Author: edwinsetiadi

“A Farewell to Arms” by Ernest Hemingway

This is a story about life and love in the middle of World War I.

The story evolves around Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver serving in the Italian army. He meets and fall in love with a British nurse Catherine Barkley while serving on the front lines, and their relationship deepens when Henry gets injured in a mortar attack and specifically requested for Barkley to be transferred to his hospital so that she can nurse him back to health.

After returning to the battle, Henry becomes increasingly disturbed by the war’s brutality and senselessness, which leads him to eventually dessert the army after he narrowly escape execution by his own forces during one chaotic battle. Henry and Barkley then run away to Switzerland to start a life together, although unlike most love tales this one does not have a happy ending (a fitting ending, I must say, in an overall gloomy mood in times of great war).

It is a simple enough general narrative worthy of a short story. But the strength of the book lies within the conversations that the many characters have with each other.

They provide interesting angles that show there’s still life happening in the middle of a massive war, with plenty of human emotions, worry, drama, loss, and sacrifices. Even time to do leisure. It shows the political opinions of the war by ordinary people, the difficult life choices they have to accommodate within the dire situation. And of course it shows the human cost of war not just by the death toll, but also the psychological and financial impacts.

It is a book with such a powerful anti-war message, coming from a writer who, like Frederic Henry himself, served as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I.

“Gadis Pantai” by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

This is a brilliant depiction of a 14 year-old teenager from the poor side of the town, a fisherman’s daughter who is forcefully betrothed to a local rich and powerful nobleman. The story is set in a feudalistic Javanese society during the Dutch occupation era in early 20th century, where “little kings” were given by the Dutch overlord enough power to rule on behalf of the Dutch and abuse their own people.

The book describes how the unnamed Girl from the Coast gets so scared at the beginning, enduring the pain of separation from her parents and from her old life that she was perfectly content with, who now has to live in a very rigid place where she – the main lady of the house – cannot even walk into certain areas in the mansion and is constantly undermined by the people in the household (due to her status as a poor villager).

Indeed, the story is a contrast between both worlds, between the poor and rich, the raw and the artificial, about how the poor people at the coast are more free than the rich people living inside the mansion with all the restrictions and societal hierarchies, with the book has this general criticism towards feodalism and injustice.

And as the story progresses, slowly but sure The Girl from the Coast begins to learn the way of life as a rich madam, mainly by befriending her old handmaiden who has tons of fascinating stories to tell. And gradually this pure innocent simpleton from the coast learns about power, about survivorship as a disposable concubine (and not a worthy wife from a fellow rich noble family), about how and why people are more afraid of his skinny and soft husband than the more muscular and rough men in her poor village. And over all we get to learn about the struggles of the common people and the cruelty of living in a local kingdom that serve the Dutch during the colonial era.

The book did not specify where the mansion is located, however, or where the fishing village is. But the author, Pramoedya, describes the Girl from the Coast as having a unique physical description of small eyes (like a Chinese descent), living near the northern coast somewhere in Java, which is unmistakenly a tale from Lasem. Lasem is a unique ancient port town from the Majapahit era (13th-16th century), a place where admiral Zheng He arrived in the archipelago and spread Islam (through 7 voyages between 1405-1433), with his men then settled and assimilated with the locals (hence the Chinese-looking offsprings in the area).

And here’s the twist: this book is a novelization of the story of Pramoedya’s own grandmother from his mother’s side. It’s supposed to be a trilogy of his family’s history, with part 1 telling the story about Pramoedya’s grandmother, part 2 telling the story of his parent’s generation within the context of nationalist uprising against the Dutch colonial ruler, and part 3 is supposed to be the story of Pramoedya’s generation alongside the struggles of Indonesia’s independence.

But only part 1 was ever published as a book (this book), with the scripts of part 2 and part 3 were confiscated by “political vandalism” and disappeared without a trace. This will forever be my grail search, the 2 lost and unpublished manuscripts.

And it shows in the way that this book (supposedly part 1) ended. It looks like the catastrophic end of the story but crucially a beginning of something bigger to come, something to build on from the ground up now everything has fallen apart. And imagine if the Girl from the Coast didn’t make that last minute life-altering decision at the very last scene in the book? Pramoedya could possibly never be born and we would never know his brilliant writings.

Now that the dust has settled, what the hell happened between Iran and Israel’s ceasefire?

After 10 days since Israel began to attack Iran on 13 June 2025, Israel was heavily beaten by Iran’s response, far more than they’ve expected, as confirmed by the panic reaction by Israel’s Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and the fact that Israeli government threatened against anyone who post anything about the damages in Tel Aviv and Haifa. And they badly needed a US intervention.

