Books and Me

by Katie Hurley (2019) With news that 9/10 teens are worried about their mental health, and that a third state that they feel helpless, sad and or fearful frequently and this problem far outstripping any help that is offered by others, these sorts of work books would seem to have a big and important function. This one does the job efficiently enough. There isn't anything you won't already have read before in other places, but it puts all the strategies in one neat place succinctly and clearly, and even if you don't have any mood disorder, often seems to offer very sensible strategies for life. Whether a teen would actually engage with it in the first place, let alone actually benefit from it, is another matter altogether. Rating 6/10

by Simon Sinek  (2011) Oh blimey, thank heaven that's over.   It was dire!  The repetition was so all engulfing that it felt as if I'd fallen into a roiling sea of nearly identical sentences which burbled around, sapping me of my last ounce of energy and breath. To tell the truth, after the millionth time of being told that Apple (whom I dislike) are amazing because they have a great big WHY (in capitals), I started skipping and dipping to see if new sections of the book had by chance got any new sentences that I hadn't seen before.  The really annoying thing was that just occasionally a new idea would be introduced, which did mean that I felt I couldn't just fling the whole thing in the nearest canal, fire, cesspit. (Sorry, imagining what to do with the thing has been the only entertainment I've had in a while.) Whether these new ideas were worth having is a moot point, however.  The central theme - that it is productive to have an ins...

by Thibaut Meurisse (2019) This is yet another of those books that takes a lot of its material from primary sources and reworks them into a succinct package so that it is pretty straightforward to extract and retain the take home messages whilst not worrying about the history of the explanations or the intricacies of the arguments, and really, for that we should be grateful - it's a quick and punchy read with a bundle of good ideas on the issue of motivation, even if it didn't solve the problem of how to magic motivation out of thin air, recommending instead that one act on whatever minute morsel of motivation one already has.  The only other quibble: the author consistently addresses the reader directly as "you" and as I personally don't have any issues with a lack of motivation just now at least, I kept feeling the urge to shout "Hey look, not a problem mate!".  However,  if the reader is stuck in a rut, this probably wouldn't be a probl...

by Chip and Dan Heath (2011) You have to love this  simply because it proffers such a plethora of sensible sounding solutions to the problem of how to implement change and it does this with so many vivid examples, and within such well organised framework that you really won't forget the broad outline of the ideas, from which is it possible to recall the finer details and therefore will be able to actually use what you've read.  It is, as with the "Asshole Survival Guide", a must read in that it would make the world a better place. OK, at some points, you may begin to wonder if some of the research might not have survived the replication crisis .  Carol Dweck is quoted with reverence and questions were hanging over her "Growth Mindset" argument, but I see that as of August 2019, a large study has confirmed that it does work, and even if the effects were small, were still significant.  Research aside (!), intuitively, every change-facilitating method i...

by Bessel Van Der Kolk (2015) Where to start?  This book is monumental, being vast in scope, beautifully argued and hugely significant all at once.  It is also deeply humane and potentially healing.  It would have been very easy for Bessel to have turned out an angry diatribe but instead he quietly makes his case, and you only gradually begin to clock, whilst reading between the lines, that his argument represents a huge challenge to current psychiatric, schooling and social services. His argument is that the epidemic of unhappiness which is currently so often attributed to snowflakery/lack of resilience is actually, often as not, a response to deeply traumatic events which for whatever reason, we do not really want to acknowledge or confront. So instead of blaming the victim or imposing deeply cruel methods of treatment (he gently explains why CBT so often fails),  Bessel gets about delineating the effects of trauma upon the mind, brain and body, an...

By Grant J. Smits (2018) This book leaves you feeling as if you have just been yelled at for an hour (it's a quick read) by someone who channels the energy of a very enthusiastic trainer along with a dose of sanctimony and disapproval of a Dr. Phil, all bundled together with the conviction of a cult leader.  The exhortatory street style could make it easy to dismiss, but actually the content pretty much sums up the current consensus on how to lose weight, whilst also usefully dismissing some of the more outlandish and exploitative methods that do the rounds.  Of course, the science around all this sort of stuff remains rule of thumb and is an on-going argument, so it would be very dangerous to think this is the last word on anything, and there are at least a couple of issues where the author appears to be behind the times on the current consensus: ie: his assertion that people need not worry too much about micro-nutrients and can solve the problem by simply popping ...