Manoj's Review on Books

The first thing that strikes when someone picks up this book is the question, what’s the connect with a technocrat billionaire and climate change? Isn’t this supposed to be the topic of some nerd scientist who would potentially display abstract mathematical models to elucidate the impact of climate change? Well, this point of view drastically changes when we realize the catastrophe of what just 1 degree Celsius (33.8F) increase in temperatures can do at a global scale. Let me throw some light on an impending apocalypse like scenario, northern ice caps could melt down submerging coastal cities, hurricane, heat waves, floods, droughts and a range of other unforeseen disasters that can regress human life by centuries. This can result in unprecedented economic depressions, massive levels of immigration, dearth of energy along with food supply and the worst of all a potential world war. Before I go any further, let’s understand that climate change is a critical aspect every human should b...

Having picked up this book after knowing that Sheryl Sandberg was a COO of Facebook, I was expecting a lot of references from her career experience of having worked in a leadership role. However, the entire book is focused on post trauma growth and the factors that lead to a positive change despite a major setback. The narrative begins with Sheryl finding her husband Dave lying dead over a treadmill back in 2015, she is shell shocked on the hard event and goes about describing the impact of her deepest trench in life. She refers to 3P’s - Personalization, Pervasiveness and Permanence as a core emotional pattern exhibited by individuals post a trauma. Let me throw some light on each of them, Personalization – it’s feeling of guilt that the individual is fully responsible for the trauma, Pervasiveness – the individual feels that the negativity will spread across or impact all areas of life and Permanence – it’s a belief that the trauma will have a life long negative impact. A high pe...