But Donald Trump cannot afford to join the war – not politically, not financially – and so he did the next best thing: he had a big show off of his B-2 bomber plane and strike Iran’s nuclear facility to show presence, but with a close to none damages.

Iran received the signal, and they too had to save face by doing what they’ve threatened to do if US attacks Iran: Iran retaliated by striking US military base, BUT the one in Iran’s ally Qatar, where they informed Qatar beforehand and thus the strike was easily intercepted also with minimum damage and no casualties. Both US and Iran saved their respective faces, that’s why Trump immediately announced ceasefire on 24 June 2025 just hours after Iran’s strike.

But then Israel attacked District 7 in Tehran not long after, and Iran responded by saying they have not received any ceasefire proposal, proceeded to strike Israel back, but tell the media that they are willing to consider a ceasefire if Israel stop shooting. That’s why Trump all of a sudden got mad with Israel (a rarity for a US president), and only then Israel backed down.

And just look at what happened after the ceasefire, the EU surprisingly pressured Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza or face a sanction. Is this part of the ceasefire deal? Because there’s no way in hell that the EU suddenly develop a conscience, not with that Stockholm Syndrome in tact. It’s more plausible that they are trying to save Israel from a total Iranian destruction (as argued by former Trump propagandist Steve Bannon), in exchange for the genocide to finally stop.

The next few days will be interesting, whether Israel can commit to it (which would also mean a return to Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial IF the “war” in Gaza is over). Or will they (and by they I mean Israel, US, UK, EU, and their “allies” in the Gulf) regroup and make their next plan to face the surprisingly very strong Iran?

This whole ceasefire saga sure feel like Yevgeny Prigozhin’s advances on 23 June 2023 that was just 2 hours away from toppling Vladimir Putin in Moscow, before bizarrely Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko brokered a deal that curb the coup attempt. Prigozhin was only 120-200 KM away from conducting a regime change in Russia, a rare window of opportunity that we likely won’t see again for a long time, just like Iran had the chance to once and for all destroy this far-right Zionist regime in Israel (and replace it with a better one that supports the Oslo Accords).

Because, you know what happened with Prigozhin since the coup attempt? Putin regrouped after the curbed attempt, and Prigozhin was later killed in a “plane crash” on 23 August 2023.

But nevertheless, here we are now. Trump said that the US and Iran will meet next week, resuming their scheduled talk that was supposed to happen in Oman on 15 June, before Israel intervene by striking Iran 2 days before to prevent a US-Iran peace talk. And meanwhile, Trump also declared that the US will personally “save Netanyahu” from being prosecuted by the Israeli courts, which has been the number 1 reason for Netanyahu to keep prolonging and escalating the war. Is this also part of the deal?

So it appears that peace could really potentially happen, and the genocide in Gaza could finally end. But at what cost? Netanyahu could actually get away with genocide and never be held accountable for his war crimes and his domestic crimes. And the settler-colonial apartheid regime will live on.

Ceasefire is not accountability.

“Xenophon’s Cyrus the Great: The Arts of Leadership and War” by Larry Hedrick

This book can be best described as 70% paraphrasing Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and 30% business book.

The editor, Larry Hedrick, switched Xenophon’s depiction of Cyrus the Great from the original third person’s vantage point in Cyropaedia into a first person cringy narrative that makes Cyrus sounds like a douche bragging about himself. Hedrick also “extended the narrative at few points” and “tied up some loose ends in the plot structure” along the way, which he then blend into the whole thing and never set the distinction between the altered original text and his addition.

Hence, the finished book is in no form or shape Xenophon’s classic anymore. But instead, it is a largely edited “modern” remake that take ancient wisdom and organize it with business focused sub-headings. Oh yes, we’re talking about those buzzwords like leadership, middle management, vision, seizing opportunity, inspiring your people, and all that crap.

Which is fine, actually, if this premise is executed properly. Because the sub-headings are actually making the book easier to navigate, and even the grossly violated contents – that pays little or no respect to the original book – are still pretty good.

But as I read on, I keep on finding inconsistencies in the editing, like the one that irritate me the most: the way Cyrus (supposed to be in first-person narrative) often call his “father” as “Cambyses” (in a third-person way). And everytime I’m reading the book, I can’t help but being curious what the original text is saying in Cyropaedia.

After all, the original biography by Xenophon is often praised to be at par with The Art of War by Sun Tzu or The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli, exactly why I purchased this book in the first place (by mistake, as it turns out). Will try to find and read the original book instead.

“Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein

This is a thesis that dives deep into the argument between specializing in a rigid structure vs. being a generalist that can creatively perform in many different contexts. With the author, David Epstein, is making the case for the latter.

