Book review: A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa

A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Some hardship the author has endured. It puts everything into perspective. From a 'must read' perspective this deserves 4 stars. Some episodes are a bit too superhero'ish, but otherwise it's a 5 star book. But the writing style puts it on 3 stars instead. It annoyed me at times, but then I put it back to 4 stars because this story is worth spreading.
I would actually like to see this book as a mandatory read on every school in the western world... 1st year in high-school.

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Book review: Be the Business: CIOs in the New Era of IT by Martha Heller

Be the Business: CIOs in the New Era of IT by Martha Heller
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First off, I bought this book as I loved the CIO Paradox and was looking forward to new insights on the topic. Currently involved in Agile Transformations and coaching SMB's in using IT more effectively instead of efficiently I was interested in reading on how IT can position itself as 'The Business'.

Unfortunately this is merely a book full of quotes with embellishments recorded by the author. Unlike the CIO Paradox, this book doesn't provide any insights as to what to do to actually become the business being IT. It does tell the stories of some CIO's that apparently succeeded. I say apparently, because the author leaves us readers dangling. In addition, she also fails in describing the commonalities between the interviewed CIO's and their approach towards the topic.

That said, there are some extremely interesting insights from some CIO's that struck a cord with me, and I immediately understood the value of these in my day to day activities. That's why this is a 3 star book and not a 2 star.

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Book review: The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin P. Williams

The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin P. Williams
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A short little book that is helpful even after the first couple of pages. It explains thoroughly in a practical and useful way how to write texts, in any fashion. It's not so much about the text itself, but all about how to design your texts. What works and what not, where the author clearly defines 'works' as 'somebody is ready what you have written'.
Too often I struggle with writing reports, documents, blogs, CV's, cover letters etc. Fiddling around with fonts, colors, styles, etc. I now feel way more confident in that I can style my documents more effectively. And while typing this, I realize that pretty much everything I learned by reading this book has nog been consciously applied in this book review. Shame on me. I guess.

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Book review: The Winter Over by Matthew Iden

The Winter Over by Matthew Iden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very captivating story about a research facility. As the story progresses and unfolds, the secrets are uncovered at the same pace as I was reading the story and drew my own conclusions. No far fetched plot turns. Although the revelation of the evildoer wasn't really surprising, it was still very interesting.

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Book review: Only the Truth by Adam Croft

Only the Truth by Adam Croft
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The author is too pretentious and wanting too much to write something good, turning it into something bad. In the acknowledgement section at the back of the book he's referring to his bestseller. I feel that he tried too much to out-do himself and write something better, failing miserably at that effort.
I'm not really sure why people would give this book more than just 1 star. The story is way too far fetched, the characters behave way too artificial and the plot-twists are really bad and make no sense. There's too much happening that doesn't warrant the plot. The timeline is really not matching with the story and the money spend by the main characters and their worry about the money they have is really absolutely not accurate.
There's actually two stories in one book here. The main story and some background story of the main character and the stuff that happened in his childhood. That story was actually fairly well written and was interesting and didn't have any added value towards the main story.

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Book review: Secret Ally (A Halo story) by Michael Blue

Secret Ally (A Halo story): by Michael Blue
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

First of all; I was getting the feeling the author is not at all aware of the Halo universe. Although the action parts of the book were decent, they made no sense considering the parts about the Master Chief. Additionally, the timelines with the rest of the Halo universe are completely off.
Then there's the stuff about the Forerunners. Greg Bear wrote the 'truth' about the Forerunners and the relation with the humans. Secret Ally is taking a completely different tack on it.

The romance in this story and the presumably erotic parts are... well... they're so artificial, as if the author had to put something in there. Apart from the countless spelling and grammar errors in the book (no publisher doing some proof-editing?) the timeline in the book is quite often incorrect.

Nope, this is one baaaaad book about the Halo universe. 343 Industries should have it pulled from the shelves.

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Iwan
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Check out my video's on YouTube, follow me on Twitter and read my IT Architecture & Strategy blog as well.

Book review: The New New Thing, ... by Michael Lewis

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If not anything else, this book is mighty inspiring. Obviously Jim Clark is painted as a hero, but that's not important, what is important is that is paints a picture of how the democratization of the computer-world, and the Internet in particular, has changed the role of the engineer. Jim Clark is one of the first people to turn the nerd, the geek into a cool dude, one that leads instead of follows.
I particularly liked the passages on Hyperion, the sailboat with the highest mast, they were explaining a lot about the zeitgeist of those days and are amazingly comic as they convey the huge gap between the geeks and the computer illeterates very accurately.
Still remembering the days where you could make millions with just selling a domain you previously registered and the record IPO's that were day to day business it is hard to imagine nowadays that there was no internet, no online services that prevented you from leaving your home for something mundane as shopping.

I consider The New New Thing... as one of the must reads for anybody that is interested in being an entrepreneur and thinks about startups.

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Iwan
--
Check out my video's on YouTube, follow me on Twitter and read my IT Architecture & Strategy blog as well.

Book Review: American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is one of those books I started and although I wasn't really captivated by it, I did want to know the ending. I felt there had to be a lot of symbolism in the story, but that was not really for me I guess. An awful lot of times I felt that the author just turned somebody into a god in order to tie up some loose ends in the story.
Well I'm happy I read the book, so now I don't need to wait for the TV series which was announced and which was actually the reason to get the book and read it.


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Iwan
--
Check out my video's on YouTube, follow me on Twitter and read my IT Architecture & Strategy blog as well.

Book Review: Firewall, by Andy McNab

Firewall by Andy McNab
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The fun part of the Nick Stone series is that the hero is not some sort of super special forces guy. He's fallible, human and has serious issues. I love the Seal Team Six No More books by Doug Murray, because the heroes die every now and then. But you know things will work out in the end. With the Nick Stone books all you know is that Nick will survive because there's another book in the Nick Stone series. That's all you know, for the rest the book stays wide open.
Furthermore, it is cleat that McNab is only writing what he knows about. There's no tech mumbo jumbo that makes no sense to the technical inclined reader. McNab knows about being in 'a drama' and how to get out of it. This part is significant because the story is about hi-tec computer stuff, and at no point McNab is pretending to understand that stuff, instead he makes it very clear he doesn't through Nick Stone. But he also makes it clear that this is irrelevant. It's a motive for the baddies in the story, but the details are left out, because they don't matter.

I can recommend this book to all of you that like thrillers about special forces fellas that are not super heroes.

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Iwan
--
Check out my video's on YouTube, follow me on Twitter and read my IT Architecture & Strategy blog as well.