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The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip G. Zimbardo My rating: 4 of 5 stars What a journey to go through! The book, with its small typeface and rich content, is quite a challenge for me to finish in a few days. However, I am really happy that I read it! The author starts with a short introduction of evil and then moves on to his landmark study--the Stanford Prison Experiment. It was really a grueling experience for me to read what they college kids have gone through in the basement. At some moments, I really felt so disgusted and kind of suffocated. I was just incredulous that normal, well-behaved college kids could have turned into either shameless torturers or depressed and almost hysterical inmates. Wasn't it just an experiment? Obviously it wasn't. Another focus of this book is the prisoner abuses that happened in the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. I know a little more about Guatanamo than Abu Ghraib, but I just coul...

Oxford by Terry Deary My rating: 5 of 5 stars I was in Oxford in 2009, and of course I didn't know much about the city. I wonder what I would have felt if I had read this book before that trip. Well, I might have roamed the streets looking for all these horrible bits of the past... Anyway, this is again a great book from the Horrible Histories series. After reading this, I can make more connections between Oxford and the British history. It is no longer just a city of dreaming spires that a lot of tourists visit day in and day out because of the university and its quaint college buildings and castles, but also a backdrop for important historical events as well as some bloody (but attractive) details of the lives of the town folks. Really wish I had another chance to visit Oxford, with this book in my backpack! View all my reviews

In Defense of a Liberal Education by Fareed Zakaria My rating: 3 of 5 stars A book I imagined to be thicker, but ended up less than 200 pages. Well, a defense can be long or short, I think. The author tries to provide reasons for why we need a liberal education, which, I think, is itself something really hard to define and hard to persuade people of whose immediate effects on life. That's why I think the defense is really not so structured, with layers of arguments. However, I think this really has a lot to do with "liberal education" itself, so I won't blame the author too much, yet I still look forward to a better argument for a lover of liberal arts like me. View all my reviews

The Horrible History of Britain and Ireland by Terry Deary My rating: 4 of 5 stars It's always an enjoyment to read one of the Horrible Histories! This one brings something that is quite novel to me, besides its humorous language and funny comics, and that is the histories concerning not only Britain but also Ireland. And of course, Scotland and Wales are also included in this book. I would really love to read more about the British and Irish histories beyond this series. Anyways, as an English teacher, it seems that I have to know more about the place where the language originates. View all my reviews