In the book Epstein shows that switching career early on is actually beneficial, that quitting is not for losers but to quit fast and early means that you identify that you’re not a good fit, and can find something else you feel much suited to thrive.

And it is supported by the data. He reveals, among many others, that the fastest-growing startups are not only founded by teenage hot shots (those 20 under 20) but statistically the average age of the founders are actually 45. Indeed, this entire book is making the case for a late bloomer who has accumulate years of general experiences in multiple discipline, and only then can apply them into a specialized force.

To back up his thesis Epstein uses so many great studies from diverse experts from psychologist Daniel Kahneman, to economist Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame), to marketing guru Seth Godin, among many other experts.

And to illustrate his points Epstein uses incredible range of stories such as the chess prodigy family, Socialist revolution in Kyrgyzstan, Baroque musicians from middle age Venice, classical vs jazz musicians, class math problems, 16th century astronomy, a surgeon’s dilemma, Fed fund rate and the economy, the long journey of Nintendo, statistical correlations between Brexit voters and anti gun control crowds, and the famous Carter Racing case study (and the plot twist in the end!).

Moreover, Epstein also uses the history of plenty of famous names, such as the long vocational path of Vincent van Gogh, J. K. Rowling’s failure in life before made it big, Charles Darwin who initially wanted to become a clergyman, a psychiatrist who became a Buddhist monk, the story of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami who at 29 was running a jazz bar before shifting vocation to a novelist, and of course the contrast upbringing between Tiger Woods (specialized) and Roger Federer (generalist) that became the anchoring point right from the beginning.

One surprising area that came up in the book is a glimpse of a world where humans and AI can possibly coexist, with AI focus more on the small tactics and humans have more on the big-picture strategy. Which could prompt us to think that probably the answer to the worry of the rise of AI is being a big-picture generalist and lead the robots to do the tactical moves within the corridor of our strategy.

Here are some of the most impactful quotes from the book:

