Searchable recommendations archive

Here you can explore the full archive of my book recommendations.

3M Peltor X-Series Over-the-Head Earmuffs, NRR 31 dB

Recommended on: 19th March 2018

These puppies are amongst the most effective sound protectors available.  They also make you look like you’re about to get inside an armored vehicle about to fire heavy artillery.  But if you don’t care how you look, these are really fantastic!

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99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos: A Guide for Online Teachers and Flipped Classes

By Karen Costa

Recommended on: 24th May 2022

99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos: A Guide for Online Teachers and Flipped Classes, by Karen Costa. This simple, upbeat, encouraging book gives a nice boost for creating simple online videos for your classes that can be used over and over again (hence the “sustainable”) part of the title.  As Costa notes: “I’m here to shout from the rooftops that videos will make your life easier! Let me explain. How many e-mails or phone calls from students do you respond to each term asking you the same questions over and over? Tons, right? I teach first-year students, often in their very first online course. They have a lot of questions, and they need almost constant support. Being a great teacher is time-consuming. What if we could support our students and save ourselves time in the process?… This time is given back to me tenfold in the time that I save from answering countless and repetitive questions term after term. I have taught with and without these videos, and I can attest to the fact that in the terms in which I use videos, I receive far fewer frequently asked question-type queries from my students, and the quality of my students’ work is much better. That means I also spend less time working with students on revisions or resubmissions, because they are more likely to get it right the first time. While creating a video might cost you 15 minutes, it will pay you back in saved time.” 

If you’re looking for a quick-to-read motivator to get you going with simple videos, this is a good book to get you started.

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A Book for Magnificent Leadership: Transform Uncertainty, Transcend Circumstance, Claim the Future

By Sarah Levitt

Recommended on: 14th March 2018

Sarah Levitt has written a book to help leaders better understand how other leaders wend their way through the difficult, sometimes lonely path of great leadership: A Book for Magnificent Leadership: Transform Uncertainty, Transcend Circumstance, Claim the Future.  Through interviewing successful leaders, Sarah has laid out guidelines that others can find useful. “The audience for this book includes CEOs, business leaders, those professionals contemplating a career change and those beginning a career as consultants.”

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A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)

By Barbara Oakley

Recommended on: 13th December 2017

This stealth world-wide best-seller has been translated into over a dozen languages worldwide.  Whether you are a student struggling to fulfill a math or science requirement, or you are embarking on a career change that requires a new skill set, A Mind for Numbers offers the tools you need to get a better grasp of that intimidating material.

Unlike most books on learning, A Mind for Numbers delves into the neuroscience–walking you through research insights that are immediately and practically useful.  This is the book that the MOOC Learning How to Learn is based on–it helps reinforce and deepen your understanding of the fundamental concepts involved in learning!

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A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy

By Sue Klebold

Recommended on: 19th March 2019

A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy. by Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two Columbine High School mass murderers.  We weren’t sure what to expect when we picked this book up, but we sure weren’t expecting this sensitively-written, insightful book the ways that even the best of parenting can unintentionally go deeply astray, if only in missing subtle warning signs. An eye-opener was Sue’s admission that if she could go back and do it over, she’d not hesitate to have intruded and read her son’s diaries.  Sue understandably doesn’t want to place blame on anyone or anything else, but clearly, a poisonous atmosphere that tolerated and even encouraged bullying was an important factor in the horrific events that took place. All author profits from the book are donated to research and to charitable organizations focusing on mental health issues.

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A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

By Jeff Hawkins

Recommended on: 1st July 2021

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. Hawkins is a neuroscientist as well as one of the most successful and highly regarded computer architects in Silicon Valley. Some of his scientific papers have become the most downloaded and cited papers in their journals. 

A Thousand Brains is one of the most intriguing books we’ve ever read about the brain—Hawkins takes an utterly novel approach to understanding how the brain works.  As he notes: 

“People often say the brain is the most complicated thing in the universe. They conclude from this that there will not be a simple explanation for how it works, or that perhaps we will never understand it. The history of scientific discovery suggests they are wrong. Major discoveries are almost always preceded by bewildering, complex observations. With the correct theoretical framework, the complexity does not disappear, but it no longer seems confusing or daunting. A familiar example is the movement of the planets. For thousands of years, astronomers carefully tracked the motion of the planets among the stars. The path of a planet over the course of a year is complex, darting this way and that, making loops in the sky. It was hard to imagine an explanation for these wild movements. Today, every child learns the basic idea that the planets orbit the Sun… Similarly, I always believed that the neocortex appeared complicated largely because we didn’t understand it, and that it would appear relatively simple in hindsight. Once we knew the solution, we would look back and say, ‘Oh, of course, why didn’t we think of that?’” 

Hawkin’s book proceeds to lay out precisely those relatively straightforward ideas—often arising from his group’s research—that make the brain much easier to understand.  He also makes a prescient case for why artificial intelligence will advance only by copying the approaches used by the human brain.  Highly recommended for brain buffs and those interested in artificial intelligence.

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Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children

By Sara Zaske

Recommended on: 18th July 2018

Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children, by Sara Zaske. Zaske’s book is more focused on early child care systems than educational systems, which somehow makes the book a lighter read, but no less interesting, read from Lenore Chu’s Little Soldiers. What we found particularly compelling in this book were the discussions of the problems with “attachment style parenting.” As Zaske points out, efforts to be a close parent who maintains a strong bond with a toddler may have the inadvertent effect of creating a type of dependency—not to mention making for many sleepless nights. Fascinating insights into the differences between US and German parenting cultures.

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After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War

By Helen Rappaport

Recommended on: 29th April 2022

After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War by Helen Rappaport. As Barb was learning Russian back in the 1970s, the exiled “White” Russians (that is, those who opposed the communist “Reds”), had left their mark on the Russian-speaking diaspora worldwide. So it was fascinating to read this book and learn more about this community of millions who fled Russia as a result of the Soviet take-over in 1917.  What makes this book particularly intriguing is the many personal stories. Talented writers and poets in exile, for example, who found themselves lost in melancholia, unpublishable under Soviet censorship; and the mind-bogglingly wealthy who were lucky enough to escape largely penniless to the West, re-emerging as seamstresses and taxi-drivers, or worse, as drunks and suicides.

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Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body

By Daniel Goleman and  Richard J. Davidson

Recommended on: 2nd November 2022

Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body by Daniel Goleman and  Richard J. Davidson.  Barb spent the past week teaching about the neuroscience of teaching and learning at the Tergar Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal.  The Lead Abbot of the monastery is Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, perhaps the best-studied yogi in the world (here is a recent paper, co-authored by Davidson, summarizing the extraordinary differences in how Rinpoche’s brain as compared to the brains of typical controls).  Altered Traits gives a careful guide into what is known, and some of what is not known, about the neuroscience involved in various meditative processes. (For those wishing to dive deeper, here is a synthesizing article, behind a pay wall except fot the abstract, about the neuroscience of meditation.) 

There is some evidence that focused types of meditation, such as those that rely on bringing back attention that wanders, may suppress the activities of the default mode network–the brain’s states of relaxation. This suppression can reduce anxiety, which is great.  But there is perhaps a concomitant trade-off of reducing the mind-wandering that can sometimes be at the heart of creativity.  

During his discussions with Barb, as well as in his book The Joy of Living, (a very informative book on Buddhist meditative practices), Rinpoche emphasized that there are many other forms of meditation, besides focused mode, with many different neural effects.  It does seem, however, that many meditative practices begin with practice through focus, so it may good to be aware of potential tradeoffs in the type of meditative mind-training you may select. Meditation is indeed brain-changing!

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As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride

By Cary Elwes

Recommended on: 26th December 2019

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride, by Cary Elwes. We’ve long been fans of the cult-classic movie The Princess Bride. After reading As You Wish, we had to watch the movie yet again, this time to observe where Westley gives a slight hobble (a result of breaking his toe while romping offset with André the Giant), and to once more enjoy such classic lines as “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father; prepare to die!” The Princess Bride has a low key humor that creeps up on you instead of smacking you in the face—all this makes it one of the nicest holiday films around to enjoy with the family, even as you can regale the family with anecdotes of movie-making from Cary Elwes’ wonderful As You Wish. Enjoy!

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Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

By James Clear

Recommended on: 24th December 2018

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, by James Clear. Sometimes it’s valuable to go back over your life and habits to get a sense of how productive you are—and how much more productive you could be so as to leave room for family, friends, and fun.  James’ book starts with a bang (literally—he was banged in the face with a baseball bat), and takes off from there to step through how to make tiny, doable changes that add up to big results. If you’re looking to make changes in the New Year, this book will be invaluable.  A useful book on reforming your habits, whether or not you’ve read Charles’ Duhigg’s The Power of Habit (which we also really liked). Atomic Habits is also good for audio. (Two free audiobooks may be possible through this link.)

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Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary

By Ozan Varol

Recommended on: 7th December 2022

Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary, by Ozan Varol. The deluge of today’s lifestyles can ultimately lead to overload and shutdown. Awaken Your Genius uses uncommon stories coupled with research findings to lift and inspire.  This great book will help you hit refresh on your sense of possibility.  Highly recommended!

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Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners

By Michael Erard

Recommended on: 10th November 2019

Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners, by Michael Erard.  For years, Barb has thought she would like to write a book about language superlearners. Babel No More is what she had in mind. This fascinating book begins with the story of legendary linguist Giuseppe Mezzofanti, the Italian cardinal who was said to speak 72 languages. It goes on to share dozens of interesting language learning tidbits. Although in 2012 (when this book was published), neuroimaging techniques weren’t as advanced as they are today, Erard does a fine job of exploring how the brain of language superlearners might be different from those of more ordinary learners.  Interestingly, “..individuals living in multilingual communities seem to settle on an optimal cognitive load. The hyperpolyglot possesses a similar patchwork of linguistic proficiencies. Yet he or she exceeds this optimum with a conspicuous consumption of brainpower.” 

We particularly liked learning how the common mentality that you only speak a language if you are a native or near-native speaker is actually not a reasonable measure. “[People think] that when you really know a language, you think in it. In fact, the brain doesn’t think in any language. What people refer to as ‘thinking in a language’ comes from being able to speak more immediately in a language without rehearsing it or translating it from a language one might know better; the spoken thought feels as if it’s closer to its source in the brain.”

If you’re interested in language-learning, and want some inspiration, you’ll find it here in this book.

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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

By John Carreyrou

Recommended on: 9th June 2018

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou. This was such a riveting book that we finished it all in one evening. There’s something so alluring about Silicon Valley would-be geniuses who claim world-changing technology.  The upshot is this whopping cautionary tale featuring world-class frauds and utterly ruthless, no-bounds-of-human-decency litigators. John Carreyrou and the Wall Street Journal deserve kudos for this edge-of-the-seat investigative reporting. See also Nick Gillespie’s interview with John Carreyrou.  Also a great book for audio.

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Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

By Tom Vanderbilt

Recommended on: 4th January 2021

Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning, by Tom Vanderbilt. The year 2021 has already started out with a bang with the publication of Beginners, a uplifting, fascinating book about the value and addictive pleasure of returning to the status of a beginner. Vanderbilt is a fantastic writer, as when he begins singing lessons and describes his rendition of “Time After Time,” as possessing “the control of a snake on ice.” 

We love how Beginners describes the joy of learning new skills—and the joy also to be found in learning together with other novices. We learn not only about whatever subject Vanderbilt is studying, whether it be surfing, jewelry-making, or chess, but also delightful ancillary information. For example, singing in choirs “has been found to increase people’s sense of happiness and well-being. Singing with someone else engages a wider range of brain activity than singing alone. Choir singing has also been found to boost people’s oxytocin levels and increase one’s tolerance for pain. One study found that group singing, but interestingly not group conversation, lowered levels of the stress hormone cortisol.” (Perhaps it would be a good idea for MOOC-makers to schedule singing sessions when they are seeking to engage their learners.) Beginners is also a great book for audio listening.

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Behavioral Neuroscience of Learning and Memory

By Robert Clark and Stephen Martin

Recommended on: 13th December 2018

Our second recommended book this week is Behavioral Neuroscience of Learning and Memory, edited by Robert Clark and Stephen Martin. (Yes, despite the price, we bought the hard copy so we could mark it up—the color pictures are a treat.) Clark is a Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at UCSD’s School of Medicine, while and Martin is a neuroscientist and Discovery Fellow at the University of Dundee.  This book provides an excellent overview of what’s known at a foundational level about memory and how we learn. There’s a fantastic discussion of the long-term memory medial temporal lobe memory system (see the great diagram on page 25); we only wish that research was more advanced so that the chapter on working memory could have been similarly as informative.  (See this fascinating article on changing concepts in working memory in Nature Neuroscience.)

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Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

By Walter Isaacson

Recommended on: 3rd May 2018

Sometimes we enjoy stepping back into the past (it can be surprising how many of today’s challenges are just repeats from the past!) This week, we dove into biographer extraordinaire Walter Isaacson’s first historical biography: Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.  What’s not to like about a prototypical science nerd who had a smooth way about his life and (often lusty) loves? Franklin was something of a North American Leonardo da Vinci (another of Isaacson’s great biographies). If your background about US history is a little sketchy, Franklin’s life will also catch you up on all the major events that swirled around the country’s founding. Fantastic book!

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Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core

By Tom Loveless

Recommended on: 10th January 2024

Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core, by Tom Loveless. Now that we’re largely back on track after the epidemic-related school shutdowns, it’s a good time to also get back on track in what’s going on more generally with education.  In his insightful book Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core, Tom Loveless provides a compelling analysis of the complex forces that shape education policy and reform in the United States. He explores the history of standards-based education reform, with a particular focus on the rollout and implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). 

What’s particularly enjoyable about this book is that Loveless writes so clearly. (Not like a typical academic!) Loveless also doesn’t take obvious sides in the progressive versus traditional debates—ultimately, that battle is extraneous to whether programs like Common Core work, and are worth the enormous cost and pedagogical upheaval. Loveless himself has led major studies in this area.  Ultimately, it seems part of the challenge with Common Core is that it was developed largely behind closed doors, with virtually no input or feedback from boots-on-the-ground teachers. This seems an obvious misstep—yet perhaps surprisingly, part of the reason for the failure of earlier standards was their very openness and transparency. 

Between the State and the Schoolhouse is an illuminating guide to the complex machinery behind education reform movements. Anyone interested in going beyond surface-level debates to truly understand the forces shaping America’s schools would do well to read this important and engagingly written work.

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Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

By Thomas de Waal

Recommended on: 14th April 2019

Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War, by Thomas de Waal. What a revelation to find a book that can even-handedly parse one of the most gut-wrenching wars of the late 20th century. De Waal doesn’t take the easy way out in his conclusions about the cause of this disastrous, still-unresolved conflict, which could set the spark for future world war. This book about an important, but often neglected, area of the world is well-worth reading.

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Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are

By Robert Plomin

Recommended on: 15th March 2024

Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, by Robert Plomin.  With the rapid advancements in genomic sequencing and the ever-expanding field of behavioral genetics, we feel the age-old question of “nature vs. nurture” is one of the hottest debates around. After all, scientists can now point to the vast array of twin and adoption studies available nowadays—as well as the new opportunities created by identifying the specific genes associated with behavioral traits and cognitive abilities. Plomin’s book lays out the evidence and implications from his 45 years of groundbreaking research in behavioral genetics, making the case that inherited DNA differences are the major systematic force in shaping who we are. The current prevailing view tends to assume that only environmental factors, particularly parenting and socioeconomic status, are causal in determining behaviors and life outcomes. However, there are growing inconsistencies and problems with this view that are difficult to reconcile, including the inability to explain stark differences between siblings raised together, the finding that the effects of parenting on children’s outcomes are mostly correlational rather than causal, and the discovery of inherited DNA differences that increasingly account for variations in behavioral traits and cognitive abilities. Plomin introduces the concept of “the nature of nurture”, positing that our genes are in fact what’s driving us to perceive, select, modify and create environments that fit our genetic predispositions.

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Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

By Trevor Noah

Recommended on: 12th June 2020

We watched Trevor Noah’s thoughtful video take on George Floyd, the Minneapolis Protests, Ahmaud Arbery, and Amy Cooper, and were inspired to read Noah’s autobiography, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. Wow! This riveting book describes how, due to miscegenation laws in South Africa, Noah really was born a criminal—blacks and whites were not supposed to be mixing under apartheid in South Africa. Lucky for us, Trevor’s miraculous mother deliberately chose to break the law. We won’t tell you how or why because we’d be spoiling the story.

The long and the short of it is that Noah is, quite simply, one of the most masterful story-tellers around.  He describes the great value of language—a gifted linguist, Noah could use his ability to understand the essence of how people spoke to in turn speak with them. “I became a chameleon. My color didn’t change, but I could change your perception of my color. If you spoke to me in Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn’t look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.” Noah truly understands and conveys the horrors of domestic violence, and perhaps most importantly, from our perspective, he describes the often appalling lack of educational opportunities for children born into poverty.  This is truly a great book by an extraordinary writer—also a terrific book for audio listening. (Noah’s subtle South African accent is almost magnetically listenable.)

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Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life

By Steve Martin

Recommended on: 5th January 2018

Laughing out loud: Barb’s aunt was the mail woman who used to deliver comedian Steve Martin’s mail for him at his home in Hollywood. So that’s how we’ve come to know that in real life, Steve Martin is truly the nice guy he appears to be in his beautifully written, best-selling autobiography Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life.  (Yes, Steve did the Audible narrative, too.) Working as a professional stand up comedian is hard. If you are a teacher or do any kind of public speaking, you’ll find valuable nuggets of information as you learn of Martin’s extraordinary life.

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Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom

By Katherine Eban

Recommended on: 11th July 2019

Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom, by Katherine Eban. We picked this book up after noticing that a minor prescription drug we were switched to—a generic—just didn’t seem to work right. What an unexpectedly eye-popping thriller!  You’ll learn about the hands-off ineffectiveness and incompetence of the FDA, the infectious nature of corrupt corporate cultures committing global fraud, and of the sometimes completely ineffective nature of life-saving drugs.  If you or anyone you know takes, or will take, generic drugs, you should read this book.

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Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War

By Robert Coram

Recommended on: 5th December 2018

Our very favorite, most highly recommended book this year is Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.  This book ranks amongst our favorite biographies ever. Boyd was a genius level iconoclast (with a measured IQ of 90), and a rebel of the first order, who changed the military’s approach to war and saved countless lives while he was at it. Boyd took on idiocy where ever he found it, whether with bombastic Pentagon generals who were happy to fake important tests, or those who thought they could out gun him in the air. Boyd was so witty, engaging, and fearless in tackling new approaches, and the research behind this extraordinary biography is so artfully done, that it’s a “can’t miss” book for anyone who loves rebels and reading.  OODA away!

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Brain Food: The Surprising Science of Eating for Cognitive Power

By Lisa Mosconi

Recommended on: 28th February 2019

Brain Food: The Surprising Science of Eating for Cognitive Power, by Lisa Mosconi.  Dr. Mosconi is the Director of the Women’s Brain Initiative and Associate Director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, where she also serves as an Associate Professor of Neuroscience in Neurology and Radiology. Mosconi’s book couldn’t be more different from Genius Foods—for one thing, grains are big for Mosconi, where avoiding grains is fundamental to Genius Foods.  We got the sense that Brain Food was based on information cherry-picked to coincide with the way Mosconi was raised in her eating habits, rather than an impartial review of recent research literature. And sometimes her recommendations are based on rocky research ground: for example, she refers glowingly to the herb ashitaba without regard for the fact that in vivo research results have not been conducted, and royal jelly is touted notwithstanding the lack of research evidence. Mosconi’s frequent mentions of her website—a dozen repetitions of the URL throughout the book—became tiresome.

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Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

By James Nestor

Recommended on: 26th October 2020

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor. We’ve long had the feeling that breathing and breathing techniques are supremely important. Yet it’s been tough to find a solid scientifically-based book that gives a trustworthy overview of the subject—until James Nestor came along.  Nestor’s extraordinary willingness to not only make himself try out the various techniques and therapies he’s describing, but also to do in-depth scientific and historical research, and on top of that, to write with the grace and beauty of a Pulitzer Prize winner, are virtually unparalleled in popular literature. Who knew that a book on breath could be hard to put down—and so important?

You’ll learn why it’s important to keep your mouth closed whenever possible (it turns out you must use—or lose—the ability to breath through your nose). You’ll also discover why the human face has, in the past 300 years ago, created breeding grounds for the sinus infections that frequently plague us—and how it is possible to widen our mouths and fix the crooked teeth and sinus problems caused by soft foods and well-meaning orthodontists. (Nestor makes the prescient point that old skulls meant to display the inadequacy of “non-civilized” peoples instead illustrate that civilization wreaks havoc on sinuses and teeth.) 

Discussions of the history of a subject are often disconnected from modern day findings, and thus more than a little boring. But in Nestor’s able hands, we’re able to see how the ancients’ abilities to, for example, stay warm even during the iciest of conditions informs our modern understanding of the impact of breath on the autonomic nervous system; and how, in the 1830s, artist George Catlin gained an uncanny understanding of Native American breathing techniques—knowledge that was sadly lost save for Catlin’s efforts to document it. We even get a surprisingly relevant visit to the catacombs of Paris.

The end of the book contains a helpful recapitulation of the most important techniques in the book (and more), along with links to relevant websites. This is the best book we’ve read all year—and one of our top ten ever.  Don’t miss it. (Also, this book is perfect for listening on Audible).

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Cajal’s Neuronal Forest: Science and Art

By Javier DeFelipe

Recommended on: 11th November 2017

Cajal’s Neuronal Forest: Science and Art, by Javier DeFelipe, is a sister volume to neuroscientist Javier DeFelipe’s earlier beautiful Cajal’s Butterflies of the Soul.

We were in Madrid looking at Cajal’s illustrations with Javier DeFelipeseveral months before Neuronal Forest launched.  The level of effort to produce this fantastic volume, and the extraordinary nature of the illustrations themselves, have to be seen to be appreciated!

Other books for Cajal fans include The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramon y Cajal, and Cajal’s own Recollections of My Life.

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Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World

By Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West

Recommended on: 26th August 2020

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, by Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West. This very readable book describes how easy it is for journalists, politicians, companies, and yes, even researchers themselves to bullshit people.  As Bergstrom and West note: “Perhaps the most important principle in bullshit studies is Brandolini’s principle. Coined by Italian software engineer Alberto Brandolini in 2014, it states: ‘The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than [that needed] to produce it.’ Producing bullshit is a lot less work than cleaning it up. It is also a lot simpler and cheaper to do. A few years before Brandolini formulated his principle, Italian blogger Uriel Fanelli had already noted that, loosely translated, ‘an idiot can create more bullshit than you could ever hope to refute.’

We also like this book because it provides fresh perspectives on the black box of artificial intelligence algorithms; how to understand conditional probability in simple, visual ways; how p-hacking leads to a misleading research landscape; and why even superb scientists can publish irreproducible results. Not that Bergstrom and West aren’t above a bit of occasional bullshit themselves, but this is an important book that we feel is destined to become a classic. Also good for audio listening.

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Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds

By David Goggins

Recommended on: 21st December 2018

This week’s astonishing book is Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds, by David Goggins. David grew up in an unbelievably tough environment with a deeply abusive father. He experienced prejudice and poverty, and suffered learning difficulties that left him graduating from high school barely able to read or do math. He became a depressed, overweight young man with an attitude.  But shockingly, he turned himself into one of the world’s greatest endurance athletes, and became the only man in history to complete training as a Navy SEAL, Army Ranger, and Air Force Tactical Air Controller.

To find a self-published book as #2 on Amazon, with a five-star rating and over 400 reviews, speaks volumes about how good it is.  If you’re trying to do more in your life, or change your life, you’ll find Goggin’s book to be a terrific inspiration.

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Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era

By Laurence Leamer

Recommended on: 28th December 2021

Capote’s Women: A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era, by Laurence Leamer.  Truman Capote was one of the most fascinating characters of the twentieth century.  So this book proved irresistible for us.  

Capote was a raconteur of the first order, and he parlayed his story-telling skills not only into a career as a novelist, but also into calling cards that made him a popular houseguest amongst the wealthy.  Over time, Capote began to realize that his awareness of the world of enormously wealthy, fashionable women could be used as fodder for his writing. Just as he took advantage of the confidences of murderers in his classic, In Cold Blood, Capote ruthlessly set about milking his wealthy female friends for their thoughts—thoughts he could put on the page to sell books, even as these publicly shared confidences would destroy his deepest friendships.  A real page-turner that is a biography not just of Capote, but of some of the world’s wealthiest, intelligent, best-dressed, but often trapped women.

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Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

By Ronan Farrow

Recommended on: 6th December 2019

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, by Ronan Farrow.  We’ve long been interested in the “successfully sinister” among us. These individuals can become so powerful that they can get away with virtually anything—that’s how they can destroy so many lives. Ronan Farrow is to be commended for pursuing the story of Harvey Weinstein and others of his ilk, despite the threats and imminent personal danger that put off so many for so long. Catch and Kill might as well be a thriller—we’ve become huge fans of Ronan and his fearless ability to uncover behavior of those who can feign doing good while doing so much harm.

The successfully sinister are the subject of Barb’s book Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend. For six years, while overtly working towards tenure as an assistant professor of engineering, she covertly delved into an analysis of the holes and flaws of the field of psychology. She remembers thinking “Why am I even doing this? Nobody’s going to read a book that’s focused on psychology, but written by an engineer.” Ultimately, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker called Evil Genes “A fascinating scientific and personal exploration of the roots of evil, filled with human insight and telling detail.” 

As one correspondent recently wrote Barb, “Reading your outstanding book [Evil Genes] today…. I work with organizational behavior, reading a lot recently about narcissism. Everything I just learned is in your book. From my work with others and most recent personal experience of aggression directed at me and accepted by a Board, I asked myself that questions that you did years ago to write your book. Seems like the Me Too movement exposes this everyday behavior…”

Yes, the Me Too movement does expose this type of behavior, which, sadly, is equal opportunity and can be found in women as well as men.  The hypocrisy of news organizations like NBC reporting on sexual abuse in organizations such as the church, while killing stories that might incidentally be related to their own sordid abuses, or the horrific behavior of their favored people or politicians, is a perfect example of Conquest’s third law of politics: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” Sadly, we feel Conquest’s insight is relevant to the field of education.

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China’s Crony Capitalism

By Minxin Pei

Recommended on: 31st May 2018

China’s Crony Capitalism, by Minxin Pei. If you want a more up-to-date perspective on modern-day social structures in China, this book will give you a broad perspective. Just when you think you’ve heard it all, there couldn’t possibly be another facet of corrupt cronyism, off Pei goes to explore a new area, from business, to environmental protection, to the judicial system, to education, to the police themselves— and far more. If you’re doing business with China, this book, along with Poorly Made in China, is a must-read.

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Churchill & Son

By Josh Ireland

Recommended on: 17th June 2021

Churchill & Son, by Josh Ireland. Reaching the end of a fantastic book like Churchill & Son is bittersweet. There’s a feeling of satisfaction with the closure, but that satisfaction is mixed with the sad knowledge that you will not be able to return and spend more time with characters and a story you’ve become entranced by.  Winston Churchill is one of history’s astonishing figures—an ostracized man who saw a future few others wished to see. His accurate vision, combined with his ability to unite and marshal his country’s (and others’) forces to combat the Nazi juggernaut was unparalleled.  But when it came to Churchill’s son, Winston took a path that virtually everyone—especially Churchill’s long-suffering wife Clementine—could see was bound for disaster.  By overcompensating for his own neglected upbringing, Churchill groomed his son to become a spoiled, overbearing, overweening character whose descent into alcoholism left him with few friends, and lost him even the respect of his father. As this book so eloquently reveals, being the son of a great man can truly be a curse. This is an amazing behind-the-scenes story of what was really going on from a family perspective during some of the most tumultuous political upheavals of modern history.  This book was hard to put down—highly recommended! (Also good for audio.)

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Clean: The New Science of Skin

By James Hamblin

Recommended on: 29th July 2021

Clean: The New Science of Skin, by James Hamblin.  Clean begins with a startling claim: author James Hamblin, a medical doctor, had stopped showering for five years and had given up as well on shampoo, conditioner, or soap, except on his hands.  With this unusual introduction, Hamblin moves on to describe soap, skin, and the entire set of related industries.  The book is filled with interesting factoids, such as that the pharmaceutical industry is tightly regulated at great expense, but the cosmetics industry is basically the wild west—“there are currently no legal requirements for any cosmetic manufacturer marketing products to American consumers to test their products for safety.”  That, in a nutshell, is why you can find seemingly elegant $60 creams and lotions with the same basic ingredients as a $6 tube. 

Clean was named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR and Vanity Fair. This is an especially worthwhile book if you have skin issues, or spend a lot on skin products, or have ever wondered why—and whether it’s reasonable—to spend so much on skin products. Clean is also a good book for audio.

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Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

By Shane Parrish

Recommended on: 5th October 2023

Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results, by Shane Parrish.  Like half the planet, it seems, we are fans of Shane Parrish’s podcast The Knowledge Project. In Clear Thinking, he distills the best of what he’s learned over the years, both from his high-pressure work for certain unnamed agencies and from his wide-ranging conversations with hyper-talented individuals. What we really love about this book are its personal stories of success and failure.  By laying out some of his poor past decision-making, Shane invites us to engage honestly with our own personality quirks and foibles. (It’s actually quite encouraging to realize that even world-class thought leaders can be all-too-human in their thinking!) Drawing from diverse fields, including philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, Shane provides us with an accessible yet sophisticated set of mental models and insights that can be readily applied to real-world situations.

Clear Thinking represents an empowering resource for anyone seeking to hone their judgment, cultivate self-awareness, and chart a purposeful path forward in work and life. Highly recommended!

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Cocoa Flavanols

By CocoaVia

Recommended on: 29th November 2020

There is solid research from a number of studies that cocoa flavanols are beneficial for heart health as well as cognition. However, ordinary chocolate processing procedures generally strip out many of the beneficial flavanols.  Researching matters, CocoaVia, which is what Barb uses, appears to be one of the best products available for the public.

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Colour Bar: The Triumph of Seretse Khama and His Nation

By Susan Williams

Recommended on: 25th February 2021

Colour Bar: The Triumph of Seretse Khama and His Nation, by Susan Williams, tells a fascinating tale about how love, racism, and politics can intertwine to affect an entire country.  Sir Seretse Khama was born to inherit the throne of leadership in what was then the British Protectorate of Bechuanaland. This area would become Botswana, and Khama was to be elected its first president.  Seretse’s strong stance against corruption has helped make today’s Botswana one of the most advanced, with the highest GDP, in all of Africa. 

But behind all this is an extraordinary love story between Khama and his wife, Lady Khama, who was born Ruth Williams, the daughter of George and Dorothy Williams of South London. Initially, virtually everyone who was anyone in both Bechuanaland and England  opposed the weddingthe English because they opposed a white woman marrying, of all people, a black man, and the Botswanans  because they opposed Khama marrying, of all people, a white woman. But the Botswanans were soon to prove much more accepting, while the English powers that be (save for Churchill!) dug in their heels. We found the book to be a bit heavy on the behind-the-scenes political maneuveringwe would have loved to have known more of what Seretse and Ruth themselves were thinking. But then, a biographer can only work with what’s available. How Seretse and Ruth found a way through a world of rampant prejudice is the stuff of legend.

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Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science

By Atul Gawande

Recommended on: 19th May 2019

Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science, by Atul Gawande. We’ve often wondered about exactly who gets to be the guinea pig when surgeons first begin to branch out independently in their practice, or when they begin to use new procedures. After reading Gawande’s book, we realize we should have wondered about much more. How do experts make decisions in that amorphous period when someone’s dying, but there are a thousand and more reasons why—and different experts will have different opinions? Virtually every chapter of Gawande’s beautifully written book starts like a thriller. This is one of those books you can’t put down. A National Book Award finalist. [Recommended by Tom Hiebert, who points to Gawande’s quote: “Surgeons don’t believe in talent. They believe in practice.”]

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Confessions of a Public Speaker

By Scott Berkun

Recommended on: 28th January 2018

This week’s book recommendation is Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker.  We’ve read a fair number of books about various aspects of public speaking, and Scott’s book ranks among the best. He goes into the nitty-gritty of travel, preparation, and what it feels like to be on stage, plus tips on calming down about verbal flubs and the like. Teachers will find much useful insight–plus, Berkun is a really funny writer. Highly recommended!

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Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

By Ryan Holiday

Recommended on: 28th March 2018

Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue, by Ryan Holiday.  Holiday’s book tells the story of Peter Thiel’s behind-the-scenes destruction of online media company Gawker. We have to admit, Conspiracy is a page turner, and Holiday’s access to both of the principals in this case, Peter Thiel and Nick Denton, gave the kind of insider details that really kept us hooked.  It was amusing to watch how journalists’ seemingly objective view of the verdict flipped once they discovered Thiel’s involvement. Ryan Holiday’s entire career has arisen from his ability to make journalists happy (he wrote the best-selling Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, which we admit we really liked). So it’s no surprise that he ends the book to go almost comically over-the-top in siding with journalists.

 

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Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste

By Bianca Bosker

Recommended on: 8th August 2021

We give an enthusiastic thumbs up for Bianca Bosker’s fantastic book Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste. You might think that this is just a simple book about wine tasting.  It’s not. Or rather, it is about wine tasting, but it is SO much more!  Much like our other favorite “immersion learning” book, Moonwalking with Einstein, Cork Dork is one person’s hilariously obsessive, but scientifically-informed pursuit of the development of memory.  But this time, rather than learning to memorize things like cards, numbers, or names, Bosker is learning to remember tastes and smells. That might seem inconsequential, but as Bosker reveals, improving your sense of taste and smell, in fact, improves all of your cognition.  Bottom’s up to this brilliant book! (Bosker also reads the Audible version; you may be able to get two free audiobooks through this link.)

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CorkScrew Solutions: Problem Solving with a Twist

By Clarke Ching

Recommended on: 24th March 2021

CorkScrew Solutions: Problem Solving with a Twist, by Clarke Ching. We love Clarke Ching’s writing, so we’d probably read a book of his even if it was about dirt.  But in fact, this latest book by Clarke is a delightful, quick and easy read about how to solve problems when any approach you take to solving the problem has a major drawback. You’ll find a valuable set of tools—enjoy!

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COVID Conversations: Helping Children Understand What’s Happening,

By Gail Brown

Recommended on: 3rd June 2020

COVID Conversations: Helping Children Understand What’s Happening, by Gail Brown. This simple book provides an explanation that young children can understand about some of the sudden changes in life’s rhythms with the COVID pandemic. Often, just talking with children can help—this simple dialog between a grandmother and granddaughter is a great conversation starter that also provides activity suggestions. (Here also is a more formal sheet of guidance on talking to youngsters about COVID.)

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Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education

By Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness

Recommended on: 28th December 2021

Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education, by Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness. 

This fascinating book is framed around an important premise – it’s not that people in a given problematic institution, say, academia, are necessarily bad people.  It is instead that people can have differing incentives and rewards.  As authors Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness observe: “What sets this book apart from many other critiques of higher ed is that we believe academia’s problems are ingrained. Bad behaviors result from regular people reacting to bad incentives baked into academia. No specters haunt academia. Normal people just take the bait.” We might point out that another difference between this book and other critiques of higher education is that it’s pretty funny.  

We quibble with Brennan and Magness about a few things.  For example, student evaluations may be problematic, but in our opinion, they’re certainly not worthless.  If such reviews can’t tell how good an instructor actually is, they can certainly give a good sense of how bad they are.  Malign instructors under the protection of tenure can kill student motivation. Just a few of these creatures on, say, an engineering faculty, can result in students—even good students—deciding that by golly, it doesn’t matter if the humanities or psychology might come with a latte-type job; anything looks better than engineering. In any case, we found Brennan and Magness’ focus on incentives to be deeply insightful—this perspective has come to flavor our own analysis of many social interactions.

