Books and Me

by Robert I. Sutton (2017) This i s, just as Daniel Pink says on the cover, a contemporary classic. If everyone were to read it, take it to heart and act on it, our planet would be an infinitely better place.  Sutton explains not only how to identify an "asshole", (sorry, there is no other satisfactory word -believe me, I've dug around in thesauri and the darkest reaches of the minds of friends and relatives, and have not yet come up with a satisfactory replacement), he also provides numerous ideas about how to deal with them, some of which strike me as inspired, (the Benjamin Franklin effect being one of these), but for the icing on the cake, he also requires that the reader look in the mirror in order to make sure they are not the asshole in the room! So it works for everyone, the asshole as well as the victim.  And of course, most of us have our moments.  It takes a masterful saint not to lapse at some point, though we might as well aim high, I guess. A must rea...

by Mark Kurlansky (2006) This is a frustrating read, primarily because the author is very much the historian and not a writer or ethicist.  To be fair, he does do what the title suggests, but unless you are gripped by a wide range of historical detail that is touched on quickly and is therefore difficult to retain, you are not likely to draw many useful lessons from history from the bulk of this book.  The moral and practical lessons would have been better drawn from fewer or more thematically bunched historical examples and with much more explication.  The author does try to save the day in the very last chapter which is a bullet point list of the lessons about non-violence that he has drawn from history but these really should have been better explained into the previous chapters and not simply appended out of context.  Further, the stark nature of the list makes it easier to question many of his conclusions as it implies a form of historicism that the s...