Mysterious Stranger EPUB - Mark Twain
[Tajemniczy Przybysz]
Various so-called 'specialists' label this longer short story as a 'philosophical-satirical novel'. I think that won't exactly encourage potential readers to pick it up. It's not some deep work that lifts you to the heights of abstract ideas so you can gaze down at lost humanity from above. It's more the kind of book you start reading at 9 p.m., finish by 11, and then find yourself double-checking if you really locked the front door and wondering where that strange cold draft is coming from...
Surfing on the Internet PDF - J. C. Herz
A 1995 book about the internet. What was the net buzzing about 30 years ago? If you're old enough and the first things that come to mind are sites like 'Yahoo' or 'AltaVista', the answer is WRONG. The net 30–40 years ago was Usenet, IRC, and MUDs, plus other smaller services. The WWW was just learning to crawl. The real life pulsed elsewhere.
The author has a beautiful command of the written word and practically transports us through time; among similar books, she may be the only one who realised that the things she described would carry historical weight. Moreover, unlike techno-optimists and techno-pessimists, she correctly foresaw the direction the internet would take globally. She knew what she was experiencing wouldn't last forever - that sooner or later the hands of leviathans and behemoths would get into this 'wild west'.
Empire of Pain PDF - Patrick Radden Keefe
Introduction of Big Pharma into polite society, but without the fumes of conspiracy theories. In short, it tells how, despite blatant frauds and crimes, the condominium of corporations, the state, and the media danced their devilish dance on a growing mountain of human corpses.
The only thing that bothered me in this book was the unnecessary dwelling on private-life minutiae, i.e. which Sackler jumped on whose cousin's friend's wife's brother's whatever. It seems to me that the author's autistic level of detail could have been better used, for example, in a broader account of how drugs were pushed through despite the initial protests of some honest scientists and doctors.