THE CHAOS THEORY

“Anak Semua Bangsa” by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Book no. 2 out of 4 of the Buru Quartet, and right from the very beginning it dives straight into the chaos that the first book left us with. It has a plot twist early on from a forgettable object from the previous book, which turns out to have a pretty big background story. And even the first 2 chapters already provided more bombshells that they eclipsed the intensity of the entire first book.

No direct spoiler as usual, but let’s just say things are quickly becoming very interesting from the start, before the plot of the book then slowly calmed down and things turned into a more familiar discussion mode.

In this sequel, the social struggles between the [3rd class] locals towards [1st class] Europeans and [2nd class] Chinese and Japanese becomes more apparent. All the envy, resentment and injustice – oh the injustice – that are portrayed in the book can be felt so real, just as it really was in history. This somehow gives me a more complete understanding with what really happened in the East Indies during the Dutch colonial era, and helps me connect the dots with the stories that my grandmothers used to tell me.

And they resonate very well with the main theme of this 2nd book, on understanding our land and culture more closely, to pay more attention towards the locals and their day-to-day struggles, and ultimately to ignite nationalism.

Which is fitting, as I started to read the Buru Quartet funnily due to the encouragement of a foreigner friend that wanted to know more about Indonesian literature and culture, with him specifically encouraged me to read them in their original language bahasa Indonesia in order to get the real feel of it. Best advice ever.

Just like in the first book, the strength in the second book is in the bold characters and their incredible back stories, which gives a unique psychological reasoning behind their decision makings, even the cruel ones. Of course that doesn’t justify all the nasty things happening in the story but it does teaches us many new perspectives on how people live their lives, which is never black and white.

Moreover, the book also provides a surprisingly good big picture on how the media industry works in those days, complete with all the process of journalism and reporting, censorship, and how news spread slowly across the globe.

And by the way, remember that question I had on my review for Bumi Manusia, about why the Suharto regime banned the Buru Quartet? I get it now. It shows and teaches people how to stand up against the powerful tyranny, from the grassroots level to the big national mobilization.

But did they succeed on doing it? The ending of this book is so very satisfying, but brilliantly it also gives the exhilarating feeling of what will happen next. Things are just getting started.

More on Buru Quartet: Book 1 | Book 3 |Book 4 | The making of Buru Quartet

“A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters” by Henry Gee

I came across this book when I first listened to Henry Gee’s interview at Inquiring Minds podcast, which was intriguing and hilarious. Now this is a guy who really knows his stuff about science, but have a twisted sense of humour to go along with it. My kind of guy.

But it wasn’t until I finish reading The Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking that I really look for this book (which apparently I have already bought months ago – talking about Tsundoku), because to be frank I didn’t understand half of what professor Hawking was saying and I thought maybe I can understand the universe better when it is accompanied by jokes.

Little did I know that in this book Gee puts all the jokes at the appendix and instead writes a serious, condensed, and very organised history of Earth, from the ground up. Which is surprisingly brilliant. While professor Hawking’s book was about the theories of space, this book is more focused on the evolution occurring inside Earth. A 4.6 billion years worth of evolution in a very readable style of writing with a nice flow, which is very useful to help us understand a difficult subject.

The book seems to cover everything, from the supernova, to the formation of the sun and Earth, then to the focus of the book inside our planet: the beginning of life at the bottom of the sea, the many weird-sounded bacterias, the evolution of animals, the beginning of life at land, the several extinctions, the ice ages, the evolution of plants and their exponential growth, when animals began to crawl, the different environments in the several supercontinents, the range of types of dinosaurs and pterosaur (and their evolutions), and many more, including the emergence of the many different types of human.

Meanwhile, every once in a while there are amusing facts that is just mind blowing. For instance, I never knew that the Earth once had a ring like Saturn, at the beginning there was no ozone layer to protect the living things from direct sunlight, there once a Great Oxidation Event between 2.4 – 2.1 billion years ago where the concentration of oxygen first rose sharply (greater than today’s 21%) then collapsed to below 2% which had a tremendous effect on life on Earth, and how the development of anus eventually leads to the evolution of larger life forms at sea.

