. That makes anarchism interesting to me in the first place. By reading his book, or by understanding what is anarchism, I learned the most not about anarchism, but what is really democracy and socialism.

Continue reading “On Anarchism by Noam Chomsky”

This is one of those books that inspires one to dig deeper into the materials lightly touch on by the author. It is a very short book that has only a hundred pages. It covers a few important topics, including government, religion, the earth, war, and socialism. It is not about the history of those topics, but the lessons learned through their history. One of the most exciting inspirations I have received from this book is the lesson one would learn from the development of socialism, or the other form of polity of a country, like capitalism.

Continue reading “The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant”

21 Lessons for the 21st Century is the latest book I read by Yuval Noah Harari. His first two famous books both got me really started to look into our world in a much different light. The format of this book is a little bit different from the last two as it composed of 21 different chapters on topics that the author found most relevant in our contemporary world. Most of the first half part of the book regrettably repeats most of the ideas he covered in Homo Deus, his second book that explored our future that would be dominated by superhuman with the advancing of the combination of biotechnology and big data.

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