Books Archives - The Y Logs

Yzabel / December 6, 2024

Review: Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
My rating: 3/5

Blurb:

For the last 100,000 years, we Sapiens have accumulated enormous power. But despite allour discoveries, inventions, and conquests, we now find ourselves in an existential crisis. The world is on the verge of ecological collapse. Misinformation abounds. And we are rushing headlong into the age of AI—a new information network that threatens to annihilate us. For all that we have accomplished, why are we so self-destructive?

Nexus looks through the long lens of human history to consider how the flow of information has shaped us, and our world. Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, Yuval Noah Harari asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom and power. He explores how different societies and political systems throughout history have wielded information to achieve their goals, for good and ill. And he addresses the urgent choices we face as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence.

Information is not the raw material of truth; neither is it a mere weapon. Nexus explores the hopeful middle ground between these extremes, and in doing so, rediscovers our shared humanity.

Review:

I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

Alright, I received a cipy through NetGalley quite a while ago, and just didn’t get to post an actual review until now. Which I should’ve done at the time for sure. Oh well. I still remember enough of the book, in any case, to be able to do so now.

This isn’t the first book by Harari that I read. Regardless of what one may think of the research itself, there is no denying that this author has a knoack for storytelling and for grabbing a reader’s attention (in a good way), all things that are a strong point when it comes to non fiction just as well as for fiction. Especially on the theme if information networks and their latest child (so to speak), the artificial intelligence, a pretty current topic.

Overall, it was quite an interesting read, and one that I would recommend, even though it wasn’t my favourite one by Harari—the latter being caused, perhaps, by the amount of information in the book, which means that each piece couldn’t be prodded in much depth. It does give food for thought, though, and a foundation for a reader to go and do more research on this or that aspect of it—sometimes, all we need is the idea of “check this out” for us to realise that, well, said topic is A Thing. That said, if you’re looking for something with, well, more depth and deeper analysis, this is not the book.

Yzabel / September 6, 2024

Review: Inside Job

Inside Job: Treating Murderers and Sex Offenders. The Life of a Prison Psychologist. by Rebecca Myers
My rating: 4/5

Blurb:

And here I am. Totally alone in a cell with a convicted sex offender who is free to do what he wants. There is no officer. No handcuffs. No radio. Only the man across the desk and me. He looks more petrified than I do.

HMP Graymoor. One of the UK’s most notorious prisons. Home to nearly 800 murderers, rapists and child molesters.

Reporting for her first shift inside is Rebecca: twenty-two, newly graduated – and about to sit down with some of the country’s most dangerous criminals.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I actually received an ARC of this book a couple of years ago, but didn’t get to read it until, well, much more recently. That said, I didn’t notice any particular “artefacts” that would pointed to a review-copy-full-of-typos of anything of that kind, the book read just like what I expect the published version to be.

This was a fairly interesting account of the beginnings of a psychologist’s career in a prison, more specifically within a program geared towards sex offenders. Interesting, but also on the difficult side, precisely because of the type of work and the people it described. I’ve always found sex offenders specifically to be a very tricky subject: cases of rape are already hard enough, but when the whole thing is perpetrated on children on top of it, it reaches into even deeper recesses. In this way, the work of psychologists/medical personnel to try and understand and figure out if yes or not “something can be done” for the offenders is also tricky. Are these people truly evil? Are they sick, and if they can, can they be cured? If someone has offended once but then never offends again once in prison and then out of it, should they be stigmatised forever (which could be justified… or just as well lead to self-fulfilling prophecies where leaving them alone may have kept them on the straight path)? Or should they be given a second chance—but then, if they’re on the way to offending again, it’s akin to letting the fox inside the henhouse… All very, very tricky, and a very touchy subject indeed.

All the more because, here, it seems that the program didn’t help much in the end. And yet the author still wanted to share her experience, her findings, what happened, because the experience itself is worth recounting nonetheless.

Also, I’m usually not super keen when memoirs and true crime books include too much of the author’s personal life, because the latter can easily veer into being distracting. However, in this specific case, the parts about her own life were just as interesting. Notwithstanding the pressure and the impact dealing with sexual offenders can have on one’s psyche (especially as a young woman on her first job, with all the usual “surely she’s incompetent” that pop up in pretty much every job and sounded even worse in those circumstances), there were also some personal elements that could’ve… gone very wrong for her, as a sort of dark mirror of the people her job was concerned with. Both parts tied with each other, and I won’t lie, but there were a few moments when I was afraid something really bad would happen to her.