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Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come

By Robert Preston

Recommended on: 30th October 2019

Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come, by Robert Preston. We’ve been fans of Robert Preston ever since his gripping New York Times best-seller The Hot Zone first came out. Crisis in the Red Zone focuses on Ebola—Preston traces its origin back to a little boy playing in the forest, probably touching a bat. Ebola got its initial foothold in humanity largely because of lack of education—most people simply couldn’t believe that the love and care that is at the heart of our humanity is what allows the contagion to take place. The bravery of the nurses and doctors on the front lines of this epidemic, and the potential danger to humanity of these types of diseases, is something everyone should know more about.  Don’t miss this edge-of-your-seat thriller.

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Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It

By Ian Leslie

Recommended on: 20th August 2020

Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It, by Ian Leslie. Barb has an upcoming talk for Novartis on curiosity for their Curiosity Week, (it will start with the story of the worst professor Barb ever had, and this professor’s inadvertent role in inspiring the corny video editing behind Learning How to Learn). So meanwhile, Barb couldn’t help but become more curious about curiosity.  Ian Leslie’s book is a scorcher on the topic—highly readable and beautifully researched.  Here’s a sample: “Sir Ken Robinson’s 2008 [TED] talk on educational reform—entitled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”—has now been viewed more than 4 million times. In it Robinson cites the fact that children’s scores on standard tests of creativity decline as they grow older and advance through the educational system. He concludes that children start out as curious, creative individuals but are made duller by factory-style schools that spend too much time teaching children academic facts and not enough helping them express themselves. Sir Ken clearly cares greatly about the well-being of children, and he is a superb storyteller, but his arguments about creativity, though beguilingly made, are almost entirely baseless.”

This is also a great book for audio.  Enjoy!

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Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

By Mason Currey

Recommended on: 18th January 2018

This week, we opted for some light reading with Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, by Mason Currey. This is basically a compendium of workaholic work habits of a number of famous writers and artists. Since we’re sort of workaholics ourselves, it was an intriguing glimpse into the psyches of kindred spirits. In one way, the book was a little unsatisfying, because most of the descriptions of people work habits were very short. On the other hand, the brevity of the entries is part of what made it such an intriguing book—Currey breezed through the lives of dozens of creative people in a way that allowed us to quickly glean key ideas from a lot of different people. It was gratifying to learn that many writers are bothered by noise, just as we are.  We’ve seen reference to Daily Rituals in so many books that we figured it was time to read the book ourselves, and we’re glad we did.

Audible version available here. (This is a nice book for listening. Two free audiobooks may be possible through this link.)

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Dakota: The Story of the Northern Plains

By Norman K. Risjord

Recommended on: 14th April 2019

Dakota: The Story of the Northern Plains, by Norman K. Risjord. We’re guessing that, unless you live in North or South Dakota, that you haven’t necessarily had a yen to discover the history of that area.  But you’re missing a treat with this book’s perspective on a little-known, sparsely populated area of the US. Risjord’s “big picture” perspective starts with the geology of the Dakotas, which leads to the earliest traces and growing presence of Native Americans in the area. Onwards the narrative goes to the French and American expeditions, revealing the area’s connection with Canada. As with elsewhere in the US, governmental intervention was devastating for the Native American tribes of the Dakotas—Risjord lays out the blatant scheming and corruption, which carried through to the Swedish and other immigrants.  An insightful look at the history of one of the most beautiful, but less-often-visited, areas in the US.

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Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

By Garry Kasparov

Recommended on: 2nd October 2017

What a contrast with Foer’s book! Although Kasparov acknowledges the same seductive, monopolistic problems that Foer alludes to, Kasparov’s overall assessment is upbeat. This is a surprise, given that Kasparov will go down in history as the first world chess champion to be felled by artificial intelligence. Lots of readable insights about how AI experts went about tackling strategy in the games of chess and go. The gripping description of the final battle with Deep Blue will keep you up at night. We love Kasparov’s quote of Coursera’s co-founder, Andrew Ng, who has said that “worrying about super-intelligent and evil AI today is like worrying about ‘the problem of overcrowding on Mars.’”

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Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

By Cal Newport

Recommended on: 20th October 2017

Cal’s Newport’s Deep Work is the best book on productivity we’ve ever read, bar none.  (Go for the Audible version if you don’t have time for the written.) Highly recommended!

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Designing the New American University

By Michael Crow and William Dabars

Recommended on: 2nd August 2018

Designing the New American University, by Michael Crow and William Dabars.  Michael Crow is one of the world’s most visionary university presidents—U.S. News and World Report has called Arizona State University, which Crow helms, the #1 university for innovation in the country. (We admit, we’re Michael Crow fans.) So this is a worthwhile book to read if only to get a handle on Crow’s admirable vision of innovation and access. Sadly, the main points of the book are buried beneath clunky prose. We think it’s time for a updated, revised, and streamlined edition.

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Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

By Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

Recommended on: 13th December 2017

We’re now reading Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, which has become a #1 New York Times bestseller. We can see why the book is so extraordinarily popular—Designing Your Life is a book “built” for people of all ages to consider what their life is about, and to help them create a life that makes them happy to wake up to each day.  Even if you’re not looking to change, this book will help you get the most out of the life you do live.

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Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

By Cal Newport

Recommended on: 9th April 2019

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, by Cal Newport. We have to start out with an admission of bias—we have always loved anything Cal Newport has ever written. (Cal’s most recent book before Digital Minimalism, Deep Work, is one of the best books on improving productivity we’ve ever read.) In Digital Minimalism, you will find that Newport has become today’s Thoreau, whose cogent observations give us much insight into how to live happier lives.  Plus, Cal’s a wonderful writer—witness this gem: “Earlier, I cited extensive research that supports the claim that the human brain has evolved to process the flood of information generated by face-to-face interactions.  To replace this rich flow with a single bit [the “Like” button] is the ultimate insult to our social processing machinery. To say it’s like driving a Ferrari under the speed limit is an understatement; the better simile is towing a Ferrari behind a mule.”  Highly recommended. (An excellent book for audio. Two free audiobooks may be possible through this link.)

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Don’t Pay for Your MBA

By Laurie Pickard

Recommended on: 8th November 2017

When some of the most prestigious business schools in the world began providing free versions of their courses online, Laurie Pickard (whose great ideas Barb featured in her latest book, Mindshift) saw an opportunity to get the business education she had long desired, at a fraction of the typical MBA price tag.  Laurie launched a blog site to document her MOOC MBA journey. NoPayMBA.com quickly attracted attention from prospective business students and the media alike. Laurie’s terrific new book Don’t Pay For Your MBAteaches readers how to put together a career-launching business education using massive open online courses (MOOCs) and other free and low-cost resources. Don’t miss this one! Even if you are interested in something other than an MBA, Laurie’s book will give you great ideas for putting together a program that’s right for you.

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Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle

By Daniel L. Everett

Recommended on: 2nd February 2023

Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, by Daniel L. Everett.  At a time when ChatGPT has everyone’s attention, this timeless book of exploration by linguist Daniel Everett lends perspective on the nature of language.  It also describes what might be called the views of “happy stoics” (the Pirahã) and their perspectives on life itself.  

Daniel Everett was a brilliant missionary, graduating at the top of his class from the Moody Bible Institute, who was sent to crack the seemingly uncrackable Pirahã language in the far-off reaches of the Amazon and translate the bible into Pirahã.  What Everett found was unexpected—that the Pirahã language appeared to overthrow the vaunted linguistic theories of MIT’s Noam Chomsky. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Pirahã worldview challenged and changed Everett in ways he himself would never have predicted. 

Interestingly, Chomsky’s recursion theory, convincingly rebutted by Everett’s hard-won research, was developed with Marc Hauser, the disgraced former professor who resigned from Harvard after substantive allegations of scientific misconduct. As our own Terry Sejnowski describes in his Deep Learning Revolution, Chomsky’s theorizing is thought to have held back advances in artificial intelligence by decades. (We suspect far more will come out about Chomsky and his theories after his passing.)  If you like adventure, language, numerical thinking, or what happens when worldviews collide, you’ll almost certainly love Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, just as we did. Enjoy! (And if you like audiobooks, this one is read by Dan Everett himself, so you could enjoy the nuances of the Pirahã language as spoken by the world’s best non-native speaker of Pirahã.)

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Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

By Benjamin Dreyer

Recommended on: 1st June 2019

Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, by Benjamin Dreyer, vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief of Random House.  Dreyer is one of the most delightfully droll writers of non-fiction we know of, full of wonderful little quips like “The only thing worse than the ungodly ‘incentivize’ is its satanic little sibling, ‘incent’.” You’ll learn of common writing mistakes, confusable words, trimmables, commonly misspelled names, and why it’s important to verify quotes. (If nothing else, Dreyer’s English taught us to try to be even more careful to look things up.)  Barb always wondered why her American editors corrected her use of “towards” to “toward”—Dreyer explains why. Dreyer’s only flaw was that he tended to go off on irrelevant political tirades that will quickly date the book—a bit like holding a treasured glass of Château d’Yquem knowing you will have to fish gnats out to drink it.

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Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

By Edward Slingerland

Recommended on: 13th September 2021

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, by Edward Slingerland.  We were a little taken aback at the title and topic of this book.  After all, drunkenness is not a state most of us aspire to—at least not most of the time—and alcoholism is a tremendous bane.  Yet, while acknowledging alcohol’s dark side, Slingerland makes a credible case that alcohol, by virtue of its ability to tone down the ever-self-conscious prefrontal cortex, can have a helpful impact on the human condition, including the fostering of trust and opening of creativity. By turns witty and thought-provoking, Slingerland leads us through a new perspective on alcohol. This passage gives a sense of the book’s style and approach: 

“A significant portion of the Incan Empire’s organized labor was directed toward the production and distribution of the corn-based intoxicant chicha. Even ancient dead people were obsessed with getting wasted. It is hard to find a culture that did not send off their dead with copious quantities of alcohol, cannabis, or other intoxicants. Chinese tombs from the Shang Dynasty were packed with elaborate wine vessels of every shape and size, in both pottery and bronze. This represented a cultural investment equivalent, in today’s terms, to burying a few brand-new Mercedes SUVs in the ground with their trunks full of vintage Burgundy. Ancient Egyptian elites, the world’s first wine snobs, were sent off in tombs full of jars that carefully recorded the vintage, quality, and name of their content’s maker. Because of its centrality in human life, economic and political power has often been grounded in the ability to produce or supply intoxicants.”

Drunk is an interesting and thoughtful read—also good for audio listening.

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Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

By John Taylor Gatto

Recommended on: 15th February 2018

Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, by John Taylor Gatto.  Gatto’s book consists of an easy-to-read, yet thought-provoking set of essays critical of the educational system.  His background in writing this book is unusual—Gatto was named New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. The eloquence and intelligence with which Gatto vivisects the modern K-12 world makes the book a very worthwhile read for anyone interested in education; it is particularly worthwhile for parents.  Highly recommended.

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e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning

By Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer

Recommended on: 30th November 2018

e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning, (4th edition) by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer. It’s easy to think that this is a book only for creating online materials.  Nothing could be further from the truth—this is a very deep and useful book for any serious educator. Early on, the book describes how to find and evaluate good research. It’s hard to find books on teaching that build their guidance from knowledge of how the brain works, but Clark and Mayer’s book does just that, and beautifully.  Sure, some of the guidance seems straightforward, but when put all together, this book provides a great set of principles that will help instructors from any discipline better understand, and reach, their students.  Hardcover (not e-book) copy is recommended.

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Eat Fat, Get Thin: Why the Fat We Eat Is the Key to Sustained Weight Loss and Vibrant Health

By Mark Hyman, M.D

Recommended on: 25th March 2020

Eat Fat, Get Thin: Why the Fat We Eat Is the Key to Sustained Weight Loss and Vibrant Health, by Mark Hyman, M.D.  For the heroes on the front lines of the pandemic, as well as those of us at home, good nutrition is more important now than ever.  Hyman’s book has an unusual take on diet—he describes why fats and oils are so important, and how the US government went astray decades ago in its low-fat recommendations. Although Hyman’s approach is similar to some low carb and keto diets, his explanations help us understand why consuming fats is actually a healthy idea.  See also Dr. Hyman’s article “How to Protect Yourself from COVID-19: Supporting Your Immune System When You May Need It Most.”

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Education and the State

By E. G. West

Recommended on: 11th February 2018

Education and the State, by E.G. West This important book seems to have somehow fallen off educator’s reading lists, which is a shame. If you want a solid reference about how education has developed over the past centuries in the UK and US, (admittedly with a bit of heavy reading involved), you couldn’t do better than to read West’s book. West doesn’t shy away from detailing the self-serving nature of many educational institutions.

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Empress Dowager Cixi

By Jung Chang

Recommended on: 31st May 2018

We often find that when we visit a country (and even when we’re simply interested in that country), it’s a great idea to read a book related to that country’s history. Barb’s recent trip to China led her to read Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China, by Jung Chang. This revisionist biography lends a sympathetic eye to Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), who is considered by many to be the most important woman in Chinese history. If you want to catch a sense of the conditions that led to modern China, this intriguing book will keep you captivated—great biographies are one of the easiest ways to learn about history. Incidentally, Empress Dowager Cixi is a nice book for audio. Jung Chang is also the author of the spectacular international best-seller Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, with over ten million copies sold worldwide. Yes, Jung Chang can write!

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Engaging Learners through Zoom: Strategies for Virtual Teaching Across Disciplines

By Jonathan Brennan

Recommended on: 16th September 2020

We rarely repeat a recommendation, but Jonathan Brennan’s Engaging Learners through Zoom: Strategies for Virtual Teaching Across Disciplines is on sale this week for $2.99, so you may wish to head over and take a look. As Barb wrote in her blurb for the book: “Engaging Learners through Zoom is like a banquet of ideas for polls, chats, breakout rooms, using the main session as a central hub, and far more.  What’s terrific about this book is that it gives concrete, innovative examples for practically every discipline—any instructor can benefit! I never knew I needed this book, but now, I couldn’t do without it!”

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Enseñanza efectiva: Herramientas de la ciencia cognitiva para el aula

By Pooja K. Agarwal, Patrice M. Bain

Recommended on: 22nd April 2023

Si tuviéramos que seleccionar un solo libro para recomendar a los instructores de cualquier tipo, sería esta obra maestra, el mejor libro sobre enseñanza que jamás hayamos leído. En Enseñanza efectiva, Agarwal y Bain brindan un tour de force de ideas prácticas y explicaciones que involucran la práctica de recuperación, explicando cómo este tema vital se relaciona con conceptos como intercalación, práctica deliberada, evaluaciones formativas. La práctica de recuperación es mucho más profunda que la simple memorización: como señala Powerful Teaching: “generalmente nos enfocamos en introducir información en la cabeza de los estudiantes. Por el contrario, uno de los hallazgos más sólidos de la investigación en ciencias cognitivas es la importancia de sacar la información de la cabeza de los estudiantes. Basado en un siglo de investigación, para transformar el aprendizaje, debemos centrarnos en obtener información, una estrategia llamada práctica de recuperación”.

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Excellent Online Teaching: Effective Strategies For A Successful Semester Online

By Aaron Johnson

Recommended on: 20th April 2020

Excellent Online Teaching: Effective Strategies For A Successful Semester Online, by Aaron Johnson. This is a wonderful little book that is available for free (at least as of the moment) on e-book on Amazon.  Johnson really nails the key simple ideas of communicating effectively with your online students, and setting up a course experience that students—and instructors themselves–will find worthwhile. You can read this book in a little over an hour—and if you’re a teacher, you’ll find it time well-spent!

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Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

By Stephen R. C. Hicks

Recommended on: 29th March 2020

Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition), by Stephen R. C. Hicks.  We read this marvelous book some years back, when it was in its first edition, and are delighted to now see the book is now out with a new, expanded version that is, as we type this, now available on Kindle for free. (The expanded essays include “Free Speech and Postmodernism” and “From Modern to Postmodern Art: Why Art Became Ugly.”  Hicks has a wonderfully readable style that makes complex philosophical ideas more comprehensible to us mere mortal, non-philosopher types.  

True story: Barb was talking to a fellow colloquium attendee who seemed keenly aware of philosophy. She mentioned she only really felt she understood and enjoyed one book about philosophy, but for once she couldn’t remember the title or author. She dutifully reported back after break that the book was Explaining Postmodernism, by Stephen Hicks.  “Oh,” said Barb’s conversant. “That’s nice to hear, because I’m Stephen Hicks.”

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Explicit & Direct Instruction: An Evidence-Informed Guide for Teachers

By Edited by Tom Boxer, Series Editor Tom Bennett

Recommended on: 5th March 2020

Explicit & Direct Instruction: An Evidence-Informed Guide for Teachers, Edited by Tom Boxer, Series Editor Tom Bennett. This wonderful short book lays out everything you need to know about Direct Instruction, a precise way of teaching that research has shown to be one of the very best approaches to use in a classroom. (Doug Lemov’s admirable Teach Like a Champion uses many techniques of Direct Instruction.) What we found to be most useful in this book was the discussion of how to select the best set of example problems when trying to give students an intuitive foundation for what they are learning.  Real people, after all, must often learn from very limited data-sets, unlike many of the approaches used in artificial intelligence. We also appreciated learning the history of why Direct Instruction has been too long been ignored and is only now coming into its deserved prominence. Enjoy!

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Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

By Tom Mueller

Recommended on: 19th December 2017

We very much enjoyed Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, an eye-opening book on the world of olive oil.  We had a sense that olive oils were often scandalously mislabeled, but this book really opened our eyes about how “extra virgin first cold-pressed olive oil” is often anything but—and regulatory bodies worldwide often avoid doing anything about it.  Author Tom Mueller covers far more in his enlightening book—the health benefits of real, fresh olive oil; the growing international marketplace, the history of the oil in athletics, religion, and perfumes; and not to mention the sheer beauty of the trees.

You’ve probably been aware of the importance of both exercise and a healthy diet.  But you may not know that exercise coupled with a healthy diet has a bigger impact on our health, and our ability to learn, than either exercise or a healthy diet alone. But which diet is best?As Extra Virginity describes, the Mediterranean diet, with olive oil as a key component, is an excellent choice for healthy eating. Interestingly, there has long been a “food desert” hypothesis that poor individuals do not have access to reasonably priced healthy food, which is why their diets are so unhealthy.  This hypothesis has been essentially disproven in a recent massive analysis (described here) of 35,000 supermarkets covering 40% of the US.  Unhealthy eating, sad to say, is often a choice. So read this book to help you do your part in making healthier (and tastier!) choices!

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Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education

By Justin Reich

Recommended on: 24th September 2020

Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education, by Justin Reich.  Let’s cut to the chase. This brilliant, upbeat book should be read by anyone involved in education, including parents, teachers, educational administrators, and policy-makers. If you want to understand how education itself is carved at its joints, this book, ostensibly centered on edtech, is the book to read. 

The challenge for us all is that today’s vast edtech industry is enormously convoluted and connects virtually every sector in education. It’s deucedly difficult to get a “bird’s eye” view of the playing field, because there are so many players with so many motives and perspectives, ranging from lawmakers and university administrators to kindergarten teachers, from charismatic high-tech entrepreneurs to established industry players. 

One would need an extraordinary intellect to understand and float between all the worlds and layers. Fortunately for us, Justin Reich not only has the intellect and writing chops to make sense of the landscape, but his positions at Harvard and then MIT have given him an unparalleled opportunity to interact with or be aware of virtually every major trend in edtech. Additionally, with the advent of COVID, edtech is shifting. The “built from the foundations” nature of this book’s explanations—which cover networked communities, assessment, gamification, adaptive tutors, and far, far morewill help you understand where the shifts are going to have their biggest impact. (We love Reich’s Law“People who do stuff do more stuff, and people who do stuff do better than people who don’t do stuff.”)

Oddly enough for a book with “failure” in the title, Reich is an optimist, and his book provides a sunny outlook on the gradual improvements taking place, tweak by tiny tweak, in education aided by technology. When Reich finds unsuccessful areas in edtech (and there are many), he relates them cheerfully, so that even the partial deadends seem worthwhile.  Reich is able to suss out the ideologies that underlie the various educational approaches, looking beneath them and dispassionately describing what’s effective and what’s not.

This is masterful writing and thinking that helps us all see more clearly how to help students succeed. Highly recommended!

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Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem

By Simon Singh

Recommended on: 10th February 2021

Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem, by Simon Singh. Wow, what a book!  You might expect this volume to be the next best thing to Ambien as a sleep-inducer, but instead, Fermat’s Enigma is a real page-turner, providing a dazzling overview of the growth of mathematics from Pythagoras, (whose different way of thinking led to his being burned to death by a proto-cancel culture mob), through Euclid, and on through the early mathematical giants of Euler,  Gauss, Sophie Germaine (a mathematical savant who managed to save Gauss’s life while inadvertently revealing she was a woman), the tragic geniuses Évariste Galois (who wrote as much as he could of his key mathematical discoveries the night before his death), and Yutaka Taniyama (spoiler alert—it didn’t go well for him).  You don’t need to know much more than elementary math to enjoy this book, because an enormous part of the story is the personalities and fascinating lives of the mathematicians. By the time we finally homed in on Andrew Wiles and his solution, we thought—well, the drama is done, we’re back to the humdrum modern world.  But that’s when the book really came alive. Highly recommended!

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Flicker: Your Brain on Movies

By Jeffrey Zacks

Recommended on: 20th June 2022

Flicker: Your Brain on Movies, by Jeffrey Zacks.  We have no idea how this magnificent book slipped under our radar when it was first published in 2014, but it’s a doozy!  Zacks is a renowned neuroscientist, but he also loves movies. The result let’s us peer into Zack’s life’s work, including an in-depth look inside movies to see what makes them work, and what makes us love them. 

Most followers of Learning How to Learn, as well as virtually all cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists are aware of working memory.  But few are aware of the importance of “event models”–the contents of working memory.  We believe the concept of event models, which Dr. Zacks helped pioneer, will become an important one in education, and particularly online education.  More about that to come in our upcoming MOOC 3 of Uncommon Sense Teaching!

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Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering

By Scott Small

Recommended on: 12th August 2021

Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering, by Scott Small.

This extraordinary book is the best, most riveting, most readable book related to learning (and PTSD, autism, memory, and a host of other topics) that we’ve ever read.  Small is an extraordinary writer—his tales of being at war, and why he didn’t develop PTSD despite what he’d experienced, provide thought-provoking insight for us all. And his simple, lucid explanations of why we forget—and how important it is to be able to forget—provide a whole new perspective on how you look at both life and learning.

Perhaps most importantly, Dr. Small provides a profound scientific underpinning for one of the most important points we make in Learning How to Learn—that having a great memory ain’t necessarily so great.  It can be hard for you to forget the details so that you can see the big picture.  (This is part of why people who can’t remember so well can be more creative.)  Even better, Dr. Small is by our estimation in the top ranks of non-fiction writers—our guess is that if he’d gone into writing fiction, he’d be ranked amongst the best in the world for his prose style.

We love this book—it is a tie for the best book we’ve ever read.  It’s also ideal for audio. You can’t start reading this fantastic book soon enough!

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Friend of a Friend: Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career

By David Burkus

Recommended on: 16th May 2018

This week’s selection is Friend of a Friend: Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career, by business school professor David Burkus. He offers great insight into how and why you can broaden your network, and how important it is to open your mind to those who are different from you, in background, training, outlook, or ideology. We particularly like the stories of both well-known people such as Tim Ferriss, and lesser-known but intriguing characters who’ve made their career breakthroughs by tapping into networks in unusual ways. We couldn’t agree more with the book’s central premise: “making choices about who your friends are and being aware of who is a friend of a friend—can directly influence the person you become, for better or for worse.”

A nice book also for audio listening.

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From Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

By Peter Thiel and Blake Masters

Recommended on: 28th March 2018

From Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters. This insightful book helps readers understand the importance of creative entrepreneurial thinkers to the world’s future. Even if you have no interest in business, the book is worthwhile for its insights into contrarianism and creativity.  We like New York Times best-selling author Neal Stephenson’s characterization: “The first and last business book anyone needs to read; a one in a world of zeroes.” (The audiobook is read by Blake Masters—you may be able to get two free audiobooks through this link.)

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Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40

By William Trotter

Recommended on: 6th June 2023

Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940, by William Trotter.  It’s all too easy to think that war is so rare that it will never happen. When war does happen, then, countries can be blindsided by their own naivete.  Such was the case with the brutal, hellish Winter War between the Soviets and the Finns in 1939-40 as Stalin sought to make an “easy” expansion of the Soviet Union to prepare for the coming conflageration with the Nazis.  Much as with Ukraine today, the Russians were surprised and lost tens of thousands of men due to poor leadership.  Frozen Hell gets right into the nitty-gritty of what happened. A quick read and a good reminder of the dangers of lack of preparedness—and the value of Finnish grit. 

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garde

By Michael Bungay Stanier

Recommended on: 28th December 2020

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever, by Michael Bungay Stanier.  (As we write this, the electronic version is free!) Fantastic as a New Year’s gift to yourself that will give to many others in the future.

If you’re like us, you like to help other people. One of the best ways to do that is by serving as a sounding board and coach for your co-workers, friends, children, bosses, and partners.  But what’s the best way to do that?  Stanier’s The Coaching Habit is basically the best book we’ve ever read about how to truly change other people’s brains for the better.  As Stanier notes: “…our brains are wired to have a strong preference for clarity and certainty, it’s no wonder that we like to give advice. Even if it’s the wrong advice—and it often is—giving it feels more comfortable than the ambiguity of asking a question. In our training programs, we call this urge the Advice Monster. You have the best of intentions to stay curious and ask a few good questions. But in the moment, just as you are moving to that better way of working, the Advice Monster leaps out of the darkness and hijacks the conversation. Before you realize what’s happening, your mind is turned towards finding The Answer and you’re leaping in to offer ideas, suggestions and recommended ways forward.”  Read Stanier’s wonderful book to learn how to tame your advice monster and be the mentor you’ve always wanted to be.  Highly recommended! Also great for audio listening.

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Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

By Jack Weatherford

Recommended on: 13th December 2017

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World is one of Barb’s all-time favorite biographies.  Author Jack Weatherford has spent years traveling, exploring, and researching in Mongolia. As a consequence of Weatherford’s writing, we can enter into the world of one of civilization’s most storied leaders.  The juxtaposition of Genghis Khan’s utter ruthlessness with his enlightened policy-making, all mixed with great discussions of Mongolian culture and the great Khan’s impact on the world, makes for riveting reading.   This is a not-t0-be-missed biography!  (Jack Weatherford himself narrated the audio version.)

A great companion book is The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire.  Genghis Khan’s incredible achievements shine even more brightly once they’re contrasted with the decay that followed his death.  The stories of the great Khan’s daughters are riveting, and his descendants’ role in the birth of what is today modern Mongolia makes for a fascinating read.  Who would have thought that a little physically handicapped boy in manly Mongolia, and his more-than-a-decade older mentor (and, eventually, wife), could grow a nation?

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Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life

By Max Lugavere and Paul Grewal M.D.

Recommended on: 28th February 2019

Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life, by Max Lugavere and Paul Grewal M.D. This is a well-researched book that covers some of the same ground as other books we’ve reviewed regarding sleep, the microbiome, and fat. But it puts everything together in one “life healthy” package that also includes food. Well-produced extra virgin olive oil, incidentally, is considered of standout importance. (But hey, we knew also that from reading the outstanding Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil.) Genius Foods is a “most sold” book of the week on Amazon.

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Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the Bloody Fight for His Empire

By James S. Romm

Recommended on: 2nd October 2023

Ghost on the Throne: The Death of Alexander the Great and the Bloody Fight for His Empire by  James S. Romm. We are suckers for history involving Alexander the Great, whose outsized personality was amongst the most influential in history.   Romm’s marvelous book takes up where most books on Alexander leave off, introducing us to the band of generals who couldn’t quite measure up to their former leader, (except perhaps clever, brave Eumenes, ill-fated by his Greek rather than Macedonian heritage). The rapid unraveling of Alexander’s empireand the fate of his sonsforms the basis of a spell-binding tale. 

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Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide

By Cass Sunstein

Recommended on: 1st March 2021

Cass Sunstein’s Going to Extremes is, quite simply, a classic. We wish every person would read this book. This excerpt gives an excellent idea of the key ideas that the book delves into.

“Much of the time, groups of people end up thinking and doing things that group members would never think or do on their own. This is true for groups of teenagers, who are willing to run risks that individuals would avoid. It is certainly true for those prone to violence, including terrorists and those who commit genocide. It is true for investors and corporate executives. It is true for government officials, neighborhood groups, social reformers, political protestors, police officers, student organizations, labor unions, and juries. Some of the best and worst developments in social life are a product of group dynamics, in which members of organizations, both small and large, move one another in new directions… When people find themselves in groups of like-minded types, they are especially likely to move to extremes… Political extremism is often a product of group polarization, and social segregation is a useful tool for producing polarization.”

This is one of the top ten books we would recommend that all well-read people should read.

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Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick

By Wendy Woods

Recommended on: 10th February 2021

Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick, by Wendy Woods. It looks like we’re on a roll this month with fantastic reads! Good Habits, Bad Habits is one of those life-changing books where the implications of what you’re discovering unfold gradually, until it hits that you’ve been oblivious to a vital part of you.  Although Wendy writes in an easy-to-read, friendly way, the book is not just woo-woo fluffy stuff—Dr. Wood is a UK-born psychologist who is the Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at University of Southern California, as well as the Distinguished Visiting Professor at INSEAD Business School in Paris. Her research on the brain’s habitual system is world class. (Our very own Terry recommended this book to Barb.)  

As a bit of historical background, Skinnerian research about the habitual system was quashed about fifty years ago by the burgeoning cognitive revolution. “Cognivistas” claimed (with some legitimacy) that Skinner’s behaviorists had been suppressing them. The problem is that Skinner and his behavioral approaches were on to something big—a lot of learning does take place through simple stimulus-reinforcement learning. Only in the past decade has this come to be more widely appreciated— except, sadly, in the field of education. (But follow our merry, mischievous crew this year… there is much more on that to come!) 

Good Habits, Bad Habits is an extraordinary book. Your relationships, productivity, health, and ability to learn will all benefit from reading it—and it’s so well-written, that you’ll enjoy every word.  Also excellent as an audio book (it is, as of this writing, free through the Audio book trial).

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Goya

By Robert Hughes

Recommended on: 15th October 2017

Goya, by Robert Hughes. Barb’s recent visit to Madrid allowed her to linger in person to examine at some of Goya’s most famous paintings, including the remarkable The Third of May 1808, as well as many of Goya’s more obscure, but equally riveting works.  An artist is able to focus on reality in a way that helps us “mere mortals” to also see that deeper reality. We decided to dig deeper into Goya’s life to discover what set him apart and made him one of Spain’s –and the world’s–greatest painters.  As Hughes’ biography reveals, Goya’s journey to greatness was spurred in part by an illness that made him deaf.  This, perhaps, set Goya unwillingly apart from the world–allowing him to be the last of the Old Masters as well as the first of the Moderns.

If you read the Kindle version, be prepared to look up many of Goya’s paintings on your cell phone beside you.  Hughes biography isn’t just a biography–it’s an insightful view of Spain of the late 1700s and early 1800s.  As you’ll discover, today’s seemingly modern societal trends are often simply repetitions of trends from centuries past.

Robert Hughes’  The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding became an international best-seller.  His The Shock of the New: The Hundred-Year History of Modern Art–Its Rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall, is also on our “must read” list.

Incidentally, here’s Barb at the Cajal Institute in Madrid, with Santiago Ramon y Cajal’s death mask peering over her shoulder.

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Greenlights

By Matthew McConaughey

Recommended on: 1st August 2021

Greenlights, by Matthew McConaughey.  It took us a bit to get used to McConaughey’s style. But once he hits his stride with stories, Greenlights soars as an unparalleled autobiography of a funny, tough, unfailingly curious extrovert with a sense that the world is conspiring to make him happy.  This is the kind of book you read so you’ve got funny stories to haul out when you’re sitting around jawing with friends. But the book goes much deeper than that, with insights ranging from the sacrifices and risks needed to get to where you want to go, to finding the love of one’s life, to the value of listening to your intuition.  Highly recommended—also good for audio (McConaughey himself is the narrator).

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Heroes & Hormones: From Screen Slave to Superhero

By Mali Alcobi

Recommended on: 15th April 2021

Heroes & Hormones: From Screen Slave to Superhero, by Mali Alcobi. Mali is an expert in work-life balance who helps both employees and organizations develop systems that help people lead productive, yet happy lives. Mali speaks around the world on this topic—which is how Barb happened to meet her and to read her book. Heroes and Hormones is one of those deceptively simple reads that teaches a few critical points—like how to train yourself to prioritize family even as you are pulling your weight at work. This book also has a good review of what you need to be doing healthwise, from exercise to the right foods, to keep your life on track—and not wake up one day at your seeming career peak only to find your family has given up on you, and your body is beginning to show the aftereffects of too much stress and too little care. This quick read will help you balance your priorities with dozens of practical tips.
Mali is the founder of Dynamix – Work-Life Balance. Barb and Mali will be speaking for Microsoft together next month—Barb can say with confidence that Mali is a great choice if your company is looking for a work-life balance speaker.

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Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone

By Satya Nadella with Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols

Recommended on: 22nd January 2018

We happened to pick up Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone, by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. To be honest, we weren’t expecting much (we read a lot of books that never make the cut for our Cheery Friday newsletter). We were astonished to find a CEO who is the real deal as far as caring both for his customers and the employees of his company.  Satya’s empathy for others, growing in part from his children’s physical and learning challenges, have given him a sui generis approach to running a company. Satya’s book is a wonderfully inspiring read about the difference a great company, with great leadership, can make in people’s lives. Also includes interesting perspectives on quantum computing and artificial intelligence. Highly recommended!

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How the Brain Learns

By David A. Sousa

Recommended on: 4th March 2018

This past week, we read How the Brain Learns, by David A. Sousa, (now in its fifth edition), which was recommended to us as a top neuroscience-based book on learning.  If you’re looking for a good general overview of what we know from neuroscience about how to educate children better, this book has been put together with care.  A good aspect of the book is its comprehensive nature—there’s a nice overview of the brain and how it develops; how the brain processes information; memory; brain organization; and a particularly important section on the importance of music and art.  It’s not easy to make sense of all the disparate strands of neuroscience-related research and get it down in a logical, understandable form, and Sousa has done a yeoman’s job with it.

The book’s fault lies in its occasional acceptance of dated, sometimes junk science.  This latest edition doesn’t mention or do justice to well-deserved criticism of topics such as learning styles, stereotype threat, multiple intelligences, or concept mapping. We’re hopeful that the book’s next edition will resolve these issues.

There are so many books to help teachers understand how younger students learn. But you may be surprised to learn that there are virtually no books for those students themselves, or for their parents.  

If you want to help youngsters from ages ten to seventeen to learn how to learn, based on practical insights from neuroscience, we can’t help but suggest our own upcoming book Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens.  The funny but deeply informative pictures alone are worth the price of the book. (And yes, there are zombies…) In some ways, this seemingly simple book goes deeper into how we learn than even our MOOC Learning How to Learn. You’ll find that this is also a great book to read together as a family. And you’ll see that even if your children are in the toddler stage, you’ll get some powerful insights on learning that will help you guide them in their learning as they mature.

