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Finished
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- The Dalai Lama's Little Book of Compassion (1)
- The Essential Teachings
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By Bstan-ʾdzin-rgya-mtsho -
Finished on Mar 24, 2013 
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- Understanding Power (33)
- The Indispensable Chomsky
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By Peter Mitchell -
Finished on Mar 13, 2013
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- La questione morale (120)
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By Enrico Berlinguer -
Finished on Dec 23, 2012
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- Basta così (132)
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By Wisława Szymborska -
Finished on Dec 23, 2012
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- Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (15548)
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By Italo Calvino -
Finished on Oct 20, 2012
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- The Skilled Facilitator (8)
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By Roger Schwarz -
Finished on Oct 1, 2012
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- ...però, Zanardi da Castel Maggiore (308)
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By Alex Zanardi, Gianluca Gasparini -
Finished on Oct 7, 2012
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- The Secret (924)
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By Rhonda Byrne -
Finished on Sep 23, 2012
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1 person find this helpful
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Il pensiero di questo libro continua ad "attrarre" il ricordo della scena di Fantozzi sulla corazzata Potëmkin.
"Secondo me "the Secret" è una cagata pazzesca!" -
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Sep 23, 2012 |
1 feedback
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- Poor Little Rich Slum
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- Poor Little Rich Slum (4)
- What we saw in Dharavi and why it matters
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By Rashmi Bansal, Deepak Gandhi -
Finished on Jul 8, 2012
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Important stories to get an understanding of the biggest slum in Asia and the forgotten people who lived there in the last 50 years.
Unfortunately the format and style of the book makes it difficult to enjoy.
Local language is used in some circumstances. Style is disconnected and makes you feel rea ... (continue ) -
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Jul 10, 2012 |
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- NoSQL Distilled (13)
- A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence
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By Martin J. Fowler, Pramod J. Sadalage -
Finished on Feb 19, 2012
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- Pragmatic Thinking and Learning (66)
- Refactor Your Wetware
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By Andy Hunt -
Finished in Aug 2012
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- Nine Lives (1)
- Making the Impossible Possible
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By Peter Braaksma -
Finished on Jun 2, 2012
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Every chapter is a story of immense achievements reached by simple people. They all share the simple gift of listening to the humanity hidden in our shells. They transform compassion in the courage to stand out for a cause and fighting for human rights.
Every chapter is a real personal story of dou ... (
continue ) -
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Jun 3, 2012 |
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- Behind Closed Doors (29)
- Secrets of Great Management (Pragmatic Programmers)
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By Johanna Rothman, Esther Derby -
Finished on May 13, 2012
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Good collection of management tips and wisdom.
Everything told trough a concrete story that includes realistic examples and conversations in between short summaries of recommendations.Liked the content
Liked the format
Liked the style -
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May 20, 2012 |
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- Poesie di Álvaro de Campos (264)
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By Fernando Pessoa -
Finished on May 6, 2012
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1 person find this helpful
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Riprendo chi ha commentato: "Non so commentare la poesia, la so solo leggere."
Lascio qui insieme agli altri passaggi uno di quelli che più mi ha (....)
O frio especial das manhãs de viagem,
A angústia da partida, carnal no arrepanhar
Que vai do coração à pele,
Que chora virtualmente em ... (continue ) -
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May 6, 2012 |
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- StrengthsFinder 2.0 (83)
- A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths
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By Tom Rath -
Finished on Apr 30, 2012
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Don't expect a traditional book.
The real value comes from an on-line survey: make sure you can transform some on the "ideas for action" in concrete change.
I'm generally skeptic about this type of tools but has been strongly suggested by one of my colleagues: in the end I must confess I found a cou ... (continue ) -
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May 1, 2012 |
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Understanding Power
I've been inspired to read this book stumbling upon the review of a colleague that recently decided to took away his live under the unsustainable pressure of the Power system.continue)
He was an incredible soul, a beautiful mind and a young activist who achieved in his short life more than many of us can jus ... (
I've been inspired to read this book stumbling upon the review of a colleague that recently decided to took away his live under the unsustainable pressure of the Power system.