Conclusion: a bit of an unusual read for me in terms of what I’ll still loosely consider as “true crime”, and one that was quite hard at times—but also quite interesting.

Yzabel / June 8, 2024

Review: This Is Why You Dream

This Is Why You Dream: What your sleeping brain reveals about your waking life by Rahul Jandial
My rating: 4/5

Blurb:

A fascinating dive into the purpose and potential of dreams

Dreaming is one of the most deeply misunderstood functions of the human brain. Yet recent science reveals that our very survival as a species has depended on it. This Is Why You Dream explores the landscape of our subconscious, showing why humans have retained the ability to dream across millennia and how we can now harness its wondrous powers in both our sleeping and waking lives.

Dreaming fortifies our ability to regulate emotions. It processes and stores memories, amplifies creativity, and promotes learning. Dreams can even forecast future mental and physical ailments.

Dreams can also be put to use. Tracing recent cutting-edge dream research and brain science, dual-trained neuroscientist and neurosurgeon Dr. Rahul Jandial shows how to use lucid dreaming to practice real-life skills, how to rewrite nightmares, what our dreams reveal about our deepest desires, and how to monitor dreams for signs of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

In the tradition of James Nestor’s Breath and Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, This Is Why You Dream opens the door to one of our oldest and most vital functions, and unlocks its potential to impact and radically improve our lives.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Dreams in general fascinate me. Not so much the typical “meaning of dreams” approach, where if you dream about X then supposedly it means Y, but the whole subject: we all dream, dreams are as old as humanity, and yet, like with sleep in general, they’re something so trivial but at the same time so elusive, not fully understood yet. (My own dreams are also pretty much of the WTF kind most of the time, and it is fascinating in its own way.)

The author explores some theories about why we dream here, also from an approach as a neurosurgeon. I enjoyed especially the part about nightmares, how it seems that very young children don’t have them, but they actually start when children really get deep into building their own sense of self: nightmares as “the Other/the Threat vs. the Self”, in a way for our brains to establish who we are? I can sense so many possibilities for stories here, too.

Another part I enjoyed was the different roles of the Executive Network and the Imagination Network. Most of my past, older traditional reading about dreams tended to put them in the “information processing” category, with their being some jumble of whatever we experienced during the day, and in a way I think this is also part of it anyway (at least, I do regularly find elements of my current work or personal life projects in my dreams!); but this other approach was more novel to me, and made a lot more sense when explained.

I think I may have liked seeing a few more case studies, but overall I really enjoyed this.

Yzabel / June 8, 2024

Review: Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You

Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud by Becky Holmes
My rating: 4/5

Blurb:

Online romance fraud is a problem across the globe. It causes financial and emotional devastation, yet many people refuse to take it seriously. This is the story of one middle-aged woman in a cardigan determined to understand this growing phenomenon.

No other woman has had so many online romances – from Keanu Reeves to Brad Pitt to Prince William – and Becky Holmes is a favourite among peacekeeping soldiers and oil rig workers who desperately need iTunes vouchers. By winding up scammers and investigating the truth behind their profiles, Becky shines a revealing, revolting and hilarious light on a very shady corner of the internet.

Featuring first-hand accounts of victims, examples of scripts used by fraudsters, a look into the psychology of fraud and of course plenty of Becky’s hysterical interactions with scammers, this is a must-read for anyone who needs a reminder that Keanu Reeves is NOT in love with them.

Review:

[I received an advanced copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

This book was pretty interesting, with just the right dose of humour for me: with a dash of fun, but without detracting from the topic itself which, all in all, is quite serious. It’s nothing academic, stemming instead from the author’s personal dabbling with Twitter and other online endeavours, and deciding at some point to make fun of the scammers (why not get a laugh out of them, after all) and, from there, to see if she could engage some of them into revealing more about their motives and their methods.

In a way, it was nothing really new to me (I’ve been a follower for years of several YouTube channels, including Sandoz, about various online scams, so most romance-based types of fraud is something I understand well enough now). Still, it provided an entertaining read, and, more important, it could be of real value to someone who has just started to get interested in this, and needs to learn the “basics”, so to speak.