It’s also so fascinating to see how different eras on Earth looked very different from one another, with different flora and fauna (like Therapsids that dominated Pangea), different continent formations, even different atmosphere and temperature. Indeed, the Earth keeps evolving and changing, with many different new animals and plants eventually replace the extinct ones, and where the inhospitable place slowly turned to the goldilocks environment for all Earth’s current creatures to thrive today. All of these are vividly described in this book.

Which got me thinking. What would the world looks like in 10,000 years? In 1 million years? Will homo sapiens survive or will we be replaced with other superior beings? Will we have futuristic towns or will our megacities be eaten back by the forests?

Gee actually has an answer to this, a calculated guess based on the trajectory of the biological history that he has just presented. “Within the next few thousand years, Homo sapiens will have vanished,” he remarked, “The cause will be, in part, the repayment of an extinction debt, long overdue.”

The first in line in the extinction debt is the failure to re-polulate. As Gee analyze, “The human population is likely to peak during the present century, after which it will decline. By 2100, it will be less than it is today.” This can be predicted using the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) – the rate where babies must be born to outpace the death rate – where 183 out of 195 countries that were studied show they would have a TFR lower than 2.1 children per mother by 2100, which indeed suggest the global population will be smaller than today.

And this will occur due to a combination of habitat loss, reproductive failure due to changes in the environment and human behaviour, events deep in prehistory (whatever that means), and local problems such as a small tribe find themselves cut off from other of the same kind.

Another factor in the extinction debt is indeed the issue of global warming. As Gee noted, “The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide over the past eight hundred thousand years or so has never exceeded about [sic] 300 ppm. In 2018, it exceeded 400 ppm as a result of human activity, a concentration not seen for more than 3 million years.”

As a consequence the greenhouse gas effect from the excess carbon dioxide will eventually makes our planet warmer, and “The glaciers will, nonetheless, grind onward and recede, advance and recede, many more times. The human-induced injection of carbon dioxide will set back the date of the next glacial advance, but when it comes, it will be all the more sudden. Climate-induced calving of icebergs into the oceans, especially the North Atlantic, will add so much fresh water to the ocean that the Gulf Stream will seize up, and Europe and North America will be plunged into a full-scale glaciation over the course of less than a human lifetime. But no humans will be there to feel the cold.”

Bleak stuff, I know, but judging from the history of the Earth, this is just part of the evolution, even if the warming is greatly enhanced by human activities. Because it has always been like this since 4.6 billion years ago, and we’re just happen to live in a relatively calm period on Earth that makes life for us sapiens possible.

And as it has always been, the Earth is constantly changing – scientists are even unanimous that there will be another supercontinent formed in another 250 million years – while the creatures from our period will vanish and be replaced by the new ones, or replaced by nothing for another millions of years.

As Gee added, “Models of the carbon cycle suggest that life will die out between 900 million and 1.5 billion years in the future. A billion years after that, the oceans will boil away. What happens after that depends on how fast the oceans boil. Fast, and the Earth will dry out and become a hot desert planet. Slow, and much of the atmosphere will shroud the Earth, creating a greenhouse effect so powerful that the surface of the planet will melt.” What happened with the planet Venus comes in mind when reading about this sentence.

The book ends at the 67% mark on Kindle, with the remaining pages serve as the massive appendix of notes, references, and jokes (with personal stories too). Make sure not to miss them. All in all, it is an excellent book that shows the grand evolution of planet Earth but written in a digestible way that makes it easy to understand. No wonder that this book won The Royal Society’s Book of the Year Award in 2022.

“A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking

My head hurts. This is a smart book, written by a smart person that needs no introduction.

It is a history of the universe and the many different scientists – from ancient Greece to present day – that are trying to unlock the codes and provide meaning and understanding of who we are, why we are here, and how we are here, with the end goal of creating a single theory that describes the whole universe.

Professor Hawking remarks that the grand theory (which still doesn’t exist yet), “should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.”

