Rosh's Reviews

AUTHOR: John Carreyrou GENRE: Investigative nonfiction, True Crime RATING: 4.5 stars. Imagine this. Right since childhood, you have had this burning desire to become a billionaire. You have your marketing plan ready, you have your investments ready, you have the external showy infrastructure ready, you have your personal PR portfolio ready,... The only thing not ready is the most crucial necessity: the product itself. What do you do then? Fake it till you make it. That's what Elizabeth Holmes did with Theranos. This book reveals the bloodthirsty (pun intended) ambition of Elizabeth Holmes, the young founder of Theranos, a healthcare corporation established in 2003 and so grandiose in its plans and marketing aggression that its peak valuation was about $10 billion in 2013 and 2014. Holmes named Theranos combining the words “therapy” and “diagnosis". Having a wealthy and reputed family helped her get the seed investments as well as the credibility, in spite of being a college dr...

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: Yuval Noah Harari ADAPTER: David Vandermeulen ILLUSTRATOR: Daniel Casanave SERIES: Sapiens: A Graphic History, #1 GENRE: Nonfiction, Graphic Novel. PUBLICATION DATE: October 7, 2020 RATING: 3.75 stars. I had read and reviewed the original Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind long back. But a recent query in a Facebook group on whether this graphic version was suitable for a 12 year old got me thinking if I could share this book with my teenager, so I pushed this up right to the top of my TBR. If you want my opinion on the content of the original nonfiction work, please click HERE. This review is only about the graphic version, whether it does justice to the original, and its suitability for younger readers. It is not an easy job to take a nonfiction tome such as Sapiens and adapt it to a graphic version. So I must appreciate the efforts of the author, the storyboard artists, illustrators and editors who would have worked on this graphic version. They have done a fab...

AUTHOR: Benjamin Alire Sáenz SERIES: Aristotle and Dante, #1 GENRE: YA M-M Romance. PUBLICATION DATE: February 21, 2012 RATING: 4 stars. Reading YA is always a risky business when you are...well... not a Young Adult. 😅 A good author can create magic with YA, depicting the intensity of the teen/youth years with accuracy. However, if written badly, YA comes off as an immature writing attempt with unrealistic characters. Where do you think this book lies? Let me keep the suspense going for a few moments more. 😁 This book, which has a mouthful of a title, is quite simple in its essential premise. It talks of two 15 year olds, Aristotle and Dante: best friends with opposite personalities, each struggling with a different personal problem. That's it. The entire book is a journey we see through Aristotle's perspective: his attempt to be strong while alone, his struggle to distance himself from emotions, his anger, his uncertainty,... All indicate a young man struggling to come to te...

AUTHOR: Andrés J. Colmenares GENRE: Sequential Art Collection PUBLICATION DATE: March 2, 2021 RATING: 5 stars. This is one of the best graphic comic collections I have read this year. And considering the number of books I've read from that genre in 2020, that's saying quite a lot! Set around sea creatures especially sharks, the book espouses the values of friendship, kindness and support. Every single comic conveys a lot. The entire book has the cutest illustrations that are totally "Awww-inducing". You'll begin to see sharks and other sea animals in a very different light. Absolutely loved this book and would recommend it to one and all. I received an advance review copy of the book from NetGalley, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.