Churchill's ministry of ungentlemanly warfare - Giles Milton

The title of this book and the synopsis caught my eye and it doesn't disappoint. Based on the WW2 era this book dives into the background and execution of the idea that England's weakness in time's of war is that they engaged in 'Gentlemanly' warfare and never hit 'below the belt'.




Winston Churchill is not the center of this book but he certainly an important peripheral character that is the shadow enforcer for the entire premise of this book. That if England has any chance against nazi Germany, they would have to resort to ungentlemanly tactics. The answer was a scrappy team of mathematicians, engineers and scientists who changed the direction of the war. After the initial setup the book dives deeply into a few sabotage missions that this team performed which proved to be a real thorn in Hitlers side.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about the underdog, world war 2 or Churchill. This book is written with several comedic undertones with all the true to life characters and many times makes you feel like you were there. 

The Dark Forest - Cixin Liu

This is the second book in the trilogy of Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem and a must read if you've read the first one and really pointless to pick up if you haven't.



This book picks up where the first one leaves off with a certain overlap in characters but that's not the anchor for the story. Whereas the first story just touches on the topic, this book has a much larger focus on the existential crisis of humans where we there's a inevitable and looming threat to our existence. There's a lot of great scientific breakthroughs and evolutionary concepts that this book gets into that is very different and fun to get into but then the book also touches on some very dark subjects that do get very disturbing.

I recommend this book to anybody who decides to get into the trilogy as this book is a great 2nd part and even though it starts off slowly it gets into some very interesting mix of futuristic action scenes and disturbing evolution of humanity in a crowded universe.

Three Body Problem - Cixin Liu

A Hugo award winner and a great sciences fiction book by a Chinese author. Enough of a tagline to pick up this book and then i saw this book recommended by Barack  Obama so I picked it up for a good read and very glad I did. Its very hard to describe what this book is about but I'll try anyway.


This was a very refreshing type of science fiction novel that deals with a not-so-distant future where we may make some scientific breakthroughs that may lead to first contact. I was sure that's what this book may be about but it very quickly evolves into a very realistic human element of how we would adopt ourselves to react to such a breakthrough. This also involves technological leaps that we make as a race with a new form of space race while still being, well Human.

Another different perspective was that it was written with the assumption that China is one of the leading superpowers and doesn't put USA in the middle of the story. I would highly recommend this book for sciences fiction fans and even to some who aren't since it deals with the existentialist crisis and a lot of philosophical questions that we may need to deal with as a race.