Book reviews

August 3, 2026

This page is not actively maintained. It is an archive, kept as it was.

I had a short stint with Goodreads and then decided to abandon it. These are the reviews I collected there, moved here so they live on my own site instead. I am not much of a book reviewer, but let’s keep them for the record.

Out of everything I shelved, only seven books got an actual write-up. The rest I read and rated without ever saying anything about them, and those are listed further down.

The reviews#

Seven Years in Tibet#

★★★★☆

Plain writing of an extraordinary story. Thoroughly enjoyed it. The film does not come close to the fascinating details of this book.

Latin America Diaries: The Sequel to the Motorcycle Diaries#

★★★☆☆

Very difficult to comprehend without solid knowledge of the historical background. Yet reveals a fascinating human.

Che… the most complete human being of our age
Sartre

Goodbye, Transylvania: A Romanian Waffen-SS Soldier in WWII#

★☆☆☆☆

The author proved throughout the book that he has a very limited understanding of the world around him. He can never see the relation between actions and result (proudly states he was a member of a secret organisation planning sedition, pages later considers unfair that he is arrested by the state) and is borderline comical as he genuinely believes that the nazis are promoting him due to his wonderful activities. He just does not get it that he is simply a useful idiot that is assigned tasks that nobody wants to do (like spying on his comrades).

That being said, the book is filled cover to cover with revisionist statements:

the Romanians are the foreigners; they don’t belong here. The Hungarians and Saxons, now minorities, are the rightful owners, or if you like, inhabitants.
page 6, talking about the present day Romania

Nazi apologism:

Adolf may be a nutcase, but he is right in many things.
page 105

I thought what a pity that the world could not have seen and heard us as we really were.
page 28, about being a nazi

Racism:

The area was now being built into one of the largest SS Truppenübungsplatz (training camp), labor being supplied by predominantly Jewish KZ (Konzentrazions-Lager, concentration camp) inmates. The only crime these unfortunate people ever committed was their accident of birth.
page 25

This discrimination was understandable as of all the Eastern European ethnic Germans, the Transylvanian Saxons were the only ones who were in every respect comparable with the Reichsdeutsche.
page 99

God, to think that the Western Powers had helped these apes to win the war.
page 144, about the Russians

And of course, the occasional atrocity, fully justified in the author’s opinion:

Now and then we did, however, surprise large gatherings of partisans, and those of them who did not die fighting were either shot or, more often, hanged. The so-called free world made a lot of noise about these killings, but according to international law, which the Allies were very keen on bringing up when it suited them, these armed civilians were murderers to be hanged, at least as far as we were concerned.
page 32

Next morning at the first opportunity, we untied their hands and sent them scampering across a large, apparently deserted square toward the Russians. Predictably, the Russians pounced like spiders in their webs and grabbed our two Commie sympathizers. Within a couple of minutes the only too-well-known tortured shrieks of agony told us the Russians lived up to our expectations.
page 125

We sent the Hungarians off, took possession of the Ivans, and marched them in small, terrified groups to the nearest site of Russian butchery where we shot each one through the head in blind reprisal.
page 96

Besides this, the book has very little historical or literary value. The information is inaccurate, obviously embellished (the author has a thing about losing all his teeth, which he does at least 5 times through the book) and the writing style is plain at best.

Prepared: What Kids Need for a Fulfilled Life#

★★★★★

Excellent book. Reading it I had to notice the failures of my own education and got a strong desire to attend a school like Diane describes.

Viața unui om singur#

★★★★☆

Din această carte am aflat că literatura română este o imagine a țării. Trăim „într-o intolerabilă pasivitate și indolență, în haos și eternă cârpeală", incapabili de planuri mărețe și de lungă durată, puși pe căpătuială și evitând responsabilitatea individuală dar preocupați mereu de capra vecinului.

Nu mi se pare că Adrian Marino a fost un trist sau un pesimist. Faptul că a fost capabil să își păstreze capacitatea de muncă în ciuda celor prin care a trecut (închisoarea și întreaga istorie pe care a parcurs-o) sau percepției pe care a avut-o față de ceilalți îl face un mare optimist.

El afirmă totuși: „Cred, în toate domeniile, în alte valori românești."

Ele există.

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century#

★★★★☆

A good collection of good practices for managing development with nice little stories attached.

The writing feels a bit too close to an advert copy, you’re always under the sensation that the author is trying to sell you something. It might be that the whole book is actually a recruitment advert for Twilio.

Down and Out in Paris and London#

★★★★★

Very pleasant and engaging book to read. Surprisingly relevant commentary almost 100 years later.

Read and rated, never written up#

★★★★★#

Aventurile lui Habarnam și ale prietenilor săi
Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen
Confessions of an IT Manager
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Der Schimmelreiter
Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Project Hail Mary
Romanul adolescentului miop
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises
The Twelve Chairs
Un om norocos
Золотой теленок

★★★★☆#

1984
Agile Estimating and Planning
Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present
Burmese Days
Despre îngeri
East, West
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Hocus Pocus
It Does Not Die
Kon-Tiki
Maitreyi
O scurtă istorie a românilor povestită celor tineri
Papillon
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Shantaram
Siddhartha
Steppenwolf
SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
The Brick Moon
The Brick Moon and Other Stories
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
The Communist Manifesto
The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia
The Metamorphosis
The Ra Expeditions
The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company
The Rum Diary
The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
Youth (Scenes from Provincial Life #2)

★★★☆☆#

Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey into Bhutan
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers
De ce iubim femeile
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
First Overland: London to Singapore by Land Rover
How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future
Key insights from The Start-up of You (Blinkist summary)
Managing
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
Război și pace, vol. 1 și 2
Scrisori către fiul meu
The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business
The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey
The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career

★★☆☆☆#

Singur sub duș
The Alchemist
The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
The Tao of Pooh
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

★☆☆☆☆#

Run Faster With Less Effort: The Essential Guide to Learning How to Run Faster in as Little as 60 Days
Who Moved My Cheese?

One book I finished without ever giving it a rating: Invisible Cities.