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How Things Work: The Physics of Everyday Life

By Louis Bloomfield

Recommended on: 19th March 2018

We want to bring up one of our favorite books: How Things Work: The Physics of Everyday Life, by Louis Bloomfield.  Barb has used this book for years to teach basic ideas of engineering to ordinary non-engineering types.  After all, “technological literacy” doesn’t just mean that you know a smattering about how your computer works–it should also mean you know the basics of how your car works, how your refrigerator keeps things cool, and how your house is kept warm in the winter. How Things Work will allow you to much more easily understand how these great technological advances work. Bloomfield uses wonderful, simple metaphors and great imagery that allow you to easily “chunk” the key ideas, even as you find yourself wading easily into the underlying physics.  There’s also a less textbooky version of the book How Everything Works: Making Physics Out of the OrdinaryIncidentally, if you are an engineering professor, you’ll find some great ideas here to more rapidly onboard your students using Lou’s great metaphors.

Although Dr. Bloomfield would have no memory of it now, about a decade ago, Barb was able to visit and tour his fantastic physics demonstrations at the University of Virginia.  He’s a wonderful man!

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How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

By Michael Pollan

Recommended on: 21st June 2018

This week’s read was How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan. We’ve had this book suggested to us by a number of Learning How to Learners, so we wanted to see why all the interest.  First off, Pollan is a great science writer—he’s able to pull the reader into the world of psychedelics and what science is discovering about them, whether or not psychedelics are “your thing.” Pollan makes a great case for why the recent movement to begin studying psychedelics again is beneficial—even as he also gives an even-handed description of the “wow factor” and the dangers of these unusual drugs. A thought-provoking and interesting read.

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How to Traumatize Your Children: 7 Proven Methods to Help You Screw Up Your Kids Deliberately and with Skill

By Knock Knock

Recommended on: 27th December 2017

We received this delightful book for Christmas.  By making fun, (in hilarious fashion) of common parental foibles, it also helps us keep in mind what good parenting really entails.  Barb regifted this to her pediatrician daughter–the book is now an even bigger hit, making the rounds with her fellow pediatrician-residents.nts.

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How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now

By Stanislas Dehaene

Recommended on: 13th March 2020

How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now, by Stanislas Dehaene. This is the best book around, hands down, on how the brain learns. Part of the brilliance of Dehaene’s book is that he breaks everything down into easy-to-understand insights that allow you to grasp the big picture without getting bogged down in the minutia of complex neural interactions.  

Dehaene also describes why discovery learning is so problematic in comparison with explicit teaching: “[Discovery learning] is attractive. Unfortunately, multiple studies, spread over several decades, demonstrate that its pedagogical value is close to zero—and this finding has been replicated so often that one researcher entitled his review paper ‘Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule against Pure Discovery Learning?’ When children are left to themselves, they have great difficulty discovering the abstract rules that govern a domain, and they learn much less, if anything at all. Should we be surprised by this? How could we imagine that children would rediscover, in a few hours and without any external guidance, what humanity took centuries to discern? At any rate, the failures are resounding in all areas: 

  • In reading: Mere exposure to written words usually leads to nothing unless children are explicitly told about the presence of letters and their correspondence with speech sounds. Few children manage to correlate written and spoken language by themselves…. The task would be out of reach if teachers did not carefully guide children through an ordered set of well-chosen examples, simple words, and isolated letters. 
  • In mathematics: It is said that at the age of seven, the brilliant mathematician Carl Gauss (1777–1855) discovered, all by himself, how to quickly add the numbers from one to one hundred (think about it—I give the solution in the notes…). What worked for Gauss, however, may not apply to other children. Research is clear on this point: learning works best when math teachers first go through an example, in some detail, before letting their students tackle similar problems on their own. Even if children are bright enough to discover the solution by themselves, they later end up performing worse than other children who were first shown how to solve a problem before being left to their own means. 
  • In computer science: In his book Mindstorms (1980), computer scientist Seymour Papert explains why he invented the Logo computer language (famous for its computerized turtle that draws patterns on the screen). Papert’s idea was to let children explore computers on their own, without instruction, by getting hands-on experience. Yet the experiment was a failure: after a few months, the children could write only small, simple programs. The abstract concepts of computer science eluded them, and on a problem-solving test, they did no better than untrained children: the little computer literacy they had learned had not spread to other areas. Research shows that explicit teaching, with alternating

If you’re into the neuroscience of learning, you will unquestionably want to read this book. (The last half, in particular, is extraordinarily enlightening.)

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Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction

By Chris Bailey

Recommended on: 8th January 2019

Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction, by Chris Bailey. This book gets right to the heart of how to tame distractions and get your attention keenly focused on the task at hand.  But Bailey does more—he also discusses intelligent use of the diffuse mode (“scatterfocus”) to help with creative problem-solving and incubation of new and different ideas in both learning and work.  We very much appreciated Bailey’s simple, yet effective illustrations. But even so, this is also a fine book for audio. Another popular book by Bailey, (which we haven’t read yet), is The Productivity Project.

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I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa

By Charles Brandt

Recommended on: 5th May 2019

I Heard You Paint Houses, by Charles Brandt. Living in the Detroit area, we’ve heard stories over the years about corrupt union activities. So we read this book when not long after it first came out in 2004. It was a riveting read then, and apparently, it’s even more riveting in the most recent edition. As one of the book’s endorsements notes: “Sheeran’s confession that he killed Hoffa in the manner described in the book is supported by the forensic evidence, is entirely credible and solves the Hoffa mystery.”- Michael Baden, M.D., former Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York. Highly recommended if you want to get a feel for the seedy underside of union life.

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I Love You All the Time – and – You Have Feelings All the Time

By Deborah Farmer Kris

Recommended on: 3rd May 2022

I Love You All the Time and You Have Feelings All the Time by child development expert Deborah Farmer Kris, illustrated by Jennifer Zivoin. These wonderful books are meant to reassure children about your enduring love for your child, whether they are mad, glad, or sad, and also to help your child to recognize and manage their feelings.  Start by skipping past the delightful illustrations to read the letter to caregivers at the back of the bookyou’ll get a sense from these brief instructions of how to best use and teach the ideas in the books as you go through the book with your toddler or pre-schooler.  Then enjoy paging through the book together reading aloud with your little one.  Highly recommended and engaging for youngsters!

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Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World

By Andrea Pitzer

Recommended on: 30th October 2021

Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, by Andrea Pitzer.  This wonderful book relates the exploits of intrepid polar explorer William Barents, who became a European legend after his death in 1597.  It can be tough to relate the story of a man about whom little is known aside from his occasional appearance in the diaries and reminiscences of others.  But Pitzer provides a great feeling for Barents’ uncompromising goal of reaching China through a northern route.  The true glory of Icebound, however, is Pitzer’s way with words.  Here, for example, is her description of how a ship is built: 

“Barents had begun exploration just as the Dutch dominated European shipbuilding. Though the craft was evolving, ships remained in that moment artisanal projects, in which each vessel was made by hand with little in the way of diagrams or written plans. Builders began with a set of blocks in a line on which they set the keel—the spine of the ship. Perpendicular to the keel, arcing planks known as ribs rose to breathe a shape into the cage of the hull. With the ribs in place, planks running parallel to the waterline could be attached, and L-shaped knees set inside to brace and bind the structure. Planks, keels, and ribs were all still cut and shaped by hand. They had to be hammered and plugged, with joining pegs pounded in then cut flush to the exterior planks. One or more decks could be laid to divide the ship into levels, from the cargo hold at the very bottom of the ship; to the orlop in the middle, which held the guns and sleeping sailors; and the upper deck, which sat open to the elements topside. The ‘ceiling’ of the ship—not the roof but the planks along the sides of the vessel—would finish off the interior.”

It is entrancing to read Pitzer’s portrayal of the crew’s exploits, as nearly every day brought an ingenious new escape from death. (Pro tip: Remain armed around polar bears.)  Pitzer herself has travelled to Russia retracing Barents’ voyages—it is little wonder her descriptions are so evocative. An excellent read, especially if you want to appreciate sitting cozily at home on a winter’s eve. 

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In A Sunburned Country

By Bill Bryson

Recommended on: 15th May 2019

In A Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson. In years past, Barb has occasionally looked with concern at her husband as he would suddenly double over with a paroxysm of—well, she wasn’t sure what, but it didn’t seem healthy.  Gradually she came to learn that these paroxysms came about whenever her husband was reading a Bill Bryson book. The laughter came so hard and heavy that he sometimes couldn’t breathe!  Bryson is a master of doubling or tripling up on his humor. A story is funny at first. But then Bryson circles around later to hit it again from an unexpected angle. And then again.  The result is comedic depth that will swallow you whole.

Who could have ever guessed that a book about both the history and travel related to a country could be so funny? If there were a Nobel Prize for comedic travel-writing, Bryson would take the honor.  If you want to find a way to look in an upbeat way at the weird and wacky things that can happen during travel—or in life itself—you can do no better than to read Bill Bryson. This has just become our favorite travel and outlook-on-life book. Barb can assure you (despite the fact that she’s in Australia now), that you don’t actually need to be travelling to Australia to enjoy this great comedic, travel, and life classic.

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In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth

By Jack L. Goldsmith

Recommended on: 25th April 2020

In Hoffa’s Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth, by Jack L. Goldsmith.  Since Barb lives in the Detroit area (she has lunched at the old Machus Red Fox, where the notorious Hoffa was last seen), she can’t help but take an interest in the fascinating life and strange vanishing act of long-time Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa.  This book provides an unusual take on Hoffa’s legacy. Hoffa’s foster son, Chuckie O’Brien, was probably the most dedicated of all of his followers—yet Chuckie has been accused by almost everyone of having facilitated Hoffa’s disappearance.  This book, by Chuckie’s own foster son, upstanding Ivy League lawyer Jack Goldsmith, burrows deep into the mindset and zeitgeist of unions, the mob, and much, much more. A thought-provoking take on loyalty and love.

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In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying

By Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Helen Tworkov

Recommended on: 19th August 2022

In Love with the World: A Monk’s Journey Through the Bardos of Living and Dying, by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche and Helen Tworkov. We’re a bit meditation-heavy lately. But this is because while in Nepal (along with many other Asian destinations) in October-November, Barb will be spending time at the Kathmandu Tergar Osel Ling Monastery. (Barb, Terry, and Beth’s book Uncommon Sense Teaching is used there as a textbook, thanks to its neuroscientific insight that also supports the monastery’s Buddhist perspectives.) In Love with the World is a fascinating book about the world of meditation because it centers around world-renowned Buddhist monk Mingyur Rinpoche’s near-death experience and the insights he gained from it.

Basically, Mingyur Rinpoche decided to do a “wandering retreat”—which meant going out into the real world instead of withdrawing into solitary meditation. In some sense, he sought to escape the patterns that had been locked in by his habitual, basal ganglia-based procedural system.  As he notes: “To break the mold of my conditioning, I had needed to do something a little extreme. In order to break through our conditioning and confront old habits, we might deliberately reverse a common pattern, at least for a limited time: If we habitually pick up a cup with our right hand, we commit to using our left hand; or we vow not to check our media devices more than once an hour; or for one week we promise never to exceed the speed limit when driving. I do not drive, but I have been told that this can be quite difficult. Anything that interferes with mindless repetition can function as a wake-up call, and an antidote to automatic, mindless behavior and habitual fixations. To encourage curiosity and flexibility, it’s important to discover our limits, and then stretch a bit further. In terms of lifestyle, a wandering retreat for me was a very big stretch, no doubt about it. But… That’s how I’d ended up on this train, all alone, in the middle of the night.”

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In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

By Erik Larson

Recommended on: 18th October 2021

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson. We have read many books over the years about the rise and fall of the Third Reich (including Shirer’s definitive classic by that name).  But In the Garden of the Beasts is one of the best we’ve ever read in describing the gradual unfolding of the evil that was Hitler and his loathsome cronies.  The book follows William Dodd, the unlikely, bottom-of-the-barrel pick as Ambassador to Nazi Germany, and his daughter, Martha Dodd, who slept her way through the top of Berlin’s high society as she merrily embraced Nazism.  But as the Dodds grew more familiar with Germany and the Nazis, they began to appreciate the true horrors of the regime. Martha would become a spy for the communists—only late in life realizing that she had been the dupe of each evil faction.  Larsen’s descriptions are stunningly apropos of the era—and resonate today: 

“…Germany had undergone a rapid and sweeping revolution that reached deep into the fabric of daily life. It had occurred quietly and largely out of easy view. At its core was a government campaign called Gleichschaltung—meaning “Coordination”—to bring citizens, government ministries, universities, and cultural and social institutions in line with National Socialist beliefs and attitudes. 

 “‘Coordination’ occurred with astonishing speed, even in sectors of life not directly targeted by specific laws, as Germans willingly placed themselves under the sway of Nazi rule, a phenomenon that became known as Selbstgleichschaltung, or ‘self-coordination.’ Change came to Germany so quickly and across such a wide front that German citizens who left the country for business or travel returned to find everything around them altered, as if they were characters in a horror movie who come back to find that people who once were their friends, clients, patients, and customers have become different in ways hard to discern. Gerda Laufer, a socialist, wrote that she felt ‘deeply shaken that people whom one regarded as friends, who were known for a long time, from one hour to the next transformed themselves.’ Neighbors turned surly; petty jealousies flared into denunciations made to the SA—the Storm Troopers—or to the newly founded…Gestapo…

This is an absolutely remarkable book of history—we cannot recommend it more highly. 

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In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits

By Terry Alford

Recommended on: 18th November 2022

In the Houses of their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits, by Terry Alford. This meandering book provides background about both Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth, through a cast of lesser-known characters, often involved in spiritualism, who were acquainted with both men.  The book provides context on the US era of the 1850s through 1860s. Alford is a good writer, but the final portions of the book were a bit of a disappointment as Alford plodded on through the dispiriting lives of relatively minor, rather disappointing characters.

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Inferno: The True Story of a B-17 Gunner’s Heroism and the Bloodiest Military Campaign in Aviation History

By Joe Pappalardo

Recommended on: 3rd November 2020

Inferno: The True Story of a B-17 Gunner’s Heroism and the Bloodiest Military Campaign in Aviation History, by Joe Pappalardo, a contributing editor at Popular Mechanics. A critically important aerial front in the WWII battles against the Nazis was the daylight forays of the US Army Air Force (USAAF) over the skies of Western Europe from 1942 until near the end of the war. Over 30,000 USAAF personnel were killedas author Pappalardo notes “For some scale, the U.S. Marines suffered 24,500 killed in action during World War II.” Barb’s bomber-pilot-to-be father, Al Grim, caught pneumonia during training in 1942. This nearly mortal illness held him back as his initial pilot training cohort went on to be killed virtually to a man over Europe in circumstances similar to those Pappalardo describes in Inferno. (Barb’s gifted uncle, Rodney Grim, was killed during training when another young pilot rammed his plane, as poignantly described in the Grave Discovery: Discovering Grave Stones and Stories blog.)

Pappalardo uses the unlikely tale of a ne’er-do-well winner of the Medal of Honor, Maynard Harrison Smith, as a narrative device to help readers understand the horrors endured by men who were often facing near certain death. The central sections of Pappalardo’s book, describing what it was like to be flying a burning, just ready-to-snap-apart “flying fortress” while being strafed by German aces, are enough to keep you on the edge of your seat (don’t even try reading at bedtime.) The undercurrent theme of the book is precision bombinga will-o’-the-wisp target if ever there was one. If you enjoy learning about important, but little-known topics of military history, this book is for you.

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Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe

By Steven Strogatz

Recommended on: 16th January 2020

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe, by Steven Strogatz. Strogatz is a wonderful writer, and Infinite Powers is a wonderful book about the beauty of calculus. But we hasten to add that you don’t need to know any calculus to enjoy Strogatz’s work. The book begins with a quip that the physicist Richard Feynman made to the novelist Herman Wouk when they were discussing the Manhattan Project. “Wouk was doing research for a big novel he hoped to write about World War II, and he went to Caltech to interview physicists who had worked on the bomb, one of whom was Feynman. After the interview, as they were parting, Feynman asked Wouk if he knew calculus. No, Wouk admitted, he didn’t. ‘You had better learn it,’ said Feynman. ‘It’s the language God talks.’”

So Wouk went on to try—and fail—to learn calculus.  Strogatz continues “It shouldn’t be necessary to endure what Herman Wouk did to learn about this landmark in human history. Calculus is one of humankind’s most inspiring collective achievements. It isn’t necessary to learn how to do calculus to appreciate it, just as it isn’t necessary to learn how to prepare fine cuisine to enjoy eating it. I’m going to try to explain everything we’ll need with the help of pictures, metaphors, and anecdotes. I’ll also walk us through some of the finest equations and proofs ever created, because how could we visit a gallery without seeing its masterpieces? As for Herman Wouk, he is 103 years old as of this writing. I don’t know if he’s learned calculus yet, but if not, this one’s for you, Mr. Wouk.”

This is a timeless book that puts all of calculus into a grand, beautifully written perspective that you’ll enjoy whether you’re a physicist or an English teacher.  Enjoy! 

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Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

By Robert Cialdini

Recommended on: 13th December 2017

We also love to listen to books—we’re now listening to Robert B. Cialdini’s masterful volume Influence, which has influenced a generation’s understanding of the art of persuasion.  Influence will help you to see more clearly the subtle influences that others are exerting on you—and allow you to more easily bring people to agreement with your own ideas. (If you want to try Audible, you can get two free audiobooks through this link.)

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Instant Pot

By Instant Pot

Recommended on: 16th March 2020

Gizmo of the Year

Normally, we don’t like kitchen gizmos. They clutter up the counter and, after not being used for a while, end up relegated to the garage.  But we love, love, love the Instapot. It’s a pressure cooker that doesn’t need you to be standing around fiddling with the temperature on the stove—you can instead just set it and forget it, cooking a tender beef stew in half an hour; making beans (our favorite is lima beans with Vegeta, sweet paprika, stewed tomatoes, and if desired, meat that you can brown with an onion and garlic right in the Instant Pot before pressure cooking). You can also make  artichokes, brussel sprouts, or other vegetables in far less time and in a more nutritious way. Now that eating out is mostly not an option, this gizmo is fantastically helpful. You can either get a cook book or just Google whatever you want to cook—you’ll see all sorts of recipes online, and of course, very helpful YouTube recipes.  If you don’t already have this very popular kitchen device, we think you’ll really like it.

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Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster

By Jon Krakauer

Recommended on: 18th July 2019

Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer,  “ranks among the great adventure books of all time,” notes the Wall Street Journal, and we couldn’t agree more. This book has resonated with us over the years—whenever we’ve found ourselves in a tough situation, we remember to, either literally or metaphorically, keep taking just one more step forward.  The Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters is rarely given for a book that’s an on-the-edge-of-your-seat thriller. This new edition addresses some of the controversies that arose after the book’s initial publication. A must read, and great as well for audio.  (Two free audiobooks may be possible through this link.)

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Isabella: The Warrior Queen

By Kirstin Downey

Recommended on: 15th January 2019

One of our tricks for finding good books, especially biographies, is to look through the books at historical tourist sites that we happen to visit.  In this way, we happened to come across (at the Royal Alcázar of Seville), the extraordinary book Isabella: The Warrior Queen, by Kirstin Downey. What a book! This great biography of Isabella of Castile, “the controversial Queen of Spain who sponsored Christopher Columbus’s journey to the New World, established the Spanish Inquisition, and became one of the most influential female rulers in history” goes into the psyche of this extraordinary woman—an increasingly black-and-white thinker whose efforts to do good sometimes rebounded for ill through many centuries. (Shades of pathological altruism.) Great biographies often take side tangents into other fascinating areas: Downey doesn’t disappoint with her descriptions of how Columbus blew one of the greatest discoveries of modern European history, the back and forth of the Ottoman and the European empires, Isabella’s focus on her children’s education, the origins of syphilis, and much more.  Amongst the best biographies we’ve ever read—we had trouble putting this book down. It’s also nice for audio.

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Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos

By Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam

Recommended on: 19th March 2022

Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam. This engrossing book provides a step-by-step understanding of how consciousness, language, self-awareness, and civilization itself arose. What’s unique about this book is its gradual exploration, with vivid illustrations, of how consciousness advanced as it progressed from amoeba to worms, frogs, birds, monkeys and humans.  In the context of all this, we learn of the extraordinary work of Stephen Grossberg, a Newton of neuroscience whose groundbreaking discoveries have quietly underpinned many neuroscientific advances. Highly recommended!

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Juggling for the Complete Klutz

By John Cassidy and B. C. Rimbeaux,

Recommended on: 9th May 2018

About forty years ago, Barb picked up the now-classic book Juggling for the Complete Klutz, by John Cassidy and B. C. Rimbeaux, which comes complete with three bean bags for juggling. Following the book’s instructions, she gradually learned to juggle. (We’re not talking circus level here—just juggling three items was Barb’s triumph!).  Juggling is a bit odd in that you must focus on the item you’re catching while also being more broadly aware of several other items at the same time. We’ve heard the suggestion that juggling can be a great way to relax into the diffuse mode. So recently, Barb picked up another copy of Juggling for the Complete Klutz and its accompanying bean bags and began to renew her juggling skills.  We’re not sure of the underlying neuro-mechanisms, but juggling does seem to be a great way of shifting mental gears.  If you want to learn a fun way to disconnect from whatever you’re doing, try learning to juggle!

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Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

By Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Recommended on: 1st March 2021

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. We have to admit, like many a fellow Homo sapiens, we’re enamored of Neanderthals. So we were very excited to get our hands on this book. And indeed, Kindred did a great job of pointing out not only the surprising intelligence of Neanderthals and their cunning abilities with stone tools, but also of describing the enormous time spans involved in the Neanderthal sojourn in Europe and parts of Asia.  We did notice that reviewers often observed that the book was “fact packed,” which can often be a bit of code to avoid unkindness.  Sadly, after a while, the facts grew monotonous, while interpretation was often lacking. The lead up to why the Neanderthals vanished was something of a bustalthough humans are a reasonable bet to being the culprits, at least in part, we instead hear of inbreeding and disease. 

Kindred is an interesting read if you’re into the current nitty-gritty of Neanderthal anthropological findings. But if you’re looking for a more conclusive read, you may wish to wait a few more years until more definitive findings might come available.

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King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

By Adam Hochschild

Recommended on: 8th February 2018

King Leopold’s Ghost is an extraordinary book exposes a vitally important, yet almost covered-up and forgotten story of how King Leopold of Belgium spearheaded the murder of some ten million people in the Congo. It would seem that such a book would be a depressing read, but somehow, Hochschild writes in such a riveting way, placing the story in context with greater world history, that the book is a not-to-be-missed masterpiece.

We believe this is one of the most important books written in the last twenty years. Don’t miss it. (Audio book here.)

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Leif and the Fall

By Allison Sweet Grant and Adam Grant

Recommended on: 14th October 2020

Leif and the Fall, by Allison Sweet Grant and Adam Grant.  All the other leaves say that “All leaves fall in the fall.”  But Leif applies creativity to learn that success grows from plenty of failures in this beautifully illustrated little story. If you are a parent, caregiver, relative, or friend, you couldn’t do better to help a child’s creativity than reading this uplifting book together. 

We also greatly enjoyed Allison and Adam’s children’s book The Gift Behind the Box. Adam Grant wrote one of our very favorite books, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (which also discusses Barb’s work on Pathological Altruism.)

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Leonardo da Vinci

By Walter Isaacson

Recommended on: 29th November 2017

Everyone’s been talking about Walter Isaacson’s latest biography, Leonardo da Vinci, so we had to join the crowd and see what all the hullabaloo was about. (We’ll admit, we’ve previously tackled da Vinci biographies that ended up putting us to sleep, so we were excited to see what master biographer Isaacson would do with Leonardo’s story.)  Isaacson’s book is a stellar exposition of what we know of Leonardo’s life—Isaacson bases much of his writing on what we know of Leonardo from his encompassing set of notebooks.

Da Vinci will always remain something of an enigma, because the inner turmoil he communicated so poignantly in his paintings is not something he described in his otherwise comprehensive notebooks.  So as a biography, Leonardo da Vinci is slightly paler than some of our favorite other Isaacson biographies, including the fantastic  Einstein: His Life and UniverseSteve Jobs, and Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. But our lack of understanding of da Vinci’s inner life is more than made up for by learning of da Vinci’s unparalleled life of curiosity and brilliance. Da Vinci tackled virtually every field of science and turned it into art.  As Isaacson observes, we ourselves can learn to observe life more fully by seeing how the magnificent Leonardo did it.

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Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To

By David Sinclair

Recommended on: 22nd October 2021

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To, by David Sinclair with Matthew D. LaPlante. [Hat tip, Adam Trybus] This fascinating, beautifully written book explores a common—but ignored—factor in many lethal diseases. That is, the effects of aging. Sinclair describes why aging occurs, and describes the potential of possible treatments such as NMN, rapamycin, and metformin. The book’s compelling descriptions of biological processes oftentimes make it a joy to read. This, for example, is the best “for the general public” explanation of epigenetics we’ve ever seen: This, for example, is the best “for the general public” explanation of epigenetics we’ve ever seen:

“Every one of our cells has the same DNA, of course, so what differentiates a nerve cell from a skin cell is the epigenome, the collective term for the control systems and cellular structures that tell the cell which genes should be turned on and which should remain off. And this, far more than our genes, is what actually controls much of our lives. One of the best ways to visualize this is to think of our genome as a grand piano. Each gene is a key. Each key produces a note. And from instrument to instrument, depending on the maker, the materials, and the circumstances of manufacturing, each will sound a bit different, even if played the exact same way. These are our genes. We have about 20,000 of them, give or take a few thousand. Each key can also be played pianissimo (soft) or forte (with force). The notes can be tenuto (held) or allegretto (played quickly). For master pianists, there are hundreds of ways to play each individual key and endless ways to play the keys together, in chords and combinations that create music we know as jazz, ragtime, rock, reggae, waltzes, whatever. The pianist that makes this happen is the epigenome. Through a process of revealing our DNA or bundling it up in tight protein packages, and by marking genes with chemical tags called methyls and acetyls composed of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, the epigenome uses our genome to make the music of our lives.”

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Lincoln in the Bardo

By George Saunders

Recommended on: 28th July 2023

Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel, by George Saunders. While spending time in the Tibetan Tergar Monastery in Kathmandu, Barb heard a lot about Buddhist theories of reincarnation and the “bardo,”  an intermediate state between death and rebirth that might also be related to Western conceptions of poltergeist activities.  So, after reading In the Houses of their Dead, it was a good time to also explore how the ideas related to the bardo can be explored in fiction.  This was a spirited effort to explore the afterlife in a way that adds meaning to our current lives. Odd, yet oddly satisfying.

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Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel

By George Sauders

Recommended on: 5th December 2022

Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel, by George Sauders. While spending time in the Tibetan Tergar Monastery in Kathmandu, Barb heard a lot about Buddhist theories of reincarnation and the “bardo,”  an intermediate state between death and rebirth that might also be related to Western conceptions of poltergeist activities.  So, after reading In the Houses of their Dead, it was a good time to also explore how the ideas related to the bardo can be explored in fiction.  This was a spirited effort to explore the afterlife in a way that adds meaning to our current lives. Odd, yet oddly satisfying.

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Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve

By Lenore Chu

Recommended on: 18th July 2018

Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve, by Lenore Chu. It’s very easy to fall into a pattern of thinking that making your child happy is—and should be—the theme of all education.  Chu’s remarkable book explores an educational system that is in many ways the exact opposite of that espoused by Westerners. As it turns out, when “happiness” is not necessarily a factor, sometimes kids, and parents, seem to end up happier.  It’s fascinating to read about the obviously negative (from a Western perspective) effects of the Chinese education system on Chu’s son, but how Chu’s open-minded understanding allows her to persevere and see the benefits of this very different system. We also deeply appreciated Chu’s visits to the Chinese countryside, to obtain a fuller account of what is going on “on the ground” in the Chinese educational system. This is one of the best and most thoughtful books we’ve read on education in a long time—highly recommended.

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Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain

By David Eagleman

Recommended on: 10th September 2020

Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain, by David Eagleman. There’s no getting around it—we loved this book! It’s enlightening, upbeat, beautifully written, and deeply thought-provoking. Ever thought about what it’s like to have a new sense? Eagleman has, and he writes provocatively of those who have begun to explore this strange new neural territory:

“Todd Huffman is a biohacker. His hair is often dyed some primary color or another; his appearance is otherwise indistinguishable from a lumberjack. Some years ago, Todd ordered a small neodymium magnet in the mail. He sterilized the magnet, sterilized a surgical knife, sterilized his hand, and implanted the magnet in his fingers. Now Todd feels magnetic fields. The magnet tugs when exposed to electromagnetic fields, and his nerves register this. Information normally invisible to humans is now streamed to his brain via the sensory pathways of his fingers. His perceptual world expanded the first time he reached for a pan on his electric stove. The stove casts off a large magnetic field (because of the electricity running in a coil). He hadn’t been aware of that tidbit of knowledge, but now he can feel it. Reaching out, he can detect the electromagnetic bubble that comes off of a power cord transformer (like the one to your laptop). It’s like touching an invisible bubble, one with a shape that he can assess by moving his hand around. The strength of the electromagnetic field is gauged by how powerfully the magnet moves inside his finger. Because different frequencies of magnetic fields affect how the magnet vibrates, he ascribes different qualities to different transformers—in words like ‘texture’ or ‘color.’

But Eagleman goes far deeper than just bio-hacking (interesting as it is) in this book—his enlightening metaphors provide insight into neural processes of all sorts, especially about the competing processes of sensory neurons. Who knew that our ability to see and feel could be equated to a form of neural colony building by our hands and eyes?  We particularly liked the section on why young brains are so much more plastic than older brains—perhaps surprisingly, it’s not all bad news for the mature amongst us. As Eagleman notes: “There’s a trade-off between adaptability and efficiency: as your brain gets good at certain jobs, it becomes less able to tackle others… To get good at one thing is to close the door on others. Because you possess only a single life, what you devote yourself to sends you down particular roads, while the other paths will forever remain untrodden by you. Thus, I began this book with one of my favorite quotations from the philosopher Martin Heidegger: ‘Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.’”

If you want to freshen your mind with the latest thinking of human potential, settle down and enjoy Eagleman’s brilliant book. (This is also a great book for audio.)

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Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It

By Kamal Ravikant

Recommended on: 25th April 2020

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It, by Kamal Ravikant. This odd little book offers its own idiosyncratic approach to self-healing: to simply love yourself.  Many successful leaders in Silicon Valley are perhaps not in the healthiest place mentally, and Kamal was amongst this “mental dark space” group. His solution was to reaffirm his own love and support for himself.  This goes against the guilt-ridden grain many of us have been raised with, but does seem to offer solid, healing qualities, at least in Kamal’s experience, and in the many thousands who have given this book a five-star review since its recent publication. A quick read with a practical upside. Also a great book for audio listening. (Two free audiobooks may be possible through this link.)

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Macular Degeneration: A guide to help someone you love

By Paul Wallis

Recommended on: 9th June 2018

Macular Degeneration: A guide to help someone you love, by Paul Wallis. It’s easy to get all excited about a great new biography, or entertaining, insightful books on subjects like octopuses or trees. But who would have ever thought that a book on macular degeneration could be both entertaining and enlightening? Entertaining, that is, even if you know no one with macular degeneration, and even if (perhaps especially if) you’ve never known anything before about macular degeneration?  Yes, Macular Degeneration: A guide to help someone you love is a delightful, informative, and upbeat book about a condition that most know little about.  Chapters 1 through 9 in particular give a nice overview of the topic. Paul Wallis is a good writer, whose use of analogies and examples makes the whole book sing—this book is the culmination of his career’s work. Dr. Wallis’s book is well worth reading if you’re generally interested in unusual subjects, if you’d like to learn a little about a subject that might save your own eyesight someday, and if you enjoy taking a literary walk with a good writer who has valuable insights on life.

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Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

By Peter Brown, Henry Roediger III, Mark McDaniel

Recommended on: 27th October 2018

We recently had the opportunity to have breakfast with Peter Brown, the first author of the redoubtable Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, which we believe to be one of the very best books on learning currently in existence. So we took the opportunity to reread the book before our meeting.  Yes, Make It Stick holds up and is even better than we remembered—it’s a wonderful romp through the various techniques that are valuable in making your learning stick.  What has impressed us is not only the scientific rigor of the work (thanks, Henry Roediger III and Mark McDaniel!), but also Peter’s in-depth explanations and wide-ranging examples—this is not a fluff job of a book. Peter’s a heckuva guy—stay tuned for a joining of forces in LHTL’s future projects.

A Spanish version is also available: Apréndetelo: La ciencia del aprendizaje exitoso.  

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Marie Antoinette: The Journey

By Antonia Fraser

Recommended on: 28th September 2019

Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser. We’re used to reading history books about compelling, intelligent men and women like Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Queen Isabella of Spain. We’re not-so-used-to reading books about apparent intellectual lightweights. And indeed, Marie Antoinette started her life as a coddled royal who successfully eluded attempts to, for example, teach her how to read. But despite her love of frivolity, Marie Antoinette had a great and good heart—you’d be hard put to find a woman who could face the worst and remain brave until the end.  Her ultimate, raw intelligence in front of the jury, with its pre-ordained verdict of guilt, is heartrending. This is the story of how dangerous “fake news” mobs—as easy to lead then as they are now—put Marie Antoinette under the guillotine. A spell-binding read.

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Marie Curie

By Susan Quinn

Recommended on: 18th September 2023

Marie Curie: A Life by Susan Quinn.  Marie Curie is one of the greatest scientists of the last several centuries.  Yet people often know little of the life of this extraordinary woman who helped unravel the mysteries of radiationto her own, and her daughter’s, ultimate peril and demise. Maria was born in Poland as the fifth and the youngest child of teachers Bronisława, (née Boguska), and Władysław Skłodowski. Władysław was the director of a secondary for boys, where he taught mathematics and physics. Władysław also taught Maria mental matha trick she used to her advantage through her career. (Would that we commonly taught these skills in elementary school nowadays.)  Meanwhile, researcher Pierre Curie in Paris was beginning to think he would have a career wedded only to science, since he could never find a woman as interested in science as he.  But when Marie moved to Paris, Pierre was bowled over.  Their mutual passions produced a Nobel Prize and two daughters.  Pierre might, however, be thought of as an exemplar of the dangers of excessive focus. It seems he was killed while inattentively attempting to cross a busy street.  Marie, devastated, still forged ahead in her research, winning a Nobel Prize yet again for her solo efforts.  This fascinating book tells the story of this exceptional woman, with a phenomenal memory and even more extraordinary ability to piece together the mysteries of radiation.

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Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture

By David Kushner

Recommended on: 13th August 2018

We’re very interested in how games attract people’s attention. So as we are beginning to explore the world of gaming, we couldn’t resist reading David Kushner’s awesome Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, about John Romero and John Carmack, and how the pair of geniuses helped revolutionize the gaming industry. A riveting read!

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Math Mind: The Simple Path to Loving Math

By Shalinee Sharma

Recommended on: 3rd March 2024

Math Mind: The Simple Path to Loving Math, by Shalinee Sharma. This is a brilliant bookhands down the most engaging and best-researched book on learning math we’ve ever encountered. These paragraphs give a sense of Sharma’s ability to step back and help us see the big picture of what’s going on when teaching and learning about math:

“Math education isn’t often discussed from an integrative complexity perspective, with requisite speed and fluency counterbalanced by a slower, more creative and collaborative approach. Both-and, not either-or. The problem can be traced back to the math wars, a phrase coined in the 1990s but a battle that has been fought in schools for at least fifty years. At the time of this writing, I am nervous that the math wars may be revving up again. This should worry us all. The only casualties are the students.

