The Orphan Master's Son

Author: Adam Johnson


Awesome book that describes what life in North Korea must be like. It chronicles the life of Jun Do (Korean equivalent of John Doe), the son of an Orphan Master. Jun gets consigned to an orphanage after his mother disappears. The book progresses through what can bleakly be described as adventures of Jun Do, with each one more harrowing than the previous. Even if you discount fifty percent of the book as the author’s imagination, you will be shocked with how bad conditions must be in North Korea. 

After reading the book I felt that there was no way any of this could be true. So I did a search on the internet to see “how true is the Orphan Master’s son” ?  You can try this yourself, but first read the book.

The author Adam Johnson is a professor of English at Stanford University. He made a first-hand visit to North Korea and read everything he could lay his hands on including propaganda and interviews with defectors. He then let his imagination take over. The net result is a very entertaining and highly readable novel that lays bare the atrocities that must be taking place in dark corners and depths of North Korea. This book is not for the faint of heart. Have courage and pick it up. It will change your perspective on what life must be like for the poor souls entrapped in North Korea.

Stringer

Author: Anjan Sundaram


I am fascinated with the bio of the author, Anjan Sundaram. Here is a brilliant young kid, who graduated from Yale with a degree in Mathematics and turned down a lucrative job offer from Goldman Sachs to pursue a career in Journalism. And how do you think he started?  He bought a one-way ticket to Congo, a place where more than 5 million people have died since the start of the second Congo War in 1998.  Congo is blessed with an abundance of mineral resources, and Anjan summarizes this well with the Congolese legend which states that  "God, tired after creating the world, stopped at this part of the earth and dropped all his sacks of riches".  

If you are looking for something that describes the vast natural resources or political climate in Congo, this is not the book for you. However, it is a great coming of age story of a brilliant Indian kid who decides to embark on a career in Journalism. The challenges Anjan faces in getting started and the first hand experiences he has living as a paying guest with a family that is struggling to make ends meet, is brilliantly depicted with an authenticity that leaps off the pages. His encounter with street kids in an inner city in Kinshasa is vivid and unsettling. I lived vicariously through his writing and learned a great deal of what everyday life in Kinshasa is like.

Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal

Author: Nick Bilton


If I didn’t know better, I would have thought this was a work of fiction. I had heard about the challenges startups face with dysfunctional investors, but never realized that even such famous company like Twitter could be subject to this. Furthermore the eccentricities of the founders is very well captured in the book and Nick Bilton can thank twitter for providing him with nuggets of information that helped corroborate and flesh out his story.

To anyone who is thinking about starting a company, this book is a must-read. It warns you about some of the challenges that founders can face down the road. Fame and fortune can put a rift between the best of friends and that is played out at the highest levels at Twitter.  Even if you didn’t care about all the lessons in there, this is one heck of an entertaining book. Just pick it up today.