1. Tiger has come to symbolize the idea that the quantity of deliberate practice determines success—and its corollary, that the practice must start as early as possible.
2. The push to focus early and narrowly extends well beyond sports. We are often taught that the more competitive and complicated the world gets, the more specialized we all must become (and the earlier we must start) to navigate it. Our best-known icons of success are elevated for their precocity and their head starts—Mozart at the keyboard, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the other kind of keyboard. The response, in every field, to a ballooning library of human knowledge and an interconnected world has been to exalt increasingly narrow focus. Oncologists no longer specialize in cancer, but rather in cancer related to a single organ, and the trend advances each year. Surgeon and writer Atul Gawande pointed out that when doctors joke about left ear surgeons, “we have to check to be sure they don’t exist.”
3. An internationally renowned scientist (whom you will meet toward the end of this book) told me that increasing specialization has created a “system of parallel trenches” in the quest for innovation. Everyone is digging deeper into their own trench and rarely standing up to look in the next trench over, even though the solution to their problem happens to reside there.
4. The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.
5. While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases—as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part—we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.
6. Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.
7. One study showed that early career specializers jumped out to an earnings lead after college, but that later specializers made up for the head start by finding work that better fit their skills and personalities.
8. I found a raft of studies that showed how technological inventors increased their creative impact by accumulating experience in different domains, compared to peers who drilled more deeply into one; they actually benefited by proactively sacrificing a modicum of depth for breadth as their careers progressed. There was a nearly identical finding in a study of artistic creators.
9. I delved further and encountered remarkable individuals who succeeded not in spite of their range of experiences and interests, but because of it: a CEO who took her first job around the time her peers were getting ready to retire; an artist who cycled through five careers before he discovered his vocation and changed the world; an inventor who stuck to a self-made antispecialization philosophy and turned a small company founded in the nineteenth century into one of the most widely resonant names in the world today.
10. When Kahneman probed the judgments of highly trained experts, he often found that experience had not helped at all. Even worse, it frequently bred confidence but not skill.
11. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.
12. Repetitive success, it turned out, taught him the worst possible lesson. Few learning environments are that wicked, but it doesn’t take much to throw experienced pros off course. Expert firefighters, when faced with a new situation, like a fire in a skyscraper, can find themselves suddenly deprived of the intuition formed in years of house fires, and prone to poor decisions. With a change of the status quo, chess masters too can find that the skill they took years to build is suddenly obsolete.
13. The reason that elite athletes seem to have superhuman reflexes is that they recognize patterns of ball or body movements that tell them what’s coming before it happens. When tested outside of their sport context, their superhuman reactions disappear. We all rely on chunking every day in skills in which we are expert.
14. But the game’s strategic complexity provides a lesson: the bigger the picture, the more unique the potential human contribution. Our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is the ability to integrate broadly.
15. “AI systems are like savants.” They need stable structures and narrow worlds.
16. But tennis is still very much on the kind end of the spectrum compared to, say, a hospital emergency room, where doctors and nurses do not automatically find out what happens to a patient after their encounter. They have to find ways to learn beyond practice, and to assimilate lessons that might even contradict their direct experience.
17. The world is not golf, and most of it isn’t even tennis. As Robin Hogarth put it, much of the world is “Martian tennis.” You can see the players on a court with balls and rackets, but nobody has shared the rules. It is up to you to derive them, and they are subject to change without notice.
18. We have been using the wrong stories. Tiger’s story and the Polgar story give the false impression that human skill is always developed in an extremely kind learning environment. If that were the case, specialization that is both narrow and technical and that begins as soon as possible would usually work. But it doesn’t even work in most sports.
19. There are domains beyond chess in which massive amounts of narrow practice make for grandmaster-like intuition. Like golfers, surgeons improve with repetition of the same procedure. Accountants and bridge and poker players develop accurate intuition through repetitive experience. But when the rules are altered just slightly, it makes experts appear to have traded flexibility for narrow skill.
20. When experienced accountants were asked in a study to use a new tax law for deductions that replaced a previous one, they did worse than novices. Erik Dane, a Rice University professor who studies organizational behavior, calls this phenomenon “cognitive entrenchment.”
21. The most successful experts also belong to the wider world.
22. The main conclusion of work that took years of studying scientists and engineers, all of whom were regarded by peers as true technical experts, was that those who did not make a creative contribution to their field lacked aesthetic interests outside their narrow area. As psychologist and prominent creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton observed, “rather than obsessively focus[ing] on a narrow topic,” creative achievers tend to have broad interests.
23. Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience. And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts.
24. The Handbook simply notes that, in contrast to classical players, jazz and folk and modern popular musicians and singers do not follow a simple, narrow trajectory of technical training, and they “start much later.”
25. “It’s easier for a jazz musician to learn to play classical literature than for a classical player to learn how to play jazz,” he said. “The jazz musician is a creative artist, the classical musician is a re-creative artist.”
26. Human intuition, it appears, is not very well engineered to make use of the best tools when faced with what the researchers called “ill-defined” problems. Our experience-based instincts are set up well for Tiger domains, the kind world Gentner described, where problems and solutions repeat.
27. They all appear to have excelled in spite of their late starts. It would be easy enough to cherry-pick stories of exceptional late developers overcoming the odds. But they aren’t exceptions by virtue of their late starts, and those late starts did not stack the odds against them. Their late starts were integral to their eventual success.
28. Learning stuff was less important than learning about oneself. Exploration is not just a whimsical luxury of education; it is a central benefit.
29. In England and Wales, students were expected to pick a path with knowledge only of the limited menu they had been exposed to early in high school. That is sort of like being forced to choose at sixteen whether you want to marry your high school sweetheart. At the time it might seem like a great idea, but the more you experience, the less great that idea looks in hindsight.
30. Switchers are winners. It seems to fly in the face of hoary adages about quitting, and of far newer concepts in modern psychology.
31. The trouble, Godin noted, is that humans are bedeviled by the “sunk cost fallacy.” Having invested time or money in something, we are loath to leave it, because that would mean we had wasted our time or money, even though it is already gone.
32. Attempting to be a professional athlete or actor or to found a lucrative start-up is unlikely to succeed, but the potential reward is extremely high. Thanks to constant feedback and an unforgiving weed-out process, those who try will learn quickly if they might be a match, at least compared to jobs with less constant feedback. If they aren’t, they go test something else, and continue to gain information about their options and themselves.
33. The more skilled the Army thought a prospective officer could become, the more likely it was to offer a scholarship. And as those hardworking and talented scholarship recipients blossomed into young professionals, they tended to realize that they had a lot of career options outside the military. Eventually, they decided to go try something else. In other words, they learned things about themselves in their twenties and responded by making match quality decisions.
34. She never did graduate from college, but her office is festooned with twenty-three honorary doctorates, plus a glistening saber given to her by the U.S. Military Academy for teaching leadership courses—as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.
35. “I feel sorry for the people who know exactly what they’re going to do from the time they’re sophomores in high school,” he said. In his memoir, [Nike founder Phil] Knight wrote that he “wasn’t much for setting goals,” and that his main goal for his nascent shoe company was to fail fast enough that he could apply what he was learning to his next venture. He made one short-term pivot after another, applying the lessons as he went.
36. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with getting a law or medical degree or PhD. But it’s actually riskier to make that commitment before you know how it fits you. And don’t consider the path fixed. People realize things about themselves halfway through medical school.
37. Psychologist Dan Gilbert called it the “end of history illusion.” From teenagers to senior citizens, we recognize that our desires and motivations sure changed a lot in the past (see: your old hairstyle), but believe they will not change much in the future. In Gilbert’s terms, we are works in progress claiming to be finished.
38. Bingham calls it “outside-in” thinking: finding solutions in experiences far outside of focused training for the problem itself. History is littered with world-changing examples.
39. “Sometimes you just slap your head and go, ‘Well why didn’t I think of that?’ If it was easily solved by people within the industry, it would have been solved by people within the industry,” Pegau said. “I think it happens more often than we’d love to admit, because we tend to view things with all the information we’ve gathered in our industry, and sometimes that puts us down a path that goes into a wall. It’s hard to back up and find another path.” Pegau was basically describing the Einstellung effect, a psychology term for the tendency of problem solvers to employ only familiar methods even if better ones are available.
40. Specialization is obvious: keep going straight. Breadth is trickier to grow.
41. In wicked domains that lack automatic feedback, experience alone does not improve performance. Effective habits of mind are more important, and they can be developed.
42. “Good judges are good belief updaters,” according to Tetlock. If they make a bet and lose, they embrace the logic of a loss just as they would the reinforcement of a win. That is called, in a word: learning. Sometimes, it involves putting experience aside entirely.
43. I always advise my people to read outside your field, everyday something. And most people say, ‘Well, I don’t have time to read outside my field.’ I say, ‘No, you do have time, it’s far more important.’ Your world becomes a bigger world, and maybe there’s a moment in which you make connections.