       “The math wars are more like World War I than World War II. In World War II, the narrative is about the good guys and the bad guys, the Allies (i.e., democracies) and the Axis (i.e., Nazis). Trying to parse WWI, meanwhile, is much trickier. The common explanation is that a series of treaties created a domino effect engulfing multiple continents in war. The dominos began falling due to the assassination of an archduke. In the end, forty million people died. Similarly, the math wars are complex without easily identifiable good guys and bad guys. In fact, it is often not clear to many educators or STEM workers, like my team of software engineers and technologists, what the math wars are about: The issues ebb and flow with the political tides. Further, the math wars morph as social media celebrities seek Likes, and factions come together and dissolve. As it pertains to speed and math, the wars are quite simple: One side overemphasizes it and the other side underemphasizes it.

       “The research doesn’t declare a clear winner in the battle over speed. The problem is that neither side is willing to acknowledge the integrative complexity that the research offers and strike the proper balance.”

The nonprofit learning platform, Zearn Math, that Sharma has co-created and led, has been deemed one of the most important and innovative educational platforms in the US. Under Sharma’s leadership, Zearn Math has developed a ground-breaking approach to teaching and learning math, including interactive videos with onscreen teachers and digital manipulatives with just-in-time feedback. In print, physical manipulatives and the digital sphere, Zearn utilizes the proven pedagogy of concrete to pictorial to abstract as well as a balance of fluency, conceptual understanding and application work used in the highest performing PISA countries. Zearn’s technology is focused on supporting students to understand grade-level work through acceleration, starting students off with grade-level work and offering personalized, brief, just-in-time supports when students struggle, rather than the dominant approach of remediation, taking students off grade-level work for extended periods of time. In fact, Zearn demonstrated using a fixed-effect model that acceleration was superior to remediation. 

Learn all about great approaches to learning and teaching math in this brilliant book that opens the doors to the future of math education.

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Memory Superpowers! An Adventurous Guide to Remembering What You Don’t Want to Forget

By Nelson Dellis

Recommended on: 8th August 2020

Memory Superpowers! An Adventurous Guide to Remembering What You Don’t Want to Forget, by Nelson Dellis. It’s probably clear from our many past postings that we’re HUGE Nelson Dellis fans. That’s because four-time US memory champ Nelson isn’t just a memory experthe’s also one of the best memory teachers in the world.  Nelson’s latest fantastic book is geared toward helping teens achieve remarkable memorization skills. If your child is a struggling underachiever, read a little section of this book together each evening so you both can learn how to outwit the Memory Thief. If your child is an overachiever, encourage them read this book on their own so they can achieve still more, all while enjoying adventures in the Forest of Forgettable Names and the Great Word Pyramids, maneuvering around the Pirates of the Periodic Table and journeying through the Himalayan Memory Palace. Nelson notes: “10-14 is the age range (but not limited to that. I mean, lot’s of adults could read it and get a lot out of it. Some advanced readers under 10 could read it too.” Truly a fun and highly practical guide to helping kids achieve remarkable memorization skills.

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Memory Superpowers! An Adventurous Guide to Remembering What You Don’t Want to Forget

By Nelson Dellis

Recommended on: 25th February 2020

Memory Superpowers!: An Adventurous Guide to Remembering What You Don’t Want to Forget, by 4-time US Memory Champion Nelson Dellis. This is a wonderful book for youths from about 10-years-old on up—it’s the kind of rollicking good adventure that your youngster can read aloud to you, so you are learning together as a family about tricks and secrets to remembering everything from the world capitals to the elements of the periodic table to speeches and soliloquies.  Barb’s blurb on the book is: “If there’s ONE BOOK to give your child (or you!) to help with learning, this is the one.” This is a pre-order—get your order in line early for what we suspect will be a sell-out!

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Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

By Adam Higginbotham

Recommended on: 16th October 2019

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, by Adam Higginbotham. This extraordinary book tells of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster—but it is also a powerful testament to how governmental propaganda and secrecy can cause these types of global-scale disasters to unfold. 

The surprisingly positive upshot of the disaster is that far safer nuclear power is being developed.  As Higginbotham notes: “Less than a month before the explosion of [Chernobyl] Reactor Number Four in 1986, a team of nuclear engineers at Argonne National Laboratory–West in Idaho had quietly succeeded in demonstrating that … the integral fast reactor … was safe even under the circumstances that destroyed Three Mile Island 2 and would prove disastrous at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), an even more advanced concept developed at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is fueled by thorium. More plentiful and far harder to process into bomb-making material than uranium, thorium also burns more efficiently in a reactor and could produce less hazardous radioactive waste with half-lives of hundreds, not tens of thousands, of years. Running at atmospheric pressure, and without ever reaching a criticality, the LFTR doesn’t require a massive containment building to guard against loss-of-coolant accidents or explosions and can be constructed on such a compact scale that every steel mill or small town could have its own microreactor tucked away underground. In 2015 Microsoft founder Bill Gates had begun funding research projects similar to these fourth-generation reactors in a quest to create a carbon-neutral power source for the future. By then, the Chinese government had already set seven hundred scientists on a crash program to build the world’s first industrial thorium reactor as part of a war on pollution. ‘The problem of coal has become clear,’ the engineering director of the project said. ‘Nuclear power provides the only solution.’” [Hat tip: Mary O’Dea] 

We read Midnight in Chernobyl in conjunction with watching the HBO documentary Chernobyl.  Television doesn’t get better than this.

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Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential

By Barbara Oakley

Recommended on: 8th November 2017

Dan Pink says it best! “Mindshift is essential reading for anyone seeking a reboot, reset, or reinvention. As Oakley trots around the globe and across disciplines, she explains the power of taking a ‘pi’ approach to your career, why worriers often get ahead, why negative traits can house hidden advantages, and why it’s smarter to broaden your passion than follow it. Jammed with inspiring stories and practical tips, Mindshift is a book that can change your life.”
                                               — Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind

If you’re into audiobooks, don’t miss Barb’s reading!

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Mission Transition: Navigating the Opportunities and Obstacles to Your Post-Military Career

By Matthew J. Louis

Recommended on: 22nd September 2019

Mission Transition: Navigating the Opportunities and Obstacles to Your Post-Military Career, by Matthew J. Louis. This book is a special treat for those in the military, and military veterans. Nearly a quarter-million leave the service each year, but transitioning to civilian life can be a challenge—as Barb knows, having shifted out of the Army to begin her engineering studies as a civilian. As the book cover notes: “Mission Transition is a practical guide to career change for service members considering leaving active duty. It attempts to address this primary question: How can transitioning veterans realize their full potential by avoiding false starts and suboptimal career choices following active duty? The book has been endorsed by Generals, Astronauts, Super Bowl winners, members of Congress, and best-selling authors.” We’re all in accord that this is an extraordinarily useful book!

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Misty of Chincoteague

By Marguerite Henry

Recommended on: 29th August 2019

Over the past few weeks, as she works on her upcoming books, Barb & her Hero Hubby Phil have been traveling the Northeast in their little trailer. (Adventurous friends from Spain are living in the Oakley house this fall to give their children a semester’s experience in US schools.)  Among the sights Barb & Phil have visited? The Morgan Horse Farm in Vermont, and Chincoteague Island in Virginia, where she sits writing the “Cheery Friday” email right now. 🙂 These wonderful places brought to mind some of Barb’s favorite books as a child: Justin Morgan Had a Horse, and Misty of Chincoteague, by Marguerite Henry and illustrated by Wesley Dennis. If you are looking for beautiful books to read with children you love, these fantastic books are just the ticket.  If you’re looking for more adult-oriented equine material to sink your teeth into, try the fantastic Seabiscuit: An American Legend, by Laura Hillenbrand. Hillenbrand’s use of metaphor is virtually unparalleled.  Want something even meatier? Try The Color of Horses: A Scientific and Authoritative Identification of the Color of the Horse, which Barb used in to help guide the creation of the best-selling horse board game (the first board game about horses): Herd Your Horses.

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My First Book About the Brain

By Patricia J. Wynne and Donald M. Silver

Recommended on: 13th December 2017

If you think your or a relative’s child might be curious about neuroscience, we recommend My First Book About the Brain (Dover Children’s Science Books), by Patricia J. Wynne and Donald M. Silver, 2013. This 32 page long, award-winning coloring book is actually used in some regular classes, and could be a particular boon for the wide-ranging interests of home-schooled kids. Suitable for ages 8–12, but grownups also seem to enjoy the relaxing process of coloring while they learn.

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Napoleon: A Life

By Andrew Roberts

Recommended on: 13th May 2020

Napoleon: A Life, by Andrew Roberts.  Having read Robert’s wonderful Napoleon, we now realize that we’d had an enormous gap in our understanding of European history—a gap related to Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars. If you’re a biography buff, Napoleon himself was one of the most fascinating characters of his, or any, age.  As Roberts points out: “Napoleon Bonaparte was the founder of modern France and one of the great conquerors of history. He came to power through a military coup only six years after entering the country as a penniless political refugee. As First Consul and later Emperor, he almost won hegemony in Europe, but for a series of coalitions specifically designed to bring him down. Although his conquests ended in defeat and ignominious imprisonment, over the course of his short but eventful life he fought sixty battles and lost only seven. For any general, of any age, this was an extraordinary record. … 

“Even if Napoleon hadn’t been one of the great military geniuses of history, he would still be a giant of the modern era. The leadership skills he employed to inspire his men have been adopted by other leaders over the centuries, yet never equaled except perhaps by his great devotee Winston Churchill… The fact that his army was willing to follow him even after the retreat from Moscow, the battle of Leipzig and the fall of Paris testifies to his capacity to make ordinary people feel that they were capable of doing extraordinary, history-making deeds… Napoleon is often accused of being a quintessential warmonger, yet war was declared on him far more often than he declared it on others.” 

If you are a fan of either history or biographies, don’t miss this book! But be prepared for battlefield detail—right down to the McDonalds’ parking lot currently located at a once key hillside now called Napoleonshöhe outside Abensberg. Also good for (33-hours-long!) audio listening.

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Negative Self-Talk & How to Change It

By Shad Helmstetter

Recommended on: 4th January 2021

Negative Self-Talk & How to Change It, by Shad Helmstetter.  After reading about how one of Caesar’s assassins, Brutus, shifted himself from probable victory into suicidal defeat at the Battle of Philippi, (at least as detailed in The Last Assassin),  we became interested in negative self-talk. Helmstetter’s short, uplifting book tackles an important issue––how we talk to ourselves makes a big difference in how we feel about ourselves, how we interact with others, and ultimately, how successful we are, at least according to however we define success.  As Helmstetter notes, “The problem is that Negative Self-Talk Disorder is an unconsciously acquired disorder that becomes physically, chemically, wired into your brain. (It becomes an actual disorder–faulty wiring–in the brain.) If you do nothing to change it, it not only stays, it also gets progressively worse. It becomes a part of your programs, and follows the rules under which your brain operates. Imagine meeting a sour, pessimistic, down-in-the-mouth person who is negative about everything. When you meet someone like that, it is clear that person did not suddenly become a negative, unhappy person overnight. People who are super-negative––whether they are aware of it or not–have worked at it. Probably for years. Day after day, thought after thought, they have, usually without knowing it, wired their brains to see the world in a darker, more insecure, less enlightened and optimistic way.”

If you’re looking for ideas about how to get yourself out of a negative way of treating yourself, even though it’s a bit of a self-promotion for his audio materials, Helmstetter’s book is a good place to start.

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Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty

By Robert Massie

Recommended on: 14th March 2019

Last week’s mention of Queen Victoria’s status as a carrier for the gene for hemophilia brought to mind what we believe to be one of the greatest biographies ever: Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, by Robert Massie.  Massie first became interested in the Russian imperial family because Massie’s own son son was born with hemophilia. This gives Massie’s book an extraordinarily sensitive understanding of the tsarevitch’s hidden illness,  which ultimately led to the family’s murder. The story of Rasputin’s influence on the royal family—along with the bizarre circumstances of Rasputin’s death—are some of the creepiest stories ever told. This is a book that’s nearly impossible to put down. One of Massie’s other books, Peter the Great: His Life and World, is our very favorite biography—it also won the Pulitzer Prize. If you’re looking for good, long audio books to take you through many driving hours, these are great choices. (Two free audiobooks may be possible through this link.)

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No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine High School

By Brooks Brown and Rob Merritt

Recommended on: 19th March 2019

No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine High School, by Brooks Brown and Rob Merritt. Brooks Brown was one of Dylan Klebold’s closest friends since elementary school, and he was alternately a friend and enemy of Eric Harris, the other Columbine High School killer. Like Klebold and Harris, Brown was an alienated teen who saw the dark side of the bullying and factionalism at Columbine. Brown’s efforts to alert police prior to the massacre resulted in the local police to do everything they could to smear Brown’s reputation, the better to hide their own malfeasance. A shocking look at how administrators at Columbine, through their one-sided “justice,” encouraged Columbine’s poisonous atmosphere. A quick read and an eye-opening book about how laissez-faire policies underpin sadly simmering rage.

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No One Cares About Crazy People: My Family and the Heartbreak of Mental Illness in America

By Ron Powers

Recommended on: 2nd January 2020

No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America by Ron Powers. Both of Powers’ sons were afflicted with schizophrenia, which fueled his desire to begin sorting out and writing about why there is such chaos in the US regarding treatment for those who clearly cannot care for themselves.  The essence of the problem lies with lies anosognosia, which, as Powers writes, is “the false conviction within a person that nothing is wrong with his mind. It stems from a physiological by-product of psychosis, and accompanies about 50 percent of schizophrenia occurrences and 40 percent of bipolar cases. Anosognosia disrupts the parietal lobe’s capacity to interpret sensory information from around the body.” No One Cares details how virtually every ideology—left, right, and libertarian—has contributed to the disastrous set of policies for mental health that have increasingly unleashed heartbreak and chaos both for US families caring for the mentally ill, and US society as a whole.  (It’s interesting to watch, however, as Powers attributes simple lack of knowledge as underlying the mistakes of his favored party, but outright malevolence as causing the mistakes of the party he dislikes. A more dispassionate observer might draw very different conclusions.) A worthwhile book on a vitally important, but all-too-neglected problem. Also good for audio listening.

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Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write: How to Get a Contract and Advance Before Writing Your Book

By Elizabeth Lyon

Recommended on: 12th December 2020

Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody Can Write: How to Get a Contract and Advance Before Writing Your Book, by Elizabeth Lyon. We’re often asked how to get started in publishing a non-fiction book. You can’t do any better than to read Elizabeth Lyon’s guide, which provides a crash course on how to write a book proposal that (along with three sample chapters), will help you sell your book idea without having to write the entire book.  A few things to note. It’s easy to overlook the importance of doing the market analysis—that is, analyzing the books that will compete with yours.  But that’s one of the first issues you should explore. What’s different about your book that hasn’t already been said in many other books?  It’s also easy to overlook the importance of developing your own personal platform.  Not everyone is going to be a Harvard professor or have a “sailed through Yale” resume. But, even so, you need some innovative dash of panache to establish your credibility as an expert.  You also need to keep in mind that it’s not enough to even just be an expert in your subject—you also want to captivate your audience.  Lyon gives great insight into how to do precisely that.

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Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

By Zeke Faux

Recommended on: 21st November 2023

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall, by Zeke Faux. We’ve been riveted by the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the erstwhile crypto king.  Basically, Bankman-Fried’s story has it all.  Loving, Stanford-trained parents who are lawyers—with his mother an expert in ethics? Check. A degree in physics with a minor in math from MIT? Check. Founds what becomes one of the biggest crypto companies in the world? Check. Makes listeners swoon as he tells how he’s going to give all his earnings to charity, even as he lives a life of luxury? Check. Arrested for “wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, securities fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, and money laundering” in what has been described as one of the biggest financial frauds of all time? Check. His own arrogant testimony seals his conviction? Check.

But we were looking for a bigger picture than just Bankman-Fried. How did crypto arise? How could someone like Bankman-Fried get away with so much? Are there other crooks out there scamming the unsuspecting public using similar approaches?  Faux’s book gives a witty, clear-eyed overview of the world of cryptocurrency. If you’re interested in crypto (or even if you’re not), this book is well-worth the read.

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Nursery Rhymes for Modern Times Vol I: The Great Americans

By Philo F. Willetts, Jr.

Recommended on: 19th August 2019

Nursery Rhymes for Modern Times Vol I: The Great Americans, by Philo F. Willetts, Jr. This wonderful slim volume uses some of the best of what we know about learning to help kids remember key ideas and concepts—just as Wexler recommends in The Knowledge Gap. Our brains are ‘wired’ to remember rhymes, and kids are inspired by the qualities and achievements of great people. This book is packed with great stories and information, including excerpts from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream!” Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and many more, including Barb’s personal favorite historical figure, Sequoyah. Here’s a witty excerpt on Dolly Madison:

She made enemies like one another,
By inviting those who hated each other
To eat at the Madison’s table
And be as nice as they were able.

She planned her table’s seatings,
So all had friendly meetings.
Her dinners weren’t just for fun.
She got important agreements done.

Barb has been commanded by her daughter to spend Christmas time teaching some English to her son-in-law’s Spanish-speaking-only (at present) little brother. She’ll be using this book to help with the task!

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Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies

By Ann Hulbert

Recommended on: 14th March 2018

This week, we read Ann Hulbert’s Off the Charts: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies.  A great strength of this book was its broad coverage of prodigies of all sorts—from computer programming savants like Bill Gates to dance and acting prodigy Shirley Temple.  (A concomitant weakness is that sometimes we wanted to learn more!) We particularly appreciated Hulbert’s highlighting of the difference between intelligence and wisdom. Some parents with extraordinary IQs, for example, have pushed their children in bizarre ways—with often disastrous results. Other parents have wholeheartedly devoted their lives to the children they wished to make into prodigies, only to find little solace in the long run. Somehow through all this, the book provides healthy encouragement for ordinary, non-savant types.

There was a disconcerting tendency through the book to switch between prodigies even mid-paragraph, but otherwise, highly recommended!

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On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks

By Simon Garfield

Recommended on: 28th June 2018

There’s something about a map that brings extraordinary meaning to what, where, and even who you are in life.  (The long and the short of it is, we’re among the map-obsessed minority known as “mapheads.”) So we couldn’t resist reading On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, by New York Times bestselling author Simon Garfield. Simon takes readers through an insightful history of how maps and map-making unfolded over the millenia If your sense of place isn’t complete without a map, and you’re a bit of a history buff, you will enjoy this book. (An earlier book we also enjoyed several years ago was Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, by Ken Jennings.)

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On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

By William Zinsser

Recommended on: 25th October 2017

This is the best book we’ve ever read on how to write well. Period. Barb would not have become a successful writer (or MOOC-maker!) if it hadn’t been for this book.

Anyone who writes will benefit from reading this book.  If you are in the “publish or perish” phase of academic life, you really need this book.

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On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft

By Stephen King

Recommended on: 17th April 2018

This week, we read Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft—if you have any interest in writing at all, this is a great book, especially when paired with William Zinsser’s On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, which is geared towards non-fiction.  What we particularly like about King’s book is that he doesn’t just talk about the nuts and bolts of writing (although what he does provide along those lines is great).  The memoir portions of the book are utterly engrossing—you’ll learn what it’s like to grow up and become an international best-seller, and the bizarre things that best-seller-dom can do to your psyche. King has sailed through it all—including his near lethal run-in with an out-of-control car. By our count, this is an “all-time top five” book on writing!  

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Online Teaching with Zoom

By Aaron Johnson

Recommended on: 31st July 2020

Online Teaching with Zoom: A Guide for Teaching and Learning with Videoconference Platforms, by Aaron Johnson. We had previously read and liked Aaron’s first book on online teaching, Excellent Online Teaching. Aaron’s new book provides a solid overview of how to use Zoom for teachinghis insights are also more broadly applicable to any sort of online teaching.  And the price is rightboth books are free on Kindle Unlimited!

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Out on Good Behavior: Teaching Math while Looking Over Your Shoulder

By Barry Garelick

Recommended on: 6th April 2021

Out on Good Behavior: Teaching Math while Looking Over Your Shoulder, by Barry Garelick. We greatly enjoyed and got a lot out of this brief, sardonic memoir of an outstanding math teacher in an era when teaching math in public schools is becoming increasingly divorced from what neuroscience has revealed about how students actually learn math. Garelick’s witty observations give a sense of what’s going on in a way that would be difficult for most parents to discover—and some of Garelick’s observations are priceless: “I once told my eighth-grade algebra class that my classroom is one place where they won’t hear the words ‘growth mindset’—to which the class reacted with wild applause. Someone then asked what my objections to ‘growth mindset’ were.  I said I didn’t like how it was interpreted: Motivational cliches like ‘I can’t do it…yet’ supposedly build up confidence leading to motivation and success. I believe it’s the other way around: success causes motivation more than motivation causes success. [Or, as researchers Szu-Han Wang and Richard Morris have noted: “we rapidly remember what interests us, but what interests us takes time to develop.” And this Slate Star Codex article about growth mindset remains timeless.] 

Garelick presciently observes: “Where students frequently see through ineffective educational fads, people in education—after buying into such theories—see what they want to see.” Out on Good Behavior is well worth reading if you care about what your child is learning—or not learning—in school, particularly when it comes to math.

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P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever

By Raj Haldar, Chris Carpenter, and illustrator Maria Beddia

Recommended on: 28th January 2021

We have it directly from Barb’s pediatrician daughter Rosie that P Is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever, by Raj Haldar, Chris Carpenter, and illustrator Maria Beddia is actually one of the greatest children’s books evuh!  Many children get tired of spelling rulesP Is for Pterodactyl features words that break all the rules. You and your gleeful youngster will have a blast with this bizarrely educational book.

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Pakistan

By Anatol Lieven

Recommended on: 29th May 2019

Pakistan: A Hard Country, by Anatol Lieven. Barb read this book preparation for her upcoming trip to Pakistan—but now that she’s read it, she’s realized what a comprehensive, thought-provoking, beautifully written book it is: truly a masterpiece of on-the-ground research over several decades. You may be surprised to discover ideas such as why sharia law is preferable for many Pakistanis to western (and often deeply corrupt) legal processes, and to learn just how deeply diverse Pakistan’s religious base is. Pakistan came together in a way almost guaranteed to make it a challenging country to govern—it can be difficult for outsiders to appreciate the dramatically diverse demands of the population.

Here’s a snippet of Lieven’s writing involving his journey through the little town of Shapqadar to do more interviews. “Bypass roads are unknown in small towns in Pakistan and we had made the mistake of travelling on a market day. Traffic jam doesn’t begin to describe the results – more like a double reef knot. The crossroads in the centre of town was a maelstrom of dust and exhaust fumes, apparently sucking into it cars, buses, trucks, scooter rickshaws, horse-carts, donkey-carts, men pushing carts, men on horseback and one understandably depressed-looking camel, all mixed up with a simply incredible number of people on foot for such a small town, as if the heavens had opened on a Sunday morning and rained humanity on Shapqadar. Out of the dust-shrouded mêlée the brightly painted lorries with their great carved wooden hoods loomed like war elephants in an ancient battle.”

Background research (and writing) doesn’t get any better than that. Lieven does his homework in knitting a comprehensive perspective of an extraordinary country. If you want to learn about the history, religions, government, and social mores of a critically important country on the global stage, you couldn’t do better than to read Lieven’s critically-acclaimed book.

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Palomino Blackwing Pencils

Recommended on: 5th December 2018

We love Palomino Blackwing Pencils for our note-taking. These pencils have the most extraordinary feel of any pencil we’ve ever used. Once past the initial sharpening with a standard pencil sharpener, we use a cheap plastic Staedtler manual pencil sharpener, which we set right beside us whenever we are writing. As for the actual note taking, we tend to use either quadrille pads or Moleskine squared notebooks.

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Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1874-1914

By David McCullough

Recommended on: 9th June 2019

Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1874-1914, by David McCullough. This is a fantastic book (a National Book Award winner) about the successes and disasters of both great and awful—and great-but-awful—leaders.  After the charismatic Ferdinand de Lesseps—the Steve Jobs of his day— spearheaded the successful construction of the Suez Canal, the French grew to adore de Lesseps’ ideas almost as much as de Lesseps himself did. (As Bill Gates has said “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they cannot lose.”) De Lesseps’ desire to create another sea level Suez Canal in Panama ultimately doomed the project, killed thousands, and ruined tens of thousands more.  When the Americans subsequently took over, their initial leadership was worse than that of de Lesseps. That is, until John Frank Stevens (he of “Stevens Pass” in Washington State), took over. Between Stevens—who ultimately appeared to crack under the strain—and his successor, the very different, but equally effective George Goethals, the canal took shape. You’ll learn of Dr. William Gargas’s David against Goliath story competing against malaria, yellow fever, and perhaps worst of all, pig-headed bureaucrats. And you’ll get a sense of how the front line laborers, primarily from the West Indies, did the hardest work under appalling conditions.

Construction of the Panama Canal was the biggest construction project in history—of inestimable value in uniting the globe.  Its clever use of the fearsome Chagres River to provide the energy to run the locks is a lesson in elegant engineering. During our tour of the Canal last week, we were surprised to learned that the Panama Canal competes with the Suez Canal in bringing goods from the far East to the Americas.  McCullough’s book gives a wonderful understanding of the main players and issues behind this extraordinary human feat of engineering.

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Pathological Altruism

By Barbara Oakley,‎ Ariel Knafo,‎ Guruprasad Madhavan,‎ David Sloan Wilson

Recommended on: 10th January 2018

This book explores, in broad-ranging fashion, how helping can hurt.  See what some of today’s top thinkers have said about the book:

“A scholarly yet surprisingly sprightly volume…The book is the first comprehensive treatment of the idea that when ostensibly generous ‘how can I help you?’ behavior is taken to extremes, misapplied or stridently rhapsodized, it can become unhelpful, unproductive and even destructive.”
—Natalie Angier, The New York Times

“What a wonderful book! This is one of the few books in evolutionary biology I’ve read in the past ten years that taught me something completely new.”
—Edward O. Wilson, Pulitzer Prize Winner and Pellegrino University Research Professor Emeritus, Harvard University

“The coverage of topics is breathtaking…. The reader will emerge with a much deeper and nuanced understanding of altruism in reading this book, the best on altruism in the last 15 years.”
—Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley; author of Born To Be Good: The Science of A Meaningful Life

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Patient H.M. A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets

By Luke Dittrich

Recommended on: 7th November 2019

Patient H.M. A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets, by Luke Dittrich.  H.M., that is, Henry Molaison, rivals only Phineas Gage as one of the world’s most famous brain patients.  As it turns out, Dittrich’s grandfather, neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville, performed the notorious surgery that removed Molaison’s hippocampuses and helped spur extraordinary bodies of research on memory. Dittrich’s family history means he has an unparalleled perspective to share on what actually happened to Molaison and what type of man Scoville actually was (hint—there are many dark secrets). This can sometimes be a bit graphic about what can happen during brain surgery, as well as what happens when people undertake to do experiments on people, but its final revelations are astonishing.

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Peltor High Performance Ear Muffs

Recommended on: 24th October 2017

When you are trying to focus on something difficult, whether reading a book or anything else, one of the best things you can do to help you keep that focus is to block out sounds.  Earphones like these are used by professional memory champions to help them keep their focus–whether in competition or just learning something new.  Barb has found over the years that when she puts on her earmuffs, it signals her brain that it’s “focus time!”  It’s much easier for her to concentrate with earmuffs on, because the earmuffs not only block sound, they also indicate that it’s time to focus! Earmuffs are one of the most important tools in Barb’s learning repertoire.

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Peter the Great: His Life and World

By Robert K. Massie

Recommended on: 13th December 2017

Peter the Great: His Life and World, by Robert Massie, is in our opinion, truly one of the greatest biographies ever written—fully deserving of its Pulitzer Prize.  Not only does the book provide great insight into Peter the Great—it also takes us down some of the stranger rabbit holes of history.  Who knew that Sweden’s Charles XII squirreled himself away in Turkey, driving his hosts crazy and refusing to leave?  Barb babbled so much about this book at home that she was temporarily banned from discussing it.

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Posture Town

By Shweta Kapur

Recommended on: 3rd March 2024

Posture Town, by Shweta Kapur, illustrated by Catherine Suvorova. Many of us adults wish we had better posture.  When’s the best time to teach about posture?  Early childhood!  Shweta Kapur is a physical therapist and researcher who is  passionate about promoting healthy behaviors in a fun and engaging way. As a clinician, talking with hundreds of her patients about posture, she realized that the habit of slouching can begin early on–and we can help kids avoid this by early coaching.  How we here at LHTL wish we’d had this book when we were little!  If you’re a parent or coach for youngsters, you will greatly appreciate this delightful book!

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Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon

By William D. Cohan

Recommended on: 2nd February 2023

Power Failure: The Rise and Fall of an American Icon by William D. Cohan. This book has earned pride of place on The New Yorker Best Books of 2022, The Financial Times Best Books of 2022, and The Economist Best Books of 2022. Great leadership in business matters in providing for people’s needs, as Southwest Airline’s recent catastrophic meltdown attests. Power Failure is the magnificent telling of the rise and fall of one of America’s formerly greatest companies, and a cautionary tale of how eminence can lead managers to hubris—and disaster.  

General Electric Company grew in the late 1800s from Thomas Edison’s brilliant innovations. By 1896, the company was so important that it was one of the original 12 companies listed on the newly formed Dow Jones Industrial Average. Ultimately, the company’s story revolves around two men. Jack Welch, who is sometimes called “the CEO of the Century,” took GE to greatness during his reign as Chairman & CEO from 1981–2001. Many people working for GE revered Welch, whose rapid-fire and flexible brilliance (he also sported a doctorate in chemical engineering) meant that he relished well-reasoned dissent.  Welch’s successor was Jeff Immelt, a Harvard MBA whose slick ability to present and glad-hand were enough to get him to the top—but not make great decisions. It turned out that Immelt, unlike Welch, didn’t tolerate dissent and rarely took advice from others. Under Immelt’s leadership GE lost over $150 billion in market value—the company was not only ultimately dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, but dismembered. (Cohan points out how Immelt’s self-serving biography often seems at variance with the facts.) 

Cohan’s book provides a perceptive perspective on capitalism itself—the motivational aspects for workers and fulfillment of people’s needs that great companies can provide.  But also, the cutthroat death spirals that companies can fall into. As Cohan pointedly observes, General Electric’s current CEO is the one who seems to be making all the money—not share holders. A lengthy read, but worth every page.

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Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning

By Pooja K. Agarwal, Ph.D. and Patrice M. Bain, Ed.S.

Recommended on: 21st October 2019

Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning by Pooja K. Agarwal, Ph.D. and Patrice M. Bain, Ed.S. If we had to select a single book to recommend to instructors of any kind, it would be this masterpiece—the best book on teaching that we’ve ever read.  

In Powerful Teaching, Agarwal and Bain provide a tour de force of practical ideas and explanations involving retrieval practice, explaining how this vital topic is related to concepts such as interleaving, deliberate practice, formative assessments. 

Retrieval practice is so much deeper than simple memorization: As Powerful Teaching notes: “we typically focus on getting information into students’ heads. On the contrary, one of the most robust findings from cognitive science research is the importance of getting information out of students’ heads. Based on a century of research, in order to transform learning, we must focus on getting information out – a strategy called retrieval practice.”  

If you are a K-12 teacher or university instructor, or a parent, don’t miss this teaching book for the ages. Think retrieval practice is only for plebeian facts? Think again—as Agarwal and Bain note: “When it comes to retrieval practice, how far up the pyramid can we move student learning? If we want students to think on a higher-order level, then we should make sure our retrieval questions are basic and higher-order. It’s shortsighted to think, ‘Gee, well, if I have students retrieve a vocabulary word, they should be able to apply this in a higher-order example or a higher-order type of material.’ Based on research, provide a mix of fact-based retrieval and higher-order retrieval if that’s the type of learning you want to see in your students.” 

Part of what we love about this book is the simplicity of its explanations—not only is it well-researched, it’s elegantly written. Looking for a Christmas present for a parent or teacher friend, or for yourself? This is it.

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Principles: Life and Work

By Ray Dalio

Recommended on: 6th April 2018

Ray Dalio’s Principles: Life and Work is a masterpiece of insight, not only on how to achieve your goals, (whatever those goals might be), but on how you can build an organization that is structured for success.  Dalio knows what he’s talking about—he founded his investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of a two-bedroom apartment. Now, forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history, and grown into the fifth most important private company in the United States.

Dalio attributes some of Bridgewater’s success to his principle of radical open-mindedness. This means, at least in part, being aware of your internal signals of annoyance, anger, or irritability—which are all signs of close-mindedness.  You can use those internal signals to trigger quality reflections. Radical open-mindedness doesn’t mean accepting all information—it means seeking out quality information that you may not want to hear.

We have often used radical open-mindedness even in our research—for example, we send advance versions of our research papers to people we know will dislike our work. When we get past our own petty feelings of “ouch—that’s not true!” in the responses, we’re not infrequently surprised to find how the criticism, even “bad” criticism, helps improve what we’re working on.

Dalio’s Principles will, we feel, go down in the annals of best books of the decade. It is a deep book of productivity that gets at the essentials of your life. (This is also a good book for audio.)

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Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World

By Melissa Schilling

Recommended on: 28th September 2018

We have a habit of reading books about rebellious, contrarian sorts of people. Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World, by Melissa Schilling, is among the better of these books. Schilling’s discussion of the independent, sometimes lonely perspectives of remarkable innovators is alone worth the price of the book—she makes a clear case that too much group work and “creative collaboration” can unintentionally kill creativity.  Well worth the price if you’re interested in creativity.

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Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent’s Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

By Julie Bogart

Recommended on: 31st October 2021

Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent’s Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age, by Julie Bogart.  As one endorser notes: “Julie Bogart is a brilliant educator who’s written a wonderful book that shows us how to nurture children’s ability to think critically and carefully. Each chapter offers dozens of questions, lessons, and exercises for helping learners understand their biases, evaluate the sources from which they get information, and consider other perspectives. These tools can enable students from kindergarten through high school to experience the joys of discovery and insight, and they can help young people grow into compassionate adults who want to make a positive contribution to their world. Read this book and use it. Your children and students will thank you, and you’ll learn a lot about yourself, too!”  

And here’s an excerpt from Barb’s foreword:

“Julie approaches critical thinking in an utterly novel way. Like a master poker player, she turns her gaze not only toward the cards being dealt, but also inward to the body’s physical ‘tells’ in reaction to those cards… these bodily reactions and thought patterns can serve as a guide for digging deeper and being more honest, both with those you are interacting with and yourself. It’s this self-awareness that supports you in guiding your children as well.

“As Julie notes, ‘Knowing how to develop well-formed opinions in spite of prejudice and bias is one of the goals of education (and this book).’  Read on, for a wonderfully insightful guide to steering yourself, and the children you love, toward a life of considered, thoughtful insight.

Raising Critical Thinkers is an instant classic.  Highly recommended! Also good for audio.

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Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

By David Epstein

Recommended on: 23rd January 2020

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein. Range has been recommended to us by a number of LHTLers, and now that we’ve finally read this marvelous book, we can see why. It lays out, in clear and convincing detail, why being a narrowly- ocused expert may seem like the way to go in your life and career—but it actually makes you less capable of creativity, not to mention more narrow-minded. As Epstein notes “I dove into work showing that highly credentialed experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination.”  