This is certainly a monumental idea, where even the best and brightest minds have so far failed to do. But, intriguingly, not without an effort.

This is what this book is all about, discussing and analyzing every theories that have been formulated to make sense of the universe, complete with all the debates and intellectual arguments, the dilemma and the assumptions, all the errors made, and the breakthroughs, covering space and time, the expanding universe, the black hole, wormholes and time travel (which Einstein in 1935 argued that it is possible), the possibility of alien life, and many more, including where God stands in all of this.

It is indeed one of the smartest books that I’ve ever read, and thus naturally also one of the hardest to comprehend. But still, if we can understand merely half of what professor Hawking is saying, I reckon we would already be greatly enlightened. I know I was.

“The Score Takes Care of Itself” by Bill Walsh with Steve Jamison and Craig Walsh

Bill Walsh is up there among the legendary coaches in NFL history. He managed to transform the 49ers from the worst team in the league to be the best team in just 2 seasons, from the most chaotic organizationally to get praises from the Harvard Business Review for organizational excellence.

And he would end up achieving what really matters in NFL, winning 5 Super Bowl championships in 14 years with the 49ers, as well as transforming the game with his West Coast Offense that has since been wildly imitated by other teams.

This book is about his blue print on doing that transformation. It is his philosophy, or what he called the Standard of Performance, broken down into easily digestible chapters that was revealed through extensive conversations with best-selling author Steve Jamison.

As Walsh remarks, “my Standard of Performance required not only maximum mental and physical effort, sacrifice, and commitment but also attention to such seemingly incidental requirements as “no shirttails out,” “positive attitude,” “promptness,” “good sportsmanship (no strutting, no posturing, no cheap shots),” “never sit down while on the practice field,” “no tank tops in the dining area,” “control of profanity,” “no fighting,” “treat fans with respect and exhibit a professional demeanor,” and many more, including “no smoking on premises,” which applied to all of us. Much of this may seem trivial to you, but it adds up and changes the environment.”

As a result, the 49er increasingly became famous for their businesslike and professional behaviour, even when they’re losing. And thus, Standard of Performance started to become appealing beyond the world of football and was attested by the many CEOs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere that sought for Walsh’s advice and invited him to speak about leadership.

This book also caters that angle from the business point of view. A little too much, in fact. In a bizarre way Steve Jamison, as the writer of the book, decided that it would be a great idea to turn Walsh’s footballing philosophy into a business book format, with all the corporate angles of leadership, teamwork, innovation, etc, complete with all those top 10 checklist of business cliches, which somewhat diluted Walsh’s core focus and stories on football.

Nevertheless, to be fair the many gems coming out of this book don’t take away the key messages from Walsh’s philosophy, regardless of the poor positioning to business genre. And they are indeed applicable in sports, business, and any other walks of life.

The followings are my favourites out of the whole bunch:

