book-review – Migo Aguado

E-books have been my preferred book format since I got my first Kindle a few years ago. However, I still have many unread paperbacks at home, and I randomly choose a title to read inside a sauna. One title intrigued me not because of its title but because of its material–it’s glossy and could be water-resistant, perfect for probable wet conditions inside a humid place. Little did I know that I already encountered the author in one of my courses back in graduate school: John Kotter. Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions (2006) is a book by management gurus Holger Rathgeber and John Kotter that transforms Kotter’s Eight Step Process of Successful Change into a visual, compelling, and engaging fable. According to the authors, fables can be powerful because they can take intimidating subjects to more discussable and memorable formats. True enough, the book did not contain any frameworks you can find in business school case rooms. Instead, you can find highly visual and entertaining illustrations of the characters in the fable: penguins.

Educated (2018) by Tara Westover is the book that influenced me to go to graduate school and the first book that moved me to tears. The second one is Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country (2023) by acclaimed journalist and Kate Webb Prize For Exceptional Journalism awardee Patricia Evangelista. The book’s description features Westover’s testimonial about Evangelista’s memoir: “Tragic, elegant, vital. Evangelista risked her life to tell this story.” Westover’s story can mirror the tragedy of Evangelista’s accounts of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines, albeit written with finesse and humanity. It is then vital to tell her stories in a post-truth culture where “slaughter dressed up in bureaucratese dulls the senses, and over time can anesthetize an entire population to the horror happening right where they live.”