Key graf: “‘Eminent physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson styled it this way: we need both focused frogs and visionary birds. “Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon,’ Dyson wrote in 2009. ‘They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.’ As a mathematician, Dyson labeled himself a frog, but contended, ‘It is stupid to claim that birds are better than frogs because they see farther, or that frogs are better than birds because they see deeper.’ The world, he wrote, is both broad and deep. “We need birds and frogs working together to explore it.’ Dyson’s concern was that science is increasingly overflowing with frogs, trained only in a narrow specialty and unable to change as science itself does.”

Epstein makes the case that even those without any advanced education can sometimes think more clearly, and make more intelligent insights about intractable problems than the so-called experts.  Read this marvelous book to discover why. (This is also a good book for audio listening.)

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Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

By Maryanne Wolf

Recommended on: 25th July 2019

Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, by Maryanne Wolf. 

This lovely book uses metaphors to convey the extraordinary complexity of what happens when we read—and to describe how important it is to pause and read deeply.  As Wolf notes: “whenever we name even a single letter, we are activating entire networks of specific neuronal groups in the visual cortex, which correspond to entire networks of equally specific language-based cell groups, which correspond to networks of specific articulatory-motor cell groups—all with millisecond precision. 

“It takes years for deep-reading processes to be formed, and as a society we need to be sure that we are vigilant about their development in our young from a very early age. It takes daily vigilance by us, the expert readers of our society, to choose to expend the extra milliseconds needed to maintain deep reading over time.”

This is a book well worth reading, if only to remind us of the value of reading slowly and deeply.

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Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice

By Bill Browder

Recommended on: 30th October 2017

Book of the Month

It can sometimes be important to step back and look at society’s impact on how we learn and grow.  Bill Browder’s magnificent best-seller Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice tells the story of the impact of highest level corruption on ordinary people’s lives.  (This book has an amazing 5-star rating with over 2600 reviews on Amazon.) Browder was the co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management, which specialized in Russian investments.  In the course of his work, Browder became a victim of a kleptocratic part of Russia’s economy, where the rule of law can be rewritten on a whim.  The book’s cover notes “A financial caper, a crime thriller, and a political crusade, Red Notice is the story of one man taking on overpowering odds to change the world, and also the story of how, without intending to, he found meaning in his life.” We agree—we couldn’t put the book down.

On a side note, we often think that relentless focus is the best way to learn and be successful. Along those lines, we often tout Cal Newport’s Deep Work.  But as Browder notes, Edmond Safra, one of the world’s greatest investment bankers, could evince an almost gnat-like attention-span.  If you have trouble keeping your focus on just one thing, it may sometimes be an advantage.

That’s part of why we read great books—we often also gain insight in unexpected areas.

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Red Roulette

By Desmond Shum

Recommended on: 18th November 2022

Red Roulette: An Insider’s Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today’s China, by Desmond Shum.  This is a fascinating look at the inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party by a brave man who stands out from the many others who gain privately as they enable and support mass public harm.

The CCP enabled Shum and his wife Whitney Duan’s rise into China’s billionaire class as the couple used their insider connections and natural smarts to built a massive air cargo facility at Beijing International Airport, as well as one of Beijing’s premier hotels.  But, much as with Bill Browder’s experiences in Putin’s Russia, (as told in Red Notice), Shum and his wife gradually became inconvenient for the CCP, and she was to disappear even while Shum himself escaped to the West. A riveting cautionary tale of how one superpower can operate. 

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Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By

By Timothy Wilson

Recommended on: 10th January 2018

Redirect is a great and thoughtful book.  It’s ostensibly about changing your interior dialogue—the story you tell yourself—in order to help you live a happier, more fulfilling life.  And there’s plenty of great information along those lines, told with riveting stories.  But Redirect is more than that—it’s also a book that helps you understand how well-meaning, but untested programs can harm the very people those programs are meant to help.

This book has resonated with us for years—it’s a “don’t miss” if you want to help yourself—and truly help others.

The audio version  of Redirect was narrated by Grover Gardner, who also narrated our own A Mind for Numbers.

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Remember It! The Names of People You Meet, All of Your Passwords, Where You Left Your Keys, and Everything Else You Tend to Forget

By Nelson Dellis

Recommended on: 5th June 2018

We were very lucky to receive a pre-publication copy of 4-time US memory champion Nelson Dellis’s new book Remember It! The Names of People You Meet, All of Your Passwords, Where You Left Your Keys, and Everything Else You Tend to Forget. Nelson’s book will be coming out next week—it’s the best book on how to develop your memory we’ve ever read. What’s terrific about Nelson’s book is that doesn’t just give the usual information about how to remember lists or sequences of numbers. Dellis provides all sorts of side bits of important everyday tips—like how to remember something important that occurs to you when you wake up in the middle of the night, how to remember where you’re parked, and how not to forget objects, like a purse (forgetting her purse is the bane of Barb’s existence). We can’t recommend this book more strongly!

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Rhythms of the Brain

By Gyorgy Buzsaki

Recommended on: 6th June 2023

Rhythms of the Brain, by Gyorgy Buzsaki. Ever wondered about the various rhythms—alpha, theta, gamma, and more—and how they play a role in our thinking?  Wonder no more, as this in-depth scientific expose walks you through why the brain’s rhythms are so important, and how those rhythms are thought to arise. Buzsaki’s first chapters cover the speed of neural signals and how this matters in large and small mammals.  The book then moves on to describe the different types of oscillators, and how the pulsating signals of individual neurons can aggregate to sinusoidal-appearing waves.  One might wonder how neurons can remain in sync even without direct connections—Buzsaki reveals how the brain’s rhythms can synchronize spatially separated areas, rather like a handful of corks rising and falling together on waves of water. In some sense, the brain’s rhythmic waves can serve as the forward “ticks” of a clock. Theta waves in particular seem to serve as discrete channels that hold higher frequency gamma wave information within them. As Buzsaki notes:  “Linear time is a major feature of our Western cultural world-view, and the experience of time flowing between past, present, and future is intricately tied to everyday logic, predictions, and linear causation… What I am proposing in this volume is that neuronal oscillations are essential for these deepest and most general functions.”  

This is a seminal, not-to-be-missed book in neuroscientific literature.

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Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations

By Ronen Bergman

Recommended on: 27th July 2019

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, by Ronen Bergman. This fascinating book has been named one of the best books of the year by The Economist, The New York Times Book Review, BBC History Magazine, and Kirkus Reviews. It is a tour de force explanation of how a people who have suffered through the Holocaust and myriad other horrors through the centuries have developed a “kill first” approach as an integral part of their approach to organized terrorism. As Bergman describes, this policy has been adopted by others in the West, for example, Barack Obama. When successful, targeted killings are very effective at saving lives. When unsuccessful—well, read the book to find out. As spy-master extraordinaire John le Carré writes: “A remarkable feat of fearless and responsible reporting . . . important, timely, and informative.” [Hat tip Ali Ali Binazir MD MPhil] Of course, other countries have related programs—perhaps not as tightly monitored, benevolently intentioned, or ultimately as accountable to the public.

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Running the Room: The Teacher’s Guide to Behaviour

By Tom Bennett

Recommended on: 21st September 2022

Running the Room: The Teacher’s Guide to Behaviour, by Tom Bennett. This book is a masterpiece of specific advice about how to handle a classroom, written by a former nightclub manager turned teacher who has become one of the world’s leading experts on classroom management. It’s virtually impossible to summarize the many pithy insights of this extraordinary book, but this snippet gives a sense of the approach:

 “I once saw behaviour deteriorate from excellent to terrible in a matter of a few weeks. The school had a challenging demographic, but the behaviour was good because the senior staff led a team of motivated teachers in a rigorous way. Then along came a new head, whose first words to the students were, ‘I want you to see me as a friend,’ and ‘I will always give you another chance.’ Within a week, the most ambitious of students had tested his word and found that he would indeed permit anything as long as they thought he was a nice guy. Within a second week, the change in behaviour was palpable. A month later, with little support, teachers started to give up. The school went into a terminal nose spin. But it was OK: the school head moved on after a few years to another school, and no one was hurt apart from thousands of children who had their futures shredded by naivety, incompetence and the fairy tales we tell ourselves to feel good.”

Tom’s book, along with his company’s training, provides critical information that should be taught in every pedagogical program:

  • How to deal with students who are late
  • What are the best ways to work with parents?
  • Managing cover lessons successfully
  • How to tame smartphones
  • The best way to design a seating plan
  • How to start the lesson for the first time
  • Dealing with low-level disruption
  • Getting the class quiet when you – and they – need it most

Whatever your approach to teaching (or parenting), you will almost certainly benefit from this book. A bonus is that Tom is a funny, insightful writeryou’ll enjoy even as you are learning.

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SELF Journal: Undated 13-Week Planning, Productivity and Positivity System for Max Achievement and Goal Success — Track Gratitude, Habits and Goals Daily and Weekly

By BestSelf

Recommended on: 25th December 2020

SELF Journal: Undated 13-Week Planning, Productivity and Positivity System for Max Achievement and Goal Success — Track Gratitude, Habits and Goals Daily and Weekly, by BestSelf.  We were given this wonderful little book not long ago, and were stunned by both its simplicity and effectiveness.  Just as is recommended in one of our favorite MOOCs (Yale’s The Science of Well-Being), each day begins with a little place where you can annotate what you are grateful for–this helps you start your day on the right foot. (There are many other proven tricks from positive psychology interwoven in the pages.) The journal serves as a coach to help you prioritize your most critical tasks and budget your time, including your also-important time off, effectively. The SELF Journal is also a flexible book that allows you to skip vacation days, even while it helps you be consistent in heading toward your long-term goals.  We love it!  If you are looking to start 2021 off with a productive, up beat bang, this is the book to get!

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Set it & Forget it: Are you ready to transform your sleep?

By Daniel Erichsen

Recommended on: 31st August 2021

Set it & Forget it: Are you ready to transform your sleep? by Daniel Erichsen.  Barb’s been doing her darndest over these past few years to try to make sure she gets at least eight hours of sleep most evenings.  Well, there’s been a problem with that.  Mostly, she just can’t get eight hours of sleep—instead, she generally spends an hour or two staring into the darkness trying to fall asleep.

Enter Daniel Erichsen’s intriguing, easy-to-read but potentially life-changing Set it & Forget itDr. Erichsen is a pediatrician who has also studied sleep medicine at the University of Chicago—his passion is helping people to improve their sleep.  His counterintuitive advice?  We generally don’t need as much sleep as the “experts” say.  Erichsen suggests simple, workable approaches for detecting when you are truly sleepy, (as opposed to just tired), and perhaps most importantly, he provides advice for reducing the stress that causes so many of us to lose sleep. (Oddly enough, one of the most common stressors on top of all our other daily stressors is that we stress about not getting enough sleep!)  If you have trouble sleeping, this thought-provoking book, and other related books and podcasts by Dr. Erichsen, may help bring you to your dreams.

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Seven Essentials for Business Success

By George Siedel

Recommended on: 17th September 2021

Seven Essentials for Business Success, by George Seidel. Since we aren’t in the world of business, we found Dr. Seidel’s description of the world of business education, and the philosophy of great professor-teachers in business, to be intriguing.  The discussion is filled with nuggets of thought-provoking, teaching-related information we’d never encountered before, as for example: 

“In 1995, Robert Coles, a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard University, published an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled ‘The Disparity Between Intellect and Character.’ He wrote the essay after meeting with a student who was distraught after another student propositioned her on more than one occasion. She recounted to Professor Coles that she had ‘taken two moral-reasoning courses with [the other student], and I’m sure he’s gotten As in both of them—and look at how he behaves with me, and I’m sure with others.’ She went on to note, ‘I’ve been taking all these philosophy courses, and we talk about what’s true, what’s important, what’s good. Well, how do you teach people to be good?’”

Now that’s an important question for us as teachers!

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Seven Myths About Education

By Daisy Christodoulou

Recommended on: 6th November 2018

As you can tell, we’ve been heavy into education books recently (don’t worry–we’ll be back soon to other topics!) Our most recent book, Seven Myths About Education, by Daisy Christodoulou, is one of the best on education that we’ve ever read. Daisy’s broad experience in teaching, coupled with her critical thinking skills, provide counter-intuitive insight into how we can be fooled into thinking some ways of teaching are better, when they’re actually worse. Her observations involve seven widely held beliefs that are harming students:

  • Facts prevent understanding  
  • Teacher-led instruction is passive   
  • The 21st century fundamentally changes everything   
  • You can always just look it up   
  • We should teach transferable skills   
  • Projects and activities are the best way to learn   
  • Teaching knowledge is indoctrination.

Although this book was written for UK audiences, its findings are perfectly translatable to what is going on in the US. This powerful book is a “must read” for any parent, or K-12 teacher, professor, or administrator.

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Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World

By Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell

Recommended on: 16th August 2021

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World, by Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell. In keeping with our enthusiasm for alcoholic beverages, and our own past experiences in the world of Marxist thinking, (both alcohol and Marxism feature in Barb’s Hair of the Dog: Tales from a Russian Trawler), we couldn’t help but be tickled by Lawson and Powell’s enlightening tales of travel through socialist societies. As Bob and Ben note: “In this book … we’re aiming for a popular audience that will appreciate not just our economic insights but our down-to-earth honesty. We wrote this book because too many people seem to be dangerously ignorant of what socialism is, how it functions, and its historical track record. We also wanted to get drunk in Cuba, and this was a great way to write off our expenses.” 

This not-to-be-missed book describes what’s really happening on the ground in socialist countries throughout the world—not just relating blinkered academic theory. Plus… beer.

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Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime

By Sean Carroll

Recommended on: 10th October 2020

Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime, by Sean Carroll. We have to admit, we know nothing about quantum physics. (Well, at least Barb, who is writing this review, knew nothing about quantum physics. Terry, on the other hand, studied relativity with John Wheeler at Princeton, so he can dish on quanta when he feels like it.) Sean Carroll is a magnificent writer—understandably, this book became an instant New York Times best seller.  Just take a gander at this paragraph: “Note the subtle difference between Planck’s suggestion and Einstein’s. Planck says that light of a fixed frequency is emitted in certain energy amounts, while Einstein says that’s because light literally is discrete particles. It’s the difference between saying that a certain coffee machine makes exactly one cup at a time, and saying that coffee only exists in the form of one-cup-size amounts. That might make sense when we’re talking about matter particles like electrons and protons, but just a few decades earlier Maxwell had triumphantly explained that light was a wave, not a particle. Einstein’s proposal was threatening to undo that triumph. Planck himself was reluctant to accept this wild new idea, but it did explain the data. In a wild new idea’s search for acceptance, that’s a powerful advantage to have.”

Barb can’t say she emerged from Something Deeply Hidden having a good grasp of quantum physics, (although maybe another version of her in a different world does), but she now has a much greater appreciation for some of the discipline’s oddly beautiful ideas. Also, it’s interesting to know that Schrödinger didn’t like cats. 

Enjoy!

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Sony Noise Cancelling Headphones

Recommended on: 19th March 2018

These are expensive, but they’re nice in that you can not only listen to your laptop (or whatever) on a plane, but you also look sophisticated rather than dorky. (For dorky but cheap, see here  Somewhat less dorky but still cheap, try here.)

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Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

By Simon Sebag Montefiore

Recommended on: 18th November 2019

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag Montefiore. This extraordinarily well-researched volume reveals what can happen when a vicious, brutal, but charming-whenever-necessary killer climbs to power in a system that has nothing by way of checks and balances. Even Churchill—no fool when it came to Hitler’s intentions, was wowed by Stalin—a man who enjoyed the mental as well as physical torture of all who opposed him. Montefiore describes the strange family and public life of a man who led one of history’s greatest democides. It’s hard to convey just how difficult life was for anyone who thought independently, or even anyone who made a simple joke, in Stalin’s time—Montefiore does an outstanding job at this virtually indescribable task. An extraordinary book.

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Still Alice

By Lisa Genova

Recommended on: 29th November 2017

Still Alice is a book that has resonated amazingly with the public–it has over 5,000 reviews on Amazon, with an overall 4.7 out of 5.0 star rating.  Barb’s father passed from Alzheimer’s–this book gives a rare, “from the inside” perspective of what it’s like to live with this disease.

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Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight

By William Davis

Recommended on: 25th February 2022

Super Gut: A Four-Week Plan to Reprogram Your Microbiome, Restore Health, and Lose Weight, by William Davis, MD.

It is shocking how many syndromes are being connected to the gut biome—including not only autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis but even heart disease such as atherosclerosis as well as Alzheimer’s disease.  This informative book lays out interesting approaches to getting your gut biome “in gear.”  What’s encouraging is that the book isn’t recommending the author’s own products as a cure-all, but instead makes detailed recommendations for how to inexpensively grow your own biome replenishment yogurts using anything from cows’ milk to nut milks to even salsa or hummus.  You might be surprised to learn that just purchasing probiotic species such as Lactobacillus reuteri is not enough—different strains (for example, Lactobacillus reuteri DSM 17938) can have profoundly different effects.  Purchasing a bacteria without knowing the strain, in other words, can be akin to getting a dog without knowing whether it’s a Chihuahua or a Great Dane. This is a fascinating book!

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Taking the Stress Out of Homework

By Abby Freireich and Brian Platzer

Recommended on: 4th January 2021

Taking the Stress Out of Homework: Organizational, Content-Specific, and Test-Prep Strategies to Help Your Children Help Themselves, by Abby Freireich and Brian Platzer. This wonderful book is a much-needed masterpiece—chock-full of simple, easy-to-implement ideas that will enable you to help your child whatever your own background or skill levels. One thing we particularly like about this book is that it shows you exactly how to be most effective with your help, whether the topic is math, reading, writing, or what-have-you. For example, Freireich and Platzer write:

“We’re about to walk you through some of the most common mistakes we see our students make. But the real question is: How are you supposed to give all this advice?

“If Lisa’s  mom sat her down and said, ‘Use correct homophones and don’t write long sentences and watch out for pronoun antecedents and don’t repeat words and avoid cliches,’ Lisa would run out of the room screaming.

“If your child is open to your feedback, make it a game that allows her to do the critical thinking, rather than simply stating which errors need to be corrected.  Point to a sentence or line of text, and ask them if they can identify two or three mechanical or grammatical errors.  This puts them in the driver’s seat (in editing, we should have revised this cliché!) and means that they are more likely to internalize the edits needed.”

If you are a parent or caregiver, you want this book—it provides the best material we know of to help you help your child learn better. Also good as an audio read.

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Teach for Attention! A Tool Belt of Strategies for Engaging Students with Attention Challenges

By Ezra Werb

Recommended on: 10th June 2021

Teach for Attention! A Tool Belt of Strategies for Engaging Students with Attention Challenges, by Ezra Werb. This brief, easy-to-read book provides “from the trenches” teaching strategies for students with ADHD, low self-confidence, distraction, and other attention challenges. There are dozens of true classroom stories that show the strategies in action. Ezra is an educational therapist working with students with attention
 deficits, learning challenges, and spectrum disorders, so his insights can definitely help build your teaching repertoire if you are working with attentionally-challenged students.

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Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College

By Doug Lemov, Joaquin Hernandez, and Jennifer Kim

Recommended on: 8th February 2020

Teach Like a Champion 2.0: 62 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College, by Doug Lemov, Joaquin Hernandez, and Jennifer Kim. It’s no wonder Lemov’s book has long been a runaway bestseller in the world of teaching. It is, quite simply, the best comprehensive book on K-12 teaching we’ve ever read, with some of its lessons being worthwhile for instructors of any kind, whether in academia or business.

Lemov took an unusual approach to researching this book. He and his team took hundreds of hours of video of outstanding teachers in action so as to carefully watch and deconstruct their magic. In this way, Lemov is able to get a new perspective on almost everything imaginable about good teachingranging from the when, where, and why of giving little encouraging nods, to getting students enthralled in material, to how to have that star quality that automatically captures students’ attention.  (Hintit involves what they call the military drill sergeant’s “command voice.”)

Barb can’t help but reflect on her many engineering and math professors who could have learned so much by reading Lemov’s book. In fact, one thing she finds interesting about learning and education is that academia, business, and K12 are often so dissociated from one another, even though each could benefit from the cross-pollination between different professions. Barb is often asked “So, what is your specialty in education?”  Her answer? “Academia and business and K12, because all three inform one another.” Her background as a professor of engineering gives her a fresh perspective that helps her see the difference between the fantastic in educationlike Lemov’s bookversus the fad.

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Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation

By Saundra McGuire

Recommended on: 31st August 2018

This week’s book recommendation is Saundra McGuire’s Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation. We thought we knew a lot about how to help students succeed, but Saundra’s inspiring book reframed the topic even more positively for us, and gave us a lot of great new strategies.  (Barb was lucky enough to speak with Saundra about her book a few days ago—Saundra herself is a force to be reckoned with in helping reshape attitudes towards student learning.)

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Teachers vs Tech? The Case for an Ed Tech Revolution

By Daisy Christodoulou

Recommended on: 8th October 2020

Teachers vs Tech? The Case for an Ed Tech Revolution, by Daisy Christodoulou. We’re tremendous fans of “force of nature” Daisy Christodoulou, author of Seven Myths about Education. In her newest book, Daisy makes the perceptive, balanced case for using technology for many critical teaching-related purposes, including personalized learning, make learning more active, and improving teachers’ reach and engagement with students. When combined with Daisy’s perceptive asides and experience, Teachers vs Tech makes for a compelling read.  

For example, think you can always “just look it up?” As Daisy shows, just looking things up can be worse than just being wrong—it can allow you and your students to be suckered by big tech into their self-serving, deceptive world. Want your students to learn independently? It’s not as simple as that—in fact, students don’t get better at learning independently by just learning independently. Think a video project can help your students learn more about the material? Think again—such a project can ultimately help students learn far more about video-making than about what you’re actually trying to teach.

Amongst all her intriguing perspectives, Daisy has a special insight into rubrics, and why rubrics can mislead teachers into believing students understand the material when they don’t. (Here is some of her published research on the topic.)  Indeed, there is excellent research evidence that just because a student may mouth or write the words you want to hear does not mean they actually understand what you want them to understand.

In the end, Daisy writes like a great teacher—we especially liked the illustrations and straightforward layout that made Daisy’s ideas easier to “chunk” and internalize. In these pandemic days, teachers and parents are pausing to reset their expectations about what the online world can bring to education. Daisy’s book provides an intriguing guide to what lies ahead.

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Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation

By Peter Cozzens

Recommended on: 24th November 2020

Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Shawnee Brothers Who Defied a Nation, by Peter Cozzens.  Tenskwatawa was a klutz who, as a youth, managed to shoot one of his eyes out with an arrow—he became a debauched alcoholic living on handouts. But, as Cozzens book reveals, after a near-death experience, Tenskwatawa turned away from alcohol and became known as the Prophet. Together with his brother, Tecumseh, the siblings worked hard against long odds to unite Native Americans against the American “Long Knives” who were constantly encroaching on Indian lands.  

This fascinating book gives insight into the margins of the nascent United States during the latter 1700s and early to mid-1800s. What makes the book all the more interesting is that, despite the heroic nature of their cause, It’s not like the siblings were perfect people. Tecumseh, who hated torture and treated even his enemies with respect, abandoned women and divorced his wives with the most trivial of excuses, even such minor transgressions as a few feathers left on a plucked turkey. And the Prophet was still a self-serving wheeler dealer even after his near-death experience—although he never drank again.

This fascinating, little known era of history about iconic Americans also is a fine book for audio listening (although you may want to keep your cell phone handy to look up place names). Enjoy!

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TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

By Chris Anderson

Recommended on: 13th December 2017

We happened to pick up the book TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking, by Chris Anderson, the curator of TED. We’ll admit, we didn’t have great expectations—after all, the title sounds a bit like a how-to manual.  But instead, as we like to say in English, it knocked our socks off!  This riveting book should be read by anyone who needs to communicate with others (which means everyone), and especially by teachers.   Even as Anderson regales us with the intriguing and sometimes hilarious stories that lie behind the great TED talks, he gives all sorts of useful nuggets about how we grow to trust and learn from others.  Highly recommended, also in the Audible version, which is actually read by Chris Anderson.   And if you are looking for a more specific how-to manual on public speaking, we also recommend Nancy Duarte’s HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations.

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Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine

By Barry Strauss

Recommended on: 22nd April 2019

We greatly enjoyed the book Ten Caesars: Roman Emperors from Augustus to Constantine by Barry Strauss. We’ve long been interested in the Roman Empire, and it was a lot of fun romping through Strauss’s explanation of the Game-of-Thrones-like atmosphere that permeated the shenanigans of the various regimes.  By focusing on ten of Rome’s most important rulers, Strauss cuts through the dizzying array of lesser figures who were perpetually offing one another, to instead give us a feel for the men and behind-the-scenes women who shaped history. Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Constantine—you may have heard the names, but Ten Caesars will help flesh them out and connect the dots between, so you can better understand an ancient world that, in surprising ways, held similarities to our own.

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The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity

By Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott

Recommended on: 27th January 2019

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott. We had never really thought about the consequences of lifespans in today’s world, where people have a good chance of living to 100.  Living so long means many societal changes–for one thing, it’s just not as possible to afford to retire at 65 and live comfortably over the next 35 years without having thought, and planned, wisely. In fact, retiring at 65 may not be the best option at all.  This book gives an insightful overview of how to effectively plan your own life, and reinvent yourself as necessary to live long and prosper.

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The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings

By Nick Gray

Recommended on: 16th June 2022

The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings, by Nick Gray. The more Barb has researched the neuroscience underlying how we learn, the more she (as a shy person simulating an extrovert) has discovered the importance of personal relationships, not only in learning, but in life.  Interacting with people with whom you have become familiar, as it turns out, activates the brain’s reward mechanisms.  It’s little wonder that we teachers like to use techniques such as “Think-Pair-Share,” and collaborative learning sessions sprinkled amongst the more difficult sessions of explicit instruction.

Which leads us right to Nick Gray’s delightful The 2-Hour Cocktail Party! (Nick himself, it should be pointed out, doesn’t drink, so alcohol isn’t at all necessary for Nick’s approach to work.)  The trick to activating those happy feelings of reward, remember, is not just interacting with people—it’s interacting with people with whom you are familiar.  How do you become familiar with people?  Invite them to a short cocktail party!  And that’s part of the trick—the party should be short.  Nick (in real life, one of the world’s nicest people) shows you how to comfortably set up the part, from sending out the first invitations, inviting your great guests (people you’ve wanted to meet!), pre-party prep, navigating the first twenty minutes, icebreakers, how to end on a high note, and what to do the day after.  

This is a wonderful book—Barb is planning her first party for after the launch of MOOC 3 of the Uncommon Sense Teaching specialization (Teaching Online) in two months! 

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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

By Stephen Covey

Recommended on: 1st February 2018

This month’s top book recommendation is the great classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, by Stephen Covey.  (Dr. Covey actually read the Audible version of his book. Don’t forget that you may be able to get two free audiobooks through this link.) There is a reason this book has been translated into 32 languages and has sold over 5 million copies. It is one of our personal, life-changing favorites—a synthesis of timeless principles for personal effectiveness that focus on character, rather than technique.  The stories he uses to convey key ideas help the ideas resonate unforgettably. We only wish that Dr. Covey were still alive to do a MOOC!

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The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change

By Stephen Covey

Recommended on: 13th December 2017

This month’s top book recommendation is the great classic The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, by Stephen Covey.  (Dr. Covey actually read the Audible version of his book. Don’t forget that you may be able to get two free audiobooks through this link.) There is a reason this book has been translated into translated into 32 languages and has sold over 5 million copies. It is one of our personal, life-changing favorites—a synthesis of timeless principles for personal effectiveness that focus on character, rather than technique.  The stories he uses to convey key ideas help the ideas resonate unforgettably. We only wish that Dr. Covey were still alive to do a MOOC!

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The AI Playbook

By Eric Siegel

Recommended on: 16th January 2024

The AI Playbook: Mastering the Rare Art of Machine Learning Deployment, by Eric Siegel. Whether you are an AI expert or know nothing about AI, this book will teach you, through compelling examples of success and failure, what machine learning projects are and how to implement them.  Siegel is a master story-teller, who starts us out by describing how the delivery company UPS implemented machine learning to streamline its business practices.  This may seem like a no-brainer, but at the time, economizing with the help of machine learning was pretty much the last thing on the mind of most UPS business executives.  Indeed, it’s easy to go off track with machine learning projects, which aren’t like simple plug-and-play computer products, but instead can involve entire swathes of a company’s different divisions. Through the corresponding sections of his book, Seigel guides us through what he terms “BizML Practice”:

  1. Value: Establish the deployment goal
  2. Target: Establish the prediction goal.
  3. Performance: Establish the evaluation metrics.
  4. Fuel: Prepare the data.
  5. Algorithm: Train the model.
  6. Launch: Deploy the model.

Seigel’s broad experience in every aspect of the field helps bring the practices he describes to life.  We LOVED this book and cannot recommend it more highly!

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The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

By Josh Waitzkin

Recommended on: 29th November 2017

We’ve just finished a fantastic book: The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance, by Josh Waitzkin.Waitzkin’s book provides a fantastic juxtaposition of the commonalities of learning, whether in mental or physical endeavours. (Not only was Waitzkin an eight-time National Chess Champion–he is also a world champion in martial arts.) Josh is a wonderful writer with a wealth of telling stories–his book is hard to put down. Good writing seems to run in the family: Josh’s father wrote Searching for Bobby Fischer: The Father of a Prodigy Observes the World of Chess, which we enjoyed when it first came out.  Josh’s experiences reinforce the importance of chunking. This is precisely what is emphasized by “expert on expertise” Anders Ericsson–see his excellent book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, which was another recent top pick, along with Mike Merzenich’s terrific Soft-Wired.)

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The Artist’s Quest for Inspiration

By Peggy Hadden

Recommended on: 26th June 2019

The Artist’s Quest for Inspiration, by Peggy Hadden. We were turned on to this book by Barb’s artist daughter Rachel, who has found it to be deeply inspirational for her work.

What we love about this book is its insights into how to look at life around you in a fresh way, and why these fresh perspectives are important. For example, Hadden talks about how seemingly silly questions can be valuable, giving the example of Dr. Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera: “One day, Dr. Land and his young daughter were walking on a beach when he stopped to take a photograph of her. “Can I see it now?” she asked. When told she’d have to wait until the film went to the lab, she wanted to know why. Although the question seemed dumb at the time, because all film had to be processed in a lab, it prompted Dr. Land to consider the need for faster-processing film.” Hadden gives example after example of practical exercises to help you redevelop the fresh eye you had as a child and overcome creative blocks. You don’t need to be an artist to gain creative insight from this book!

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The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

By James Weldon Johnson

Recommended on: 29th September 2018

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, by James Weldon Johnson, a polymath author, educator, lawyer, diplomat, songwriter, civil rights activist, and key figure in the history of the NAACP. Johnson’s book is actually a fictional account of a man of biracial heritage of the late 1800s and early 1900s who describes his experiences as the son of an African-American woman and a wealthy white aristocrat.  The astonishing musical gifts of the “Ex-Colored Man” (Johnson never supplies a name) are subverted by his horrifying experience in witnessing a lynching. This is a moving roman à clef that will haunt you.

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The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

By Benjamin Franklin

Recommended on: 1st October 2018

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, by Benjamin Franklin.  Although we read Walter Isaacson’s outstanding biography, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, we couldn’t resist digging deeper to see what Franklin himself wrote about his life.  Once we grew accustomed to Franklin’s style, we found the book to be a deeply insightful read. We were taken with Franklin’s quote of Pope:

“Men should be taught as if you taught them not,

And things unknown propos’d as things forgot.”

Many of you have already realized that is the approach we took with the creation of Learning How to Learn.  This is an inspiring book about how to improve both yourself and the lives of others.  Plus, who knew that Franklin almost made a living as a swimming instructor?

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The Battle Over the Butterflies of the Soul: Camillo Golgi, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, and the Birth of Neuroscience

By Wallace B. Mendelssohn, MD. 

Recommended on: 20th August 2023

The Battle Over the Butterflies of the Soul: Camillo Golgi, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, and the Birth of Neuroscience, by Wallace B. Mendelssohn, MD. 

One of the more intriguing rivalries in the history of science is that between the Italian Camillo Golgi and the Spaniard Santiago Ramón y Cajal—both of whom received the Nobel Prize for their interlinked discoveries.  Golgi’s staining methods gave Cajal the start of a methodology he refined to help him get a more comprehensive view of neurons.   Both scientists initially published in back-water journals, so it’s no surprise that each at first remained unaware of aspects of the other’s work.   Cajal would publish studies claiming results that Golgi had published earlier. The brash younger Cajal would write Golgi to challenge his theories aggressively—in particular, Golgi’s hypothesis that only a single, large interwebbed “reticulum” of cells was fused to form the brain’s neural networks. This short book by Dr. Mendelson describes the development of staining techniques in photography and neuroscience and examines the rivalry between the pair. Why was Golgi so stubborn—and wrong—in the face of overwhelming data? This book by psychiatrist Wallace Mendelson comes as close to what we can know today as the answer.

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The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

By Maria Konnikova

Recommended on: 29th September 2020

The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win, by Maria Konnikova. What a fantastic book! Maria has a doctorate in social psychology from Columbia. But instead of going into academia, after a bout of sad events in her family, and with the stalwart support of her husband, Maria decided to tackle the world of high stakes poker.  Armed only with her own chutzpah (she had no knowledge whatsoever of poker), and a deviously informative research paper, she convinced one of the world’s best poker players to take her on as a student. This extraordinary book tells her tale. What turns this book into a master work is that Konnikova turns her psychoanalysis skills on herself.  As she observes:

“What I will offer throughout is insight into decision making far removed from poker, a translation of what I’m learning in the casino to the decisions I make on a daily basis—and the crucial decisions that I make only rarely, but that carry particular import. From managing emotion, to reading other people, to cutting your losses and maximizing your gains, to psyching yourself up into the best version of yourself so that you can not only catch the bluffs of others but bluff successfully yourself, poker is endlessly applicable and revelatory. The mixture of chance and skill at the table is a mirror to that same mixture in our daily lives—and a way of learning to play within those parameters in superior fashion. Poker teaches you how and when you can take true control—and how you can deal with the elements of pure luck—in a way no other environment I’ve encountered has quite been able to do. What’s more, in an age of omnipresent distraction, poker reminds us just how critical close observation and presence are to achievement and success. How important it is to immerse yourself and to learn new things, truly. As Erik [Konnikova’s mentor] told me that first day, lesson one: pay attention. This book isn’t about how to play poker. It’s about how to play the world.”

This book is a wow—enjoy it now! (Also great for audio.)

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The Bilingual Brain

By Albert Costa

Recommended on: 6th July 2020

The Bilingual Brain, by Albert Costa.   We’re suckers for books on bilingualism, and this recent book, by multilingual Albert Costa, (who is in real life a leading researcher on bilingualism), really delivers the goods on what we know from neuroscience.  Unlike many authors who are in love with their discipline, Costa is an honest broker—he thoughtfully describes areas where research may be reflecting a bit of wishful thinking about the benefits of bilingualism. But he also has intriguing perspectives on how, for example, making decisions while speaking a foreign language can result in a more rational decision. As Costa notes: “I realized that we had discovered something interesting when I was explaining these results to my mother and son over lunch and they both said at the same time: ‘No way!’ If people who were more than fifty years apart in age were surprised by the same phenomenon, it was because they could not believe that their moral judgements, what most identified them as individuals, could be affected by such an insignificant thing as the language in which a moral dilemma is presented. And believe me, my stories almost always bore them.” If you’re trying to learn a new language, this book will give you fascinating insights into how your brain will change. Count us now as Costa fans! Also good for audio.

