Read And Return

“Italians have a little joke, that the world is so hard a man must have two fathers to look after him, and that's why they have godfathers.”
― Mario Puzo, The Godfather.

Don Corleone - Tyrant, blackmailer, racketeer, murderer, a friendly man, a just man, a reasonable man. The Godfather.

The Godfather is the epic story of organised crime in the 1940s.The book is about how a mafia family, Corleone family, gets formed; the obstacles faced in the way to gain the Power and their greed and lust to get even more.
It deals with a mob war fought between the Corleone family and the other four of the five Mafia families in New York.
Filled with the requisite valour, love, and rancour of a great epic, The Godfather is the definitive gangster novel.

The Book was adapted in an Oscar winning movie by the same name, ranked 2nd in the IMDB list.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.
- Abraham Lincoln
(We can be that friend of yours :) )

"The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system, the next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine and the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them"
- Peter Thiel, Zero to One

The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.

Peter Andreas Thiel is a German venture capitalist, hedge fund manager and entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and he was the first outside investor in Facebook.
Blake Masters was a student at Stanford and took detailed class notes of the course CS183: Start-up taught by Peter Theil. They both worked on the notes and modified the content for a wider audience.

Doing what someone else already knows how to do take the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1.

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies" - George R.R. Martin (writer of the song of ice and fire)

“Here are answers to the stupid questions you were afraid to ask in school . . . [Bryson] peppers the book with wit and great details. . . . Bottom line: Science with a smile.”—People

From the instant of the Big Bang to right now, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson chronicles how we ended up where we are – and how we figured it all out.

In this book the author confronts his greatest challenge: to understand—and, if possible, answer the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves.

Bill Bryson attempts to answer scientific questions in a simple yet engrossing manner for the layman's understanding. With his lucid and humorous writing, Bryson makes complex science matters seem unambiguous and appealing.

Bryson wrote the book because he found that science textbooks state facts, like the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but don’t really go into how these discoveries came about. How do we know this? Who were the scientists who made these discoveries in the first place?

4.2/5• Goodreads
5/5• Waterstones

Mein Kampf is an autobiography of Hi**er, a name which sends shivers down people’s spine even today.

Remembered for humanity’s greatest genocide incident, the Holocaust, and ethnic cleansing of six million European Jews and millions of other non-Aryans, Adolf Hi**er was a German politician, author and leader of the N**i party and was primarily responsible for the outbreak of the Second World War.

Mein Kamph is an account of Hi**er’s life spanning from his birth to his ascendance to power. It gives a detailed account of the historical views, the prevalent political conditions that existed during the time of First World War and the period after viewed in the lens of Hi**er.

Hi**er has mentioned everything that he wants to do once he comes to power: the kind of allies that Germany needs to have, the kind of society he intends to build, the emphasis on racism, the need for ethnic cleansing.

We’ve only seen one facet of him, but the book also throws light on the other aspects of his life.