Books and Me

By Jason Fox (2018) This  is a gripping, convincing read for which the actual writer, Matt Allen, should take a lot of  credit, not least because until I got to the acknowledgements right at the end, I had managed to persuade myself that Jason's voice was largely authentically his.   OK, so you could see that the book was beautifully structured and that this sort of level of writing skill isn't something people normally acquire when they've spent their entire adult life busting through doors and shooting the threats that lie behind it, so I guess I should have just got on and accepted this fact - but in some regards, it still sounded like the Jason you hear on  Who Dares Wins,  so I just wanted to believe.  But really, duh, in retrospect what was I thinking! One regular feature of PTSD, to which Jason bravely admits, is that it closes down Broca's area - the part of the brain that is responsible for speech.  It is quite possibl...

by Tom Wainwright (2017) This is proving tricky to review!  I loved the writing style and the presentation of the numerous arguments, and indeed I was completely convinced, in the end, that specific forms of legalisation of drugs would be the best way to go, but I kept being struck by a terrible ennui.  The thing is, I just am not terribly interested in either illicit drugs or economics. This is wrong of me. I should be more concerned, not least as what we do with drugs in this country has implications for people all over the world. If you do happen to be interested in these subjects, and want a very slick exposition as to why the war of drugs is bound to fail, and what we should do instead, this is very much the book for you. Rating 8/10

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 Brene Brown (2018) This  book is both a quickish reiteration of themes from Brown's previous books and an extension into the application of those themes to leadership.  Perhaps because it was my first Brene Brown book, I couldn't read it in the flight time that Brene prescribed.  I had to linger over the ideas primarily because it could be quite dense but also because of some key parts of the language which somehow remained obscure to me.   For example,  I finished the book still not being entirely sure I that I know what a "rumble" is. The meaning seemed to mutate a bit depending on context, so I sketched it in as I went along.  These a quibbles though.  The main message of the importance of being aware of one's vulnerability, facing it honestly and dealing with the resulting shame in a way that avoids the noxious pitfalls shame generates is utterly obvious, helpful and healing. You also end up feeling that the world badly needs a ...

by Jem Friar (2017) I have to say I am a complete sucker for books where the author has clearly spent his time selecting and collating a load of primary sources and packaging them all into a lovely, readable, presentable, entertaining product, rather than them bothering to come up with any devastatingly new ideas themselves and this is pretty much what happens here .  OK, you can argue for a degree of creativity on the part of the author in managing all this selecting, collating and packaging, so I won't feel too bad giving this lovely, readable, presentable, entertaining book a high rating. Somehow also, I don't seem to be tiring of reading books about positive psychology.  This year alone, I seem to have read quite a few and whilst a lot of the information in  "Choosing Happier " is familiar, there are other ideas I hadn't encountered before.  All in all, from personal experience of a vast range of moods including a general sense of happiness and cont...

by Rod Liddle (2014). True to form, Rod continues to entertain and infuriate by turns .  Actually, if I'm honest, he never does manage to infuriate me, but regular headlines, including one  today , demonstrate that he does successfully irritate a large number of people.  The thing is, unlike the likes of Katy Hopkins, I suspect that being vexatious isn't Rod's entire raison d'etre.  Instead he primarily wants to say it as it is even when what it is he has to say completely unsayable in this day and age.  You have to respect that, even on the few occasions when you suspect that he might also be wrong.   And of course on the entertainment front, he is quite often very funny, turning out perfectly pitched, humorous ridicule annoyingly easily, which is always admirable. The stand out unsayable, the elephant that has occupied my particular room ever since I floundered around for most of my youth as my mother worked her socks off as a doctor, was the...

by Richard L. Currier (2015) This is a massive book in terms of scope, being a review of the whole of human history.  Much of the contents will, of course, be familiar to people with a passing knowledge of history, but for the rest of us, it is a concise, thoroughly useful romp through all the key elements that one really should actually already know but somehow don't.  It would make a visit to the British Museum or the Ashmolean for more interesting, and dinner parties with informed guests far less intimidating. Despite the authorial voice being almost non-existent, reading as the book does almost like a collaborative effort of a Wikipedia page, it manages to hold the reader's attention through a spattering of rich historical anecdote and often rather astonishing answers to enormous questions about the nature and form of humanity. When the author does reference himself, it is all the more startling for its rarity. Questions answered include why humans became so mu...

            by Kevin Horsley and Louis Fourie  (2018) Of all the books on positive psychology that have been reviewed in this blog so far, this book contains by far the most straightforward description of the happy state of mind and is by far the most transparent in describing the sort of behaviours that contribute to this way of being.  There is no equivocation about the exact nature of happiness and there's no discussion of how difficult it is for people to predict what will make them happy .   Instead the authors just get about describing the features of a broadly happy life-style; for example, the authors explain that it takes work to be happy, but by implication, that this is happy work.  They particularly stress that happiness is a creation borne of an approach where a person seeks to solve problems rather than to dwell on them. Overall this book is an invigorating, quick read, and is pretty convincing in that thos...

by Tobias Harwood  (2019) Continuing to be happily surprised by books for which I had very low expectations, this unprepossessing little number turned out to contain a welter of insights which the author had gleaned from a thematic analysis of interviews with people who had achieved unusual feats in their various fields. Common traits did emerge which all seemed to make a great deal of sense. An easy read and pretty inspirational, and proceeds of sale are apparently going to a charity. Rating: 8/10

by Chad W. Hall (2015) Short and sweet, this book lays out eight simple principles for helping other people. These principles chime almost completely with other well argued learning theories, such as unschooling doctrine  and indeed the strategies here could well prove a useful adjunct to unschooling practice. The brevity is actually hugely useful: the author doesn't stint on explanations, but instead cuts to the chase and the book therefore works well as an aide memoire, particularly when one is in the  potentially stressful improv that is a coaching scenario. Pleasantly surprised! 8/10

by Martin Blaser (2014) I was initially concerned that "Missing Microbes" would replicate the information I had already gleaned from other sources, such as Tim Spectre's "The Diet Myth" (2015), but I needn't have worried.  I have recently taken to rationalising the highlighting system in Kindle books so that I will have a clue as to what sort of information it is.  Pink indicates new and vital information, blue  denotes new vocabulary that I wish to retain and yellow indicates material that is repeated but that is so important that I wish to ram it home and retain it.  "Missing Microbes" is covered in pink  and   blue  .The only place where yellow  cropped up was in the two page epilogue. In other words, this book is cram pack full of new and, given the state of the science, pretty detailed information principally about a certain microbe that is, or at least should be, very close to all our hearts, (ie: in our stomachs). Of cours...

by Daniel Gilbert (2009) This is quite some book!  There is a lot more to it than I had initially predicted, which in retrospect is strange as the first bit of the book did set one up with a challenging question - (why are humans so bad at predicting what will make them happy?) - which would seemingly demand pretty big answers, but I still thought that it was likely that the book would be a bit sketchy somehow!  Perhaps that was partly the cover, which quite possibly does predispose one to think that this book isn't up for anything too weighty. Or perhaps it was another problem of priming, ie: that I had recently read a few books that whilst they weren't exactly short of content, had laboured the point a bit more than this one does and I had therefore made a false predication as to the extent and nature of the content based upon recent books I had read rather than my other awareness of the need for big answers. As it happens, this problem of priming, although Gilbe...