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The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age

By James Crabtree

Recommended on: 13th September 2018

This week, we read and enjoyed James Crabtree’s The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age. We’re always fascinated by India, but sometimes the unfamiliar names (to our US-based sensibilities) can make it hard to keep track of what’s going on. Crabtree solves the name-challenge by following outsized personalities with riveting stories, all in the context of what’s unfolding politically and financially in today’s India. This is an Amazon Best Book of July 2018—as the review notes, “Crabtree uses interviews and riveting reporting to give us a fascinating look into the sudden, sometimes shocking, and seemingly insurmountable rise of the Indian super-elite, as they surf the wave of globalism.”

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The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo

By Tom Reiss

Recommended on: 27th August 2021

We can always tell when we’ve got a great book to read when we’re so excited about it that we sneak reading in even during the day, when we’re supposed to be working. And just such a book is Tom Reiss’s The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.  This is a stunningly good book—to be deposited on Barb’s shelf of “favorite books of history.”  It’s always fantastic when you read a biography centered around a decent, caring, but daring human being who gives whatever it takes to do it right by his fellow humans.  

Just such a person was Alex Dumas, father of the famous novelist Alexandre Dumas, (author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers—whose key characters were clearly based on aspects of the novelist’s father). Alex, the son of a white marquis and a black enslaved woman, Marie-Cessette Dumas, was the first person of color in the French military to become general-in-chief of a French army. What an extraordinary man!  You can’t help but read about his exploits and come to believe he was an eighteenth-century superhero. 

Reiss provides a very different perspective on the French Revolution and its destroyer, Napoleon Bonaparte.  By providing an in-depth perspective of someone who knew Napoleon well, we come to see how narcissistic Napoleon actually was.  And where the French Revolution had begun the process of freeing all enslaved people in French dominions, Napoleon moved to re-enslave them and to re-institutionalize racism in France.  (Somehow, this is never emphasized in Napoleon biographies.)  In the end, however, it is the wonderful exploits of Alex Dumas that makes this extraordinary book such a delight to read. Also fantastic for audio.

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The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Recommended on: 10th January 2018

We’re embarrassed to admit that, despite all of the hullabaloo over the past decade, we had never previously gotten around to reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbablea no-holds-barred vivisection of so-called experts. Taleb doesn’t shy away from naming names—including Nobel Prize winners and the head of the Fed, and describing exactly how their financial guidance is, in some ways, more harmful than that of a cab driver.  

This is one of those books that we love because it confirms our own previous experiences with regards experts, particularly academic experts. As Taleb puts it, “Black Swan events are largely caused by people using measures way over their heads, instilling false confidence based on bogus results.”  Once you’re indoctrinated with a certain methodology, as for example, the value of the Gaussian curve, it’s hard to see when that curve gives dangerously misleading information.

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The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect

By Judea Pearl

Recommended on: 22nd April 2021

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by computer scientist and philosopher Judea Pearl. For anyone with the slightest interest in statistics, mathematics, or figuring out whether the public is being duped by yet another “solidly researched” fad, this book is for you.  Judea himself observes “In Statistics 101, every student learns to chant, ‘Correlation is not causation.’ With good reason! The rooster’s crow is highly correlated with the sunrise; yet it does not cause the sunrise. Unfortunately, statistics has fetishized this commonsense observation. It tells us that correlation is not causation, but it does not tell us what causation is. In vain will you search the index of a statistics textbook for an entry on ‘cause.’ Students are not allowed to say that X is the cause of Y—only that X and Y are ‘related’ or ‘associated.’

But, in large part due to Judea’s research, “…things have changed dramatically in the past three decades. Nowadays, thanks to carefully crafted causal models, contemporary scientists can address problems that would have once been considered unsolvable or even beyond the pale of scientific inquiry. For example, only a hundred years ago, the question of whether cigarette smoking causes a health hazard would have been considered unscientific. The mere mention of the words ‘cause’ or ‘effect’ would create a storm of objections in any reputable statistical journal. Even two decades ago, asking a statistician a question like ‘Was it the aspirin that stopped my headache?’ would have been like asking if he believed in voodoo. To quote an esteemed colleague of mine, it would be “‘more of a cocktail conversation topic than a scientific inquiry.’ But today, epidemiologists, social scientists, computer scientists, and at least some enlightened economists and statisticians pose such questions routinely and answer them with mathematical precision. To me, this change is nothing short of a revolution. I dare to call it the Causal Revolution, a scientific shakeup that embraces rather than denies our innate cognitive gift of understanding cause and effect.”

We love this book, which explains the new science of causality in a straightforward fashion. You’ll find yourself thinking about correlations in a new way.  

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The Bottleneck Rules: How To Get More Done at Work, Without Working Harder

By Clarke Ching

Recommended on: 14th February 2019

This week, we read the simple The Bottleneck Rules: How To Get More Done at Work, Without Working Harder, by Clarke Ching. This is a short, quick read that gives plenty of examples of bottlenecks (we’ll never look at lines in a coffee shop—or elsewhere—in the same way). Bottleneck Rules gets to some of the key ideas of the theory of constraints much more quickly than the famous The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement; at the same time, Clarke’s breezy style makes the book altogether fun. [Hat tip: José António Basto]

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The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy

By Peter W Huber, Mark P. Mills

Recommended on: 6th January 2022

The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy, by Peter W Huber, Mark P. Mills. This book is considered a classic in energy studies, lauded by everyone from Bill Gates to, well, the best economist we know in energy studies, Gabriel Calzada.  And we can see why.  Huber and Mills put it best:

“Energy thus consumes itself at every stage of its own production and conversion, from the grassland on the Serengeti to the gazelle to the black-maned lion of Ngorongoro crater, from strip mine and derrick to the power plant and car engine, and from the direct current (DC) power supply to the central processing unit (CPU). Not just a bit of energy, here and there, but most of it. Over two-thirds of all the fuel we consume gets run through thermal engines—and well over half of it never emerges as shaft power at the other end. Just over half of all the shaft power we produce is used to generate electricity—but another 10 percent of that power doesn’t make it out the far end of the generator. A rapidly growing share of our electricity is now used to transform ordinary grid electricity into computer-grade power—with another 10 to 20 percent overhead in this stage of conversion.

“Some small but growing fraction of high-grade electric power is used to produce laser light—and another 60 to 90 percent, or more, of the electric power dispatched to the laser never makes it into the blinding beam of light. These losses compound from end to end: overall, only 1 to 5 percent (at best) of the thermal energy locked up in the fossil fuel or the enriched uranium ever emerges at the other end of the pipeline, as a laser beam, or a stream of cool air from an air conditioner, or as 200 pounds of 40 mph mom-and-kids; all the rest goes into purifying, conditioning, and tailoring the power.”

This book will change your thinking about energy, which is, no matter how you slice it, crucial for survival and economic growth.

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The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron

By Benjamin Ehrlich

Recommended on: 10th April 2022

The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramón y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron, by Benjamin Ehrlich.  What a magnificent book!  Longtime fans of Learning How to Learn know that we’re in turn longtime fans of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience.  As a youngster, Santiago struggled markedly with his learning, and as this remarkably researched book describes.  We can’t help but wonder whether Santiago might have had dyslexia coupled with dyslexia’s frequent comorbid companion: ADHD. Hints and clues abound through the text:

  •  “…though he struggled to remember the spelling of words or their order within a sentence, Santiagüé never forgot an image… his talent allowed him to reproduce even the most intricate maps to perfection.
  •  “… his academic reputation was far from stellar. Cajal ‘was the typical student who was inattentive, lazy, disobedient, and annoying, a nightmare for his parents, teachers, and patrons,’ one teacher at Huesca recalled. He ‘will only stop in jail,’ predicted another, ‘if they do not hang him first.’
  • “[Santiago] passed his examinations at the end of the year in Latin I , Castilian I , Principles and Exercises in Arithmetic, and Christian History and Doctrine , earning the lowest possible grades—no doubt aided by the fact that [his father] had performed a life-saving surgery on the wife of one of the examination judges.
  • “Careful not to slacken ‘the creative tension of the mind,’ he avoided gossiping and reading newspapers , ceased writing short stories , abandoned the study of hypnotism , and even quit playing chess . He exercised his will not because he was uninterested in the world around him but precisely because he knew himself to be so distractible.  [Those with ADHD can have hyperfocus in what they are interested in—but also be easily distractable.]
  • “All who had known the Nobel Prize winner as a young delinquent responded with the same expression: utter shock.”

Cajal was a fabulously gifted and prescient researcher who pushed back against the stodgy “academic reactionists“ who, then as now, clung to outmoded ideas.  (One of Cajal’s colleagues disparaged the new truths of microscopy as “pure fantasy.”) This is a brilliant, beautifully-written book for all who wish to have a sense of how neuroscience was moved to a solid, modern foundation. A great biography of a great man.

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The Brave Learner: Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life

By Julie Bogart

Recommended on: 7th February 2019

Julie Bogart’s written a magnificently helpful book: The Brave Learner: Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life.  Barb’s cover blurb says it all: “A masterpiece. This is the deepest, most meaningful book on parenting I have ever read. If you want to raise your child to be a happy learner, whether via homeschooling or conventional schooling, read this book.” If you are a parent or parent-to-be, get this book!  In these times of COVID and stay-at-home parenting, this book is invaluable. If you’re looking for writing guidance for your kid’s writing, also check out Julie’s website, Brave Writer.

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The Breakdown of Higher Education

By John M. Ellis

Recommended on: 22nd June 2020

The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done, by John M. Ellis. This provocative book provides a sobering analysis of what is unfolding on college campuses today—a phenomenon similar to that which Barb experienced in her past work with the Soviet communists. (All of which ultimately led to Chernobyl, because censorship under communism reigned supreme.)  Key graf: “Censorship on college campuses concerning questions where the opinions of thoughtful people differ is contrary to what we have always thought about higher education. Until recently, universities dealt in precise argument using evidence that is systematically gathered and carefully analyzed—not in ruthlessly enforced uniformity of opinion based on arbitrary political dogma. That is exactly the kind of anti-intellectual behavior that we expect universities to remedy—it’s what we have them for. If those institutions now routinely resort to this irrational thuggery, what is the point of them? We already see enough of that in the wider world. Academics who behave in this way are really telling us not only that they don’t do university-level thinking, researching, or analyzing of issues, but that they won’t allow anyone else on campus to do it either.”  The Breakdown of Higher Education explores, in great detail, the consequences in higher education of Pathological Altruism.

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The Bridge at Andau: The Compelling True Story of a Brave, Embattled People

By James A. Michener

Recommended on: 25th February 2022

The Bridge at Andau: The Compelling True Story of a Brave, Embattled People, by James A. Michener. In an eerie coincidence, we have just finished reading Mitchener’s riveting book on the doomed Hungarian revolution of 1956.  (Barb’s platoon sergeant in West Germany during the 1970s was an escapee from Hungary.) The Bridge at Andau provides insight into today’s equally appalling invasion by Russia of Ukraine as it tells the story of the brave Hungarian resistance to the ravages of communism and predations of the Russians.

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The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning

By Richard E. Mayer

Recommended on: 30th November 2018

The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, 2nd edn, edited by Richard E. Mayer. If you want to go even deeper into the principles of how human beings learn effectively, you can’t do better than this marvelous 900 page, nearly five-pound behemoth of a book. It goes heavily into the research that helps guide our understanding of how human beings learn. The basic premise is that humans learn better when they can both see and hear what they’re learning–Mayer and his contributors give great insight into why this is true. Hardcover (not e-book) copy is recommended.

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The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery

By Dr. Jason Fung

Recommended on: 17th March 2021

The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery, by Dr. Jason Fung.  This is an extraordinarily insightful book. If you simply have an interest in a disease that has killed far more than COVID has, or you fear cancer might be in the future for you or a loved one, this book will give you ideas for subtle tweaks that could make an enormous difference in what unfolds long term.

As the book begins, you might think—well, been there, done that—the book’s just describing how it’s carcinogens that cause cancer.  Oh yes, and maybe genetics.  But in Dr. Fung’s masterful hands, you gradually learn that cancer often involves a process where cells revert to primordial states. In these states, rather than playing nicely with the rest of the cells of the body, malignant cancers forge ahead on their own ancient kill-or-be-killed fashion, using ancient anaerobic pathways to fuel themselves while poisoning other cells and gaining building materials for new malignancies.  

You will gain extraordinary insight into cancer that is often not conveyed by cancer experts.  This is a not-to-be-missed book. Also great for audio.

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The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

By Bryan Caplan

Recommended on: 15th February 2018

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, by Bryan Caplan. If you are in any way involved in education, or you think education is important (as we do!), this book will make you uncomfortable. But unlike The New Education, The Case Against Education is rigorously argued, and it will force you to examine the premises of your support for learning. Ultimately, we found that this book caused us to respect real learning even more.  Strongly recommended.

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The Cattle Kingdom

By Christopher Knowlton

Recommended on: 25th April 2021

The Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West, by Christopher Knowlton. What an eye-popping read! Many North Americans grow up familiar with cowboys, cattle barons, and the battle of barbed wire fences in the Western US, along with haute cuisine (at least as haute as American cuisine could get) at the legendary Delmonico’s Steakhouses in New York City. And North Americans know at least a little about the meatpacking industry of Chicago and its accompanying scandals.  They may even be familiar with iconic, laconic, literary figures like Shane and the Virginian (an apparent legacy of European aristocracy). 

But until the publication of The Cattle Kingdom, few of us had the opportunity to put together the disparate pieces to understand this important era in US history. We know why the buffalo disappeared (a horrific addendum to the genocidal predations on Native Americans), but Knowlton helps us understand how cattle arose so quickly to take the place of buffalo, why the life of a cattleman became so popular, and how the whole enterprise came crushing finale with the Johnson County war, when local newspapers essentially owned by the elite, wealthy cattlemen spurred an insurrection allowing them to quite literally get away with murder.

This is an in-depth look at virtually every aspect of the history of the cowboy west, from the major players (including fascinating discussions of Teddy Roosevelt, the father of the American conservation movement),  to saddles, barbed wire, the economics of cattle rearing, British attitudes of “I can do what I want with my land,” and of course, the “Big Die Up,” where millions of cattle died in one horrific winter—officially sealing the end to the cattle kingdom. From about 1850 to 1900, the US Kingdom of Cattle was the equivalent to today’s Silicon Empire. A remarkable work of history. Also great for audio listening. [Hat tip, Ryan Holiday.]

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The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism

By Olivia Fox Cabane

Recommended on: 8th September 2021

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism, by Olivia Fox Cabane.  Every once in a while, it’s good to return to a book that’s shown its worth through the years.  Just such a book is The Charisma Myth, which is one of the best books we’ve ever read about how to get along with people while simultaneously being more persuasive, influential, inspiring, and yes, charming. (Who knew that charm could be taught?)  If you feel uncomfortable in meeting people and interacting in public settings, this is one of the best books we could suggest to help.  Also good for audio.

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The Checklist Manifesto

By Atul Gawande

Recommended on: 19th May 2019

The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande. Gawande is actually perhaps best known for The Checklist Manifesto, so, having read Complications and been converted into lifelong Gawande fans, we couldn’t resist picking up this important book. The biggest breakthroughs in life are often due to surprisingly simple ideas, and the Checklist Manifesto reveals how simple checklists make an extraordinary difference in industry after industry, including, as it turns out, surgery.  (Is it possible that checklists of the sort Gawande describes could help teachers as they lift students off for learning?) Great, thought-provoking book.

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The Chiffon Trenches

By André Leon Talley

Recommended on: 4th June 2020

The Chiffon Trenches, by André Leon Talley. Barb’s own sense of fashion tends toward frumpy. So she was fascinated to read André’s descriptions of life at the highest levels of fashionhe was friends or colleagues with practically every major figure in high fashion over the past fifty years, including Karl Lagerfeld, Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, Oscar de la Renta, Halston, Yves Saint Laurent, and Oscar de la Renta. As a black, gay fashion maven inspired by both his Southern roots and his faith, André opened new doors of diversity in an industry struggling with a history of racism, prejudice, and bias. A very elegant and readable book, as “bespoke” as André’s extraordinary sense of fashion.

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The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure

By Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

Recommended on: 21st February 2019

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Where Campbell and Manning’s Rise of Victimhood Culture views the microaggression, safe space, and trigger warning trends from a larger perspective, as sociologists, Lukianoff and Haidt’s book also goes into more depth at a personal level about how these kinds of trends can be harmful. But this is actually an uplifting book overall, with plenty of insights from cognitive behavioral therapy to help you get, and keep, your own life in order.

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The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure

By Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

Recommended on: 19th December 2017

Barb is a big fan of Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. This book will be a very important part of the public conversation when it’s published on July 17, 2018.  Pre-order to be first in line for a copy!

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The Courage to Grow: How Acton Academy Turns Learning Upside Down

By Laura Sandefer

Recommended on: 26th April 2018

The Courage to Grow: How Acton Academy Turns Learning Upside Down, by Laura Sandefer.  The Acton Academies are private schools that were created to solve precisely the types of problems discussed in Levine’s Price of Privilege.  Laura Sandefer tells a personal story of her own children, and how and why she and her husband Jeff chose to develop a new system of schooling that focuses on the hero’s journey—and vaults students well above their standard grade level. (Incidentally, Jeff Sandefer, with his MBA from Harvard, was named by BusinessWeek as one of the top Entrepreneurship professors in the United States and by The Economist magazine as one of the top Business School professors in the world.) Acton Academies are spreading quickly worldwide, and it’s little wonder, because the schools embrace personal accountability even as they provide powerful learning opportunities for children. An honest, forthright, deeply thought-provoking book about what an education could and should be. (Audio version read by Laura Sandefer herself.)

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The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love—Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits

By Judson Brewer

Recommended on: 30th June 2020

The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love—Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits, by Judson Brewer. For years, we’ve been looking for a good book that gives insight on the science of meditation. This book is a great one that goes far beyond simple addiction and gets to the heart of issues such as why our minds get “stuck” on people who annoy us, and squirrel-like thoughts that can keep us from focusing as we’d like. 

Amongst many quotable gems, we liked how Judson described what the “RAIN” process of what to do when getting caught up in obsessive thinking: “RECOGNIZE/RELAX into what is arising (for example, your craving) ACCEPT/ALLOW it to be there INVESTIGATE bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts (for example, ask, ‘What is happening in my body or mind right now?’). NOTE what is happening from moment to moment The N is a slight modification of … ‘nonidentification.’ The idea is that we identify with or get caught up in the object that we are aware of.” Also nice for audio. [Hat tip: Mako Haruta]

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The Deep Learning Revolution

By Terrence Sejnowski

Recommended on: 25th October 2018

The Deep Learning Revolution, by Terrence Sejnowski.  Barb had the chance to read this superlative book pre-press, and she has a beautiful hard copy beside her as she writes this. If you are interested in how we got to driverless cars, automated translations, eerily human-like conversations with automatons, and uncannily adept opponents in chess and Go, you can’t miss this fantastic book by our very own Terry Sejnowski. Terry’s many decades of experiences at the pinnacle of discovery in neural processing and artificial intelligence give him an irreplaceably broad perspective. Learn how the obstruction of a few key players delayed the advent of artificial intelligence by decades  and the future direction of deep learning networks in everything from gaming. The deep learning revolution has brought us driverless cars, the greatly improved Google Translate, fluent conversations with Siri and Alexa, and enormous profits from automated trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Deep learning networks can play poker better than professional poker players and defeat a world champion at Go. In this book, Terry Sejnowski explains how deep learning went from being an arcane academic field to a disruptive technology in the information economy.

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The Distributed Classroom

By David Joyner and Charles Isbell

Recommended on: 31st May 2022

The Distributed Classroom, by David Joyner and Charles Isbell. Online teaching has a sometimes confusing welter of terminology. Common buzz words include synchronous, asynchronous, remote, flipped, hybrid (blended), and hyflex. (This article provides a quick overview of what these terms mean.)  Where Joyner and Isbell’s book comes in is to provide an encompassing perspective on how the many different forms of online learning can be used by universities, high schools, and other educational institutions to meet the needs of diverse populations.  Both authors have been deeply involved in the development of Georgia Tech’s outstanding Online Master of Science in Computer Science (or OMSCS) degree, which has captured 10% of the market for US computer science masters degrees and has become one of (if not the) largest masters program in the world due to its quality, accessibility, and low price. If you are interested in creating better online programs, this book is worth your time.

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The Education of Eva Moskowitz: A Memoir

By Eva Moskowitz

Recommended on: 3rd May 2019

The Education of Eva Moskowitz: A Memoir, by Eva Moskowitz. What a wonderful and eye-opening book about the educational system! Eva Moskowitz is a take-no-prisoners, never-blink pioneer in the K-12 sector. A lifelong Democrat, Moskowitz understands politics through her participation at a variety of levels. She came to the conclusion that education was the place where her natural talents could have the biggest impact, because it was most in need of reform. If you want to truly understand the pernicious effects that American education-related unions have had on students’ access to quality education, read this book. Moskowitz names names of the cabal of successfully sinister leaders who have succeeded in harming children and wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars through subterfuge and intimidation, all under the guise of helping children.

Unions can do important and valuable work, but if you think unions and their leaders are always good, you might read  I Heard You Paint Houses, about the Teamsters and their notoriously “disappeared” leader Jimmy Hoffa. Incidentally, in Barb’s experience, teachers unions in other countries can be far more common-sense supportive of students themselves, instead of just teachers.

Moskowitz’s book also shows how one should take newspaper reporting on education by ideologically, rather than factually, motivated journalists with a boatload of salt. With people like Moskowitz involved, there’s hope for the disadvantaged students most in need of a sound education. [Hat tip, Roman Hardgrave.]

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The Ego Is the Enemy

By Ryan Holiday

Recommended on: 13th December 2017

Lately, we’ve found ourselves caught up in Ryan Holiday’s thought-provoking books.  We found a lot to like in his The Ego Is the Enemy, (Audible version here) which provides a refreshing break from today’s relentless onslaught of books about successful egotists. Ryan’s reflections on his own ego-related failures, as well as well as those of intriguing people through history, can give you good strategies for avoiding these problems yourself. Ryan’s excellent related book which has understandably developed a cult following is The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph (Audible here).

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The Elements of Education for Teachers: 50 Research Based Principles Every Educator Should Know

By Austin Volz, Julia Higdon, William Lidwell

Recommended on: 20th April 2020

The Elements of Education for Teachers: 50 Research Based Principles Every Educator Should Know, by Austin Volz, Julia Higdon, William Lidwell. When reading books about good teaching, it can easy to become overwhelmed with a flurry of approaches. The Elements takes a step back and focuses on the best approaches, with pithy summaries that help you know exactly what to do without becoming overwhelmed.  Elements doesn’t just take the easy path—it describes, for example, when and why meta-analyses, despite their value, must be taken with a grain of salt. And for some situations direct instruction just doesn’t work so well: “For example, rather than abstractly teaching a child how to ride a bike, it is more productive to first allow them to try and then provide feedback and guidance.” A solid, deeply insightful overview that will strengthen your understanding of the foundations of teaching.

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The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience Is Changing How We Think About PTSD

By George A. Bonanno

Recommended on: 28th September 2021

The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience Is Changing How We Think About PTSD, by George A. Bonanno. Bonanno argues that we vastly overestimate how common PTSD is, and we often fail to recognize how resilient people really are. In fact, many relatively new ideas about stress and how to handle it can actually exacerbate stressful feelings. Take mindfulness, for example—as Bonanno points out, not only is there not good evidence for mindfulness’s efficacy in helping with recovery from trauma, there is actually some evidence that it could be detrimental. As Bonanno notes: “A group of mindfulness experts recently cautioned, in a paper published in a leading psychology journal, that misinformation about the effectiveness of mindfulness can mislead people, and can even lead to harm. An alarming number of published studies and case reports have linked meditation to serious side effects, including increased anxiety, panic, disorientation, hallucinations, and depersonalization—the feeling of being disconnected from oneself. It can also cause people who have gone through potentially traumatic events to reexperience memories of these events.”

So what does Bonanno recommend to end trauma? Flexibility—realizing that there is no “one-size-fits-all” ways to handle trauma. For example, letting emotions out in relation to a stressful situation may sometimes be warranted, but many times, suppressing emotions is the better approach.

As Bonanno concludes: “All of this research points to the same basic conclusion: coping and emotion regulation strategies are inherently neither good nor bad. Every strategy has costs and benefits, and a given strategy is effective only insofar as it helps us meet the demands of a specific situation. Ironically, this is not a new story. The leading theorists on coping and emotion regulation have always emphasized this kind of dynamic interaction with changing situational demands. The core theorists have also emphasized the importance of timing. What may be effective at the onset of a stressor event, they pointed out, may be less effective or less useful later as the stressor runs its course.”

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The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters

By Benjamin Ginsberg

Recommended on: 27th December 2017

This important book gives a great overview of why administrative bloat at universities is a major societal problem.  “Deanlets,” that is, administrators and staffers often without serious academic backgrounds or experience, are setting the educational agenda. This book is highly recommended if you want to understand the important problem of sky-high student tuitions in higher education, or if you’d like to understand some of the strange recent academic decisions that are counter to the intellectual freedom that universities have long espoused.

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The Fast Track to Your Technician Class Ham Radio License

By Michael Burnette

Recommended on: 8th January 2018

This highly rated book is being used by Barb’s daughter to study for her Technician Class Ham Radio License.  The book has terrific explanations–no wonder it is so highly rated!

Don’t miss the audiobook, which is surprisingly useful.

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The Fire and the Darkness: The Bombing of Dresden 1945

By Sinclair McKay

Recommended on: 6th October 2021

The Fire and the Darkness: The Bombing of Dresden 1945, by Sinclair McKay.  This riveting book held us spell-bound each evening over the past week—only when sleep called with urgency was Barb able to draw herself away.  It is hard to do justice to Dresden’s horrific bombing, which was, on the face of it, a war crime that killed some 25,000 innocent civilians—many of them refugees—in the final weeks of World War II. Yet McKay does a fantastic job of setting out the context of what occurred, describing the horrors experienced by Jews and anyone else who dared cross the Nazi juggernaut, and how, whatever else it might have done, the savage bombing seemed to have been the final straw that broke the Nazi’s morale.  Even-handed, riveting works of history such as this book are extraordinarily important as nowadays, hyperinflated versions of the Dresden death toll are used by neo-Nazis to support revisionist history. These revised histories give short shrift to the millions of deaths and untold damages that Hitler caused.  The Fire and the Darkness is truly a great book. (Also excellent for audio listening).

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The First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher

By Harry and Rosemary Wong

Recommended on: 18th October 2018

The world’s most popular book about teaching, it seems, is Harry and Rosemary Wong’s The First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher. This self-published book has sold over four million copies in the decades it has been in print, perhaps making it one of the most successful self-published books ever. What’s nice about this book is its disarmingly folky advice about common sense topics such as why you shouldn’t be your students’ friend, and why and how to set your classroom up for successful management practice.  We found the practice of placing entire bibliographic references into the middle of sentences, instead of just referring to them in an endnote, to be pretty clumsy—it was clear this is a self-published book.  But even so, there was a lot of great advice. If you’re a K-12 teacher, this book’s a must-read.

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The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine

By Serhii Plokhy

Recommended on: 6th February 2020

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy. It’s all too easy, in reading books on history, to focus on the areas of the world that currently have large populations. Russia, for example, overshadows Ukraine by more than a factor of three, population-wise (145 versus 42 million), meaning Russia gets the vast majority of coverage in books and press. But this kind of “large pop” reading can give a misleading sense of the conflicting interests of the groups involved, and can give short shrift to important current issues and past events. For example, the Cossacks were an important group through much of Russian history, but with the brief descriptions of many excellent Russian-centered history books (for example, Peter the Great, Barb’s favorite biography), it’s still hard to piece together who the Cossacks were, and what they stood for.  The Gates of Europe explains Cossacks, and far more, so that the reader can truly understand the important historical linkages between Greece, Byzantium, Europe, and Asia.  With Ukraine topping headlines today, it can be helpful to get a good overview of this country’s fascinating history, and to understand its past and present relationship with central European countries as well as Russia.  Plokhy has written an extraordinary book—highly recommended.

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The Gift Inside the Box

By Adam Grant

Recommended on: 18th December 2019

The Gift Inside the Box, by Adam Grant and Allison Sweet Grant, illustrated by Diana Schoenbrun.

Adam Grant wrote one of our very favorite books, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success (which also discusses Barb’s work on Pathological Altruism.) Adam and his wife Allison have been looking for ways to help teach kids about the joy of giving. The result? The sweet-natured children’s book The Gift Inside the Box. If you’re looking for something to read together with your little one to help inspire an attitude of giving, this simple little book is a great gift.

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The Girl Who Ran

By Kristina Yee and Frances Poletti, and illustrated by Susanna Chapman

Recommended on: 6th February 2022

Bobbi Gibb was the first woman to—despite staunch opposition—run the Boston Marathon.  Here’s an inspiring children’s book about the story: The Girl Who Ran: Bobbi Gibb, the First Woman to Run the Boston Marathon, by Kristina Yee and Frances Poletti, and illustrated by Susanna Chapman. (We still remember the newscasters’ shock at what she’d done.) And here’s a wonderful video of children reading along with the story!

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The Glass Castle: A Memoir

By Jeannette Walls

Recommended on: 25th February 2018

We make it a practice to ask people about their all-time favorite book. Along these lines, we’ve had a number of recommendations for The Glass Castle: A Memoir, by Jeannette Walls. So we finally broke down and read it. This book, incidentally, has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 411 weeks, and has over 7,000 Amazon reviews with a 4.6 rating.   Walls experienced, along with her brother and sisters, a deeply dysfunctional upbringing. Yet her upbeat, spunky child’s voice carries us through the hard times to Walls’ ultimate triumph as an adult. Walls writes in a way that we can draw our own conclusions about her parents’ shortcomings and odd blessings, even as we learn of the seamy, hardscrabble world experienced by many around the world.  (The audiobook is read by Walls herself—you may be able to get two free audiobooks through this link.)

Incidentally, years ago, we enjoyed Jeannette Walls’ Gossip: The Inside Story On The World Of Gossip Became the News and How the News Became Just Another Show, an eye-opening history of celebrity news reporting.

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The Graduate Student as Writer: Encouragement for the Budding Scholar

By Shuyi Chua

Recommended on: 15th August 2019

This week’s recommendation is rather an unusual one. “Anonymous friend” writes: “I’m one of 1M ‘silent’ students of LHTL who also enjoys your Friday Greetings emails since 2015. A friend of mine [Shuyi Chua] recently self-published The Graduate Student as Writer: Encouragement for the Budding Scholar, a tiny book (1.5hr read time) to encourage and help fellow young scientists to develop writing skills. It would be great if could take a quick look at it… Why? I trained as a physicist and did fMRI from 1996 to 2010, and then quit science altogether because I couldn’t figure out how to deal with ‘publish or perish’ BS. Had I come across something like Shuyi’s book, things might have been different. If it ‘worked’ for me with 15 years of age difference, it might be even more effective for people with a smaller age delta.”
And yes—we agree, it’s a very good book! And it’s free on Kindle Unlimited.

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The Grapes of Math

By Greg Tang

Recommended on: 9th September 2019

The Grapes of Math, by Greg Tang. We’ve recently become aware of Greg’s work as a math educator. He came about his calling through a circuitous path—first earning a B.A. and M.A. degrees in Economics from Harvard, and later an M.A. degree in Math Education from New York University. Greg is certified as a middle and high school math teacher. His books, including the Grapes of MathMath-terpieces, the Best of Times, and many more, are cleverly designed to allow young people to learn and become excited about math, and to learn how to problem-solve in creative ways.  Enjoy!

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The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die

By Niall Ferguson

Recommended on: 5th October 2019

The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, by Niall Ferguson.  One experience that struck Barb when she worked as a translator on Soviet trawlers was just how easy it was to convince people to go along with certain ideas, no matter how bizarre they might be. Once you get enough people thinking in the same way, that’s enough to get them to blithely hurdle themselves, lemming-like, off a societal cliff.  

Ferguson’s book is a prescient reminder of how countries get themselves into terrible trouble when society turns a blind eye to profligate overspending. In 2010, Ralph Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Sciences, and Jennifer Dorn, President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Academy of Public Administration, jointly wrote: “Much is at stake. If we as a nation do not grapple promptly and wisely with the changes needed to put the federal budget on a sustainable course, all of us will find that the public goals we most value are at risk.” (See also Pathological Altruism and “Concepts and implications of altruism bias and pathological altruism.”)

Ferguson’s book gives an overview of a future that could still be changed through the will of a well-educated populace.

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The Great Gatsby

By F. Scott Fitzgerald

Recommended on: 10th October 2018

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Normally, as you might have discerned, we’re not novel readers. But seeing as how The Great Gatsby has long been considered to be THE great American novel, we decided to give it a read. The Great Gatsby is a short book, just as Gatsby’s life was itself truncated. Nick, the narrator, is an honest guide to how love led his friend Jay Gatsby to the boundless, tragic pursuit of money. This book is a beautifully written reflection on life, idealism, and ambition, all framed in the excesses of the Roaring Twenties. It’s strange to realize that Fitzgerald died in 1940 with the belief that his writing was a failure—even as Fitzgerald’s  limning of an ultimately forgotten Gatsby created his own literary immortality.

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The Great Mental Models (two volume series)

By Shane Parrish and Rhiannon Beaubien

Recommended on: 28th May 2020

The Great Mental Models Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts and Volume 2: Physics, Chemistry and Biology by Shane Parrish and Rhiannon Beaubien. There is intriguing evidence from neuroscience that our brains “reuse” patterns based on models to help us think creatively about ideas we are grappling with. Shane Parrish and Rhiannon Beaubien’s delightfully interesting books provide many examples of how models can be used to help us think in fresh ways. For example, we know that different systems, like a small pot of hot water nestled inside a larger pot of cold water will tend towards reaching a thermal equilibrium.  As Mental Models Volume 2 notes: “What if we consider the equilibrium of two systems not between two containers of different temperature water, but two societies with different values?” What a neat way of thinking about societal differences!

As Parris and Beaubien note: “You’ve got to have models… You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You’ve got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head.” Mental Models describes some of the best of these models. These are also good books for audio listening (Volume 1, Volume 2). (Two free audio books may be possible through this link.)

We’re also fans of Parrish’s Farnam Street Blog, Podcast, and Learning Community. Check them out!

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The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future

By Arthur Levine and Scott J. Van Pelt

Recommended on: 12th October 2021

The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future, by Arthur Levine and Scott J. Van Pelt. If you’re looking to understand the future of higher education, you couldn’t do better than to look at The Great Upheaval.  What makes this book so interesting is not only its review of past changes in higher ed, but also its careful look at what has happened in leading industries such as movie-making, filmmaking, and newspapers as they’ve been disrupted by the online world. All this background means it’s a slow wind-up to get to the meat of the matter—that is, the future of higher ed. But the careful foundation that Levine and Van Pelt lay pays off. They conclude that many new universities will be unlike their industrial era predecessors. “The key actor is the student or consumer of higher education, no longer the colleges and universities that provide it. The focus is on learning rather than on teaching. The outcomes of education are fixed instead of time- and process-based. Higher education is primarily digital, no longer principally analog, and content is unbundled rather than consolidated. Competencies replace credits as the currency and accounting system of higher education. Colleges and universities are one of many sources for education rather than the sole provider.”  Well worth reading if you are wondering where higher ed is heading post-COVID.

