Books and Me

Daniel Goleman (2014) The subject of this book - focus - really is the launch pad for emotional intelligence and a successfully Stoic way of being.   Get this right and you have the foundations for building that essential freedom between stimulus and response , which means that you can choose how you react.  Other forms of focus are described too, but of course, once that initial self focus, along with self insight are triggered, one can much more easily actively choose to focus in these ways too.  Methods for increasing ones powers of focus are described.  With even only a little practice, if coupled with an understanding of what to aim for,  one can radically improve emotional and attentional outcomes. These skills should be taught to all children everywhere.  Lessons in attentional control, self awareness and relaxation are taught in classes in Singapore and look what happens to their PISA scores !   I will have to go back to Lucy Cr...

by Amy Morin (2019) While most of this makes great good sense, is well researched and referenced, the format made reading it sequentially a teensy bit tedious and unmemorable.  It is probably best to dip into it, and finding the chapter that is relevant for the moment as it is otherwise pretty difficult to retain all 13 things one must do in order to stay mentally strong. Rating 6/10. 

by Zoe Wybrant (2015) I've been dreading writing a review of this book  for the reason that I really, really don't want to say anything harsh about it.  The author dares to expose her inner soul and in doing so,  provides an abundance of source material that will be very revealing to anyone who encounters the problem of profound and persistent dissatisfaction with appearance.  She also describes the solutions that worked for her in overcoming the problem.  You don't feel right to say anything critical in the face of such honesty and bravery and really most of the problems are just carping.  Zoe isn't really a writer which means that the profundity of some of her assertions may easily be missed which could be a huge shame.  I had to reread the book to pick up on and ram in the take-home messages.  A good editor would have been handy as the content in raw form is all there. Rating 4/10

by Peter Hollins (2019) Well this turned out to be unexpectedly useful.  It's difficult not to assume that you might not get much out of a book if it starts off with the omnipresent Phineas Gage ,  but actually in this instance, after Phineas, there was plenty of information that was completely new to me, most of which was constructive and what's more, most of which chimed very well with my go-to books on how to improve one's mental health, ie: "The Little Book of Stoicism" and "The Chimp Paradox ".  So now we have the complete package, the philosophical take (Stoicism), the psychiatric approach (The Chimp/human paradigm) and now the layman's guide to the neuroscientific angle. It is, for example, satisfying to marry up the powerful chimp versus feeble human paradigm (from the Chimp Paradox) with the neuroscience as described by Hollins when he describes huge proportions of the brain as being swamped with powerful reward-seeking dopamine, wi...

by  Prof Steve Peters (2012) This book on its own could well be a life-changing read, but when read in conjunction with "The Little Book of Stoicism" , you really do have the whole package - ie: both the psychiatric and the philosophical take on how to live well.    "The Little Book of Stoicism" will give you the broad view, ramming the key messages home through the force of rigorously convincing argument, so you really can't forget what to do, even in the heat of the moment and the ethical heft it adds makes the whole exercise seem worth doing. "The Chimp Paradox" describes exactly the same mental model but approaches the subject from a psychiatric point of view.  It is underpinned by the same Stoic idea that one should be realistic about the limits of ones control, and that one should learn to accept the things one cannot control. All the methods for dealing with the chimp brain are prefaced by this knowledge. It is not in the least sur...

by Matt Haig (2015) This is a brave, honest, utterly engaging, at times searingly painful and finally uplifting account of one man's struggle with anxiety and depression.  He manages to make the experience very real at times, which is often a hard thing to convey to those who are broadly happy.  Despite some uncomfortable reading, it is worth the effort to engage with it as there are useful lessons to be learned even for those who have never had a tinge of the black dog, since Matt not only comes up with some very sensible suggestions as to how to get well again but also describes the unexpected value of the experience.  My only quibble: he doesn't prescribe a Stoic philosophy, veering instead towards Buddhist doctrine, yoga and a more classic version of mindfulness than The Little Book of Stoicism prescribed, but this is easily rectifiable as there is nothing that cannot easily be tweaked to bring it in line with the healing nature of stoicism.  Read the...

by Heidi Farrelly (2018) Sometimes it's very hard to get past first impressions and the cover of this book certainly didn't make this easy. On the other hand, it sometimes really isn't worth the effort and first impressions turn out to be spot on, which was most definitely the case in this instance. I did wonder if this book suffered in my estimations from being read at the same time as two other far better books on the same sort of subject, but that aside, the lack of over-arching deep principle on which to hang the poorly researched, poorly referenced, completely common-place advice made the whole thing instantly forgettable and frequently contradictory.  Rating 3/10

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...