It is soothing to learn that the road to success is not only the survivorship bias tales from the billionaires, great musicians, or the pro athletes, etc where a child prodigy has been amassing 10,000 hours worth of experience before the age of 7.

But instead, there’s another pathway that is actually used by the majority of people. One that is more grounded in the trial-and-error environment, where people organically learn about themselves as they grow up, one that can provide career-changing inspiration only after decades of doing many other things, or one that can prepare us to survive the rise of AI: by being the jack of all trades and master of one, but one that could come later in life after collecting an abundance of experiences in many different fields.

“Drama Mangir” by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

This is an incredible story about the fall of Majapahit in 1527, and the proceeding game of thrones in the vacuum of power for decades.

In the middle of this utter chaos, Penembahan Senopati, the king of Mataram in 1575-1607, became the main vocal point of the story. He was the descendant of the last Majapahit king Brawijaya V and a vicious man who employed some of the nasties strategies to conquer the villages, including an attempt to capture a small area called Mangir.

It is in this village that he eventually met his match, their ruler named Wanabaya (or more commonly known as Ki Ageng Mangir or the leader of Mangir) who possessed a powerful mystical spear called Klinting. Wanabaya was also the descendant of Brawijaya V (making him and Senopati distant cousins), hence he felt entitled to control Mangir independently and not to succumbed to the rule of Mataram, which Senopati did not take very well. And the resulting mind games and battle tactics are what this book is all about, the drama that happened in Mangir.

The introduction of the book is especially exquisite, providing the grand context of the historical event. It covers all the mysticisms and local beliefs, the prophecies, the political propaganda, the origins of words (that last until today), the impressive contextual background for the weaponry, disproving false narratives in history books (like what ended up happen with Wanabaya – no spoiler), the analysis of war tactics, and describing the background story of various different kind of people such as Tumenggung Mandaraka whom Pramoedya dubbed as a Machiavellian before Niccolo Machiavelli was known to the world.

Different from the rest of Pramoedya’s books, however, is the format of the story where Pramoedya decided not to use the usual novel format, but instead use a stage play format in order to tell the story more authentically. And this is where the book stands out, the gripping conversations and stage drama that incredibly told in detail that can be a minute-by-minute guide to actually perform the play live in theatre.

I sincerely hope that one day I can get to see it performed live.

“How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking” by Jordan Ellenberg

Jordan Ellenberg is a math PhD graduate from Harvard whom later become the professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also the mathematics consultant for the 2017 movie “Gifted”, a story about a math prodigy.

These two contrasting facts about him are pretty much what this book represents, the serious and the amusing. And it is such an intelligent book, that teaches us advanced logical reasoning of math using everyday examples and the wider current affairs.

I initially got lost when Ellenberg lays out the grown up formulas or even the math tutorials that brings back fond, fond memories from school. But I soon realized that the math itself can be treated as the blueprint on the background, just like we don’t need to fully understand the blueprint or the engineering part of a car in order to drive it.