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The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate―Discoveries from a Secret World

By Peter Wohlleben

Recommended on: 26th May 2018

This week’s book is a little different from usual.  It is The Hidden Life of TREES: What They Feel, How They Communicate, by Peter Wohlleben (Audio book here).  We LOVE this best-selling book, which has been optioned for translation into 19 different languages!  The New York Times review of the article summed up some of the book’s intriguing insights about how forest trees are social beings: “They can count, learn and remember; nurse sick neighbors; warn each other of danger by sending electrical signals across a fungal network known as the ‘Wood Wide Web’; and, for reasons unknown, keep the ancient stumps of long-felled companions alive for centuries by feeding them a sugar solution through their roots.”

Wohlleben’s use of analogy and metaphor to convey fascinating science is masterful. This is of the best books we’ve read on nature in the last few decades.

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The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience

By Matthew Cobb

Recommended on: 17th June 2020

The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience, by Matthew Cobb. This broad-ranging book starts back in the dawn of written history, where we learn that even back in ancient Rome, active learning was a “thing.”  “To demonstrate his discoveries Galen used ‘lecture-commentaries’ in which he simultaneously described his new knowledge and showed it in an animal… this was part of Galen’s emphasis on the importance of experience in understanding.” As Cobb wends his way into modern times, matters get even more interesting. We learn, for example, of the different main theories of consciousness, how they differ, and why each theoretical approach still has problems.  

The study of the brain is endlessly fascinating, and Cobb’s delightfully wry sense of humor provides the perfect foil as we get an overview of the field’s history.

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By Rebecca Skloot

Recommended on: 28th March 2019

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot.  Skloot spent ten years unearthing the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor—and consequently poorly educated—black woman who had pieces of her cervical cancer tumor taken without her consent.  Those cells lived on, and on, and on, spawning a multi-billion dollar industry. The cells’ insidious ability to contaminate wreaked havoc on thousands of seemingly impeccable studies, even as they also helped spur fantastic new scientific insights. The real story involves Henrietta Lacks herself—how she lived, how she died, and what effect the seemingly immortal life of her cells has had on her family. The value of a good education—and what happens when such an education is not available, is an underlying theme of Skloot’s magnificent book. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a #1 New York Times best-seller, has an amazing near 15,000 5-star reviews on Amazon. It has become one of our all-time favorite books of science.

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The Incredible Journey of Plants

By Stefano Mancuso

Recommended on: 25th October 2020

The Incredible Journey of Plants, by Stefano Mancuso.

Have you ever wondered how avocados spread their seeds when their pits are so large? (Hint, when the mammoths died out, avocados almost did, too.) Or where the world’s most forlorn trees reside? Or what happened to the trees that survived the blast at Hiroshima? This oddly appealing book by neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso of the University of Florence (translated from the Italian by Gregory Conti), describes Mancuso’s unlikely admiration for invasive species and unusual plant survival-and-spread stories. 

As Mancuso notes: “One plant that truly has a terrible reputation in many parts of the world, and with all of the national and agencies involved in some way with invasive plants, is without a doubt the Eichhornia crassipes, or water hyacinth. Its rapid diffusion and its sovereign contempt for the vast majority of means with which humanity tries to fight it have combined to make it commonly considered the worst aquatic invasive species known to humanity. Furthermore, it has the dubious privilege of membership in the elite club of the ‘100 worst invasive species’ established by the Invasive Species Study Group… In short, deemed the vegetable personification of evil, it is hated by everyone. Without reservation. As you might imagine, it is exactly the kind of flora non grata that I find irresistible.” 

Gotta love such a contrarian, who also sagely observes that attempts to eradicate invasive species often simply make matters worse. Looking for a fun, yet nicely calming reading experience in today’s turbulent times? Settle back and enjoy!

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The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out

By Clayton Christensen and Henry J. Eyring

Recommended on: 10th October 2018

The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, by Clayton Christensen and Henry J. Eyring. We’re attracted to books that explore the potential of online learning in reducing costs and improving education.  Christensen and Eyring’s book does this, but only towards the end—the bulk of the book is an interesting comparison of the historical development of Harvard and BYU-Idaho (initially Ricks College). Cost-cutting is simply not in Harvard’s DNA. Yet, as Christensen and Eyring show, deliberate and judicious choices to not emulate Harvard can result in tremendous cost-savings for students. Key graf: “…most universities’ fundamental problems are of their own making. They are engaged in genetically driven, destructive rivalry with their own kind—other institutions trying to be the world’s best according [to] a single, narrow definition of excellence.”

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The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church

By Malachi Martin

Recommended on: 2nd March 2020

The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church, by Malachi Martin.  At a time when some public schools are refusing to teach at all in the name of “equity,” (as we mentioned last week), this book is as topical today as when it was first published in 1988.  Martin was originally ordained as a Jesuit priest—he became Professor of Palaeography at the Vatican’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. From 1958 he served as secretary to Cardinal Bea during preparations for the Second Vatican Council, so his knowledge of the Jesuits and the inside history of this important group was unparalleled. (Disillusioned by reforms, he asked to be released from certain of his Jesuit vows in 1964.) Martin makes a convincing case for how the Jesuits used cult-like revamping of the meaning of Roman Catholic vocabulary, such as equating evil with capitalism, that allowed the group to essentially become a Marxist splinter group in direct opposition to Pope John Paul II’s attempts to overcome the evils of communism, particularly in South America. As Martin notes: “Cleverly used, the new ‘theological’ lexicon not only justifies but mandates the use of any means—including armed violence, torture, violation of human rights, deceptions, and deep alliances with professedly atheistic and antireligious forces such as the USSR and Castro’s Cuba—in order to achieve the ‘evolution’ of Marxism and its promise of material success.” 

See also Perfect Peril: Christian Science and Mind Control for another example of how cults redefine important words so that when you think you are discussing the same ideas, you actually aren’t—making cult deprogramming all the more difficult. Martin’s views must be taken as a snapshot of the context of the time and his own beliefs, but his careful attempts to be objective contain much worth pondering.

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The Keystone Approach: Healing Arthritis and Psoriasis by Restoring the Microbiome

By Rebecca Fett

Recommended on: 8th October 2017

If you suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, or other autoimmune-related disorders, we highly recommend The Keystone Approach: Healing Arthritis and Psoriasis by Restoring the Microbiome, by Rebecca Fett. (Rebecca read the Audible version of her book.) Rebecca Fett is a science author with a degree in molecular biotechnology and biochemistry. Before becoming a full-time author, Rebecca spent ten years as a biotechnology patent litigation attorney in New York, where she specialized in analyzing the scientific and clinical evidence for biotechnology companies. This book has enabled Barb to largely get off of medications for rheumatoid arthritis—remarkable, given her 30 years on a cornucopia of drugs.

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The Knowledge Gap: The hidden cause of America’s broken education system—and how to fix it

By Natalie Wexler

Recommended on: 19th August 2019

The Knowledge Gap: The hidden cause of America’s broken education systemand how to fix it, by Natalie Wexler. If you are a teacher, parent, or in any way involved in the US school system, this book should move to the very top of your list to be read today. We can’t help but quote Amazon reviewer Emily, whose review nails the subject: “Essentially, the majority of US elementary schools use language arts curriculum that attempts to teach vague ‘skills’ like ‘finding a main idea,’ ‘finding supporting evidence’ or ‘drawing conclusions’ from texts. Wexler summarizes the substantial evidence showing that reading comprehension depends on a person’s background knowledge on the subject. Students from advantaged backgrounds will pick up some background knowledge at home, topics related to history, geography, science. But these subjects have been pushed out of elementary schools to make more time for reading instruction (for testing purposes). Children from disadvantaged homes suffer disproportionately with this system. It is truly a matter of social justice.”

We were struck by examples of children confusing “civil rights” and “Civil War,” or “conservation” and “condensation” because they may have been able to read the terms, but they had no knowledge of what lay behind them.  This highly readable book was often hard to put down. What’s especially encouraging is that, as Wexler describes, there are solutions—great knowledge-based curricula have been developed and are being used in more and more schools.  If your school isn’t using Core Knowledge or Wit and Wisdom, it’s time to explore the possibility of change!

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The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science

By Michael Strevens

Recommended on: 27th December 2023

Book of the Year

Michael Strevens’ The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science is not just a book; it’s a journey through the evolution of modern science, presented with an eloquence and clarity that sets it apart. Strevens manages to do something remarkable: he articulates the complexities of scientific development in a way that is both accessible and captivating.

This book stands out for its lucid prose, which contrasts sharply with the more challenging style of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, another influential work in the field. While Kuhn’s classic is undoubtedly groundbreaking, its dense narrative can sometimes obscure its insights. Strevens, on the other hand, uses clear and vibrant language to not only explain but also build upon the ideas of Kuhn and Karl Popper, (known for his falsifiability principle).

What makes The Knowledge Machine especially compelling is its ability to challenge preconceived notions. If you’re expecting a straightforward exposition of how science methodically answers questions, prepare to be surprised. Strevens masterfully guides the reader towards a conclusion that is both unexpected and deeply satisfying.

This book emerges not merely as a must-read but as a paradigm-shifting experience. It is a profound exploration of both the rational and irrational underpinnings of science, delivered in a style that is simultaneously engaging and enlightening. It’s no exaggeration to placeThe Knowledge Machine high on the list of top ten books of all time, especially for those intrigued by the evolution of scientific thought.

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The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar

By Peter Stothard

Recommended on: 12th December 2020

The Last Assassin: The Hunt for the Killers of Julius Caesar, by Peter Stothard. The Roman Empire is an endless source of fascination—this new book lends a different perspective to the Empire’s most pivotal event.  Frankly, we have never read a book of history that had such a great starting hook, as Cassius, the last living assassin of Caesar, awaits his fate.  While dangling on this hook, we were led through the often self-serving saga of the Caesar’s killers and the civil war that the killing provoked. A book like this helps you appreciate the comparatively benign politics of today. Incidentally, we kept our cell phone handy to look up place names and found ourselves discovering all sorts of fascinating new geographic spots we hope to visit post-COVID.

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The Last Emperor of Mexico

By Edward Shawcross

Recommended on: 2nd October 2023

The Last Emperor of Mexico: The Dramatic Story of the Habsburg Archduke Who Created a Kingdom in the New World, by Edward Shawcross.

The year is 1864—a time when the US is deep in the throes of the Civil War.  War rages across Mexico as well as revolutionaries fight to end colonial rule. Meanwhile, in the ornate palaces of Vienna, a plan is hatched: a dashing prince will sail across the Atlantic and become the Emperor of Mexico. Maximilian von Habsburg is hesitant, yet with his wife Carlota’s urging, he accepts the Mexican crown. The French army arrives to sweep away resistance, paving the way for his imperial reign.

But, as we learn in Edward Shawcross’s engrossing book, Maximilian’s kingdom is built on a feeble foundation. Mexico simmers with the fury of nationalism. As America emerges from its own civil war, its leaders bolster the Mexican resistance. Betrayal looms as French troops abandon Maximilian. But Maximilian refuses to flee, as Carlota descends into madness.  

A forgotten chapter of North American history springs to vivid life in this riveting book. Though lesser known, this fascinating era shaped the destiny of a continent. Through meticulous research and captivating prose, Shawcross brings this critical period the attention it deserves.

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The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn

By Nathaniel Philbrick

Recommended on: 31st August 2020

The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, by Nathaniel Philbrick. Barb and her Hero Hubby Phil were driving through Montana last week and happened to spot signs for the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Next thing you know, the intrepid duo had parked their little trailer and were off to spend a blistering hot day exploring the battlefield.  In some sense, the Little Big Horn Monument is like an action-packed cemetery, with clusters of gravestones marking the spot of bodies as the battle swept through the gullies and hillsides. But just roaming the hillsides wasn’t enough—they had to learn more.

Enter Nathaniel Philbrick’s extraordinary The Last Stand.  From the very first pages, this exquisitely written book pulls you into the world of bad guys (if Custer’s premeditated attacks on a peaceful Native American villages don’t qualify him as a bad guy, nothing would), good guys like the extraordinary leader Sitting Bull, and everyone in between. The Last Stand gives a tremendous sense of the injustice and inequities experienced by Native Americans around the time of the first US Centennial in 1876. But it also gives a broad sense of place and time thanks to Philbrick’s extraordinary way with words. (Philbrick has won the National Book Award and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.)  This is a rare, hard-to-put-down masterpiece. Enjoy!

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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

By Marie Kondo

Recommended on: 9th November 2017

We’re just finishing Marie Kondo’s intriguing The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing, (Audible book here). Before reading this book, we hadn’t made the connection between tidying and, for example, doing well on examinations. Some of Marie’s observations seem spot on for both improving productivity and improving ability to learn well under stress.  Marie’s book has sold over two million copies worldwide, and has over 12,000 reviews on Amazon with a 4.5 star average rating.  We can all clearly learn something of value from Marie’s lifelong compulsion to tidy. At first, her recommendations may simply seem impossible. But just keep reading—you’ll see that Marie has great insight not only about tidying, but about life.

We have to laugh at our recommendation of Tidying Up, given that we recently also recommended Tim Harford’s Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives. As Ralph Waldo Emerson has observed, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

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The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over

By Jack Schafer and Marvin Karlins

Recommended on: 12th November 2017

We love The Like Switch!  It has made us much more aware of the tiny “tells” that signal whether or not you’ve captured a person’s attention and interest.  Most people naturally give off “friend” or “foe” signals without even being aware of it. With the information in this book, you can find yourself making friends quite literally with the flick of an eyebrow.  You’ll see others–and yourself–with a new perspective. We only wish we’d read this book decades ago!

Audiobook version narrated by George Newbern, who’s voice we really enjoy–he did a fantastic job on Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. (Two free audiobooks may be possible through this link.)

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The Longevity Diet

By Valter Longo

Recommended on: 16th February 2020

The Longevity Diet, by Valter Longo. This book provides an intriguing set of hypotheses about how to extend life, and reset bodily systems, using intermittent fasting.  Longo is the real deala top researcher at UCLA who has studied this issue for years. Along with making an excellent case for intermittent fasting, Longo also recommends a more vegetarian-oriented diet that includes some fish. What we wouldn’t give to see Valter Longo and Michael Eades (of Protein Power Diet), in a debate!

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The Magic of Impromptu Speaking: Create a Speech That Will Be Remembered for Years in Under 30 Seconds

By Andrii Sedniev

Recommended on: 5th July 2018

This week we read The Magic of Impromptu Speaking: Create a Speech That Will Be Remembered for Years in Under 30 Seconds, by Andrii Sedniev.  Andrii is someone to be reckoned with—as the book description  notes: “At the age of 19, Andrii obtained his CCIE (Certified Cisco Internetwork Expert) certification, the most respected certification in the IT world, and became the youngest person in Europe to hold it. At the age of 23, he joined an MBA program at one of the top 10 MBA schools in the USA as the youngest student in the program, and at the age of 25 he joined Cisco Systems’ Head Office as a Product Manager responsible for managing a router which brought in $1 billion in revenue every year.”  So we picked up Andrii’s book, and we’re glad we did. Along with useful insights, Andrii provides wonderful stories about speaking, including his own growth from shy youth to outgoing public speaker. A useful primer to help you gain more comfort in speaking publicly, and an easy, nice read.

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The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan

By Robert Kanigel

Recommended on: 2nd January 2019

The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan, by Robert Kanigel.  We first read this book not long after it originally came out in 1991.  The best biographies are often older ones, and this is definitely one of the best. We’ve been surprised over the years to find ourselves recalling all sorts of fascinating tidbits from this book, including mathematician G. H. Hardy’s horror of his own image—he hated looking in mirrors—and Ramanujan’s struggles in the damp, cold British clime. (Which reminds us to bring long underwear—Barb will be speaking at FutureLearn’s headquarters in London on January 31st.) We recently reread The Man Who Knew Infinity, and it’s even better than we remembered. If you’re looking to tuck in to a good winter’s read, this is one you’ll enjoy.

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The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad

By Emily Thomas

Recommended on: 29th July 2020

The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad, by Emily Thomas. Thomas’s book helps explain why travel is so useful and important, and such a valuable tool for creativity. (Although it doesn’t quite get to why travel can, for some, be such an addiction.) Although the book can be a bit uneven, Thomas gets into unusual, often-overlooked aspects of travel. For example, the European “Grand Tours” that served as a sort of finishing school for the wealthy were apparently just as often an exercise in debauchery. We particularly appreciated the descriptions of how travel has changed over the years—mountains and empty spaces, for example, weren’t always seen as beautiful. Thomas’s description of the meaning of sublime is alone worth the price of the book, and echo Barb’s experiences at the South Pole Station in Antarctica. If you’re pining for travel, this book will help serve as a temporary touchstone to assuage your longing.

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The Molecule of More

By Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long

Recommended on: 10th March 2022

The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity–and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race, by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long.  This book starts out with a bang, differentiating future-oriented, anticipatory dopamine from “here and now” oriented molecules like serotonin: “Dopamine is one of the instigators of love, the source of the spark that sets off all that follows. But for love to continue beyond that stage, the nature of the love relationship has to change because the chemical symphony behind it changes. Dopamine isn’t the pleasure molecule, after all. It’s the anticipation molecule. To enjoy the things we have, as opposed to the things that are only possible, our brains must transition from future-oriented dopamine to present-oriented chemicals, a collection of neurotransmitters we call the Here and Now molecules… [t]hey include serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins (your brain’s version of morphine), and a class of chemicals called endocannabinoids (your brain’s version of marijuana). As opposed to the pleasure of anticipation via dopamine, these chemicals give us pleasure from sensation and emotion.”  And off the authors go on a journey to describe dopamine and its influence on motivation and drive. The end of the book became a bit too speculative for our tastes, but the beginning of the journey made the trip worthwhile.

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The Molecule of More

By Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long

Recommended on: 6th February 2022

The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity–and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race, by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long.  This book starts out with a bang, differentiating future-oriented, anticipatory dopamine from “here and now” oriented molecules like serotonin: “Dopamine is one of the instigators of love, the source of the spark that sets off all that follows. But for love to continue beyond that stage, the nature of the love relationship has to change because the chemical symphony behind it changes. Dopamine isn’t the pleasure molecule, after all. It’s the anticipation molecule. To enjoy the things we have, as opposed to the things that are only possible, our brains must transition from future-oriented dopamine to present-oriented chemicals, a collection of neurotransmitters we call the Here and Now molecules… [t]hey include serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins (your brain’s version of morphine), and a class of chemicals called endocannabinoids (your brain’s version of marijuana). As opposed to the pleasure of anticipation via dopamine, these chemicals give us pleasure from sensation and emotion.”  And off the authors go on a journey to describe dopamine and its influence on motivation and drive. The end of the book became a bit too speculative for our tastes, but the beginning of the journey made the trip worthwhile.

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The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

By Barbara K. Lipska and Elaine McArdle

Recommended on: 10th July 2018

This week’s read was The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery, by Barbara K. Lipska (the neuroscientist of the title) and Elaine McArdle. This is a wondrously eye-opening account of what it feels like to go mad, or to be like one of those mean, nasty, self-centered, semi-crazy types who you sometimes run into if you work in customer service. This upbeat, pretty durn happy-ending book is one of the most beautifully-written that we’ve read all year. Good insight into the brain even as we readers receive wonderful insight into the frailty and wonder of human consciousness.

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The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux

By Cathy Davidson

Recommended on: 15th February 2018

The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux, by Cathy Davidson. We went into this book with high hopes—Davidson characterizes herself as a contrarian instigator with provocative new ideas about how to revolutionize higher education.  What we found was a series of cherry-picked stories that supported Davidson’s unswerving worldview that MOOCs are bad and virtually impossible to learn from,  and that the only way to learn well is through a teacher who is willing to go to extremes to provide the personal touch. Her ultimate underlying recommendation for improving universities? Throw more money at them. (She writes off criticism of academic misspending or bloat with a few quick Manichean sentences.) No wonder academicians love her despite her self-proclaimed contrarian stance.

How readers would have benefited by seeing a profile a student like Tulio Baars, who has taken over 160 MOOCs to self-educate and used that knowledge to found an innovative new data analysis company! Tulio demonstrates the potential of today’s students to take advantage of the economy of scale that MOOCs provide to bootstrap themselves at low cost to an extraordinary education. Davidson constantly interweaves poorly founded opinion with facts—unless you know which are which, it can be hard for typical readers to understand when she’s going off the rails.  This is one of the few books we are reviewing without recommending.

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The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss

By Jason Fung

Recommended on: 27th November 2019

The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss, by Jason Fung. We’ve met several friends lately who have shifted to eating only one meal a day—whatever they want during that meal—and have successfully lost, and kept off, dozens of pounds. One friend finally clued us into The Obesity Code, which has helped them a great deal to provide a good background and framework for this type of semi-fasting lifestyle.  We have to say, after a month’s tryout, we’re finding this lifestyle has done a lot for helping keep us alert, even while we still enjoy our meals and knock off a few pounds.  The Obesity Code is a wonderfully thoughtful book—if you are having trouble with losing pounds that creep back, even while you’re trying to keep your cognition in tip-top shape, give this approach a try.  It works great except on days where Barb’s giving major presentations and can’t eat until late. If you’re in a hurry, just read the final chapters on how to set up this lifestyle.

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The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

By Gary Keller and Jay Papasan

Recommended on: 13th December 2017

Our book recommendation this week is The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results. (The Audible version seems to be on sale now. Two free audiobooks may be possible through this link.)  The ONE Thing has  been a monster best-seller, with  more than 350 appearances on national bestseller lists, including #1 Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and USA Today. We read this book when it first came out in 2013, and then reread it again recently. What’s surprised us is how much of its message we’ve internalized into our approach to our work. This has clearly been beneficial!  Highly recommended if you’re trying to improve your productivity in your work—and your happiness in family life.

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The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

By Salman Khan

Recommended on: 15th November 2018

We’re often asked by people who want to try to get back into math (or just into math, if they haven’t been successful at it before). We unfailingly recommend Khan Academy, not only for math, but for pretty much anything. Salman Khan is one of the world’s greatest teachers, and his upbeat, fun, but always spot on videos are one of the best ways around to get yourself started.  (Of course, there’s plenty of practice opportunities available, too!) You may not be aware that Sal has written a fantastic book about his experiences in starting Khan Academy and his vision for education: The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined.

This “big picture” book helps you see where education could–and should—be heading. What’s great about this book is that it isn’t a theoretical tome—it’s a practically useful guide to the future by someone who has already done so much to help us get there.  

We can’t help but ask. Which do you prefer—Sal Khan’s videos with no instructor face shown? Or our LHTL videos that show the instructors?  Feel free to comment in the discussion forum here.

Incidentally, Barb is visiting Khan Academy today to have a “fireside chat” with Sal Khan—she’s so excited!

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The Order of Time

By Carlo Rovelli

Recommended on: 25th April 2020

The Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli. Who knew that a world class physicist—one of the founders of loop quantum gravity—could also write world class prose?  In this lovely little book, Rovelli introduces us to the complexities of (current) conceptions of time, where nothing is as simple as it appears.  Time, for example, may not be infinitely dissect-able—it may come in tiny little timely chunks. And your time is different from my time is very different from time across the galaxy. And there may be a reason, in our universe, that time appears to flow forward—it may not be that way everywhere. The audio version of the book is read by actor Benedict Cumberbatch, which puts the book in a league of its own, audio-wise.

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The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor—the Truth and the Turmoil

By Tina Brown

Recommended on: 19th July 2022

The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor—the Truth and the Turmoil, by Tina Brown.  We have to admit, we enjoy gossip about the British monarchy. And few are as “in the know” gossip-wise as Tina Brown, former top editor of some of the world’s leading magazines, including Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.  Brown covers all today’s leading charactersCamilla, Duchess of Cornwall; Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge; Meghan, Duchess of Sussex; William and Harry; and of course the Queen herself.  What’s particularly interesting about this book is how Brown doesn’t take sides.  Even when there’s an easy layup to dump on someone, Brown digs deeper and shows matters from multiple perspectives. Everyone comes out spattered with a bit of both mud and gold.  

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The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in “Healthy” Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain

By Steven Gundry MD

Recommended on: 4th April 2019

The Plant Paradox: The Hidden Dangers in “Healthy” Foods That Cause Disease and Weight Gain, by Dr. Steven R Gundry M.D. We stumbled across this book several weeks ago, when we were reading some of the other books on neuro-nutrition. That this is a “most read” book on Amazon, with over 2,000 mostly 5-star reviews, gave us the idea that there might be something interesting going on.  And was there ever! As it turns out, there are highly toxic, plant-based proteins called lectins that are found (as the book description notes) “not only in grains like wheat but also in the ‘gluten-free’ foods most of us commonly regard as healthy, including many fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and conventional dairy products. These proteins, which are found in the seeds, grains, skins, rinds, and leaves of plants, are designed by nature to protect them from predators (including humans). Once ingested, they incite a kind of chemical warfare in our bodies, causing inflammatory reactions that can lead to weight gain and serious health conditions.” The Plant Paradox is well worth reading, not least because it also explains why genetically modified foods are not necessarily as innocuous as they might seem.  (The Europeans may be quite right to look at American food products with a jaundiced eye.) We were also surprised to learn why Spanish and Italian milk and cheese don’t seem to provoke the same allergic reaction as their American equivalents—something Barb has frequently observed in her visits to Europe.  Truly a provocative thesis and book.

[Appended by Barb–if you are a vegetarian, you will find this book offers good options for vegetarians. In fact, on Gundry’s diet, you will find yourself eating far more vegetables than the usual American. If you have read take-downs of Gundry’s work by critics who have much to gain themselves by framing themselves as would-be experts, make sure you fact-check those critics by reading Gundry’s book and then looking carefully to see how honest the critics actually are.

I really do also recommend the book The Keystone Approach, which has much the same thesis as Gundry’s book, and is very well-researched. I mean, I’m no nutritionist myself, but I remember back in the day when sugar was a-okay, and fat was the devil—and according to the self-righteous pundits of the day, anyone who said anything different was a complete quack. Pretty much anyone who puts forward a new thesis is going to be criticized by those who see benefit for themselves in being perceived as the expert critics. But there’s some pretty good research evidence that lectins can cause problems in those with the right (or wrong) genetics. (See Cordain, L., Toohey, L., Smith, M., & Hickey, M. (2000). Modulation of immune function by dietary lectins in rheumatoid arthritis. British Journal of Nutrition, 83(3), 207-217. doi:10.1017/S0007114500000271.) Again, take a look at the Keystone Approach.

I have severe rheumatoid arthritis, and the insights in The Keystone Approach and Gundry’s book have been very helpful for me.]

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The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It

By John Tierney and Roy Baumeister

Recommended on: 28th January 2020

The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It, by John Tierney and Roy Baumeister. Unlike many optimists, Barb has always been the kind of person who anxiously anticipates possible bad outcomes. Since she’s a contrarian, however, she faces life with a relentlessly positive attitude that not only belies, but helps her overcome those anxious feelings. Teirney and Baumeister’s wonderful book helps give a scientific perspective about why people can often focus on the negatives in their lives, even when positives abound. What we really like about this book is that it gives concrete strategies for overcoming negativity and moving forward in a positive way, whether in relationships, work, or life in general. Highly recommended—also a good book for audio listening.

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The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids

By Madeline Levine, Ph.D.

Recommended on: 26th April 2018

The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids, by Madeline Levine, Ph.D. Our tendency is to focus on obviously disadvantaged kids coming from poor families. That can be a mistake, says author and practicing psychologist Madeline Levine, who works in affluent Marin County, California. Consumerism and focus on achievement can produce depressed, anxious, angry and bored teenagers who suffer from high rates of drug use, eating disorders, and suicide. Sometimes, in fact, the seeming poor can have far wealthier internal lives. Levine offers great suggestions for the advantaged to help them avoid common parenting pitfalls involving intrusiveness and autonomy.

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The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience

By Kent Kiehl

Recommended on: 5th July 2019

The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience, by Kent Kiehl.  Like many people, we’ve long been fascinated by people who could even think of deliberately and unfairly harming others. (Barb’s book Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend, acclaimed by Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker among others, was her attempt to understand why seemingly above-board people likesay, your bosscan still sometimes act like psychopaths.) 

The story of how Kiehl got his start in interviewing psychopaths is fascinating and, at times, edge-of-your-seat scary. Kiehl’s work in imaging hundreds of psychopaths in the New Mexico area has resulted in important new theoretical breakthroughs, which Kiehl describes in easy-to-understand fashion.  Kiehl has probably studied more psychopath brains than any other living humanhe’s been able to do this in part because he’s witty and plucky, enough to spend enormous amounts of time in prisons. The Psychopath Whisperer is a surprisingly positive bookas Kiehl notes, there are now glimmers of hope for treatment. 

Barb was lucky enough to have attended one of Kiehl’s hands-on, immersive 3-day fMRI analysis workshops with Vince Calhoun and Tor Wager. It doesn’t get more intensely usefulor funnythan what that trio of seriously clownish instructors provides.

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The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars

By Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning

Recommended on: 21st February 2019

The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning. It can be dizzying to understand the new “victimhood” culture that is arising in opposition to the more traditional US culture of dignity.  “Victimhood culture,” as Campbell and Manning define it “is marked by a low tolerance for slight. It produces a correspondingly low tolerance for all sorts of discomfort and difficulty, even if these are not considered offenses as such. Victimhood culture is also distinguished by a tendency to ask third parties for support in conflicts, and to do so in ways that advertise or exaggerate one’s victimization.”  This excellent book puts a helpful framework on a seemingly helpful movement that, given our past work with the Soviets, we know can lead to problematic outcomes for individuals as well as society. (We can’t help but also recommend Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Reassessment and The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Li Zhi-Sui, Mao’s personal doctor.Campbell and Manning’s wrap up gives as good an overview of sociology as we’ve seen—between their fearless assessment of societal trends and their mastery of their field, those two authors carry the ground-breaking tradition of the great early sociologist Ibn Khaldun. (Read about Ibn Khaldun’s breakthroughs and adventures in Peter Turchin’s not-to-be-missed War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires. (Okay, so Turchin does go on a bit about the Cossacks…)

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The San Francisco Fallacy: The Ten Fallacies That Make Founders Fail

By Jonathan Siegel

Recommended on: 20th June 2022

The San Francisco Fallacy: The Ten Fallacies That Make Founders Fail, Jonathan Siegel. Many books on entrepreneurship tell you what to look for, and what to look out for.  But they don’t focus on the failures–and how those failures can eventually lead to success.  Siegel’s book is jaw-droppingly good. He knows how to write and how to tell a story—this means that it’s hard to put his book down as he makes point after point from his sometimes disastrous, but ultimately phenomenally successful career as an entrepreneur and angel investor. ( Incidentally, the “San Francisco Fallacy” refers to herd mentality in thinking that the enormously expensive Silicon Valley area is necessarily the place to go for tech startups.) 

VERY highly recommended!

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The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t

By Julia Galef

Recommended on: 15th December 2022

The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t, by Julia Galef.

Critical thinking has stood for decades near the top of the World Economic Forum’s “10 skills needed to thrive in the fourth industrial revolution.” A real standout for us amongst the hundreds of books on this vitally-important topic is The Scout Mindset—a book about being able to see things as they are, not as you wish they were

You can think about it this way.  Some people are like soldiers.  They are there to protect their own thoughts and the thoughts of their team.  It really doesn’t matter if those thoughts are well-founded or not, their job is to fight off any evidence that might be threatening to their position. As Galef, co-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, observes: “A scout is different.  Scouts are sent out to find out what is really out there—not what we want to be there.”  

If you are looking for a great holiday gift, we highly recommend The Scout Mindset—one of the best books on critical thinking we’ve encountered. 

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The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body’s Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You

By Sylvia Tara

Recommended on: 20th January 2019

This week’s fascinating book is The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body’s Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You, by Sylvia Tara PhD. What we love about this book is not only that it brings fat to life as the fascinating substance it is, but Tara is also a great story-teller, able to wrap us into the lives of various genetic syndromes that manifest as humans becoming too fat or too thin. We picked this book up, oddly enough, because of the title’s resonance with the book The Hidden Life of Trees, a favorite book of ours. Whatever, we’re glad we found it!

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The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness

By Sy Montgomery

Recommended on: 26th May 2018

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness, by Sy Montgomery.  (She also read the Audible version of her book.) This National Book Award Finalist caught our attention because we had no idea that octopuses are so smart and so filled with personality.  Montgomery is an infectiously enthusiastic writer who could get you excited about anything.  The book also gives great insight into the behind-the-scenes work needed to run a world-class aquarium, and the magic of diving on coral reefs in search of wild octopuses. Have you always wondered how an utterly alien intelligence might think? Read on!

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The Story of Spanish

By Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow

Recommended on: 7th July 2023

The Story of Spanish, by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow. This fascinating volume gives a comprehensive overview of the Spanish speaking world and its history by using the unique lens of language.  Beginning with how Spanish evolved from the remnants of Vulgar Latin in the then-obscure Kingdom of Castile and León in what is now northern Spain, Nadeau and Barlow take us through a unique tour of the twenty countries that have evolved to share a common, sometimes locally quirky language.  This is the book we’ve been waiting for to gain a better understanding of Spanish-speaking world.  If you’re learning Spanish, or even just thinking about or admiring the language, this is the book to read. An intriguing companion book is Nadeau and Barlow’s The Story of French. Ever wondered why there are French-language schools in many seemingly unlikely places (e.g. Miami, Florida) around the world, where other major languages, such as Portuguese, don’t have them?  This book explains why!

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The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

By Stephen Greenblatt

Recommended on: 8th July 2021

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt. One of the things we love about reading is that it allows us to discover how much we don’t know.  We had no clue, for example, about how the works of ancient Roman writers were able to make their way through two thousand years of mold, mildew, bookworms (the real kind), fire, and purposeful destruction. Greenblatt allows us to follow in the footsteps of Italian politician and humanist Poggio Braccilioni who, in the early 1400s, undertook journeys to northern Europe to seek out such ancient manuscripts as he could find hidden away in monasteries.  By leaning in to Poggio’s methods, we learn how and why manuscripts survived—often under the care of monks who were utterly opposed to the ideas contained in those ancient, heretical documents.  One of Poggio’s discoveries was epic. It was, in fact, Lucretius’s De rerum natura: On the Nature of Things, a poem that spelled out a shockingly prescient worldview of a world derived only of atoms that swerve—not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities.  

Greenblatt explores the nature of the Italian world of the middle ages, and also shows how important free thought, shocking though it may be, has been for the development of the modern world. The Swerve is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction. Highly recommended, and an excellent book for audio listening. [Hat tip, Sadegh Nabavi]

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The Tiger

By John Vaillant

Recommended on: 3rd June 2021

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, by John Vaillant.  This is one of those books that’s hard to put down, as the story unfolds of a tiger with a lethal grudge against a particular human—a grudge that widened to encompass every human the tiger encountered.  John Vaillant is a magnificent story-teller—this brief excerpt gives hint of his literary prowess: “As the encyclopedic reference Mammals of the Soviet Union puts it, ‘The general appearance of the tiger is that of a huge physical force and quiet confidence, combined with a rather heavy grace.’ But one could just as easily say: this is what you get when you pair the agility and appetites of a cat with the mass of an industrial refrigerator. To properly appreciate such an animal, it is most instructive to start at the beginning: picture the grotesquely muscled head of a pit bull and then imagine how it might look if the pit bull weighed a quarter of a ton. Add to this fangs the length of a finger backed up by rows of slicing teeth capable of cutting through the heaviest bone. Consider then the claws: a hybrid of meat hook and stiletto that can attain four inches along the outer curve, a length comparable to the talons on a velociraptor. Now, imagine the vehicle for all of this: nine feet or more from nose to tail, and three and a half feet high at the shoulder. Finally, emblazon this beast with a primordial calligraphy: black brushstrokes on a field of russet and cream, and wonder at our strange fortune to coexist with such a creature. (The tiger is, literally, tattooed: if you were to shave one bald, its stripes would still be visible, integral to its skin.) Able to swim for miles and kill an animal many times its size, the tiger also possesses the brute strength to drag an awkward, thousand-pound carcass through the forest for fifty or a hundred yards before consuming it.”

