Review: Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo

4 stars for Auschwitz and After by Charlotte Delbo.

Auschwitz and After is a finely translated masterpiece that encompasses three volumes - Volume I None of Us will Return, Volume II Useless Knowledge and Volume III The Measure of Our Days. The entire book holds within itself one of the saddest accounts of living and breathing in the concentration camp in the history of mankind, and yet, the unique blend of prose and poetry gives a lyrical feeling of poignancy that stretches from sadness to beauty.

The book tells of the price the women from the French Resistance paid for their daring contributions in World War II. Of the 230 women sent to Auschwitz in January 1943, only 49 returned. Besides the daily struggle to stay alive in the concentration camp besieged by hunger, thirst, fatigue, abuse and despair, these women have to contend with debilitating diseases such typhus and dysentery that come about due to terrible living conditions. To survive against the odds, these women form groups and avoid being separated from one's group. The temptation to give up is high when one is alone, but when surrounded by others, one is able to endure and dare to hope. Members of the same group give support and take care of one another. However, there are still those who stop believing they will return home and these women are as good as dead. To stay alive, one has to make plans about going home. Hope keeps one alive.

After Auschwitz, those who survived continue to struggle. These survivors, yes, they return, they live and they are alive. Everything about them is the same, yet nothing is. Because nothing will ever be the same within those who survived Auschwitz for they carry the weight of the dead in their arms, in their heart and in their memories. These survivors, though liberated from their captors, are imprisoned by their memories of the dead. They find it difficult to talk to the living. And having conversed with death, they find everything pointless and grapple with the meaning of living. Through the author, we learn that surviving and returning is not the end. In fact, it is the beginning to living again. No one survives Auschwitz and returns unscathed. For those who return, it is a must to learn to endure their horrid past and adjust to living anew, otherwise they cannot move on.

This trilogy of a book is written for us to learn from the past so that history will not repeat itself ever again. Reading this book makes me appreciate even more for being born and living in a part of the world where there is peace and harmony.

Review: To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino

4 stars for To Hell and Back: The Last Train from Hiroshima by Charles Pellegrino.

Annihilation of mankind. This is what comes to the forefront of your mind as I flip to read the first few pages and take on the journey from Hiroshima to Nagasaki on the last train.

This is not a book about the geostrategic issues of great power conflict, nor is it about the rights and wrongs of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima (6 Aug 1945) and Nagasaki (9 Aug 1945) in Japan.

This is an insightful and powerful book on the subject of bombings. It focuses on the singular mission of chronicling the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people before and after the A-bomb. It brings to life, the experience of the people and the endless aftermath. It transports readers into a world that is frightening and painful.

The horrors as told in the book are based on eyewitness accounts supported by knowledgeable and reasonable guesses about the unknown, such as what happened to the people who disappeared at the hypocenters. It is hell for those who died. It is also hell for those who survived; the burdens the hibakusha carried, and the prejudices against them seemed to know no end. The social stigma attached to being an atomic bomb survivor is so strong in Japan that to live on, these people had to hide their identities and disappear. The scary truth is that it still is a continuing sad story of survivor suffering seven decades on.

Nuclear war is an often predicted cause of the extinction of humanity. If World War III ever come to be one day, it can and in all likelihood will be the cause of total annihilation of humankind.

Review: Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built by Duncan Clark

4 stars for Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built by Duncan Clark.

This book is a joy to read.

It is easy to read about the success of people, the founders of so-and-so companies, but it is not often that we get to learn about the difficulties faced or the sheer amount of hard work put in or even the many failed attempts undergone before these people come to be where they are today.

In the book, the author tells the remarkable story of how Alibaba Group Holding Limited - a company registered in the Cayman Islands but based in China, controlled by a partnership which does not actually own the business assets in China, and subsequently listed in the United States New York Stock Exchange - come to be and its goals for the future.

