Ulasan Buku "Ranah 3 warna", buku ke dua dari Trilogi "negeri 5 menara" karya Ahmad Fuadi

Ulasan Singkat :

Judul	Ranah 3 Warna (novel ke-2 dari trilogi Negeri 5 Menara)
Penulis	Ahmad Fuadi
Penerbit	Gramedia Pustaka Utama
Jumlah Halaman	488 halaman
Jenis Cover	Soft Cover
Cover

Alif baru saja tamat dari Pondok Madani. Dia bahkan sudah bisa bermimpi dalam bahasa Arab dan Inggris. Impiannya ? Tinggi betul. Ingin belajar teknologi tinggi di Bandung seperti Habibie, lalu merantau sampai ke Amerika.

Dengan semangat menggelegak dia pulang ke Maninjau dan tak sabar ingin segera kuliah. Namun kawan karibnya, Randai, meragukan ia mampu lulus UMPTN. Lalu dia sadar, ada satu hal penting yang dia tidak punya. Ijazah SMA. Bagaimana mungkin mengejar semua cita-cita tinggi tadi tanpa ijazah ?

Terinspirasi semangat tim dinamit Denmark, dia mendobrak rintangan berat. Baru saja dia bisa tersenyum, badai masalah menggempurnya silih berganti tanpa ampun. Alif letih dan mulai bertanya-tanya : “Sampai kapan aku harus teguh bersabar menghadapi semua cobaan hidup ini ?” Hampir saja dia menyerah.

Rupanya “mantra” man jadda wajada saja tidak cukup sakti dalam memenangkan hidup. Alif teringat “mantra” kedua yang diajarkan di Pondok Madani : man shabara zhafira. Siapa yang bersabar akan beruntung. Berbekal kedua mantra itu dia songsong badai hidup satu persatu. Bisakah dia memenangkan semua impiannya ?

Kemana nasib membawa Alif ? Apa saja 3 ranah berbeda warna itu ? Siapakah Raisa ? Bagaimana persaingannya dengan Randai ? Apa kabar Sahibul Menara ? Kenapa sampai muncul Obelix, orang Indian dan Michael Jordan dan Kesatria Berpantun ? Apa hadiah Tuhan buat sebuah kesabaran yang kukuh ?

Ranah 3 warna adalah hikayat bagaimana impian tetap wajib dibela habis-habisan walau hidup terus digelung nestapa.

Saya akan coba menceritakannya kembali:

Buku ini bercerita tentang kerja keras seorang bernama Alif Fikri, seorang lulusan Pondok Madani untuk mewujudkan mimpinya, yaitu merantau ke Amerika. kondisi ekonomi yang berantakan sepeninggal ayahnya tidak meredam keinginannya yang membara. dengan berat hati ia tinggalkan ibu dan kedua adiknya ke Bandung untuk kuliah di Unpad mengambil jurusan Hubungan Internasional. dia pun berhasil mewakili indonesia sebagai Duta Bangsa di Quebec, Kanada. kehidupan cintanya juga cukup rumit. Alif mencintai seorang wanita yang juga tergabung sebagai duta bangsa. dia berniat untuk menyatakan cintanya, tetapi ia mengurungkan niatnya setelah mendengar pembicaraan antara wanita itu dan temannya. wanita itu tidak akan memiliki pacar sebelum diwisuda. 

hari yang ditunggu Alif pun tiba, pada saat ia akan menyatakan cinta ternyata wanita itu telah mempunyai tunangan yang diajaknya pada acara wisuda tersebut. penantian Alif pun sia-sia. namun cita-cita Alif pun telah terwujud, sekarang ia adalah orang yang sukses.

  Biografi singkat penulis :

Ahmad Fuadi (lahir di Maninjau, Sumatra Barat, 30 Desember 1972; umur 38 tahun) adalah novelis, pekerja sosial dan mantan wartawandari Indonesia. Novel pertamanya adalah novel Negeri 5 Menara yang merupakan buku pertama dari trilogi novelnya. Karya fiksinya dinilai dapat menumbuhkan semangat untuk berprestasi. Walaupun tergolong masih baru terbit, novelnya sudah masuk dalam jajaran best seller tahun 2009. Kemudian meraih Anugerah Pembaca Indonesia 2010 dan tahun yang sama juga masuk nominasi Khatulistiwa Literary Award, sehingga PTS Litera, salah satu penerbit di negeri jiran Malaysia tertarik menerbitkan di negaranya dalam versi bahasa melayu. Novel keduanya yang merupakan trilogi dari Negeri 5 Menara, Ranah 3 Warna telah diterbitkan sejak 23 Januari 2011. Fuadi mendirikan Komunitas Menara, sebuah yayasan sosial untuk membantu pendidikan masyarakat yang kurang mampu, khususnya untuk usia pra sekolah. Saat ini Komunitas Menara punya sebuah sekolah anak usia dini yang gratis di kawasan Bintaro, Tangerang Selatan.

Memulai pendidikan menengahnya di KMI Pondok Modern Darussalam Gontor Ponorogo dan lulus pada tahun 1992. Kemudian melanjutkan kuliah Hubungan Internasional di Universitas Padjadjaran, setelah lulus menjadi wartawan Tempo. Kelas jurnalistik pertamanya dijalani dalam tugas-tugas reportasenya di bawah bimbingan para wartawan senior Tempo. Tahun 1998, dia mendapat beasiswa Fulbright untuk kuliah S2 di School of Media and Public Affairs, George Washington University. Merantau ke Washington DCbersama Yayi, istrinya---yang juga wartawan Tempo-adalah mimpi masa kecilnya yang menjadi kenyataan. Sambil kuliah, mereka menjadi koresponden TEMPO dan wartawan VOA. Berita bersejarah seperti peristiwa 11 September 2001 dilaporkan mereka berdua langsung dari Pentagon, White House dan Capitol Hill.

Tahun 2004, jendela dunia lain terbuka lagi ketika dia mendapatkan beasiswa Chevening untuk belajar di Royal Holloway, University of London untuk bidang film dokumenter. Penyuka fotografi ini pernah menjadi Direktur Komunikasi di sebuah NGO konservasi: The Nature Conservancy.

sources: http://www.wikipedia.com

Eat, Pray, Love - Review sinopsis dan trailer

My Friendship

I can only imagine the angst that Jessica Vascellero at the Wall Street Journal inserted[Image] into countless minds this evening with her article about the difficulties people are having defining what is and isn’t a “friend” for online social networking purposes. Most Americans who aren’t teenagers or a little older are just getting used to the idea of social networks in general. But the complicated and evolving rules about what constitutes friendship online is adding even more stress.One young woman had to face someone she defriended on Facebook in a chance encounter on an elevator, and re-added the person to rid herself of the guilt. A middle aged jeweler frets over the implied meaning a competitor unfriending him. Meanwhile, the web-savvy David Dalka[Image], saying he doesn’t need to know “you’ve changed to a new brand of peanut butter,” has unceremoniously dropped people from his friend list at LinkedIn.

So What Is An Online Friend, Anyway? The social networks themselves, and those of us who spend a lot of time there, are still trying to work out the details on what it means to be a friend with someone online. With friendship comes benefits – you get a stream of information about the person, but it also has costs (you have to wade through a stream of information about the person, and they get access to your intimate details).Facebook in particular has struggled with this. For a time they really just wanted users to be online friends with people they already know in the offline world. That messaging has subtly changed more recently, though, to a less rigorous position.It’s clear that the more friends you have on any given service, the more noise you have to wade through to find the golden signal. In the real world when you don’t want to be friends with someone, you just find ways not to spend time with them. But online, you click that friend button because it seems so easy, and it’s considered insulting if you don’t. And then you pay.Social networks are taking two approaches to dealing with this. MySpace and Facebook (and those like them) have added different buckets to throw friends into. You can share more or less information with different groups of friends. So if you aren’t really friends with someone but don’t want to insult their friend request, you can throw them into the unwashed masses bucket (or whatever you want to call it).The other approach is the one taken by sites like Twitter and Friendfeed. Anyone can follow anyone and watch what they’re up to, but you are under no pressure to reciprocate. The problem with this approach is that there is still a lot of social pressure to follow people back. I suggested a “fake follow” back in August so that you can just pretend to follow those people. Friendfeed now has a feature which allows just that.But bucketing friends just seems like a bolted on way to fix the problem. And managing the changing relationships you have with of hundreds or thousands of people across multiple sites is a real time sink. In the future, the services should be able to do a much better job of just figuring out, through your gestures, who you are really close to and who you aren’t. It may also define a relationship with someone I don’t know at all based on whether or not we have friends in common. So even if there is no interaction at all, Facebook and MySpace (or whoever) can theoretically have an idea of how much personal information to share between us.Ultimately, though, our culture is adapting just as quickly as the networks are. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg[Image] has said users are becoming more and more comfortable sharing online. Sometimes (ok, often) Facebook is pushing the envelope when it comes to deciding on my behalf what is shareable and what isn’t. They’re placing aggressive bets on where this is all evolving. And sometimes they lose the bets (but not always).
souces: http://techcrunch.com/2008/12/24/the-meaning-of-friendship/ 

 "Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it...It really is worth fighting for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more." 

- Erica Jong -

courtesy of "moon over my obscure little town". by andrea hirata based on dwilogy book "padang bulan"

im so afraid of losing someone i never have

crazy, oh, crazy

finding reasons for my jealousy

all i can remember

when u left me alone

under the moon over my obscure little town

as long as i can remember

love has turned to be as cold as december

the moon over my obscure little town

the moon over my obscure little town

‎"..There's a hero If you look inside your heart You don't have to be afraid
Of what you are. There's an answer If you reach into your soul And the
sorrow that you know Will melt away.."

like mariah carey said.. we have to believe that in every problems of course there's an answer and in every problems of course there's a way. The last is in every heart of course there's a HERO.. :))