Rosh's Reviews

AUTHOR: Hans Rosling GENRE: Nonfiction PUBLICATION DATE: April 3, 2018 RATING: 4.5 stars. It was truly coincidental that I took up a book written by a global health expert just before a global health crisis. When I started with this book, the Coronavirus scare had begun, but was restricted to China and parts of Europe. But as I progressed with the book, the virus and the panic seemed to grow at an exponential rate. In these stressful times, if there were a few things that helped me retain my sanity, one of them was this book. Factfulness, mainly authored by Dr. Hans Rosling, teaches you a "factful" way of looking at data and making sense of it. Dr. Rosling fleshes out the seemingly boring topic with a very steady, interesting, interactive and sometimes humorous approach that causes you to be spellbound. Every single page is enlightening. Each chapter is named after a particular instinct that he says humans have which causes them to look at data in a lopsided way. For instance...

AUTHOR: Alix E. Harrow GENRE: Low Fantasy RATING: 4.25 stars. There are books that zoom like an express train, rushing ahead at top speed, leaving you breathless & eager to find out what lies beyond. There are other books that move at a snail's pace, meandering all over, with no end in mind, leaving just a trail of slime behind. And then there are books like this one! Books that make you want to rush ahead and yet proceed slowly! Let me attempt an analogy... Imagine you have been given a jigsaw puzzle. You have to put the pieces together but you haven't been given any reference image. So how exactly the pieces have to be fitted is entirely up to you. In addition, each piece is mesmerising. You get so absorbed in admiring each tiny clue that you forget the motive, the puzzle. But once you see signs of the picture emerging, you find it very difficult to stop and relish the individual pieces. You just want to reach the end asap so that you can appreciate the completed picture ...

AUTHOR: Caitlin Doughty ILLUSTRATOR: Dianné Ruz GENRE: Nonfiction PUBLICATION DATE: September 10, 2019 RATING: 4.5 stars. If anything about Death intrigues you, or if you have any queries about cremations or decomposition or funny doubts about what happens if an astronaut dies in space or if you die when you are eating or how corpses smell, this is the book for you! A beautifully enlightening book replete with great examples and tongue-in-cheek humour, it deserves an audience. Caitlin Doughty, the author, is a mortician in real life and she puts her experience and knowledge to good use. As she says in the introduction, "We can’t make death fun, but we can make learning about death fun. Death is science and history, art and literature. It bridges every culture and unites the whole of humanity." I never thought I'd enjoy any book about such a morbid topic so much. Just in case the title makes you squeamish, keep in mind the tagline: "big questions from tiny mortals....