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Titles Reviewed/Index of Posts

What follows is a list of all of the books reviewed so far in this reading blog. The titles contain links to each individual post; the links that say "Amazon Link" will take you to that specific title on Amazon.com.

1) The Elephant and the Dragon by Robyn Meredith
[Amazon Link]

2) New Think - The Use of Lateral Thinking in the Generation of New Ideas by Edward de Bono
[Amazon Link]

3) The Sinister Pig by Tony Hillerman
[Amazon Link]

4) The Renaissance Soul: Life Design for People with Too Many Passions to Pick Just One by Margaret Lobenstine
[Amazon Link]

A Simple Rule for Getting Rid of Your Excess Books

5) Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment by Tal Ben-Shahar
[Amazon Link]

6) The Fords: An American Epic by Peter Collier and David Horowitz [Amazon Link]

7) The Overspent American by Juliet Schor [Amazon Link]

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Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Tedious, weak, and worst of all  "riddled" with errors  and oversights. Do not read. I recommend instead  Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction  by J. Allan Hobson  for information about the REM/dreaming stage of sleep, as well as  Restful Sleep  by Deepak Chopra  for readers interested in practical help for improving sleep quality. Unlike Why We Sleep , both of these books are short, direct, readable and clear. Sadly, I also have to spend a brief few sentences  on Alexey Guzey's devastating criticisms of this book . Alexey's entire post is very much worth reading, but if you want to see just one glaring example of atrocious academic ethics, you can start with a chart Matthew Walker uses in Chapter 6 to prove a linear relationship between sleep loss and sports injury-- except that he cuts off the part of the chart that disproves his argument . This is childish middle school stuff, way beneath the line of a Berkeley and Harvard professor, a...
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Good Thinking: The Foundations of Probability and its Applications by Irving J. Good

This collection of scientific papers is a challenging but useful discussion on statistical methods, probability, randomness, logic and decision-making. Much of the book centers around Bayesian statistical methods and when and why to use them, as well as "philosophy of science"-type discussions on when a scientist should--or sometimes must--apply subjective judgments to scientific problems. It will help enormously if you've had a semester or two of statistics to really get at the meat of this book. If not, scroll down a few paragraphs for a short list of layperson-friendly books that address many of these subjects more accessibly. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] Author Irving Good worked with Alan Turing at ...
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Deep Response: An Emergency Education in Post-Consumer Praxis by Tyler Disney

Tremendously useful. This is a book about meta-preparation: about what it really means to be prepared when you don't know the future. It teaches readers how to think about skill development, optionality and flexibility--and by virtue of these meta-tools, how to earn true individual self-sovereignty. Deep Response is a sophisticated strategy-level discussion hidden in a simple story: a thirty-something man goes back in time to offer guidance to his twenty-something younger self. Their discussions are engrossing on many, many levels, as the two characters--with radically different perspectives, despite being the same person--work out various life problems. The older character wants to warn the younger man that all of his strivings will eventually cause him to achieve nearly the exact opposite of what he seeks, and worse, if he doesn't adjust, his life will soon lack enough flexibility to do anything about it. The reader is the lucky beneficiary, getting exposure to a wide-rangi...
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