But still, it helps to know the inner workings, so that we can be fully aware of what’s going on and have lesser probability to be wrong about things. This is what the book is all about.

“Knowing mathematics is like wearing a pair of X-ray specs that reveal hidden structures underneath the messy and chaotic surface of the world” Ellenberg remarks. “Math is a science of not being wrong about things, its techniques and habits hammered out by centuries of hard work and argument. With the tools of mathematics in hand, you can understand the world in a deeper, sounder, and more meaningful way.”

And to illustrate his points, he uses some of the most interesting stories from a wide range of history and complement them with a playful demonstration of statistics. Stories from the mathematics to figure out how to upgrade fighter jet during WW2, to calculating a missile projection, a story about a stockbroker’s scam, the math of lottery, casino gambling, how to find missing planes, and many more, all the way to the mathematics of God.

Indeed, such a wide range of topics, hence no wonder the book is often dubbed as the Freakonomics of math. But is it really? Despite the occasionally funny and the overall friendly tone of the book, make no mistake, this is still a serious book about math. So, it is nothing like the wacky and fun Freakonomics (for economics) or the even wackier Why Do Men Have Nipples (for medicine).

However, as Ellenberg explains, “[w]e tend to teach mathematics as a long list of rules. You learn them in order and you have to obey them, because if you don’t obey them you get a C-. This is not mathematics. Mathematics is the study of things that come out a certain way because there is no other way they could possibly be.”

Therefore, despite being a serious book, it is also a rebellious one that teaches math from an unorthodox approach: from the vantage point of the practical user rather than just the theories. No wonder that math lovers absolutely adore this book.

“Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work” by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal

This book is high on adrenaline. Right after Steven Kotler published the phenomenal book “The Rise of Superman” about individual flow state, he encountered so many people that came forward to tell their stories about biohacking for performance.

“But what caught our attention were the conversations we were having after those presentations”, Kotler remarks. “On too many occasions to count, people would pull us aside to tell us about their clandestine experiments with “ecstatic technologies.””

Ah yes, ecstatic (or ecstasis). As Plato describes it, it is “an altered state where our normal waking consciousness vanishes completely, replaced by an intense euphoria and a powerful connection to a greater intelligence.” In other words, group flow.

Kotler then continues, “We met military officers going on monthlong meditation retreats, Wall Street traders zapping their brains with electrodes, trial lawyers stacking off-prescription pharmaceuticals, famous tech founders visiting transformational festivals, and teams of engineers microdosing with psychedelics.”

What on Earth is going on here?

It took Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal 4 years to undergo the research for this ecstasis phenomenon. A journey that “has led us all over the world: to the Virginia Beach home of SEAL Team Six, to the Googleplex in Mountain View, to the Burning Man festival in Nevada, to Richard Branson’s Caribbean hideaway, to luxurious dachas outside Moscow, to Red Bull’s headquarters in Santa Monica, to Nike’s innovation team in Portland, to bio-hacking conferences in Pasadena, to private dinners with United Nations advisers in New York. And the stories that we heard stunned us.”

Their findings are then broken down into 4 categories in this book:

1. Psychology: How the mind works.
2. Neurobiology: How the hacks to reach ecstasis work in the brain.
3. Pharmacology: The controlled usage of substances (such as psychedelics) to enter this state.
4. Technology: The tools they use to induce or measure the altered states. Tools such as VR, wearables, and neurofeedback.

Indeed, the findings are exceptional. But what makes this book an even more incredible read is the stories that illustrate the points in action, from the story of the SEAL’s intense ambush operation in Afghanistan, to the appeal of a CrossFit “bland” gym with less distractions but more intensity, and of course to the high point of this book: the tales from the Burning Man festival, among many others. They show that by entering the ecstatic state we can increase productivity, heightened creativity, have deeper insight, can learn faster, and can even have a spiritual growth.

I mean, I felt that, in a much lesser degree. I often find it in the energy of music concerts or festivals, when watching a football match directly in the stadium, or on the low-key side of the spectrum when participating in a mass prayer or engagingly witnessing a cultural ritual.

Now, imagine what we can do if we are able to hack that group energy and synchronicity into a deliberate action? Like the myth of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and give humanity the ability to advance their civilization and improve their lives, we might just found the secret fire to an advanced life through the state of ecstasis. This is what the book is all about.

“Ian Fleming: The Complete Man” by Nicholas Shakespeare

This is a 823 pages book that dives deep into the fascinating life of Ian Fleming, a person most famous for creating the character of James Bond.