Another reason this book provides enjoyment reading is that the author has a good grasp of the Chinese language. By using the Hanyu Pinyin, a Mandarin phonetic transcription system, together with corresponding English explanations, he succeeds in relating the story content in his own way while retaining the Chinese flavour of what the book is like.

Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, a former English teacher turned businessman, philosopher, philanthropist, environmentalist, has big vision for the company. It does seem as if Alibaba wants a share in everything, from business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce to business-to-consumer (B2C) to health care to environment to sports and entertainment to even the newspaper industry which some consider to be a sunset industry.

Can Alibaba survive long enough in today's cutthroat industry to span three centuries from its incorporation in 1999 to see its vision come to fruition? Only time will tell.

Review: Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden

4 stars for Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden.

Kaechon political prison camp, also known as Camp 14, was established in 1959. At time of this post, Camp 14 is a sixty-year-old Skinner box, an ongoing experiment in repression and mind control in which guards breed prisoners whom they control, isolate and pit against one another from birth.

Born (1982) and raised in a political prison, Shin In Geun is reputed to be the only known prisoner to have successfully escaped from a "total-control zone" grade internment camp in North Korea, one of the world's most brutal totalitarian regimes.

Escape from Camp 14 is Shin's account of the misery of life in the North Korean gulag and his subsequent escape. He is not only a witness to but also an example of North Korea’s cruelty to its own people. His body is a roadmap of the hardships of growing up in a labour camp, a walking proof of those tortures he has been subjected to.

I am very much affected by what I read in this book. It is a depressing story. But what makes it even more disturbing and scary is that these hardships and cruelty are not dealt by enemies but by the country's leaders to its very own people.

Camp 14 and all the other labour camps are clearly visible in satellite photographs. Yet, North Korea government denies the existence of these camps. Read this book to find out more and decide for yourself what the truth is. But be forewarned, not all that is presented in the book is real. In 2015, some years after the first edition of publication, Shin discloses that his life in the North Korean gulag differ from what he has been telling government leaders, human rights activists, and journalists. I will recommend to read the new foreword first to prepare for Shin's admission of fabrication.

Review: Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

2 stars for Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance.

This book follows Elon Musk's life from his childhood up to the time he spent at Zip2 and PayPal, and then onto SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity.

Musk's deep-seated interest in rockets, space exploration, electric cars and solar power technology is astounding. You have got to hand it to him, his optimistic vision and relentless drive to execute.

Well, I am not a car enthusiast nor am I into space travel or Mars or solar energy. I am sorry but not sorry to say it is difficult for me to understand the pursuit of Musk's dreams. But still, I do enjoy reading the first one third of the book before it goes into technical details of rocket making, electric cars, solar panels, funding matters and the ugliness of power wrestling.

This is not a book that I will recommend to just about anyone. Technically speaking, this book is well written and you can tell that the author has done a great background job on all things Elon Musk related. However, unless you are already a fan or staunch follower of Elon Musk, the likelihood of losing interest along the way and skipping chunks of this book is rather high. Read it or not at all.

Review: The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore

5 stars for The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women by Kate Moore.

I read this book because of the word "Radium" in the title. I first read and learn about radium in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. For the reason that radium is mentioned only in passing for its application to treat cancer in Skloot's book, I find myself drawn to this book which is all about radium and the girls who pay with their lives, and their fight for recompense, for recognition and for justice.

So what is radium?

Radium is a chemical element with symbol Ra and atomic number 88. It is a rare radioactive metal of the alkaline earth series and can be extremely dangerous.

Radium is formed when uranium and thorium break down in the environment. Uranium and thorium are found in small amounts in most rocks and soil.

Radium has a half-life of about 1600 years. As it undergoes radioactive decay, it divides into two parts - one part is called radiation and the other part is called a daughter. The daughter, like radium, is not stable, and it also divides into radiation and another daughter. The dividing of daughters continues until a stable, nonradioactive daughter is formed.