1. To succeed you must experience failure, and more importantly develop the ability to bounce back from failures. “I’ve observed that if individuals who prevail in a highly competitive environment have any one thing in common besides success, it is failure—and their ability to overcome it. “Crash and burn” is part of it; so are recovery and reward.”
2. Have a grand unifying principle, have a philosophy.
3. Before you can win the fight, you’ve got to be in the fight.
4. You’re part of the team, and everyone have their own roles in the team. Your role won’t succeed if it’s not supported by other roles.
5. Be professional in mannerism. “For example, how the players dressed at practice and the appearance they gave to others when taking the field was very important to me. I wanted our football team to look truly professional—impeccable. Thus, shirttails tucked in, socks up tight, and more were requirements.”
6. It takes time to rebuild, it’s not an overnight success. Achieving success takes time, patience and fortitude.
7. Focus on what you do best, be the master of it, until you’re comfortable even with the pressure. Thorough preparation and the training for it can only get you so far, and trying harder has its limits. Walsh cannot do what he’s done in football in other sports like tennis or golf.
8. Have a clear plan with meticulous details. “Meetings were held, and he would take an hour or two with every employee so they knew exactly what he expected of them, what he wanted them to do and how he wanted them to do it. He made it very clear. There was no confusion in their minds as to what he expected.”
9. Communication is very important. “Communication within the organization was extremely important to Bill, especially between coaches and players. Even though our headquarters at 711 Nevada Street in Redwood City, California, weren’t so good, he saw the cramped offices where we were almost sitting on top of each other as an asset. When somebody was talking on the phone or having a conversation, everybody could hear what was going on. In a strange way, it meant that everybody on the staff was in the loop.”
10. The importance of having the ability of making the most out of the situation or the hands you’d been dealt with. “Creating gold from dross is alchemy; making lemonade when you’re given lemons is leadership; making lemonade when you don’t have any lemons is great leadership.”
11. Get creative with your limitations, to turn it into a strength. “Instead of looking for reasons we couldn’t make it work, I sought solutions that would make it succeed.”
12. Respect the past but don’t cling to it.
13. Give credit where credit is due.
14. Always have a contingency plan. “Having a well-thought-out plan ready to go in advance of a change in the weather is the key to success.”
15. About 20% of all things we cannot control, such us luck, weather, etc. But we can control 80% of the things, and we should focus on what we can control.
16. Respect is earned and should be justified. “Declaring, “I am the leader!” has no value unless you also have the command skills necessary to be the leader.”
17. “There is no one perfect or even preferable style of leadership, just as there is no perfect politician or parent.” “Some leaders are volatile, some voluble; some stoic, others exuberant; but all successful leaders know where we want to go, figure out a way we believe will get the organization there (after careful consideration of relevant available information), and then move forward with absolute determination.”
18. Know when to quit, when to admit the plan is not working, and cut loss. Sunk-cost fallacy is a worse burden. “A leader must be keen and alert to what drives a decision, a plan of action. If it was based on good logic, sound principles, and strong belief, I felt comfortable in being unswerving in moving toward my goal. Any other reason (or reasons) for persisting were examined carefully. Among the most common faulty reasons are (1) trying to prove you are right and (2) trying to prove someone else is wrong. Of course, they amount to about the same thing and often lead to the same place: defeat.”
19. Stood your ground and protect your turf when your position or authority is being challenged. “Leaders who don’t understand what their territory is and how to protect it will soon find themselves with no turf to protect.”
20. Be prepared, be detail oriented, be organized, be accountable, keep everything in perspective while simultaneously focused fully on the task at hand, be fair, be firm, be flexible.
21. Sweat the right small stuff.
22. Beat em’ to the punch! Hurt your opponents before they hurt you. Strike first.
23. A leader needs to have a very hard edge inside. “It has to lurk in there somewhere and come out on occasion. You must be able to make and carry out harsh and, at times, ruthless decisions in a manner that is fast, firm, and fair. Applied correctly, this hard edge will not only solve the immediate difficulty, but also prevent future problems by sending out this important message: Cross my line and you can expect severe consequences. This will have ongoing benefits for your organization.”
24. Inner voice is more influential than outer voice. “The true inspiration, expertise, and ability to execute that employees take with them into their work is most often the result of their inner voice talking, not some outer voice shouting, and not some leader giving a pep talk. For members of your team, you determine what their inner voice says.”
25. “you don’t need to shout, stomp, or strut to be a great leader—just do the job and treat people right.”
26. Blend honesty and “diplomacy.”
