Roseto Vallortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia. In the suyle of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square. Facing the square is the Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of the Saggese family, once the great landowner of those parts. An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine-Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely clustered two-story stone houses with red-uile roofs.
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day In the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching be hind a erumbling mud wall peeking into the alley near the lezen creek That was a long time ago, but it's wrong what they say about the past, Dve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way our Looking back now. I realize I have been peeling into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.
Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam, the son of a little-educated boat-owner in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, had an unparalleled career as a defence scientist, culminating in the highest civilian award of India, the Bharat Ratna. As chief of the country's defence research and development programme, Kalam demonstrated the great potential for dynamism and innovation that existed in seemingly moribund research establishments. This is the story of Kalam's rise from obscurity and his personal and professional struggles, as well as the story of Agni, Prithvi, Akash, Trishul and Nag-missiles that have become household names in India and that have raised the nation to the level of a missile power of international reckoning. This is also the saga of independent India's struggle for technological self-sufficiency and defensive autonomy-a story as much about politics, domestic and international, as it is about science.
Later on, Thiel uses some of those points to make an interesting case about biotech startups and compares them side-by-side with IT startups. I can buy into the theory that is much easier to control the development of software-based businesses than “messy” biotech.
The bestselling Brazilian author of The Alchemist delicately etches this morose but ultimately uplifting story of the suicidal Veronika, who creeps along the boundary between life and death, sanity and madness, happiness