During the decay process, alpha, beta, and gamma radiation are released. Alpha ray can travel only a short distance and cannot travel through your skin. Beta ray can penetrate through your skin, but they cannot go all the way through your body. Gamma radiation can go all the way through your body; this gives radium its medicinal value, being able to travel through the body and be directed at a tumour.

Until the 1960s, radium was a component of the luminous paints used for clock dials, intrument panels in airplanes, military instruments and compasses, and even in many everyday products, including wristwatches, toothpaste and energy drinks. It was thought to have curative properties until its intense radioactivity was found to cause adverse health effects.

It is extremely sad and disturbing to know that the events in the book are real and did happen in the 1920s in Newark and Orange in New Jersey, Ottawa in Illinois and Waterbury in Connecticut, United States of America.

The girls work in a radium dial painting factory that make the first watches with illuminated dials. Following the instructions to keep their paintbrushes well pointed, the all-female dial-painters use the ‘lip, dip, paint routine’ where they put the brush to their lips, dip it in the radium, and painted the dials.

Eventually, the introduction of minute quantities of radioactive substance build up in the bodies of these girls and nearly all died of radium poisoning. The book describes in horrendous details the pains and sufferings these women have to endure as their bodies slowly disintegrate and make them the living dead. Due to industrial occupational hazards, none of them are able to lead normal lives.

There is also the riveting courtroom drama that keeps me at the edge of my seat as I read on how these young innocent women stand up for what is right, even as their world fall apart, how they fight on when all hope seems gone, how they inspire one another to defend against attack or criticism, and finally, how they lead other dial-painters to come forward through their friendship networks.

On top of the hopeless situation of radium poisoning due to no cure, there is also plenty of anger to go around as I read about the notoriously dishonest United States Radium Corporation (USRC). The USRC is a vivid example of the ways of an inconceivably selfish capitalist system which cares nothing about the lives of its workers, but seeks only to guard its profits and interests.

The story of The Radium Girls has now been told, their voices heard. If you have yet to read this book, it is never too late to pick one up and be transported to the Roaring Twenties to understand what it means to be a dial-painter, to be one of the glowing girls who leave behind an extraordinary legacy.

Review: Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald J. Trump, Tony Schwartz (With)

4 stars for Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald J. Trump, Tony Schwartz (With).

I have come to learn about this book from the previous non-fiction book that I have reviewed. Truth be told, though The Art of the Deal piques my interest, I am not at all sure if I want to continue reading yet another book on Donald Trump after The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump and Fire and Fury, both of which did not manage to earn good ratings from me. In the end, curiosity wins. And I find myself enjoying Donald Trump's telling of his building, accumulating, and accomplishing of things against all odds.

This is a man who talks and talks and enjoys it totally. He thinks big and he talks big. Since it is a double-edged sword, I can see why people either like him a lot or they do not like him at all. According to Trump, deal-making depends on a variety of factors - genes, instincts, courage, and good fortune. He thinks he possesses it all.

No doubt much of what has been mentioned in the book has changed in the course of these three decades, the fundamentals of the art of business dealing remain the same.

Think big
Protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself
Maximise your options
Know your market
Use your leverage
Enhance your location
Get the word out
Fight back
Deliver the goods
Contain the costs
Enjoy it

In his closing chapter of the book published in 1987, Donald Trump admits to not knowing what's next, only that it will not be the same. Fast foward thirty years to 20 Jan 2017, this man is sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. What an unexpected turn of events.

Donald Trump may be criticised for not having the political background, experience, knowledge and tact to lead a nation but, you have got to hand it to him, this man not only hides a shrewd business acumen, he has the uncanny ability to assess situations or people and turn them to his advantage. He is direct and he is persistent, to the point of relentless even in the face of a total lack of encouragement. These qualities are what make him so successful a businessman.

Trump: The Art of the Deal. Everything that makes him Trump and defines his savvy, energy, and charisma is in this book. Whether his business associates, adversaries or even the general public agree with him - his ways and actions - or not, is beside the point since he is the protagonist in this book. In any case, if you want to know Donald Trump, just read the book.