Melihat update blog saya beberapa minggu ke belakang isinya cuma ulasan buku, kali ini saya mau curhat aja tentang aktivitas baca saat ini. Nggak banyak sih, karena lagi sibuk. Tapi setidaknya, saya masih bisa menyempatkan baca buku di waktu luang yang saya miliki. Here we go!
Ryan Holiday baru saja menerbitkan buku terbarunya, Stillness is the Key, jadi saya lagi awet-awet baca biar ilmu yang masuk bisa maksimal. Jujur saja, edisi Stillness is the Key yang saya beli lebih kecil dari edisi paperback Ego is the Enemy. Karena sudah terlanjur suka sama font normal ala paperback, pengalaman baca edisi yang sekarang bisa dibilang kurang nyaman. Terlalu kecil dan kadang paragraf terpotong ke halaman selanjutnya. Lagi asyik baca, eh harus membalik halaman. Agak terganggu sih di situ. Berita bagusnya, dengan harga Rp 170.000-an, saya dapat versi hardback. Jadi, jilidnya bakal lebih kokoh menanggung beban anotasi yang biasanya menelan korban lem jilid paperback.
Baru saja ditamatkan:
I am the worst! The Professor and the Madman adalah biografi dua tokoh penting di balik terbitnya Oxford English Dictionary (OED), dan saya tidak menyukai buku ini! Sebagai penerjemah, saya kaget kok bisa tidak suka? Tetapi sebagai pembaca, saya mengenali banyak aspek di buku ini yang tidak sesuai dengan selera saya.
Pertama, gaya penulisan buku ini masih pakai bahasa klasik, yang tentu masuk akal mengingat buku ini terbit di tahun 1998. Transisi pengalaman baca Bahasa Inggris modern ke Bahasa Inggris klasik agak bikin kaget otak, sehingga sedikit mengganggu kelancaran membaca. Kedua, di awal saya senang sama cara penulis bercerita, tapi semakin ke belakang, kok semakin ngalor ngidul? Misalnya ya, untuk menjelaskan poin B sebagai suatu bagian dari poin A, pembaca diajak untuk flashback jauh sekali, hingga pas dua poin tersebut dipertemukan, saya sudah hilang minat sama poin A. Ketiga, dan yang paling bikin tidak sreg, adalah penulis tidak detail dalam menjelaskan kronologis penyusunan OED oleh Dr. Murray dan Dr. Minor. Informasi yang diberikan tampak apa adanya tanpa dilakukan elaborasi lebih lanjut. Penulis memang berhasil menceritakan kisah awal kedua tokoh secara menyenangkan, tetapi ketika menceritakan kejadian puncak yang jadi alasan orang-orang beli buku ini, eksekusinya nggak bisa menarik. Apa karena jumlah halamannya dibatasi penerbit? Apa karena sumber riset yang ada terbatas? Apa ini memang gaya menulis Simon Winchesther? Was-was sih saya kalau penyebabnya ada di gaya menulis Simon Winchesther, karena banyak sekali buku karangan dia yang ingin saya baca.
Yang ingin dibaca:
Ini adalah daftar yang akan selalu berubah sesuai dengan mood dan rasa penasaran yang saya punya. Saat ini saya lagi tergila-gila dengan sejarah dan biografi, sambil berusaha nyerempet dikit ke bisnis biar nggak lupa sama akar saya. Jadi, daftarnya akan terus saya manipulasi biar saya tetap doyan melahap buku bisnis tanpa merasa eneg.
The Truffle Underground
Beneath the gloss of star chefs and crystal-laden tables, the truffle supply chain is touched by theft, secrecy, sabotage, and fraud. Farmers patrol their fields with rifles and fear losing trade secrets to spies. Hunters plant poisoned meatballs to eliminate rival truffle-hunting dogs. Naive buyers and even knowledgeable experts are duped by liars and counterfeits.
Deeply reported and elegantly written, this page-turning exposé documents the dark, sometimes deadly crimes at each level of the truffle’s path from ground to plate, making sense of an industry that traffics in scarcity, seduction, and cash. Through it all, a question lingers: What, other than money, draws people to these dirt-covered jewels?
Deeply reported and elegantly written, this page-turning exposé documents the dark, sometimes deadly crimes at each level of the truffle’s path from ground to plate, making sense of an industry that traffics in scarcity, seduction, and cash. Through it all, a question lingers: What, other than money, draws people to these dirt-covered jewels?
Yale Needs Women
In the winter of 1969, from big cities to small towns, young women across the country sent in applications to Yale University for the first time. The Ivy League institution dedicated to graduating "one thousand male leaders" each year had finally decided to open its doors to the nation's top female students. The landmark decision was a huge step forward for women's equality in education.
Or was it?
The experience the first undergraduate women found when they stepped onto Yale's imposing campus was not the same one their male peers enjoyed. Isolated from one another, singled out as oddities and sexual objects, and barred from many of the privileges an elite education was supposed to offer, many of the first girls found themselves immersed in an overwhelmingly male culture they were unprepared to face. Yale Needs Women is the story of how these young women fought against the backward-leaning traditions of a centuries-old institution and created the opportunities that would carry them into the future. Anne Gardiner Perkins's unflinching account of a group of young women striving for change is an inspiring story of strength, resilience, and courage that continues to resonate today.
Imperial Twilight
As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War.
As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.
As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.
Super Pumped
In June 2017, Travis Kalanick, the hard-charging CEO of Uber, was ousted in a boardroom coup that capped a brutal year for the transportation giant. Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolize everything wrong with Silicon Valley.
Award-winning New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against an era of rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley. Backed by billions in venture capital dollars and led by a brash and ambitious founder, Uber promised to revolutionize the way we move people and goods through the world. A near instant “unicorn,” Uber seemed poised to take its place next to Amazon, Apple, and Google as a technology giant.
What followed would become a corporate cautionary tale about the perils of startup culture and a vivid example of how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong. Isaac recounts Uber’s pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company’s toxic internal culture, and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance. With billions of dollars at stake, Isaac shows how venture capitalists asserted their power and seized control of the startup as it fought its way toward its fateful IPO.
Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve-month periods in American corporate history.
Billion Dollar Whale
Now a #1 international bestseller, BILLION DOLLAR WHALE is "an epic tale of white-collar crime on a global scale" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), revealing how a young social climber from Malaysia pulled off one of the biggest heists in history.
In 2009, a chubby, mild-mannered graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business named Jho Low set in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude--one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system. Over a decade, Low, with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others, siphoned billions of dollars from an investment fund--right under the nose of global financial industry watchdogs. Low used the money to finance elections, purchase luxury real estate, throw champagne-drenched parties, and even to finance Hollywood films like The Wolf of Wall Street.
By early 2019, with his yacht and private jet reportedly seized by authorities and facing criminal charges in Malaysia and in the United States, Low had become an international fugitive, even as the U.S. Department of Justice continued its investigation.
In 2009, a chubby, mild-mannered graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business named Jho Low set in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude--one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system. Over a decade, Low, with the aid of Goldman Sachs and others, siphoned billions of dollars from an investment fund--right under the nose of global financial industry watchdogs. Low used the money to finance elections, purchase luxury real estate, throw champagne-drenched parties, and even to finance Hollywood films like The Wolf of Wall Street.
By early 2019, with his yacht and private jet reportedly seized by authorities and facing criminal charges in Malaysia and in the United States, Low had become an international fugitive, even as the U.S. Department of Justice continued its investigation.
BILLION DOLLAR WHALE has joined the ranks of Liar's Poker, Den of Thieves, and Bad Blood as a classic harrowing parable of hubris and greed in the financial world.
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