27. Produce clear instructions and battle plan. “Use every means before and after combat to tell troops what they are going to do and what they have done.”
28. Be careful with flattery, don’t get it into your head and make you lose focus.
29. Don’t get influenced by outside opinion. “Believing your own press clippings – good or bad – is self defeating. You are allowing others, oftentimes uninformed others, to tell you who you are.”
30. Positive words work better than negative ones. “You demonstrate a lack of assuredness when you talk constantly in negatives. When attempting to help someone attain that next level of performance, a supportive approach works better than a constantly negative or downside-focused approach.”
31. Give constructive criticism rather than demeaning criticism. “If you’re growing a garden, you need to pull out the weeds, but flowers will die if all you do is pick weeds. They need sunshine and water. People are the same. They need criticism, but they also require positive and substantive language and information and true support to really blossom.”
32. Be crystal clear with direct communication that is clear, specific, and comprehensive without an ounce of ambiguity. Don’t beat around the bush.
33. Embrace uncertainties, in order to avoid mental comfort zone. “This comfort zone is dangerous because it creates an often almost imperceptible lowering of intensity, focus, and energy, which leads directly to reduced effort, additional mistakes, and diminished performance.”
34. Leadership needs poise under pressure.
35. On teaching: use straight forward language. Be concise. Account for a wide range of difference in knowledge, comprehension, and experience. Account that some are more receptive and more eager to learn than others. Be observant during your comment. Strongly encourage note taking. Use an unpredictable presentation style. Organize sentence using logical, sequential building blocks. Encourage audience participation. Use visual aids. And remember Sun Tzu: with more sophistication comes more control.
36. Money talks. Treating people right talks louder.
37. On motivation: Formally celebrate and observe the momentous achievement—the victory—and make sure that everyone feels ownership in it. Allow pats on the back for a limited time. Be apprehensive about applause. Recognize that mastery is a process and not a destination.
38. On situational character: “It’s worth remembering that some individuals have “situational character”—their attitude (and subsequent performance) are linked to results. Good results? Great attitude. Bad results? Bad attitude.”
39. Ego is good. “Here’s what a big ego is: pride, self-confidence, self-esteem, self-assurance . Ego is a powerful and productive engine. In fact, without a healthy ego you’ve got a big problem.”
40. But egotism? Now that’s bad. “Egotism is something else entirely. It’s an ego that’s been inflated like a hot-air balloon—arrogance that results from your own perceived skill, power, or position. You become increasingly self-important, self-centered, and selfish, just as a hot-air balloon gets pumped with lots of hot air until it turns into some big, ponderous entity that’s slow, vulnerable, and easily destroyed. Unfortunately, a strong, healthy ego often becomes egotism.”
41. The bottom 20% may determine your success. “the so-called bottom 20 percent of our team—the backups, “benchwarmers,” and special role players, those who didn’t see much action during the regular season. In a sports organization this is the group that often determines your fate—they make the difference between whether you win or lose. In business it may be a customer-service representative or another less prominent “player” who fails to address a problem due to lack of readiness or a feeling that his or her particular job doesn’t really mean that much in the big picture.”
42. If it looks inevitable that you’re going to lose. At least lose with dignity.
43. Use the four most powerful words: I believe in you.
44. “Occasionally, when striving to go beyond conventional results, you must go beyond the conventional and against popular opinion. This means trusting your own judgment enough to be resourceful, innovative, and imaginative. It means resisting the herd mentality.”
45. The no enemies policy. “I instructed everyone in our organization—players, staff, and all others—to do everything possible to get along with people who interacted with us, even when it might appear they were treating us unfairly. We simply couldn’t afford to waste resources fighting needless fights, whether with fans, media, vendors, sponsors, other teams, or anyone else, including squabbles among ourselves. You can quickly find yourself doing nothing but chasing so-called enemies.”
46. “The most effective survival tools a leader can possess: expertise, composure, patience, and common sense.”
47. There’s no mystery to mastery, the connection between preparation and performance: training, training and training. “You never stop learning, perfecting, refining—molding your skills. You never stop depending on the fundamentals—sustaining, maintaining, and improving.”
48. The importance of work ethics. “For me, the starting point for everything—before strategy, tactics, theories, managing, organizing, philosophy, methodology, talent, or experience—is the work ethic. Without one of significant magnitude you’re dead in the water, finished.”
49. “When you make a mistake, admit it and fix it. Don’t let pride, stubbornness, or possible embarrassment about your bad decision prevent you from correcting what you have done. Fix it, or the little problem becomes a big one.”
50. And last but not least, the sentence that becomes the title of the book: Focus on the process, and the result will take care of itself.

