What I Just Read

Gives a very useful set of lenses for how to think about stress in all its forms and manifestations. The bulk of the book deals with stress in medical biology and human physiology, but there are applications beyond our bodies, to our lives, communities, even among civilizations. A very interesting work.  The chapter "When Scientists Disagree" by itself makes this entire book worth reading. It is an eloquent articulation of the nature of scientific debate (including the implications of when scientific debate turns insulting and hostile), and the author quite humbly provides the reader *all* of the professional disagreements and contentions with his model of stress. This part of the book really sings out with humility, sincerity and a scientific rigor we seems to have lost in the postmodern era. Notes:  * General adaptation syndrome (G.A.S.): how we adapt to stressors: various shock therapies across history (fever treatments, electric shock, etc) provided improvement with n...

An unexpectedly fun read! A book that looks at history through a lens of cyphers, codes and decryption, starting with achaeological/linguistic problems (breaking the "code" of heiroglyphics and ancient Persian), running right through millennia of history, right up to (this book's) present day: the years leading up to World War II.  Another unexpected gift from this book: all the fascinating historical context the reader gets, simply because espionage, ciphers and codebreaking play such a role in so many important historical events. A wonderful bonus for history geeks. I only lament the fact that this book was published in 1939 and thus doesn't include the incredible stories of codes and codebreaking during and after WWII. This author would have done them great justice.  Notes:  1) Breaking the code of ancient Persian, which took up the consecutive lives of three brilliant code breakers, followed by the "breaking" of Egyptian hieroglyphics by French archaeolo...

Conveys the importance of being volitional with your mental attitude and self-concept, as well as conveying the importance of being "mindful about your mindfulness"--cultivating the ability to observe and adjust your mental attitude. The context here is (obviously) sports, but the book's ideas can be applied to all life domains. It could be better organized and certain chapters could be better structured, but these are minor criticisms of useful book that is a genuine gift from the author. I thank her for writing this book and for sharing her thoughts.  Notes:   1) "The philosophy behind this work is that for athletes to control and channel physical energy most effectively, they must be aware of their thoughts and intentions. Your thoughts are your reality. Your intentions are your goals--the reality you wish to achieve in your sport participation and your life. What are your goals? What are your intentions for the day, the week, the month, and the season?"  2) ...

I don't care all that much about golf, but I am interested in a psychological aspects of performance in different domains. This book is helpful, but would be much more helpful for a golf enthusiast reader who wants to manage specific shots and shot problems. The book spends less time on the mental aspect of the sport than you'd think (given the title) and more time on technical golf-specific problems.  Notes: 1) Pair with Anders Ericsson's Peak : mental representations for complex ideas, chunking.  2) The book's introduction contains a good rundown of useful golf literature.  3) "Course management and mental toughness" what Earl Woods said he taught Tiger. ("is that all?" quips the author). These two phrases are good examples of mental representations in the sense of the book "Peak." You can't use them effectively until you know enough about the game, and are an advanced enough player at the game, to genuinely understand what these phra...

Intellectually tepid but harmless. A discussion of the value of statistics in explaining and understanding the modern world, with advice in the form of simple--and sometimes vacuous--rules. The author tries for a Malcolm Gladwell style but he's not quite the writer Gladwell is, and the result is a book that offers readers less insight and less enjoyment than it might. Notes:  1) The author opens with a strange critique of the short (and in my opinion very useful) 1950s-era book  How To Lie With Statistics , claiming it made people collectively suspicious of statistics. Interestingly, he makes this claim with no evidence given, which is an unfortunate way to open a book about finding the truth with statistics. On one level this probably seems a stupid thing to nitpick about, but to put it on another level, it is never nitpicking to expect a writer to back up any and all claims with at least some evidence. If an author makes the specific claim that a book written in ...