In The Tiger, you will learn a great deal, not only about tigers and their remarkably human ability to think abstractly, but about how the Russian Far East is slipping toward ecological imbalance, even as brave conservators work to keep this unique region intact. Highly recommended!

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The Trusted Learning Advisor: The Tools, Techniques and Skills You Need to Make L&D a Business Priority

By Keith Keating

Recommended on: 3rd March 2024

The Trusted Learning Advisor: The Tools, Techniques and Skills You Need to Make L&D a Business Priority, Keith Keating. With the advent of generative AI, we feel learning and development (“L&D”) is one of the hottest areas around.  After all, L&D experts can now point employees not only toward the vast array of learning platforms available nowadays—but also toward the new opportunities created for employees to do even better at their jobs if they learn the judicious use of generative AI.  Keating’s book lays out the strategies and best practices for learning and development professionals to build trust and credibility within their organizations so they are seen as reliable, go-to advisors on matters related to training, capability building, and upskilling the workforce for the future. The current state of L&D tends to be order-taking rather than advising. But there are growing risks and problems if L&D teams do not evolve into trusted learning advisors, including lack of integration with the business, misalignment between learning strategies and business strategies, and inability to demonstrate awareness and prioritization of business needs. Relationship building through understanding the language and culture of stakeholders provides a strong foundation for trusted advisors to make an impact.

If you are looking to understand the L&D industry, whether as a quick overview or to do a deeper dive, you couldn’t do better than to read The Trusted Learning Advisor.

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The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education

By Warren Treadgold

Recommended on: 2nd August 2018

The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education, by Warren Treadgold. This book has drawn attention from the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, and Inside Higher Education.  Frankly, although it was sometimes interesting to learn of Treadgold’s perspectives, which are very different from that of typical humanities professors, we struggled with his book. Treadgold’s background is in Byzantine studies, which often meant that his sweeping statements about how universities can and should operate were often completely unworkable for the STEM disciplines—we’re surprised Treadgold didn’t have at least one beta reader friend from the STEM disciplines to clue him in on this.  Suggestions such as the creation of a national National Academic Honesty Board overlook the fact that state boards designed to ferret out cheating in state schools never actually seem to do so. (See the discussion in the far better book Freakonomics for why this occurs.)  And Treadgold’s cherry-picking to point out poor consequences of online learning overlooked excellent results. We’re puzzled about the hullabaloo surrounding this book.

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The Viking Heart

By Arthur Herman

Recommended on: 19th January 2022

The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World, by Arthur Herman.  Seeing as how 23&Me revealed that Barb is roughly 70% Scandinavian, with intriguing dollops of Egyptian and Eastern European mixed into the gene-pool, she figured it was time to learn a bit more about her ancestry. (And who, she has long wondered, was her “Black Norwegian” grandfather?)  

This fascinating book answers all these questions, and many more!  Whether of Scandinavian descent or not, after all, one can’t help but wonder how a small group of Scandinavians perched on the outer edge of Europe could have had such an outsized influence on how European history unfolded.  

It all started, it seems, with naval technology: 

“The big change came when Scandinavian sailors introduced the square sail, which, when combined with oars for propulsion, turned the Viking ship into an unsurpassed maritime instrument. It made for swift and sure navigation across large bodies of water: comparisons with the flight of birds, made by poets and others, were inevitable… Viking ships were built to last. They were broad in the beam, as buoyant as giant water lilies, and equipped with a new nautical technology: the single oaken plank running along the bottom of the ship, from stem to stern, known as the keel (in Old Norse, kjǫlr), which the Vikings invented in the seventh century. It was the keel that gave the Viking ship its stability in any kind of sea and any kind of weather. A single sixty-foot pine mast (from the Norse word mastr, meaning ‘tree’) raised in the dead center of the vessel, with a three-hundred-square-foot sail attached, gave the vessel the wind power it needed to travel anywhere…. When a Viking vessel had to make its way up a river such as the Seine or the Thames or the Volga, its mast could be struck and laid aside and the oars lowered, so that the crew’s muscle power could take over. Viking ships, with a draft of eighteen inches fully loaded, were well designed for these waterways.”

This book will help knit together your understanding of a small group of people whose influence was broad through history. Now, thankfully, that Scandinavian influence is felt in peaceful realms!

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The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

By Steven Pressfield

Recommended on: 29th April 2019

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, by Steven Pressfield. This short book reframes your creative work, whatever that might be, as war. The battle goes to the most cunning! Pressman has the street cred to write a book of this sort—it took him 17 years of writing to get his first paycheck, but his debut novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, became the film directed by Robert Redford and starring Matt Damon, Will Smith and Charlize Theron. Pressfield graduated from Duke, and has been a U.S. Marine, an advertising copywriter, schoolteacher, tractor-trailer driver, bartender, oilfield roustabout, attendant in a mental hospital and screenwriter. He’s our kind of guy, in other words. This is also a good book for audio. (Two free audiobooks may be possible through this link.)

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The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean

By Susan Casey

Recommended on: 14th July 2020

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey. Recent research on the dead water phenomenon (see below), reminded us of Casey’s book—a New York Times best-seller and one of our favorite about waves. Casey herself is something of a phenomenon. She was the long-time editor of O, The Oprah Magazine, and she had unprecedented access to surfer Laird Hamilton, joining him and other surfers to begin experiencing waves as surfers experience them. But she explores the bigger picture as well, looking at things like rogue waves, disappearing ships, and Lloyd’s of London insurance practices. Interesting look at the fascinating phenomena of waves, which Barb has been interested in ever since her own years at sea.( Her old, well-thumbed copy of Waves and Beaches: The Dynamics of the Ocean Surface has been reread many a time—when, that is, she wasn’t sea-sick with the dynamics of said ocean surface!)

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The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

By Fei-Fei Li

Recommended on: 9th February 2024

The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, by Fei-Fei Li.  

In her memoir The Worlds I See, AI pioneer Dr. Fei-Fei Li offers rare insight into the human story behind modern artificial intelligence advances. Detailing her journey from her childhood in China to leading Stanford’s famed AI Lab, Dr. Li reveals the curiosity, exploration, and discovery underlying her seminal contributions.

Central was her risky gambit developing ImageNet—a categorical catalogue of what is now over 14 million images—to push computer vision research. This massive dataset allowed for a competition to assess how good a given algorithm was at analyzing what category an image might belong to. The contest proved a turning point as Geoff Hinton’s convolutional neural network approach shattered records, launching the deep learning revolution now embodied by systems like ChatGPT.

Beyond the analytical breakthroughs, Dr. Li compellingly addresses the human biases and ethical considerations tha influence what AI models learn. Dr. Li helped establish AI Safety and AI for Social Good as research priorities.

Threaded with Dr. Li’s discussions of her research and visionary leadership is her personal tale escaping stifling environments in communist China. Through clear storytelling and hard-won wisdom, The Worlds I See inspires future innovators while unveiling AI’s societal importance and human foundations. For comprehending modern AI or the values driving great science, Dr. Li’s memoir fascinates and enlightens. This is already going to go on the list as one of our favorite books of the year!

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The Wrong Kind of Muslim

By Qazim Rashid

Recommended on: 31st August 2019

The Wrong Kind of Muslim: An Untold Story of Persecution & Perseverance, by Qazim Rashid. This is a soul-searching book about one man’s attempt to discover why people would want to die for their faith. Not in the sense of being suicide bombers, but exactly the opposite: How can one be willing to stand fast for one’s beliefs even when faced with torture or death?  Qazim is a member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, which is deeply persecuted as heretical within Pakistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Qazim notes the Prophet Muhammad’s words that “Faith is a restraint against all violence, let no believer commit violence.” He also notes that “Islam champions universal freedom of conscience for all people of all faiths, and for all people of no faith.”  Unfortunately, as Qazim relates, pointing out these kinds of ideas nowadays, in certain places, does indeed make him The Wrong Kind of Muslim

This book describes little known facts such as how the first Pakistani and first Muslim to be awarded the Nobel Prize in the sciences, Abdus Salam, was disavowed by his own country for being an Ahmadi Muslim. A real eye-opener about what can happen when discrimination becomes law.

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Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know

By Adam Grant

Recommended on: 3rd February 2021

We have long been fans of Adam Grant, whose powerful book Give and Take is one of our favorites.  His newest book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, is worth the price of the book in the first chapters alone. Grant nails it, for example, with his discussion of the problems of being too smart—as our own Santiago Ramon y Cajal has pointed out, geniuses can flounder not because of their intelligence, but because of their lack of flexibility.  Key graf:

“Mental horsepower doesn’t guarantee mental dexterity. No matter how much brainpower you have, if you lack the motivation to change your mind, you’ll miss many occasions to think again. Research reveals that the higher you score on an IQ test, the more likely you are to fall for stereotypes, because you’re faster at recognizing patterns. And recent experiments suggest that the smarter you are, the more you might struggle to update your beliefs. One study investigated whether being a math whiz makes you better at analyzing data. The answer is yes—if you’re told the data are about something bland, like a treatment for skin rashes. But what if the exact same data are labeled as focusing on an ideological issue that activates strong emotions—like gun laws in the United States? Being a quant jock makes you more accurate in interpreting the results—as long as they support your beliefs. Yet if the empirical pattern clashes with your ideology, math prowess is no longer an asset; it actually becomes a liability. The better you are at crunching numbers, the more spectacularly you fail at analyzing patterns that contradict your views. If they were liberals, math geniuses did worse than their peers at evaluating evidence that gun bans failed. If they were conservatives, they did worse at assessing evidence that gun bans worked. In psychology there are at least two biases that drive this pattern. One is confirmation bias: seeing what we expect to see. The other is desirability bias: seeing what we want to see. These biases don’t just prevent us from applying our intelligence. They can actually contort our intelligence into a weapon against the truth. We find reasons to preach our faith more deeply, prosecute our case more passionately…” 

 This fascinating book contains so much more, on “idea cults,” the problems with perspective-taking, resisting the impulse to simplify, the difference between skepticism and denialism…  The insights don’t stop coming. Think Again is also a great book for audio.

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Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

By Ozan Varol

Recommended on: 5th January 2020

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life, by Ozan Varol. Varol really was a rocket scientist—he served as a member of the operations team for NASA’s 2003 Mars Exploration Rover project; which sent two rovers to examine the Martian surface. But, in a tribute to his wide-ranging intellect, Varol is now tenured law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School. Think Like a Rocket Scientist is a wonderful book—a sort of vade mecum of critical thinking, whether in business, learning, or life. Varol has an unparalleled ability to weave together the brilliant thoughts of others into a coherent narrative that is greater than the sum of its parts.  A counterintuitive thinker, Varol often surprises: you’ll learn about how to act under conditions of uncertainty; how to think big, but carefully; how moving fast and breaking things doesn’t work well for rocket science or many other situations; how success can cause failure, and many other mental frameworks and strategies. We particularly like Varol’s quote from T. H. White: “The best thing for being sad… is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds.  There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it.” Think Like a Rocket Scientist is a book to savor. Those who pre-order the book can get digital access to it within 7 days through a service called Netgalley. That means they can start reading it now, months before the book is released to the public. Pre-orders also come with the bonuses listed on this page. All you have to do is forward your receipt to [email protected]

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This Is the Year I Put My Financial Life in Order

By John Schwartz

Recommended on: 9th April 2018

This week, we read This Is the Year I Put My Financial Life in Order, by New York Times reporter John Schwartz.  This is an important book—before she passed away, Barb’s aunt Renie could have told you why.

Renie was a smart, independent career woman.  When she retired, to her surprise, found herself unable to afford to live independently.  The reason? Although Renie had learned many things in her life, she’d never bothered to learn about personal finances.  As it turns out, putting away a little each month beginning relatively early in your career can make enormous improvements in your life, and the lives of your family members, as you grow older.

John Schwartz tells you how to get your financial life in order, no matter what your age.  This is the Year is not some dry accounting discussion—instead, the book builds from a candid and entertaining description of Schwartz’s own occasional financial successes and many failures, including his brush with bankruptcy and disastrous housing “investment.”  Schwartz describes the what type of account to set up for retirement, how much to put away (it’s not much, especially if you start early), and how to think about your income, taxes, debt, investments, insurance, and home purchasing. If you want to do the best you can long term for yourself and those you love, you owe it to yourself to read this excellent book. (Also nice on audio.)

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Tiger Woods

By Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian

Recommended on: 9th January 2023

Tiger Woods by Jeff Benedict  and Armen Keteyian

We are major fans of biographiesthis is our favorite genre, so when we say that Tiger Woods is one of the best biographies we’ve ever read, it also means it’s one of the best books we’ve ever read.  (That’s really saying something, since we knew nothing about golf going into the book.)  From its opening pages at the scene of Tigers’ very public car wreck, and working backward through his implosive career arc, Tiger Woods is a book that’s virtually impossible to put down. It’s hard to believe the authors could bring such great insight when they weren’t even able to interview their subject, but if anything, the book is probably even better for its dispassionate ability to delve into the thick of Woods’ increasingly aberrant life.  For parents, Tiger Woods provides a wonderful instructional manual on how not to raise your kids.  A must-read.

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Traditional Math: An effective strategy that teachers feel guilty using

By Barry Garelick and JR Wilson

Recommended on: 22nd February 2023

Traditional Math: An effective strategy that teachers feel guilty using, by Barry Garelick and JR Wilson. This wonderful book is highly recommended for parents, grandparents, and teachers of all kinds who would like a solid guide to help youngsters learn math in a simple, elegant, and straightforward way.  As Stanford mathematician Wayne Bishop has pointed out, leaders in modern mathematics education often sadly and erroneously continue to push Freudenthal Institute’s discredited “reform” approaches to teaching math. On the uplifting side, as Bishop also points out apropos Traditional Math, “this book is a wealth of down-to-earth, logically presented topics from kindergarten through beginning algebra. The work will be effective for most mathematics teachers but especially so for those who have been indoctrinated with reform math but are recognizing its ineffectiveness and in need of solid ideas.” 

Barb will be using this book with her new granddaughter as she grows up!  

On a side note, Barb & her Hero Husband Phil raised their two daughters with twenty minutes of carefully designed extra math practice through use of the Kumon math program. The result of this extra “drill and kill” practice?  One daughter is now a Stanford trained pediatrician, and the second is a graduate level statistician.  Yet reform educators would have one believe that the decade Barb and Phil gave their daughters of twenty minutes of daily extra math practice would turn the girls away from math. What reform educators characterize as “drill and kill” is actually all-important “drill to skill”!

It certainly wasn’t that the girls loved every day of their practice. (Take heart, homeschooling parents!) But that practice led to the solid internalization of mathematical patterns that the girls needed long-term for professional careers in STEMand for them to feel comfortable with and ultimately learn to love mathematics.  Incidentally, when Barb was recently in Vietnam, she learned that her daughter’s statistics graduate advisor rarely takes on students educated in the US, because he has found that US-trained students simply don’t have the comfort and ability with math of students from countries that use more traditional approaches to teaching math.  All those years of a little bit of extra practice a day for the Oakley girls paid off!  (And interleaving of math practice, as with Kumon and Smartick, rules!)

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Trilingual by Six: The Sane Way to Raise Intelligent, Talented Children

By Lennis Dippel MD

Recommended on: 21st May 2023

Trilingual by Six: The Sane Way to Raise Intelligent, Talented Children, by Lennis Dippel MD. As the old joke goes: “What do you call a person who speaks two languages? A bilingual. What do you call a person who speaks one language? An American.” 

If you have young children or grandchildren, Dr. Dippel’s thought-provoking book provides a fountain of ideas about how to help your child grow up multilingual (that is, not like the typical US-born American!) in the easiest fashion possible–by learning new languages during their earliest years. Learning a language at this early time allows toddlers’ tiny little basal ganglia procedural systems—which are then at their strongest—to soak up the rhythms and patterns in the easiest possible way. That is, by just listening and talking!  Incidentally, we have met many professors and business executives who have started out as au pairs. So if you use one of the approaches outlined in Dr. Dippel’s book and hire an au pair, (Dr. Dippel also has many other ideas) you may be providing a step forward in international acumen for both your child and the blossoming career of your au pair.

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Troubled Water: A Journey Around the Black Sea

By Jens Mühling

Recommended on: 24th May 2022

Barb glanced at the title of this book and thought, “The last thing I need is to be diving into, (amidst the hundreds of samples already downloaded onto the Kindle), is a book about the Black Sea.” Out of curiosity, she took a look at the first couple pages, and suddenly she was one hundred pages in, hooked by Mühling’s combination of scintillating prose (which comes across even in the translation by  Simon Pare from the original German) and remarkable ability to bring out fascinating bits of local lore and culture.  Troubled Water, as it turns out, is a compendium not only of adventure travel (fortunately, Mühling has a remarkable talent for holding his alcohol), but also of semi-forgotten and little-known groups. We learn, for example, of the Karaites, a Jewish religious movement that recognizes the written Torah alone as its supreme authority in Jewish religious law and theology (this subtle difference in beliefs protected the Crimean Kariates from the Nazis in World War II). And we learn how successful Russian efforts to foment divisiveness in Abkhazia has kept that gorgeous region from helping its people progress. Mühling has no more than to hear about an outlying cultural group, whether it’s Turks in Romania, Bulgarians in Turkey, Greeks in Russia, or simply a hermit, and off he goes on the hunt to meet them. Mühling’s serviceable Russian is extremely helpful in these parts of the world, but it’s a lucky thing that Mühling is Germanit allows him to gain insights and confidences that many writers in English miss.  And we learn of all sorts of other aspects of the biology of the Black Seafor example, the fact that its unusual top layer of fresh water and bottom layer of salt makes a poisonous mixture that leaves three-thousand-year old sunken vessels as fresh as if they had sunk yesterday. 

If you want a “you are there” reading experience that gives you a good feel for a vitally important region, you couldn’t do better than to read Jens Mühling’s fantastic Troubled Water. Highly recommended!

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Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

By Jordan B. Peterson

Recommended on: 4th February 2018

Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, has been floating at the top of the Amazon best-sellers listing for several weeks, so we had to see what all the hullabaloo was about. Peterson’s book is an intriguing mixture of deeply researched psychology, philosophy, religious studies, and history, with a connective tissue of biology, neuroscience and real-life experiences. (Given our own not-so-hot experiences with communism, we were gratified to see that Peterson, unlike many modern academicians, didn’t brush right over one of the most horrific movements of the twentieth century.)  Peterson’s book forms a worthwhile effort to find an inspiring, rather than nihilistic, worldview of life and of learning—read it yourself to see what all the hype is about. Peterson, with his wonderfully listenable accent from rural Canada, reads the audio version of his book. (You may be able to get two free audiobooks through this link.)

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Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career

By Scott Young

Recommended on: 16th June 2019

Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career, by Scott Young.  We’re big fans of super learner Scott Young—hence our interview with him in Learning How to Learn. As Barb’s blurb on the book’s cover notes: “Ultralearning is the best book on learning I’ve ever read. It’s a beautifully written, brilliantly researched, and immediately useful masterpiece. If you are looking for the magic match to help light your learning, Ultralearning is it. If you want to learn anything, do yourself a favor and read this book. Now.”

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Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life

By Aidan McCullen

Recommended on: 6th May 2021

Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life, by Aidan McCullen. Aiden knows something about reinvention. He had finally achieved his dream of becoming a professional rugby player, when injury forced him to completely rethink his life’s journey.  Aiden is a master of analogy.  As he observes: “Rather than a rigid set of frameworks or business models, I present the book as a series of mental models. To bring these mental models to life, I offer analogies from nature, anecdotes from business, ancient wisdom, exemplars of perpetual change and evidence from evolution, neuroscience, business and life.” Aiden’s goal is to help you adopt a mindset of permanent reinvention. Enjoy!

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Urban Myths about Learning and Education

By Pedro De Bruyckere, Paul A. Kirschner, and Casper D. Hulshof

Recommended on: 22nd July 2020

Urban Myths about Learning and Education, by Pedro De Bruyckere, Paul A. Kirschner, and Casper D. Hulshof. This book, originally published in 2015 (and followed by a 2019 sequel), is as topical as ever. Killing commonly repeated educational myths is, it seems, its own cottage industry, although it probably isn’t nearly as lucrative as the sales of learning styles assessments. What we particularly like about Bruyckere et al’s book is the personal nature of the writing. Sometimes it feels as if a good friend is writing to you, making mildly snarky side-comments about the strange things they’re discovering when trying to detect the source of some of education’s most popular—and utterly bogus—imagery and ideas. Sometimes seemingly solid research citations lead nowhere! Anyone involved in education would find gold in this easy-to-read but thought-provoking book.

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Victoria’s Daughters

By Jerrold Packard

Recommended on: 4th March 2019

Victoria’s Daughters, by Jerrold Packard.  Historians and writers understandably like to focus on Queen Victoria, whose lengthy reign had such an impact on the Great Britain and Europe. (Long ago, we read and enjoyed Stanley Weintraub’s Victoria—many a biography has come out since.) But Packard instead focuses on Victoria’s daughters who, largely through their inheritance of the gene for hemophilia, passed like battering rams through the royal houses of Europe, among other effects, squarely taking out the Romanov dynasty and setting in motion the communist revolution. Victoria’s ill-fated grandson Kaiser Wilhelm suffered injuries during birth which appear to have affected his cognition—what would the world have been like without this key figure in the launch of WWI? Victoria and Albert’s great intentions to do good, through the vicissitudes of fate, spun off into sometimes shocking disarray. A memorable book.

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Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement

By John Hattie

Recommended on: 7th September 2018

This week’s recommendation is John Hattie’s Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement. This book is a master compendium of what works and what doesn’t in order to help students achieve–Hattie is rightly considered one of the best researchers in education, no matter what quibbles you might have with his approach.  By comparing effect sizes of various interventions such as reduction of class size, holding students back if they aren’t performing well, whole language versus phonics, and so forth, a meaningful idea of what works and what doesn’t can be found. A pioneering work in education.

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Visual Intelligence: Sharpen Your Perception, Change Your Life

By Amy E. Herman

Recommended on: 13th December 2017

If you’re interested in how art improves our ability perceive and understand, we highly recommend Amy Herman’s Visual Intelligence: Sharpen Your Perception, Change Your Life.  (We prefer the hard copy over the e-reader copy, because the images are easier to see on the hard copy.)  This book will definitely improve your powers of observationeven while some of the stories are so compelling that the book’s tough to put down. And yet another excellent, but hard-to-get book on art is Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, by Margaret Livingstone.

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Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

By Sam Harris

Recommended on: 8th August 2022

Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, by Sam Harris.  This book is meant to be a common sense guide to finding spirituality without necessarily springboarding from a religious tradition. 

In Harris’s hands, we gain a clearer understanding of mindfulness. “It is simply a state of clear, nonjudgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant.” (But for those LHTLers amongst us who are interested in such matters, it seems cultivating mindfulness translates to continuously maintaining focus and concomittently diminishing both anxiety and creativity, perhaps a mixed blessing.) 

As Harris notes: “The crucial point is that you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from suffering in the present. Even just recognizing the impermanence of your mental states—deeply, not merely as an idea—can transform your life.”

Harris has knocked around the world of meditation for many yearslong enough to have a good feel for both the best and the worst of meditation experts and spiritual gurus.  You’ll find yourself thinking about Harris’s ideas  long after you finish the book.

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We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance

By David Howarth

Recommended on: 21st August 2018

We’ve long thought that Shackleton’s amazing voyage, as described in the riveting book Endurance, was one of the greatest stories of courage and, yes, endurance, ever told.  But we’ve now read an even more amazing story—We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance, by David Howarth.  This is the epic tale of how Jan Baalsrud, a Norwegian commando, overcame virtually every hardship that could be thrown at a human being as he fought, skied, limped, dragged, was carried, was entombed, and yet still carried on.  This book will inspire you to carry on with aplomb—it is unforgettable!

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What Every BODY is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Speed-Reading People

By Joe Navarro and‎ Marvin Karlins

Recommended on: 20th February 2018

This week’s recommendation is the wonderful, quick read What Every BODY is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Speed-Reading People, by Joe Navarro and‎ Marvin Karlins. We love the pictures in the book, which give an excellent sense of the small “tells” that signal characteristics such as sincerity or untrustworthiness.  This culturally aware book could help keep you out of trouble during your travels, and also give you a leg up in your ordinary interactions both at work and at home.  And veryone—especially teachers—could benefit from knowing how they may inadvertently be sending negative signals they don’t really want to be sending.  Highly recommended!

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When Can You Trust the Experts: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education

By Daniel Willingham

Recommended on: 13th December 2018

This week we read When Can You Trust the Experts: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education, by Daniel Willingham. This is a good, much-needed book—what we particularly like is that Dan takes a step back to look at the big picture of what educators (and parents) want to get from education. You’ll learn about Enlightenment to Romantic approaches to education, how to charlatans can use their looks to help them unfairly pass tests of legitimacy (Dan’s bald pate is perhaps a signal of his trustworthiness), and much, much more. Incidentally, another great book by Willingham is his Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom.

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When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

By Dan Pink

Recommended on: 3rd January 2018

We’ve long been major fans of Dan Pink. His latest book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing lives up to Dan’s fantastic writing record. Right from the start, we were riveted to read of a ship sunk on a sunny afternoon within sight of shore—with over a thousand lives lost. How did it happen?  You’ll have to read When to see, but the book’s title gives an important clue. We love Dan Pink’s work because he’s one of the best writers around at combining practically useful insights from science with compelling stories that are hard to put down. (And as a result of Dan’s book, Barb plans to take tango lessons with her husband!)

Dan himself reads the Audible version, here.

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Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University

By Richard White

Recommended on: 31st May 2022

Who Killed Jane Stanford has all the ingredients of a thriller—a murder by strychnine of the primary founder of one of the world’s leading universities. In able hands, this book would have been a real page-turner—the deceit, acrimony, corruption and malevolence by academicians that underlie the true origins of Stanford University are mindblowing.  Sadly, the bulk of the writing centers on petty details, while skimming over important big-picture issues such as the corrupt means by which Leland Stanford apparently gained his wealth.  A great book if you like petty details.

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Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams 

By Matthew Walker, PhD

Recommended on: 7th December 2017

EMBARRASSING REVELATION (added August 21, 2021):

Walker’s book, as it turns out, is riddled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, as described in this outstanding analysis by Alexey Guzey (himself an early student of Learning How to Learn). As Wikipedia notes: “Walker failed to disclose that numerous meta-analyses involving over 4 million adults found the lowest mortality was associated with 7 hours of sleep, and that the increased risk of death associated with sleeping more than 7 hours was significantly greater than the risk of sleeping less than 7 hours as defined by a J-shaped curve.” As Guzey concludes: “…imagine that a 20-year-old who naturally needs to sleep for 7 hours a night, reads Why We Sleep, gets scared, and decides to spend the full 8 hours in bed every day. Then, assuming that they live until 75, they will waste more than 20,000 hours or more than 2 years of their life, with uncertain long-term side-effects.”  But there’s far, far more, including evidence for misrepresentation of the institution where Walker received his doctorate (the institution Walker had claimed apparently doesn’t issue doctorates), plagiarism, and, well, just making stuff up if it supports what Walker wants to say.  (Here is Walker’s response to some of the criticism.)

And we were also sad to learn of retraction and problematic research by Dan Ariely, who has studied, of all things, honesty.  Many companies (including some online learning platforms), ask students to sign integrity statements before beginning quizzes.  This approach has often arisen due to Ariely’s research.  Unfortunately, there’s good evidence that Ariely’s data for this research was cooked.  

Now if only Jo Boaler’s problematic research involving mathematics education—which is being used as the shaky foundation that underpins reform mathematics approaches—would be held by Stanford, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and other educational organizations to the level of scrutiny and consequent opprobrium that Walker and Ariely have received.

Older (embaressing) review:

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams is one of the most important books we have ever read.  If you read one book to help you with your learning (and life) this year, we think it should be Why We Sleep.

It seems that every question we’ve ever wondered about related to sleep is covered by author Matthew Walker’s masterful discussion of sleep. Walker is the Director of UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, so he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to snoozing.  Yet Walker is also a masterful writer, full of witty, insightful metaphors that give an in-depth understanding of how and why we need to sleep.  We’d always known that sleep was a vital part of learning–Walker’s book tells why sleep is so important.  Walker shares sleep-related insights by the dozen along the way, such as why sleeping pills are much less innocuous than you think, tips and tricks to falling asleep more quickly, and why a tiny percentage of the population needs only 4 hours or so of sleep a night–(and why you’re probably not one of those people).  Do not miss this book. (Audio version here.) [Hat tip, super-MOOCer Ronny De Winter.]

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WICKED PROBLEMS: How to Engineer a Better World

By Guru Madhavan

Recommended on: 28th March 2024

WICKED PROBLEMS: How to Engineer a Better World by Guru Madhavan. This ingenious and important book is about the cloudiest, most difficult-to-solve of all the problems we encounter–the “wicked” problems.

The author Guru Madhavan, a systems engineer and the Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and Senior Director of Programs at the National Academy of Engineering, helpfully frames his book’s topic in terms of different levels of problem complexity. Some problems, Madhavan notes, are “hard problems,” bounded and boundable, like self-checkout at a grocery store, or the development of the smartphone. Next up, and far more difficult to solve, are the “soft problems” relevant to human and organizational behavior, which involve both political and psychological factors. Even the seemingly simple task of designing and building a bridge can be a soft problem—the solutions can differ broadly depending on what country and city you want to build in. The third class are “messy problems,” which are problems that entangle differences and divisions created by our value sets, belief systems, ideologies, and convictions.  Trying to grapple with a disease like Ebola, with its implications for traditional funeral values among other delicate religious sensibilities is a messy problem. 

So where does this place wicked problems? 

They emerge from the interaction of hard, soft, and messy problems. As Madhavan puts it “If they were works of art, hard problems would be photographs, offering clarity and directness. Soft problems are like blurry brushstrokes of impressionism, and messy problems are spilled and splattered abstractions. A wicked problem emerges when hard, soft, and messy problems collide. Think of them as a cubist collage where the truth is simultaneously sharp, shaky, and squiggly. All three are required for wickedness.”

And off you’ll go in Madhavan’s wonderfully engineered double-track book to learn about wicked problems–and about how the development of pilot training and flight simulators might help guide us to better engage with these problems. This book is profound and phenomenal!

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World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech

By Franklin Foer

Recommended on: 2nd October 2017

The central idea of this book is that Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple have become pernicious monopolies. One result, according to Foer, is that the writing world has changed dramatically, and not for the better. Foer has personally experienced this upheaval. The magazine he edited, the New Republic, ran roughshod over his career. Franklin makes some important points, even as it’s amusing to see him show the same “we know best” bias he’s accusing others of. Franklin, incidentally, is the brother of Learning How to Learn author fave Joshua Foer, who described how he became an unlikely memory champion in Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.

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Wu: The Chinese Empress who schemed, seduced and murdered her way to become a living God

By Jonathan Clements

Recommended on: 31st May 2018

While in China we were also recommended another related biography—Wu: The Chinese Empress who schemed, seduced and murdered her way to become a living God, (a living God is, after all, a nice gig if you can get it). Where Cixi comes across as brilliant but sometimes necessarily hard-edged, Wu comes across more along the lines of the successfully sinister described in Barb’s classic, tongue-in-cheek titled but critically-acclaimed book Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend. (As Harvard’s Steven Pinker noted apropos Evil Genes: “A fascinating scientific and personal exploration of the roots of evil, filled with human insight and telling detail.”)

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You Look Like a Thing and I Love You

By Janelle Shane

Recommended on: 16th November 2020

You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place, by Janelle Shane.  Shane is a Colorado-based artificial intelligence researcher who makes computer-controlled holograms for studying the brain. She also runs the blog AI Weirdness, where she writes about “the sometimes hilarious, sometimes unsettling ways that machine learning algorithms get things wrong.”  Shane knows her stuff, and she’s also hilarious—a rare, killer combo of talents for an author.  If you’ve ever wondered about how machine learning and artificial intelligence works, this book is for you. And if you’re an expert on machine learning and artificial intelligence, but want to learn more about its bizarre antics and foibles, this book is also for you. We love the simple, bizarre illustrations, but this is also a surprisingly good book for listening. Enjoy!

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You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

By Alexis Coe.

Recommended on: 30th March 2021

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington by Alexis Coe.  If you’re a history buff, as we are, you will get a lot out of Coe’s seemingly lighthearted and oft-times irreverent look at George Washington.  We’ve long wished for a fairly dispassionate book about Washington that discussed his good and bad sides without taking snide potshots or putting him on a pedestal. Alexis Coe’s book walks that fine line—perhaps most importantly, she is able to outline Washington’s integrity combined with a deep-rooted racial hypocrisy that is sometimes quite breath-taking. Here’s a sample from the book’s beginning that gives a sense of Coe’s delightful, but deeply thought-provoking alternative take on America’s leading founder: 

“All of the Founding Fathers have problems. Thomas Jefferson strikes modern audiences as beyond hypocritical, John Adams as tiresome, and James Madison as downright boring. But according to Washington’s own biographers, he’s in real trouble. Joseph Ellis calls him ‘the original marble man.’ Ron Chernow says he is ‘composed of too much marble to be quite human.’ Harlow Giles Unger says he’s ‘as stonelike as the Mount Rushmore sculpture.’ What is to blame for Washington’s inhuman stature? Well, for starters, his renowned self-control. ‘My countenance never yet betrayed my feelings,’ Washington once said. That was an exaggeration, but he was discreet enough to land himself, as Richard Brookhiser has lamented, in ‘our wallets, but not our hearts.’ Every biographer humbly endeavors to break Washington out of his sepulchre—by proceeding in almost the exact same way as the one who came before him. First, his biographers stick a portrait of the man Ellis calls America’s “‘foundingest father’ on the cover. Many favor Washington’s most iconic image, his rigid and gloomy face on the one-dollar bill, but most prefer a painting that shows his whole body, because his thighs drive them wild. Brookhiser, examining a portrait from 1792, can’t help but notice how ‘well-developed’ they are. Ellis admires how they ‘allowed him to grip a horse’s flanks tightly and hold his seat in the saddle with uncommon ease.’ For Chernow, Washington’s “‘muscular thighs’ were just the beginning. He was a ‘superb physical specimen, with a magnificent physique . . . powerfully rough-hewn and endowed with matchless strength. When he clenched his jaw, his cheek and jaw muscles seemed to ripple right through his skin.’ They pair that visual coffin of a cover with a verbal coffin of a title, often adhering to the same stale format. George Washington: A Biography. George Washington: A Life. George Washington: A President. The more adventurous among them might throw in a hyperbolic word or two (Destiny! Power! Genius!) or a phrase borrowed from Washington’s time, immediately lost on potential new readers (‘His Excellency’ or “‘For Fear of an Elected King’). With titles this stodgy, presidential biographies will always appear as if they are for men of a certain age, intended to be purchased on Presidents’ or Father’s Day. The Thigh Men, as I came to think of these kinds of biographers over the years, are a decidedly ‘size matters’ crowd. Chernow’s book on Washington, which won the Pulitzer Prize, clocks in at almost a thousand pages, a record among single-volume editions on our first president—in no small part because it takes every opportunity to remind readers that the great general was very, very manly.”

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