“Bumi Manusia” by Pramoedya Ananta Toer

This is a 1973 novel about life in Dutch-occupied East Indies in the 1890s. Vividly portrayed through the fictitious characters that are described in such impressive details they could easily be mistaken for a real-life person from history.

The book shows the social structures of the time, the apartheid law, the race discriminations and class struggles, the colonial injustice, the media scenes, and the local customs straight from the historical archives, all written in a semi-poetic style.

Using charming old jargons and 1970s expressions, the book is narrated through the voice of its main protagonist, Minke, a character loosely based on Tirto Adhi Soerjo. And it started slowly, in a simple enough circumstance that would later proven to be an aftermath of a complex conflict.

This is the author’s strength, where Pramoedya can construct some complex situations but thread them neatly in a simple narrative.

This will be apparent later in the development of the story, where in every step of the way the rich backstories of the characters are revealed one by one, some with a surprising twist, which delightfully add into the thickness of the plot of the ongoing main story. Like the most unbelievable back story of the mother Nyai Ontosoroh or the tragic tale of the Japanese prostitute, to name a few, which are so mesmerising.

It is indeed an incredible story worthy of all the awards that it has received over the years. But for the life of me I cannot understand why the book was banned during Suharto era in Indonesia, on the grounds that it promoted Marxist-Leninist doctrines and Communism, because neither doctrines are promoted in the book. All book stores and agents were visited by the government and Pramoedya’s books were all confiscated, his English translator, Maxwell Lane (a staff at the Australian Embassy), was sent home.

Pramoedya was even arrested and exiled before this, by the Suharto regime between 1969-1979 to Buru Island in Eastern Indonesia, with his library back home burned. He wasn’t permitted access to pen and paper either in exile, but that didn’t stop him for creating his magnum opus: the 4 books that became known as the “Buru Quartet”, which he recited orally to other prisoners in 1973 in Buru before they were eventually written down and smuggled out in 1975. Including this book, the 1st out of 4 books. Such was the power of his ideas that the books were then quickly banned and confiscated.

Today Bumi Manusia (or the Earth of Mankind) has been translated to 33 languages, it is now freely circulating in Indonesia since the fall of the Suharto regime, and Pramoedya has since considered as one of the biggest writers (if not THE biggest writer) in Indonesia.

And spoiler alert, this book at first seems to be heading towards a conclusive and happy ending. But my God the bombshell it gives when it was just about to end! Which is a perfect setting for the sequel. Screw it, I’m going to start reading book no 2 right now.

More on Buru Quartet: Book 2 | Book 3 |Book 4 | The making of Buru Quartet

“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain

This book is a sequel of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, now narrated from the vantage point of Huckleberry Finn.

The story begins where the first book left off: when the boys decided to form a robber gang. But soon afterwards, Finn broke out on his own adventure where he suddenly posses a considerable sum of money, and the headache that came along with it. Including his alcoholic father that reappear in his life to get his hands into the money but eventually kidnap and imprison Finn when this attempt failed.

Finn’s escape from his father and a friendship he developed with a runaway black slave is the main adventure narration of the book, alongside the colourful characters he met and the places he visited along the Mississippi river.

Unfortunately, however, the casual racism from the Adventures of Tom Sawyer is enhanced in this book, where the slave named Jim becomes a key part of the story. While it does give a unique view on how slavery really works in that era and how it also humanised the slave, some of the humor was written at the expense of Jim’s negatively-stereotyped behaviour, where he is portrayed as gullible, uneducated, superstitious, helpless and dependent on a white boy to make decisions, but have strong principles – the archetype of a nobel savage.

And the book also uses a whole lot of the N word. Like a lot, a lot. Some are even used not in a casual descriptive way (in a 1890s style), but indeed with a racist connotation to it. Which create this uncomfortable feel whenever I’m reading the book and leave a bad aftertaste.

Hence, a conundrum. I generally believe that society will benefit more from more context over old written work, instead of censorship. That it is necessary to still show the old ways so that we can clearly see the progress made in society over the years. But holy crap. Now I get it why so many people are trying to ban or cancel this book.

“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain

This is a great American novel about the mischievous adventures of a boy named Tom Sawyer.

