Sekar Writes
A Collection of (Mostly Nonfiction) Books Review and Personal Notes
Welcome!
Take a look around my blog, where I bring you book reviews filled with knowledges and favorite quotes. Alongside my literary explorations, I share personal stories and some side projects.
Latest Nonfiction Book Reviews
Check out my nonfiction book reviews, featuring thoughts, summaries, and favorite quotes.
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Review: Flourish
Our fast culture pulls attention away from what truly matters. Flourish reflects on a meaningful life that we should create together.
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Review and Summary: The Score
What happens when numbers decide what matters in life? The Score reflects on value capture where meaning and learning turn into metrics.
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Review and Summary: Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Pedagogy of the Oppressed shows why learning should build critical thinking, voice, and humanity, not just careers.
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Review: Letters to Cristina
Letters to Cristina is the personal story behind Paulo Freire’s ideas, how his life in Brazil shaped his vision of education and democracy.
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Review: Create Dangerously
Create Dangerously is an essay about art, freedom, and truth in hard times. It’s a challenging read that still critically urgent today.
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Review: Hyperpolitics
Anton Jäger’s Hyperpolitics explores why politics today feels louder, faster, and more intense than ever, yet real change seems out of reach.
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Review: The Story of a Heart
Two children are connected by a life-saving heart transplant in this true story about organ donation and the bond between grief and hope.
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Review and Summary: Art Cure
Art Cure is a science-backed book that explains why creativity might be the missing key to your well-being.
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Review and Summary: Technofeudalism
Has capitalism already been replaced by something more powerful? Technofeudalism explores how cloud capital crisis reshaped our economy.
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Review and Summary: How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division
Elif Shafak explores echo chambers, collective narcissism, education, and the crisis of meaning shaping our uncertain world today.
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Review: The Road to Wigan Pier
The Road to Wigan Pier takes us deep into 1930s industrial England, marked by coal dust, overcrowded homes, and mass unemployment.
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Review and Summary: The Other Side of Change
The Other Side of Change explores how we deal with loss, identity shifts, and unexpected change through real-life stories and psychology.
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Review and Summary: The Way of Excellence
As AI and automation reshape the world, this book explores why human excellence remains our greatest competitive advantage.
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Review and Summary: Mattering
Mattering explores what makes people feel valued and why that feeling can disappear, even in busy, successful lives.
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Review: Mother Mary Comes to Me
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy is a memoir about motherhood, family, political injustice, and her most famous literary works.
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Review: Moonlight Elk
Moonlight Elk is a nature-rooted memoir of Green’s life, inviting readers to reconnect with the overlooked beauty of the natural world.
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Review and Summary: Carbon
Carbon explores how one element connects plants, insects, humans, and the climate crisis through a deeper, more human lens on our future.
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Review: Collaborating with the Enemy
Collaborating with the Enemy unpacks idea of stretch collaboration and the choices that shape how we work with others.
Browse Nonfiction Books by Specific Genre
Have a specific book topic in mind?
You’ll likely find it in these categories!
- Biographies and Memoirs (33)
- Biology and Life Sciences (12)
- Child Development and Parenting (13)
- Climate Change (2)
- Cooking and Culinary (3)
- Critical Thinking and Research Skills (15)
- Data and Statistics (8)
- Economics (6)
- Education and Learning (10)
- Essays (27)
- Evolutionary Biology (6)
- Fitness and Human Performance (23)
- Health and Medicine (30)
- Leadership and Career (8)
- Life Transitions (11)
- Linguistics (4)
- Literature (2)
- Luck and Chance (3)
- Mathematics (2)
- Mindfulness (3)
- Nature (21)
- Neuroscience (13)
- Poetry (15)
- Politics and Society (41)
- Productivity (25)
- Psychology and Behavioral Science (49)
- Science (44)
- Self-Development (79)
- Technology and AI (10)
- UI/UX (2)
- Women's Studies (6)
- Writing (9)
From Facts to Fiction
Nonfiction teaches me about the world, but fiction helps me feel it.
Every review comes with the quotes I saved — maybe you’ll want to save them too.
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Review: The Trouble with Happiness and Other Stories
Some people always want more from life than life will hand them. The Trouble with Happiness is about that ache, and the homes it wrecks.
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Review: The Castle
The Castle is an unfinished novel about a man trapped in an absurd bureaucracy. He fights for answers no one will ever give him.
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Review: Playground
Four strangers, a remote island, and an ocean full of secrets. Playground is a stunning story of nature, friendship, and life’s big questions.
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Review: The Trees
Brutal murders shake the town where Emmett Till died, and the truth cuts deeper than anyone feared. The Trees is haunting and funny.
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Review: The Deal of a Lifetime and Other Stories
A regretful father and a dying little girl meet in one hospital room. One choice could change everything, what is a single life really worth?
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Review: Arborescence
Imagines a world where humans turn into trees as the planet grows greener and emptier. A story of nature, tech, and the cost of letting go.
Life in the Margins
Here’s what else you’ll find on this blog.
Reading Life
- Snapshots of my reading life: the habits, the tracking, and everything around the books.
Journaling
- Writing is how I make sense of things. A look at my journaling practice: how I do it, why I do it, and what it’s given me.
Fresh Flower Care
- There’s something grounding about tending to fresh flowers. My personal notes on keeping them beautiful and alive for longer.
Home Gardening
- Growing things at home with a lot of curiosity. A record of my small gardening experiments, wins and failures included.
Life in Helsinki, Finland
- Living in Helsinki has shaped how I read, think, and move through the world. A little window into daily life in the north.
Hi, I am Sekar!
My passion for reading (at least) one book a week fuels my love for books and drives me to share the insights with others.
Medical science by training, curious about everything else. Here I share my hobbies and the things life teaches me.
Feel free to reach out and join me in celebrating books and all the small joys that make life fuller.
Books let us know we’re not the center of the universe; the universe has many centers.
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie