How to Choose a Partner



by Susan Quilliam  (2016)

This slim book creates the sensation of having spent a couple of sessions with a slightly dodgy counsellor who may have read all the right books which they can proffer up as needed, but who doesn't have much more to offer and indeed can do a complete explanatory volte face if the situation seemingly dictates.   Given that the book is only 99p on Kindle, perhaps that represents value for money, but if you've been around the block a bit, done a smidgeon of reading for yourself (Bowlby et al), and have topped this up with a dose of navel-gazing, there really won't be much to surprise you in this.   Perhaps it's a book for the very young, but then again, it often makes relationships seem so arduous and distracting that one wonders if it will put that readership off for good. 

Rating: 2/10

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Only Skill that Matters

Image
By Jonathan A. Levi (2019) One minor quibble I have about "The Only Skill That Matters" is that the title only accurately describes the contents if you take it as meaning, "How to Learn Efficiently", even though this overarching skill is subsequently broken down into quite a few distinct sub-skills that need to be acquired in different ways.   Having said that, all of what the author says makes a huge amount of sense, even if you will have seen most of it somewhere else already.  He rehashes the inspirational work of Harry Lorayne  on how to use visual mnemonics, discusses the various applications of the Pareto Principle, (that 80% of the benefits accrue for 20% of the input), about how to manage motivation, speed reading, pre-reading, the inter-related nature of knowledge, aka cross-pollination, the benefits of the brute force approach, self-quizzing and teaching, all of which we have come across before elsewhere but it is all condensed very neatly and a...
Read more

The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World

Image
by Jamil Zaki (2019) This is a clarion call for maximisation of the very best of human qualities, and given the increasing alienation, unhappiness and general antipathy that ail us, along with the global problems we face, this call doesn't come a moment too soon. It is an essential read - important for everyone - parents, policy makers and leaders of all sorts. Rating 10/10. 
Read more

The Little Book of Stoicism

Image
by Jonas Salzgeber (2019) This should be required reading for everyone on the planet.  It is a gem - a perfect summation of a perfect moral philosophy.  For many of my generation who, somewhere along the line, have lost their religious faith and with it have lost the nuggets of moral wisdom that were buried amongst the rubbish, this is what we have been waiting for. Most of the atheism of the generation of Dawkins and Hitchens was about the repudiation of theism and whilst we could agree whole-heartedly with that, we were left high and dry as regards to how to live our lives without a god of some description telling us what to do. And yet it was here all along!  The Stoics had worked it all out well before Christianity came on the scene, and it is infuriating that on account of the fact that Stoicism sounds all rather miserable and stiff upper lip, I had never thought to look it up before.  But miserablist it really isn't and in this regard, it mis-sells it...
Read more