The book also emphasises how it’s not about being “too naive” or “too stupid” (you know, the typical victim blaming our societies like to indulge in–I wonder if the same people who say that would also call themselves stupid for allowing themselves to be mugged in the street). You can be a police officer or with a whole life of romantic relationships and experience behind you, and still have a blind spot. Indeed, it is very easy to think that from our little corner of safety, when we’re not confronted to it ourselves, sure… but no one is ever completely immune to having a bad spell, a tense period in their life when they could do with a friendly and/or romantic shoulder… and scammers of all kinds are very, very talented when it comes to smelling a prey and pounce on it, insinuating themselves into the chinks in the armor. (People saying “this will never happen to ME because I’m too smart”: good for them if their lives are so perfect that they never find themselves in a spot where they could become vulnerable… but, nope, it’s still not about being smart. Also, let’s not become complacent, that’s how we also become easier to manipulate.)

I would’ve liked the book to devote a little more room to scammers’ circumstances as well, though, especially when it comes to South Asia: there is a real dimension of human trafficking going on as well (people getting lured into “scammers’ compounds” on the false pretense of a genuine job, and finding themselves held there against their will, literally enslaved and forced to scam others online for fear of being beaten, or worse). It’s not all black or all white here. But I guess this is a good topic for another book, after all.

Yzabel / April 20, 2024

Review: The Trading Game

The Trading Game: A Confession by Gary Stevenson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Blurb:

“If you were gonna rob a bank, and you saw the vault door there, left open, what would you do? Would you wait around?”
Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken soccer balls on the streets of East London in the shadow of Canary Wharf, Gary Stevenson dreamed of something bigger. And he was good at numbers.
At the London School of Economics, Gary, wearing tracksuits and sneakers, shocked his posh classmates by winning a competition called “The Trading Game.” The a golden ticket to a new life, as the youngest trader at Citibank. A place where you could make more money than you’d ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional geniuses and insecure bullies, yet they start to feel like family. Where against the odds you become the bank’s most profitable trader, closing deals worth nearly a trillion dollars. A day . Soon you are dreaming of numbers in your sleep—and then you stop sleeping at all.
What happens when winning starts to feel like losing? It’s 2008 and now you have a front-row seat to the global financial crisis. A time when the easiest way to make money is to bet on millions becoming poorer—like the very people you grew up with. The economy is slipping off a precipice, and your own sanity starts slipping with it. You want to stop, but you can’t. Because nobody ever leaves .
Would you stick, or quit? Even if it meant risking everything?
This is an outrageous, unvarnished, white-knuckle journey to the dark heart of an intoxicating world—from someone who survived the game and then blew it all wide open.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Quite an interesting memoir in many ways, from an ex-trader whom a lot of people must have seen as an unlikely candidate for such a job (or, at least, I bet a lot of people would expect traders to come from a more specific pool with families closely related to financial matters, for instance).

Gary Stevenson worked at Citi for a few years after university, and managed to find his place there… or did he? For not everything was so peachy, even though he made money and things looked, for all intents and purposes, as if they were going the right way… for him, not necessarily for the rest of the world caught in the 2008 crisis. And reading about that was definitely interesting, because it is no secret that as a lot of people suffered from that very crisis, there were also those who managed to get an upper hand, so to speak, and leave the table rather wealthier. Which is partly the moral dilemma that Gary went through here, finding it more and more difficult to reconcile his success with the realisation that the markets were going crazy, and soon going down in flames.

I had a bit of a harder time, though, with the portrayal of the trading world—entertaining in a way (everybody in there seemed to be a prick of some sort or other), but it’s the kind of portrayal that grows a little… stale after a while? Note: I have no idea how people behave on the trading floor, it may or it may not be that this environment is pretty toxic in general and in nature, and I wouldn’t be surprised if indeed it was. It just grew old after a while. Also I was somewhat annoyed at the last part of the book, because in the end it read more like constant anger cum trying to get as much money as possible from Citi before leaving, but without the deeper introspection I would’ve expected from this?

Conclusion: 3 stars, it is an interesting read, the author just doesn’t come off as very reliable or relatable. (Not sure if he was supposed to be, to be fair.)

Yzabel / January 11, 2024

Review: Hidden Potential

Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam M. Grant
My rating: 3.5/5

Blurb:

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.

Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess—it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.

Many writers have chronicled the habits of superstars who accomplish great things. This book reveals how anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

A pretty interesting read in general. Maybe not the most original theme, nor anything that hasn’t been written about aplenty, but as a condensate of examples illustrating how we have plenty of hidden potential we could tap with (but don’t always realise we can), I found it inspiring nonetheless. Inspiring for myself, that is, but also as a resource for deeper thoughts when it comes to making my way on the path of leadership, since all in all, I’m still fairly new to it. And, perhaps, it was simply also a book that reached me at the right time, in the right frame of mind? (Hello, Impostor Syndrome my old friend? Can you go back into the closet again? Thank you!)

