100 Books Like Max Havelaar

I loved this book because of the many years I spent living in Mexico and the deep connection I have to that country, culture, and its people. The sheer potency and ferocity from which the various authors wrote of the tragedies and struggles plaguing contemporary Mexico was astounding.

With bravery that is hard to fathom, the collection of celebrated journalists exposed the realities and truths of their beloved country that government officials, police, and military have killed to keep silent. I was angry, sad, moved, and inspired all at the same time while reading this book, and it showed me the power of writing as realistically as possible without compromise.

David Simon’s Homicide stands as one of the most honest and most vivid looks at police work ever put on paper.

Simon drags us into this violent and chaotic world as few could, based on a year he spent alongside detectives in the Baltimore Police Department’s homicide unit. This insider access produces an immersive experience that unfolds in dramatic fashion.

What absolutely leaps off the page is the weight of the implications of such violent crimes and what it demands of the detectives investigating. These are men and women gripped in a desperate vice, toiling relentlessly in the darkest corners of the city, absorbing grief, frustration, and exhaustion while trying to bring answers to families who are desperate for them.

Simon doesn’t overdramatize the work. He doesn’t need to. He brings us inside the grind: sleepless nights, leads that don’t pan out, political machinations, and the quiet toll the constant… show more.

This book described not just a heinous crime that was committed near Johannesburg, South Africa, but the effects it had on a man falsely accused and imprisoned for that crime. Instead of focusing on a single perspective, the author chose to focus on several perspectives, some of which were totally unreliable. As a result, I was shown the messy mind states of all those people associated with the crime, 2 decades after it was committed.

I was in a constant state of curiosity with every page, and as soon as I finished the book, I wanted to learn more, not just about the case itself, but the culture and society from which it took place. 

This book showed me in a way I’d never seen before what life was like for an imprisoned bureaucrat in Stalin-era Russia. The author proved to me that through undeniable detail and unflinching sincerity, you can show an unsettling reality that powerful authorities have worked tirelessly to conceal.

Found within the book’s pages are poignant anecdotes, lessons, and reflective moments that made me question the very concepts of what a person is capable of doing and enduring under extreme circumstances. I could not get the chapter “The Buddha’s Smile” out of my head, and I don’t think I ever will.

This is a book that keeps on changing my life. I was bowled over the first time I read it because it completely transformed my understanding of global history. The multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-national history I’d been piecing together studying Conrad’s work suddenly all made sense in a different way.

Pramoedya’s novel shows how Conrad’s novels are really all about the anti-colonial revolution. I love the book for the way it introduces all the most important historical, political, social, sexual, and philosophical questions bound up with decolonization.

It's a deceptively simple read, but cocooned within the sentimental coming-of-age story of its first-person narrator, the European-educated Minke, is an increasingly historical account of colonial oppression, anti-colonial resistance, and worldwide revolution that completely overturns European assumptions about what constitutes “this earth of mankind.” 

Although I have done very little ethnographic research in Java, I worked closely with Javanese transmigrants in West Sumatra. Peluso’s book provided me with additional understanding of the world from which these folks were likely to have come.  It also provided useful historical and contemporary material on Indonesian policies relating to forests that were very useful for me to know. The book has become a classic in the field!

Docker is the technology that works perfectly along with Kubernetes, and I believe that in such a fast-paced development environment, applications do not need to depend on the machine that they are running on.

What truly stood out for me was the exploration of Docker's features like images, networks, containers, and volumes, and how these elements create a consistent environment for applications to run. This consistency is key in eliminating the "well, it works on my machine" problem, making our lives easier and our work more portable.

To be honest, I did not expect to learn something new from this book, given the fact that I have been working on enterprise-level applications since high school, which mostly follow a microservice architecture. 

Still, I have to admit that in Richardson's discussion on decomposition strategies, inter-service communication, and managing distributed data, I still got some valuable insights into dealing with such an architecture. Particularly, the saga pattern for managing transactions was definitely a game-changer for me.

Unless you are writing a greenfield app, you have legacy code around. And even if you are on a greenfield app, you are writing legacy code right now.

This book gives you techniques for working on such a codebase. It is a really good read for learning how to refactor safely so you can work with what you are inheriting. You might notice this book is 20 years old. It’s just as relevant today as when I first read it in 2004. The concepts don’t depend on the exact language syntax.

In fact, some of the examples are in a mix of Java, C#, and C++. I really appreciate the perspective on testing that I got by reading this book.

Mastering a tool like Hibernate is essential when dealing with Spring Boot and databases, as it can simplify the development process if used correctly.

I was particularly impressed by how the authors tackled complex concepts like caching, lazy loading, and transaction management, making them accessible and relatable to persons with zero to no experience, and also making sure that someone with experience does not get bored either.

I found that managing entities correctly and knowing how to deal with JPQL automatically results in a cleaner, more scalable, and performant code base.