He was an incredible soul, a beautiful mind and a young activist who achieved in his short life more than many of us can just imagine.
I'm glad I red this book and I'd like to use some Aaron's words to talk about it:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany
"The book that changed my life"
Two years ago this summer I read a book that changed the entire way I see the world. I had been researching various topics — law, politics, the media — and become more and more convinced that something was seriously wrong. Politicians, I was shocked to discover, weren’t actually doing what the people wanted. And the media, my research found, didn’t really care much about that, preferring to focus on such things as posters and polls.
As I thought about this more, its implications struck me as larger and larger. But I still had no bigger picture to fit them in. The media was simply doing a bad job, leading people to be confused. We just had to pressure them to do better and democracy would be restored.
Then, one night, I watched the film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (I think it had come up in my Netflix queue). First off, it’s simply an amazingly-good film. I’ve watched it several times now and each time I’m utterly entranced. It’s undoubtedly the best documentary I’ve seen, weaving together all sorts of clever tricks to enlighten and entertain.
Second, it makes shocking points. I didn’t understand all of what it was saying at the time, but I understood enough to realize that something was severely amiss. The core of the film is a case study of Indonesia’s brutal invasion of the country of East Timor. The US personally gave the green light to the invasion and provided the weapons, which allowed Indonesia to massacre the population in an occupation that, per capita, ranks with the Holocaust. And the US media ignores it and when they do cover it, inevitably distorts it.
Shocked and puzzled by the film, I was eager to learn more. Noam Chomsky has dozens of books but I was fortunate to choose to read Understanding Power, a thick paperback I picked up at the library. Edited by Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffel, two public defenders in New York, the book is a collection of transcripts of group discussions with Chomsky.
Chomsky lays out the facts in a conversational style, telling stories and explaining things in response to questions from the groups, covering an incredibly wide range of topics. And on every single one, what he tells you is completely shocking, at odds with everything you know, turning the way you see things upside-down. Mitchell and Schoeffel know you’re unlikely to believe these things, so they’ve carefully footnoted and documented every claim, providing blockquote excerpts from the original sources to establish them.
Each story, individually, can be dismissed as some weird oddity, like what I’d learned about the media focusing more on posters than on policy. But seeing them all together, you can’t help but begin to tease out the larger picture, to ask yourself what’s behind all these disparate things, and what that means for the way we see the world.
Reading the book, I felt as if my mind was rocked by explosions. At times the ideas were too much that I literally had to lie down. (I’m not the only one to feel this way — Norman Finkelstein noted that when he went through a similar experience, “It was a totally crushing experience for me. … My world literally caved in. And there were quite a number of weeks where … I just was in bed, totally devastated.”) I remember vividly clutching at the door to my room, trying to hold on to something while the world spun around.
For weeks afterwards, everything I saw was in a different light. Every time I saw a newspaper or magazine or person on TV, I questioned what I thought knew about them, wondered how they fit into this new picture. Questions that had puzzled me for years suddenly began making sense in this new world. I reconsidered everyone I knew, everything I thought I’d learned. And I found I didn’t have much company.
It’s taken me two years to write about this experience, not without reason. One terrifying side effect of learning the world isn’t the way you think is that it leaves you all alone. And when you try to describe your new worldview to people, it either comes out sounding unsurprising (“yeah, sure, everyone knows the media’s got problems”) or like pure lunacy and people slowly back away.
Ever since then, I’ve realized that I need to spend my life working to fix the shocking brokenness I’d discovered. And the best way to do that, I concluded, was to try to share what I’d discovered with others. I couldn’t just tell them it straight out, I knew, so I had to provide the hard evidence. So I started working on a book to do just that. (I’m looking for people to help, if you’re interested.)
It’s been two years now and my mind has settled down some. I’ve learned a bunch more but, despite my best efforts, haven’t found any problems with this frightening new world view. After all this time, I’m finally ready to talk about what happened with some distance and I hope I’m now able to begin work on my book in earnest.