To be fair, for someone who has read several books on this theme already, this one won’t bring anything really new, even though it reads easily and is engaging. Otherwise, it will provide food for thought.

Conclusion: 3.5 stars

Yzabel / September 23, 2020

Review: The Big Book of Mars

The Big Book of Mars: From Ancient Egypt to The Martian, A Deep-Space Dive into Our Obsession with the Red Planet by Marc Hartzman
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

Mars has been a source of fascination and speculation ever since the Ancient Sumerians observed its blood-red hue and named it for their god of war and plague. But it wasn’t until 1877, when “canals” were observed on the surface of the Red Planet, suggesting the presence of water, that scientists, novelists, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs became obsessed with the question of whether there’s life on Mars. InThe War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells suggested that we wouldn’t need to make contact with Martians–they’d come for us–while, many years later, Nikola Tesla claimed that he did make contact.

Since then, Mars has fully invaded pop culture. It has its own day of the week (Tuesday, or martis in Latin), candy bar, and iconic Looney Tunes character. It has been the subject of iconic novels and movies, from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles to Mars Attacks! to The Martian. And it has sparked a space-race feud between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who both hope to send a manned mission to Mars in the near future.

Filled with entertaining history, archival images, pop culture ephemera, and interviews with NASA scientists, The Big Book of Marsis the most comprehensive look at our relationship with Mars–yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Originally, I received an excerpt, but promptly proceeded to order the actual book once I started reading it. (The paper version itself is hefty and printed on thick glossy paper and smells good, and yes, I know, I like smelling my books.)

This book deals with how we have perceived Mars, currently and historically, whether in reality or in fiction works, starting with the Victorian period. It abunds in colourful illustrations, which makes its reading all the more pleasant – especially if you do that in little chunks rather than all at once (but really, “all at once” is very tempting, because it is definitely interesting). The style is fairly humoristic in places, making for an entertaining read on top of an informative one – perhaps even more information would’ve been good here? I can never get enough when it comes to Mars, I guess.

I couldn’t decide at first whether I liked the choice of going by theme rather than purely chronologically, but in the end, the “themed” approach worked well enough. The other way might have been too much of a catalogue of dates. Also, it makes it easier to come back to it later knowing roughly what I’m looking for (“fiction about Mars”, and so on) even if I’ve completely forgotten by then when exactly that “thing” happened.

All in all, a thoroughly enjoyable book, and a pretty one to boot.

Yzabel / September 15, 2020

Review: The Other People

The Other People by C.J. Tudor
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

She sleeps, a pale girl in a white room . . .

Three years ago, Gabe saw his daughter taken. In the back of a rusty old car, covered in bumper stickers. He was driving behind the car. He watched her disappear. But no one believes him. Most people believe that his daughter, and wife, are dead. For a while, people believed that Gabe was responsible.

Three years later and Gabe cannot give up hope. Even though he has given up everything else. His home, his job, his old life. He spends his days and nights travelling up and down the motorway, sleeping in his camper van in service stations, searching for the car that took her. Searching for his daughter.

Katie spends a lot of her life in service stations, working as a waitress. She often sees Gabriel, or ‘the thin man’ as she has nicknamed him. She knows his story. She feels for him, because Katie understands what it’s like to lose a loved one. Nine years ago, her father was murdered. It broke her family apart. She hasn’t seen her oldest sister since the day of the funeral; the day she did something terrible.

Fran and her daughter, Alice, put in a lot of miles on the motorway. Not searching. But running. Trying to keep one step ahead of the people that want to hurt them. Because Fran knows the truth. She knows what really happened to Gabe’s daughter. She knows who is responsible. And she knows that if they ever find them, they’re dead.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley and Pigeonhole, in exchange for an honest review.]

The time I needed to read this book doesn’t correspond to how enjoyable it was—I would normally have read it faster, only I made the mistake of starting it during a period where what I really wanted to read was non fiction. So, even though it took me one month to finish, I actually liked it (more than other novels by the same author, in fact).