The author, Nicholas Shakespeare, was granted access from the Fleming estate to all of his files, making this long biography as close as accurate as can get: a narrative based on information gathered from unpublished letters and diaries, declassified files, previously uninterviewed witnesses; as well as interviews with Fleming’s past biographers, friends, and family.

The biography reveals the privileged upbringing that Fleming had – including studying at Eaton and Sandhurst – but a difficult childhood nonetheless after his father’s death in World War I and while having a controling mother. It shows the era when he was working at Reuters going around Europe covering the rise of Hitler, among many other now-historical pivotal events, and a brief life as a stockbroker in the City of London.

The book also shows his time at the military during World War II, serving as a personal assistant to Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, where Fleming contributed in planning covert operations, and helped to create a special commando unit known as 30 Assault Unit (30AU). The occurrences in this era later hugely contributed to his early ideas of James Bond, where the spy character is actually inspired by his own experiences and from the people around him.

But his James Bond part of his life, as we shall see in the book, comes much later in his life. In fact, the character only appear in the last fifth of his life, almost as an afterthought. And instead, there’s so much that Fleming himself did in his lifetime that makes this book a real page turner, the kind of life that would be a force of nature even if he had never created James Bond.

“The pre-Bond Fleming was a patriotic Scot who had lived in Austria, Munich and Geneva as Hitler was coming to power”, Shakespeare remarks, “He made a noteworthy contribution to the Second World War – and not only in organising covert operations in Nazi-occupied Europe and North Africa that helped to shorten the conflict.” Shakespeare then continues, “He was also one of a trusted few who were charged with trying to bring the United States into the fight, and worked to set up and then coordinate with the foreign Intelligence department that developed into the CIA. Following the Allied victory of 1945, he continued to play an undercover role in the Cold War from behind his Sunday Times desk.”

It was during his stint at Sunday Times (that he held from after World War II in 1945 until his death in 1964) that he really began to write the Bond novels, where he incorporated his years of knowledge to pen and paper while overseeing the network of foreign correspondents and playing an undercover role. Particularly after he bought a 6.1 hectare estate in Jamaica for a holiday house (that he named Goldeneye) with a house on the edge of a cliff overlooking a private beach. It was there when the idea of writing James Bond novels really came to him as he was swimming in his bay. As Fleming remarks, “Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it.”

And it’s very intriguing, for example, that Fleming got his inspiration for “From Russia, With Love” from his time in Moscow as a Reuters journalist covering a controversial international trial during Stalin’s Soviet. Or his own experience in money matters (including being excluded from his wealthy grandfather’s will) can come up in the way James Bond refused a 1 million Pounds dowry from Marc-Ange Draco in “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.” Or the fact that the villain’s nerve center in “Moonraker” was the actual site of Fleming’s pre-war Pimlico address. Or the headquarter of the terrorist group in “Spectre” was inspired by a real-life encounter in France during World War II. Or how “You Only Live Twice” ended with James Bond on a small island peacefully living on the sea, with no memory of his past, that is until he gets a message that sends him back to the world that will corrupt him, which was written during a period of time when he had a turmulous marriage and just wanted to get away from it all.

But the novels didn’t become an instant hit from the get go. In fact, none of Fleming’s first 5 novels sold more than 12,000 copies in hardback. So much so that he was so sick and tired of Bond at one time and was very close to killing off the character in 1956. But as luck have it, the novels then took off in 1957 following the Suez Crisis in the autumn of 1956, when British Prime Minister Anthony Eden (whom was at Jamaica at the time to rest from sickness) decided to use Ian’s Goldeneye home as his basis for global operation hub, with the sick leader “sending secret telegrams to London, Washington, Paris, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Ottowa, Sydney, Wellington and Cairo.”

His Goldeneye base gave Fleming the unintended exposure, which eventually led to people reading his books. And much later, JFK helped to boost James Bond’s popularity into the stratosphere as the young American Senator (and later President) publicly lauded the novels as some of his favourite books.

If fact, the book recorded the moment when James Bond became instantly popular: “In the 1950s, the idea of individual agency was not yet so strong. It took off two months after Ian’s dinner with JFK, with the shooting down on 1 May 1960 of a top-secret U-2 surveillance plane over Soviet territory. On parachuting free, the American pilot, Gary Powers, was captured by the Russians, forcing President Eisenhower to admit what had occurred. As soon as it was revealed that spies really existed, the fantasy of James Bond became more real to American readers.”