Right from the get go we get that old childhood feel of carefreeness and wonder, in a small town environment where the orphan Sawyer lived with his aunt Polly, half-brother Sid and cousin Marry. The book is a never ending suspense of what will Sawyer do next with his juvenile demeanor and clever tricks. And when he eventually meet Huckleberry Finn? Forget about it, it’s a match made in hell.

Their days are filled with skipping school to play, sneaking out of the house at night, trading “treasures” that they find (including a tooth), performing a superstitious ritual at a graveyard at midnight, witnessing a gruesome murder, forming a robber gang, meeting Indians, went out for an adventure for few days with another friend – Joe Harper – without telling anyone (and were presumed dead) to become pirates in the Mississippi river, and of course making a surprise appearance at their own joint funeral.

Mind you, however, this is a book written in 1876 with all its charms and backwardness. And this includes casual racism that was the norm at the time. Still a classic though, considering the context of its time, that is filled with humor, wit and veiled social criticism that became Mark Twain’s signature style.

“The Psychology Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained” by Nigel Benson, Joannah Ginsburg, and Voula Grand

This is a complete big-picture book about psychology.

First, it provides the context of the evolution of psychology, from ancient Greece to modern era. It shows its many different branches and the many thinkers with different approaches and even conflicting ideas. Then it explains the many overlaps with other disciplines, such as with medicine, physiology, neuroscience, computer science, anthropology, sociology, education, politics, economy and the law.

The book then goes down straight to business. It covers a wide range of topics in psychology, such as multiple personality disorder, Pavlovian conditioning, the fascinating world of the unconscious mind, the inferiority complex and superiority complex, the psychology of adopted child, on self hatred, conditions of worth, on giving meaning to suffering, on accepting our negative emotions rather than repressing them, understanding schizophrenia, Stoic-based therapies, or how unfinished tasks have different status in memory.

Moreover, there is the implementations of psychology in advertising, the magic number 7 in memory, the filter theory, memory retrieval clues, how events and emotion are stored in memory together, on flow state, the fascinating forensic psychology, the benefits of mindfulness meditation, nature vs nurture in behaviour, flashbulb memory, just-world hypothesis, cognitive dissonance, the now famous Stanford Prison experiment, the contextualisation of trauma, the pros and cons regarding catharsis effect, on violence on video game and TV, on autism, introvert-extrover spectrum, and back to multiple personality disorder at the end of the book to make it a full circle.

Along the way, it answers some of the key questions on psychology, such as how ordinary people are capable of cruelty when under pressure to conform, is intelligence hereditary, how a cat and a mouse can live peacefully if conditioned from babies, the explanation behind obsessive compulsive behaviour, how our preference is not rational but can be conditioned, what happens when you put good people in an evil place, the association between genius and psychotic temperament, and of course the analysis of the marshmallow test that has been cited in almost every self help books.

The book generates all of this from the best of the best minds in the field, from Sigmund Freud, to Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, Viktor Frankl, Daniel Kahneman, Steven Pinker, Stanley Milgram, to the influential Carl Rogers, Albert Ellis, Virginia Satir, Bluma Zeigarnik, Endel Tulving, Donald Hebb, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Albert Bandura, to the controversial ones like Timothy Leary, non psychologists such as Alan Turing and Noam Chomsky, to my new favourites Fritz Perls and Erich Fromm.

All in all, this is a book about theses of the human minds, that have been tested, re-tested, debunked, few buried and got resurrected, others debated and still inconclusive, while some became world changing. And this book shows them all in a concise manner.

“A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson

From the Big Bang, to the 5 mass extinctions, to the rise of Homo Sapien, Bill Bryson takes us in an incredible journey to learn about our universe, our planet, and everything in it. Within the 500+ pages the book covers, well, nearly everything about what we know [so far] from the lens of science, narrated in an easy style of writing suited for non-scientist lay people.

We’ll hear about the best of the best people, the Nobel Prize-winning all stars, and their stories in discovering their theory, their struggles in testing their hypothesis, and their eureka moments in inventing their ground breaking device for the advancement of humanity.

