Books and Me

By Gary Klein (2017) For reasons that now completely escape me, I started out skeptically with this book  but somewhere in the course of it, I have been completely persuaded and have just finished it in a flurry of committed appreciation.  This is probably partially because it is a less depressing read than many of the behavioural economics books I have been reading lately, but more constructively it is also because I now feel I have a bit more of a handle on how to generate new ideas more easily and often. The author approaches the matter of how insights are generated through naturalistic research - taking 120 examples of moments where insights have occurred in real life rather than from experiments in a laboratory, and as a result, he generates a richness of understanding that more controlled testing would and has missed. In the process, Klein provides a very welcome corrective to the heuristics and biases movement which is often lab based and which is often terr...

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...

by Patrick King (2018) The wonderful thing about reading widely is that you end up reading books you otherwise wouldn't on the basis that it is only one book among many and nothing much hangs on it being a bad 'un, but then, joy of joys, finding that it is a total gem!  This worked for The Little Book of Stoicism , and it has worked for this one too.  Thankfully for both books, the messages are compatible - essentially - control what you can control, don't make your self assessment dependent upon factors that are outside of your control, be good enough for yourself and don't attempt to manipulate others for your own purposes.  Both books bulge with rational, life-improving, relatively easily actionable advice. Both leave you with clear messages that you won't forget in a hurry.  Highly recommended. Rating 9/10

by Daniel Pink (2018) For someone utterly terrified by the concept of selling, I was, by the end of the book , brought into the idea that, one way or another, we are all selling pretty much all the time, so I had better bite the bullet and get better at it.   Given that my previous knowledge is next to zero, I was completely sold on 100% of the suggestions which came neatly chunked and presented with persuasive anecdotes in a way that clearly suggests that Pink has imbibed his own messages.  Reviews elsewhere suggest that the research (which is amply referenced) may either be stretched for the purposes of the argument or may not be rigorous in the first place, but frankly I didn't care.  Any suggestions are welcome and all seem broadly sensible.  The sheer volume of ideas, even though they are clearly sorted in a well constructed system, does mean that unless one has a pretty good memory, one will have to revisit the book to mug up on the finer de...

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 Dr. Michael Mosley  (2017) The fact that this is my third Michael Mosley book so far this year is a pretty strong clue that I am a dedicated fan of this doctor-turned-journalist. He churns out these books on similar subjects and I read them all avidly.  This is yet  another  book primarily on the microbiome and the latest (as of 2017) ways to improve it, which of course is predominantly through diet (a lot of tasty though often meat based recipes are provided), but also through fasting, exercise, getting a good night's sleep and minimising stress. It might seem like reinventing the wheel, given all the other stuff I have read on this subject in the recent past, but actually, I am constantly grateful for the revision as well as the updates. For example, it is easy to fall off the fasting wagon and a little reminder of why it is worth it, particularly when coupled with the advantages of  HIIT,  is always a good thing.   And of course the ...

                                                                     by Sue Lloyd-Roberts and Sarah Morris (2016) This was not an easy read.  Yes, one is broadly familiar with most of the forms of savagery that are meted out on women, (a knowledge for which we most likely have to thank the likes of Sue and her fellow journalists), but the sheer horror of these atrocities is brought home by the reporting of the stories of the individuals who underwent these experiences.  It doesn't start out gently either.  We jump straight in with female genital mutilation, from whence we proceed to the appalling grief of Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, then on to the wash house persecution of "fallen" women in Ireland and so on, unrelentingly, until we reach the last chapter on the UK's gender pay gap (com...

by Heather T. Forbes (2010)  Phew, therapy that makes sense!  It sees the problems for what it really are and offers utterly wonderful, compassionate solutions.  It's a peculiar experience - when you finish this book, it all seems so obvious but that's probably because the explanations of the underlying causes of trauma-related behaviour are so right and real that it gives you the impression that it must have been staring you in the face all along. However, clearly this has been a difficult nut to crack and a good chunk of this book describes other nominally therapeutic strategies that are actually no help at all and indeed are often sources of even more trauma for the family. If your young person has been traumatised by something, including past therapy, read this utterly sensible, kind book. Rating: 9/10