The story’s premise rests on something a parent’s worst nightmare (or so I assume): seeing their child abducted or killed. One fateful evening, Gabe came back from work only to see his only daughter riding in a stranger’s car, then find out his wife and daughter were savagely murdered… but wasn’t the little girl in a car on the motorway? Since that day, Gabe has been travelling the roads in the hopes of finding information about his missing daughter—a daughter that everyone else sees as dead—aided only by a mysterious man who calls himself “the Samaritan”.

The novel has us follow different characters: Gabe himself, of course, but also Fran and Alice, a woman and her daughter who may or may not have strange powers, and Katie, who works as a waitress in a restaurant off the motorway. While their trajectories appear independent at first, they gradually start to tangle and make sense, for all of them are, in fact, involved in what is unfurling here. This goes on at a pace that I found just right for me—not too quick, not too slow, with just enough information to make me imagine what was going on, without allowing me to guess the ending.

Overall, the story here is dark and creepy, often raising so many questions that one can’t help but wonder if all of them will get answers. And they don’t always—at the end of the novel, there were still a couple of things I couldn’t explain, even though overall there was an explanation to most of the ploy. This was partly annoying (I’m thinking of the ‘supernatural’ aspect here, to be more specific), but I found it didn’t detract from my enjoyment, or not as much as I thought it would, so that still makes it 3.5 stars for me.

Yzabel / August 2, 2020

Review: Saved by Science

Saved by Science: The Hope and Promise of Synthetic Biology by Mark J Poznansky
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

With all the advances in science in the last century, why are there still so many infectious diseases? Why haven’t we found cures for difficult cancers? Why hasn’t any major headway been made in the treatment of mental illness? Why did 36 million people die of hunger in 2019? How do we expect to feed the additional two to three billion people expected by 2050? And how do we intend to stop, and not only that but reverse , global warming and the climate crisis? In Saved by Science , scientist Mark Poznansky examines the many crises facing humanity while encouraging us with the promise of an emerging synthetic biology. This is the science of building simple organisms, or “biological apps,” to make manufacturing greener, energy production more sustainable, agriculture more robust, and medicine more powerful and precise. Synthetic biology is the marriage of the digital revolution with a revolution in biology and genomics; some have even called it “the fourth industrial revolution.” Accessible and informative, Saved by Science provides readers with hope for the future if we trust in and support the future of science.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley and Pigeonhole, in exchange for an honest review.]

Quite an informative book on the current state of biology as well as extrapolation on what we could do in the future in regards to synthetic biology. Hopefully in the near future, too, because as far as I can see, starvation and climate change aren’t going anywhere soon.

The scientific explanations are easy to follow, so you don’t need a deep scientific background to get something out of this book. Will any of this happen? Maybe, maybe not, but envisioning the possibilities was made easy and, dare I say, exciting—the author seems to have an optimistic train of thought here, and it shines through. Even though there are concerns about certain things (GMOs, etc.), I must say my own outlook on this would veer more towards the positive than the negative, for sure. Shall we play with DNA? Is that our place? Maybe not, but it wasn’t our place either to pollute and wreck the planet, so maybe it’s time we do something about it.

If anything, I’d say it could’ve done with being a little longer, although a few parts were also slightly repetitive… so maybe a compromise here?

Conclusion: 3.5 stars

Yzabel / July 25, 2020

Review: Sur les traces du coupable (Dans les Yeux de Lya #2)

Sur les traces du coupable by Carbone
My rating: ★★☆☆☆

Blurb:

Lya va peut-être enfin connaître l’identité du chauffard qui l’a renversée la veille de ses 17 ans. Elle tient dans ses mains le dossier subtilisé dans le bureau de maître Martin de Villegan. C’est pour ce dossier qu’elle s’est faite embaucher comme stagiaire dans ce cabinet d’avo-cats. Tout ça pour ça. Mais Lya peut compter sur ses deux alliés fidèles, Adèle sa collègue dévouée et Antoine son meilleur ami. Sur le terrain, l’enquête pour la vérité vire à la série noire.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I was a little less satisfied with this one than with volume one. It’s still a pleasant read, and I definitely like the artwork as much as I did originally, but after the cliffhanger on which volume 1 ends, I was expecting a little more in this one. Instead, what Lya finds leads to more questions (not necessarily a bad thing in itself), yet in the end, the additional answers she gets aren’t so interesting. At least for me, the latter probably stems from the fact we do get a name at last, but it doesn’t have much impact. (I’m trying hard not to spoil anything here, so let’s say that it’s akin to someone being super known/loved in certain circles, but if you’re not part of these circles/not interested in that person, you don’t feel emotionally involved in their lives.)