This book is not as exciting as [book:Stolen Lives], but it is still very interesting. The author writes about her life in freedom, and the decade shock she is facing!

I enjoyed reading this book, and if you liked the first book, I think it's worth reading!

Poll #1014048 Freedom: The Story of My Second Life - Malika Oufkair
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Have you read this book?

If so, how much do you give it out of 10? (10 being the highest)

This book discusses the story of Malika Oufkair and her family. Malika's daughter was a powerful man in Morocco, and grew to become the minister of defense and the strongest man among the King's people. Malika herself lived with the King's daughter (Mohammad VI) and was treated as one of the King's children.

This did not last though. The minister decided to betray the King (Hasan II) and try to assassinate him. His attempt failed. He was killed, and his family was punished.

This book is really about the punishment they got, and how they suffered. To say that it is painful is an understatement. As much as it was painful to read, I enjoyed it thoroughly.

I do advise each one of you to read it. It does give us this feeling of how valuable our lives are.

Poll #1010628 Twenty Years in a Desert Jail - Malika Oufkair & Michele Fitoussi
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Finally got to buy the novel, and I couldn't wait to read it.

The Children of Húrin is the latest of Tolkien's books, released over 30 years after his death. This novel focuses on the life of one of Tolkien's characters, namely Túrin Turambar in great detail, expanding on the brief mention of him in The Silmarillion.

I have enjoyed reading this novel so much. It was good to be able to read another well-written story from Middle-Earth (I obviously haven't read everything by Tolkien, but I do not enjoy reading those incomplete works that are full of commentary). I liked some aspects of the story, and hated others.

The style and flow of the story was very nice. I literally couldn't put the book down unless I had to. It's been a while since I read a book this fast. The character development was interesting, and the level of detail adequate.

I have, however, felt that the dramatic aspect of the story is a bit too much, and the way things tend to go wrong is a bit too contrived. I tend to like feel good stories, and this one was a feel very bad, and then even more bad kind of story. You see, Morgoth (For those of you not familiar with Tolkien's works, he's the big bad guy!) placed a curse on Húrin's children for some reason (which you'll be able to see in the story), and sine then, everything - EVERYTHING - went wrong for them, and you get to read about that all through the story.

Don't take this the bad way. It is really enjoyable to read it nonetheless, and I do recommend the book for those of you who liked other Tolkien works, but don't let it be your first Tolkien book! I think it's best if it's read after The Silmarillion.

Poll #995894 The Children of Húrin – J.R.R. Tolkien
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If so, how much do you give it out of 10? (10 being the highest)

This book discusses the thinking process, and describes the concept of intelligent memory, which is this part of our brain that makes intelligent rapid connections.

Lately, I have been interested in various books that talk about memory and/or the human brain, and for this reason, I chose to read this book. I, however, was not impressed. I mean the book is not bad, it was very readable and contained some interesting stuff, but I got bored while reading it, and I lost interest in its contents early on.

It even took me a while to write about it here after I had finished reading it, because I didn’t have much to write.

Poll #987209 Intelligent Memory – Barry Gordon
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If so, how much do you give it out of 10? (10 being the highest)

Freakonomics is a book that asks dull meaningless questions, and find interesting answers to these questions. Different than most books, the book does not promise any recurring theme, and it sticks to that. It will talk about crime, names, schools, and even sumo wrestlers; and even though it tries to establish a link, there is really no relationship between sumo wrestlers and teachers, it just is that they both have the same basic patterns, and this book explores these patterns.

I enjoyed reading this book, and liked the stories provided. I liked the thinking style, because - and everybody who knows me personally would vouch for that - I have an over-analytic attitude which kinda fits with the concept of the book.

The latest edition of this book also includes some bonus material. This bonus material contains some entries from the Freakonomics blog (http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/ ); I found some of these entries to be very interesting as well.

I do recommend this book, but only for those among you who like general reading, and not very specific and organized reading, because well, that's what you'll find here.

Poll #941046 Freakonomics – Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
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If so, how much do you give it out of 10? (10 being the highest)

The Va Dinci Cod is a parody of The Da Vinci Code. This book is a crazy but hilarious parody that I enjoyed reading. In fact, I only got this book yesterday, and I could not stop reading it until I was done with it, which is not very common for me.

I have to start out by saying that I did not read the complete original novel, but rather listened to an abridged version of it (I did not know that it was heavily abridged until much later, and was not that interested in the book to go and get the full novel). The original novel was not the best there is, but I actually enjoyed reading it. It was, however, quite overdone, and after watching the movie version, I believe that I wouldn’t have liked it if I read it today.