Moreover, this book also shows the human side of Fleming, such as his troubled marriage to a toxic Ann Charteris, his love to his only son Caspar (whom he wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for), the dire effects of their marriage on Caspar, and his numerous affairs (all of which reflected in the demeanor of James Bond as a playboy). It mentions all the people that helped him along the way, and his many writing influences, such as William Plomer, Alfred Adler, Leo Perutz, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, including his number 1 inspiration Ernest Hemingway. But Hemingway was not by all means his only inspiration. In fact, Fleming read a wide range of books in impressively several languages, with the German edition of “War and Peace” by Leo Tolstoy mentioned as his dessert island book.

Furthermore, the book also delightfully shows the random name pop throughout the story, such as Fleming’s downstair neighbour during his time working at the City of London that happened to be T. S. Elliot whom was working at Lloyd’s Bank, or meeting J. P. Morgan Jr. when he went to America, having a contact with Alan Turing in World War II, casually diving with Jacques Cousteau, having a family connection with Winston Churchill, being friends with Roald Dahl, having dinner with JFK, having a brief encounter with Alfred Hitchcock at an airport, and of course his encounter with the real James Bond: an American ornithologist by the name of Dr. James Bond, whom Fleming (an avid bird watcher) had a copy of his book “Birds of the West Indies.”

Perhaps nobody can summarize Fleming better than Christopher Moran, the professor of US National Security who specializes in Ian Fleming’s Secret Service work. Moran was quoted in the book where he said, “It’s impossible to cling to the orthodoxy that Ian Fleming was a nobody. He was unique, there is nobody to compare him with. He was invested in and aware of the whole cycle of intelligence, which is remarkable when you think of the compartmentalised world – “the need to know” – of intelligence. Fleming transcended that world. He was not a desk officer, he was the desk officer. He knew it all, as a spy chief should, operating as a proxy spy chief for three to four years. He was the glue that glued these bits and pieces.”

All in all, this is a long book filled with impressive intricate details. If this is in a film form, this would likely be several episodes mini-series rather than one whole movie. It is in my opinion best read in a slow pace, in order to fully emmersed at every aspect of Ian Fleming’s life, which in turn he poured into the character of James Bond. And once you read his whole story, you’ll understand how and why James Bond can be such a brilliant spy novel.

“The Castle” by Franz Kafka

This is Franz Kafka’s last novel, an unfinished novel before his death, that is different from the other “Kafkaesque” style that any reader of Kafka will be familiar with.

It is a story about a small village, ruled by an administrative staff of a castle on top of the hill, a property owned by an absent nobleman. The story follows around the protagonist (simply named “K”), an outsider coming to the village as a land surveyor. When inspecting the remote village deep in winter, he soon discovers the weird way life is organized around the mysterious castle (which he cannot access). But everything else in the village can be accessed and this is where the story evolve around, the investigation.

It is quite a departure from Kafka’s other novels, which often rely on small bunch of strong characters in his stories. Instead, in The Castle the characters are plentiful with intricate relationships, but yet they are still neatly characterized, so much so that even those who appear only briefly – such as the village schoolmaster, the schoolmistress, and her suitor – they still have a strong presence.

In the story, K learns that the village is a community that has deep ties between friendships and hatreds that go back years into several generations. The village has two inns: 1. Bridge Inn (operated by humble people) 2. Castle Inn (the more pretentious one); with interesting stories how the owners acquired them. And among many other notable characters, K meets the families of the tanner Lasemann and the cobbler Brunswick and learn about their standing in the village, and has an interaction with the castle messenger, Barnabas, and his family, whom all have bad odor because of their resistance attitude towards the castle.

The novel sees authority differently from Kafka’s previous novels. Instead of one controlling abusing figurehead (which creates the Kafkaesque world) The Castle dwells on various different kinds of authority without a clear figurehead, which clearly showed in the way the castle is being operated.

For example, it is said that the castle is owned by Count Westwest, a mysterious figure whom we will never meet. In his absence, the castle is operated by a big staff of bureaucrats, which are arranged in a strict hierarchy. This is where the book excels, finding stories in between the bureaucratic confusion and inefficiency. Moreover, besides political power, the castle (and its staff) also bizarrely receive religious devotion from the villagers. Both of these examples have ignited plenty of interpretations from well known philosophers and critics alike of what the castle really symbolizes.

For context, Kafka wrote The Castle in a turbulent time in history, just after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires. And thus his tone of writing was partly influenced by the then-contemporary zeitgeist of a new movement, that ask the question of what replaces the traditional monarch authority (i.e. the figurehead at the top). Hence, the analogy of an empty castle at the top.

This is what makes the book so good, despite being unfinished and thus with an ending that will forever be mysterious. All the open-ended symbolisms and the many possible interpretations, as well as K’s search for meaning and connection to society throughout the journey (not to mention his attempt to access the empty castle), still become the subject of inspiration and debate until this day.