5 Books I Read in February|Reading Wrap Up|February 2020

Hello book lovers,

My name is Alin and welcome to my Youtube channel. Today I am going to do my first reading wrap up. I will talk about the books and the audiobooks that I read and listened to in February. So let’s do this.

‘White Fragility: Why is it so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism’ by Robin DiAngelo

• The first book that I am going to talk about is ‘White Fragility: Why is it so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism’ by Robin Di Angelo, which talks about how white people are dealing with the problem of racism.
• The concept of white fragility refers to how white people look at their ‘whiteness’  and the author observes that white people are cautious in taking courses about racism and being taught by people of colour.
• She emphasizes several times throughout the book that not only bad people are racist but also good people and that’s what keeps racism in its place, it is this white sensibility and belief that only bad people are racists.
• And we can see this in how white people defend themselves when somebody would say that they are racist: ‘I have friends who are black’, ‘I dated a black girl’ ‘I supported the black civil movement’ and so on
• This book teaches us to look at ourselves and understand how we manifest our hidden racism, I really liked this book.

‘Sexual Intelligence: What We Really Want From Sex and How to Get It’ by Marty Klein

• The second book I want to talk today is Sexual Intelligence: What We Really Want From Sex and How to Get It’ by Marty Klein which provides us with some insights on how to have a better sex life, understand the meaning of sex and how it changes over time -> from horny to independent sex
• According to Marty Klein, sexual intelligence has 3 elements: information and knowledge, body awareness and emotional ability. The author destroys several myths about sexuality like there is no such thing as normal sexuality and he considers our entire body is an erogenous zone, not only our reproductive system and the traditional erogenous zones.
• To improve sex life we need to do a few things: communicate with our partner about what we want from them, accept our bodies -> this will create a better connection; don’t think about our performance in bed which can have an impact how we perform, sometimes alcohol, drugs and health can be an impediment for good sexual performance, as well as sexually transmitted diseases.

‘Talking to Strangers’ by  Malcolm Gladwell

• Another book or actually audiobook that I want to talk about today is Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is about how we are dealing with strangers, there are 12 stories about different people encountering strangers and how they interpreted or misinterpreted them.

  

• I listened to the audiobook and I would recommend you to listen to the audiobook too because the storytelling so powerful and contains original material from the people who are involved in these stories. Even Malcolm Gladwell recommends the audiobook –
• The book starts and ends with the tragic story of Sandra Bland who was coming from a job interview and her car gets stopped by a state trooper  – they start a normal conversation and at one moment the conversation escalates from nowhere, and the police officer tells her she is under arrest and he drags her out of the car, takes her to the police station and after three days in jail she kills herself – this story had a very big impact on me.
• Other stories that I found interesting in this audiobook is Neville Chamberlain meeting with Hitler and not being able to read his real his intentions, the case of Ana Maria Montes who was working for DIA (Defense Intelligence Strategy) and at the same time she was a Cuban spy and the process of discovering that she was spying for the Cuban regime

‘Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs To Know’ by Jerry Kaplan

• Another book that I read this month is  ‘Artificial Intelligence: What Everyone Needs To Know’ which I consider it very useful for anyone who wants to know a bit about this domain –  so these are some things that I found interesting in this book.

  

• There is not a clear definition of what artificial intelligence is and the discipline is not considered a hard science yet, like computer science. An interesting fact that I found in this book and I wasn’t aware of it is that women use to do the job of computers in the 19th century because women were considered more meticulous at doing this job
• Artificial intelligence works by identifying patterns and there are different ways you can train an AI machine to recognize an object or an image and at this moment, these machines are doing a very good job in image and face recognition, but are not that good understanding and recognizing language.
• Another thing that this book touches is how philosophy looks at artificial intelligence and if we can consider artificial intelligence similar to human intelligence or just an imitation or a simulation of it or a totally different thing.  does AI has feelings?  if we program a robot to talk like it has feelings, does it mean that it has feelings?
• And last the book discusses the problem of automation and how that will have an impact on our jobs and the author’s conclusion is that there will be eliminated lots of repetitive jobs but at the same time there will be created new jobs to replace the jobs lost.

’12 Rules for Life’ by Jordan Peterson

• The last book I will talk about today is 12 Rules for Life. For some time I wanted to read Peterson’s book just to have a better idea about him because all my views about him were based on other people’s opinions and they were mostly negative. And when I read the book, this is what I discovered.

  

• First of all, his book is filled with prejudices and pseudo-scientific statements. You would think that Jordan Peterson, who is a clinical psychologist and a professor at the University of Toronto, would put forward scientific arguments. That’s not the case, most of the authors mentioned are long dead, and the Bible stories seem to solve any type of problem.
• Peterson is a poor copy of Joseph Campbell. His public speaking skills are definitely comparable to Joseph Campbell’s eloquence, but his interpretations of mythology and legends and his motivational speeches lack knowledge and insight.
• Another thing I found about him is that he is very sexist, he left me perplexed with is the concept of women and the type of man that he promotes is some sort of caveman.
• If you want some rules for life, it is better to ask a friend or a relative, they actually know more than Peterson. Listen to a lecture on Youtube, that’s all you need to do have an idea what he’s talking about. Or check his answers on Quora because that’s how his book came about.
• He talks in the book about being precise in speech but by reading each chapter of his book his writing says the opposite. Rules Are Made to Be Broken. And especially Jordan Peterson’s rules, some of them being very comical at times. Enough is enough. His book is chaos unleashed.

 

 

This was my wrap up video, I hope you enjoyed it.

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