We’ll learn about the planetary system, how to make sense of time and space, the discovery of dinosaur, what’s inside atom, on proton and neutron, on gravity, how to calculate carbon dating, on predicting earth quake and volcano eruption, about the Ice Age, the younger dryas period, on complete human biology filled with mitochondria ATP and the rest, the curious case of DNA, the many types of humans other than Homo Sapien and what happened to them, and so much more, including how 99.99% of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us, and how the average lifespan of complex organism is about 4 million years (roughly where we are now).

And while the range of topics in the book is very wide, Bryson is still able to demonstrate that everything in the universe are connected and prove his most profound conclusion about life in the universe: that all life is one. It is such a fascinating book, perfect for understanding the big picture.

“How to Live with a Huge Penis: Advice, Meditations, and Wisdom for Men Who Have Too Much by Dr. Richard Jacob and Rev. Owen Thomas

This is a hilarious book about a condition called Oversized Male Genitalia (OMG), aka “huge penis.” (Not sure why I use quotation marks for that).

It is, according to the book, “[a] genetic birth defect that causes the penis to grow absurdly large. The condition is thought to affect about 1 million American men, though that number may be artificially low due to underreporting.” Ah yes, the underreporting. Finally, a book that understands.

The book covers everything about schlong-related matters. It has a chapter on big dicks throughout history (not sure how the authors can possibly know), on dealing with discrimination, the step-by-step guide to come out to your family and friends, on care and maintenance, on sexual intercourse, it has a dedicated section for daily affirmation journal, there’s even a ruler in one page to measure the length gauge of your package and a some kind of round target image in another page to measure the girth gauge. And the best part is, the book is co-authored by a PhD in Asian economic psychology and a reverend (yeah, reverend. He even provides a prayer for the wiener at some point in the book).

However, jokes aside, it is quite hard at times to figure out whether the book is joking or being serious. I mean, just look at this sentence: “OMG sufferers have a suicide rate 30 times that of the average population. Many more express their pain through self-mutilation, often harming their penises or—in rare cases—cutting them off entirely.”

But due to the overall nature of the book as two blokes having a laugh, I treat this book nothing more than just one huge (pun intended) joke, where nothing is factually correct, no lessons supposed to be learned, and nothing inspirational can be found within its 132 pages. Just dick jokes, dick jokes everywhere. And it’s very entertaining.

Because, c’mon is this sentence even real? “if you fail to remove lingering ejaculate from the urethra of a huge penis, it could harden into a cementlike substance called “cumcrete.” Or this one: “Almost all cases of adult phallophobia (the unnatural fear of penises) are the result of a frightening encounter with a huge penis while in the womb.” Or the claim that due to the vast amount of blood needed to create an erection, someone with a massive dong when having a boner could absorb more blood than needed from elsewhere like from our brain, thus it can cause problems and even deaths (this one’s gold).

But it’s not all nonsense, as the authors are teaching tolerance and harmony, as well as giving excellent advices on how to live life with an enormous junk, advices that can also be applicable for men in any walks of life, any shape and sizes. Such as “[u]nless your partner is a professional sword swallower, it’s probably best to leave oral sex off the bedroom menu.” Or the types of usage your humongous knob can be utilised for, described in a pretty graphic way: as a cliffhanger, as an alibi to escape court sentence, to win an audition for a broadway acting job, to stop a leaking boat.

They also have a lot (like a lot, a lot) of random testimonies from fellow OMG sufferers, and sympathetic sentences such as this: “When you have a weapons-grade wang, the occasional penile wound is a fact of life. Every OMG sufferer over the age of 20 can tell you stories of sitting on his penis, slamming it in a car door, getting it caught in a pool filter, or waking up to find the family cat using it as a scratching post.”

Now can you think of any other book that have such widths and depths of analysis over 1 particular subject than this one? It’s a nice palate cleansing in between the literatures, the history, the psychology, the religion, and books with topics like the rise of AI and government conspiracy crap. Suggestion: they should make a sequel to this book, on balls.