By Dr. Giles Yeo (2018) This is a thoroughly useful book, describing what we currently know about how genes influence obesity.  It also makes it quite clear that we still need to know a lot more but, as far as it goes, it is very handy to know where we're at at the moment, at the very least so that we don't continue to make bad dietary choices.  And making a mess of dietary choices we clearly do!  Giles does his best to sort the wheat from the chaff with the best arguments and explanations to date: various cleanses, the GOOP madness, gluten free diets and many others come under the spot light and shrivel under the scrutiny. The only quibble: the tone is somehow a bit wobbly, as if English isn't actually the author's first language, or as if he would far rather be writing a scientific paper and dumbing down is desperately counter-intuitive.  However, the effect is endearing rather than annoying and certainly doesn't detract from the "must read" natur...

By Edward Bullmore (2018) This is a persuasive and exciting read, so exciting in fact, that it's extremely hard not to skip to the end to see how things turn out, but it is worth resisting the urge as there are so many gems along the way.  The author, a professor of Neuroscience and Head of Psychiatry at Cambridge University, is clearly attuned to explaining things in simple language whilst at the same time somehow managing not to seem patronising, and you learn such a lot along the way that you don't mind that you are reading an "Immunology and Medical History for Dummies". In the course of discussing his central hypothesis, (that depression may be caused by inflammation), we find out not only about macrophages, lymphocytes, microglial cells, cytokines, anti-TNF antibodies and the vagal nerve, but he also untangles the theories of Descartes and covers Celsus, Paracelsus, Hippocrates and Darwin to boot, and all this encased in a gripping narrative of med...

by Dr. Michael Mosley (2018) True to the scientific method, Michael moves where the evidence takes him with this book  and updates his  5:2 Fast Diet book of 2014 .  The thing is, I have been enjoying the results from the 2014 version, having relatively easily lost a reasonable amount of weight (5kg and down to my target BMI of 19) following its prescriptions, so I was worrying that the update involving a significant revision would leave me confused and in a bit of dilemma as to what to do next. As it happens, it simply opened up the options, which turned out to be useful since a friend has recently challenged me to actually do that 5k parkrun  that I have long talked about but have not actually trained for in any shape or form, having been focusing more on HIIT and walking the dogs and certainly not doing the paced jogging that my version of a park run would entail. When I did start to try to do longer runs on fast days of only 400 cals (sadly that is a qua...

By Lucy Crehan (2018) Subtitled "The Secrets Behind the Success of the World's Education Superpowers", Crehan visited five of the top performing countries in the PISA checklist: Finland, Singapore, Japan, China and Canada.    Despite the superficial differences in education policy in the above countries, there are indeed lessons to be drawn from the exercise.  For example:  you can't build problem solving excellence in a vacuum - you need the expertise in the content.   All of the above systems, one way or another, help young people to build that expertise and the related problem solving ability. In the last chapter, the author derives five key lessons from what she has seen.  Broadly speaking, the greater the respect for the neuroscience and the culture in which children are raised, the more successful the schooling. It turns out the author has had some advisory role in the Department for Education in the UK, but sadly as yet, the dep...

By Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) I can't help feeling that this book is undersold by its title.  There is nothing much to suggest that this is a pretty radical overhaul of the theory of emotion, and indeed of all thought.  Of course, Karl Popper has been saying the same sorts of things since the 1950s in "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" et al,  ie: about all products of the human mind being "theory laden", but that was coming at it from a philosophical point of view.  Feldman Barrett seems to be backing up what Popper said (without ever referencing him) with evidence from the lab. Feldman's thesis is such a massive overturning of previous assumptions in popular science books that even though I am familiar with Popper and have had at least a tenuous grasp of his epistemology for about 20 years now,  and even though Feldman's theories seem to make sense, I was still rather pleased that Barrett kept labouring her points.  It was necessary so as to f...