The parody, however, was something else! It was silly, stupid, and just badly written, badly written in a really enjoyable way. The author made sure he made every stupid thing writers do, over and over and over, in a very stupid way. He especially made fun of Dan Brown’s know-it-all let’s overanalyze the history style very well.

I do recommend this for anybody willing to read a crazy book, who has previously read The Da Vinci Code. It’s small and extremely funny; give it a try!

Poll #894689 The Va Dinci Cod – A. R. R. R. Roberts
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If so, how much do you give it out of 10? (10 being the highest)

To start, Are Men Necessary does not answer, or attempt to answer to any serious degree, the question it asks. This question is used mainly as a teaser that would get your attention to the book. Even though it does not address the main subject comprehensively, I did find this book enjoyable to read, and do not regret having read it.

The biggest weakness I found in this book is the way it is unorganized. The author jumps around between different subjects, coming back to some of them multiple times, and this can be confusing. Additionally, the book contained a lot of strong opinions and claims with little or no back up. I do understand that this book does not try to be a scientific book, but I did expect a slightly higher standard anyway.

It is very obvious that the author of this book is a journalist; each unit of text on its own is a really nice read. However, I have to admit that I got confused, and could not discern what political views this author holds; she comes out differently in different contexts.

I found the parts where she discussed her visit to Saudi Arabia and her opinions very interesting. I wish that some people could read some of this text and see how hypocritical our culture can be, and how it is viewed from the outside.

The author also includes a section where she discusses in biological terms the expected demise of the male gender. I did take this section lightly, but I also find it really interesting and at some points, hilarious.

This book is a fun read, and is worth the time I spent reading it, but don’t expect a masterpiece.

Poll #885969 Are Men Necessary? – Maureen Dowd
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Have you read this book?

If so, how much do you give it out of 10? (10 being the highest)

This book is a very simple book. It has ten questions that talk about important things in life and it asks some well known people to answer these questions. The answers are listed in the book.

Some of the people questioned in this book are Nelson Mandela, Jack Nicholson, Sharon Stone, Paulo Coelho, Bono, and even the Dalai Lama. There are so many others.

Examples of these questions are:

• What is your concept of God?


• Do you believe you have a destiny and do you see yourself as here to fulfill it?


• What advice or words of wisdom would you like to pass on to those close to you?


• Who do you most admire in this world, historical or living?

To be honest, I had expected much more of this book. The answers are sometimes very interesting, but most of the answers just go on and on beating around the bush in a similar fashion until you get bored. This is why it took me a very long time to finish this reading book.

Poll #856163 Ten Eternal Questions – Zoe Sallis
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Body Language is an interesting subject. It’s something that most of us pay very little attention to, and if we did, we would have noticed a lot of things about the people around us.

This book talks about body language in great details. It describes, sometimes with the aid of images, different body shapes and gives their significance. It is not, however, a list of shapes. The book aims to build a model in our heads, which we can use to analyze the way the person we’re talking to is seated, the way they’re looking at us, and the way they’re moving their limbs, among other things, to decide how they are feeling, and maybe even predict what they are going to say.

I don’t like books like these sometimes because they sound like a cookbook for life and such a thing definitely does not exist. However, this particular book did not sound like that. It did have some parts that suggest that everything is so easy and that you can crack a human’s mind by doing so and so, but I found this to be rare, and not even very strong; a positive aspect in this book.

I do recommend this book, especially to those who deal with customers (Actually, to everybody who deals with other humans face to face on a continuous basis, so all of you!). If you cannot read the non-verbal language, then you surely have been missing a lot.

Poll #856162 The Definitive Book of Body Language – Allan & Barbara Pease
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As the name suggests, this book talks about the story of Google; Google is not only a search engine, but also a very successful software company that has a unique style and set of values. Created by two young graduate students, who only wanted to complete their studies and had no interest in business, this company has grown to be able to compete with the biggest software companies out there.

The book gives a lot of insight about the backgrounds and lives of both creators of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It then goes to show how these two geniuses collaborated to build the greatest search engine, their efforts to get this engine to the public, and the emergence of Google the company, taking us through the different problems, issues, and hurdles they had to deal with during their journey. The book will address these issues from many perspectives; the political, economic, technical, and even the social.

I found this book to be one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read. It is an amazingly true story of success of an amazingly meaningful company. I do advice everybody to read this book!

Poll #834578 The Google Story – David A. Vise
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Have you read this book?

If so, how much do you give it out of 10? (10 being the highest)