The Peabody Sisters of Salem by Luise Hall Tharp

Slow, stately biography of three sisters from 1800s-era Massachusetts. The eldest, Elizabeth Peabody, was a well-regarded educator; the middle sister, Mary Peabody, was a teacher and author who became the wife of educator and congressman Horace Mann; and the youngest, Sophia Peabody, was an artist who married author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

It's not my favorite style of biography when the author attributes thoughts and feelings to each of the characters when there's no way the author can know their thoughts and feelings. This is "James Michener" history, not real history. At the same time, the book gives a competent tour of a kind of birth and early gestation of American literary and artistic culture.

You'll meet a shy and weird Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was Elizabeth's Greek tutor. You'll learn the circumstances of Nathaniel Hawthorne surprise breakthrough to worldwide literary fame with The Scarlet Letter. You'll meet general (later President) Franklin Pierce, as Hawthorne writes a controversial biography of him. You'll see educator and congressman Horace Mann's career arc as he befriends Elizabeth, marries Mary, wins a seat in Congress, and then goes on to Ohio to found Antioch College.

You'll see the Peabody sisters mingle with prime movers in the public education movement in the early USA, you'll meet key New England abolitionists, and you'll meet leaders of the socio-philosophical "Transcendentalism" movement, as they attempt to create a self-sustaining agricultural community (the result was about what you'd expect if a group of Brooklyn soy-hipsters tried the same thing today).

Finally, you'll see dynamics common to all families: manipulation, sibling rivalry, and angry disputes over the political issues of the day. Slavery, for example, became a wedge issue in the Peabody family when the youngest sister's abolitionism wasn't sufficiently pure and aggressive enough for the oldest sister's taste. They "ruined their Thanksgiving dinners" arguing about politics too, and I'm unsure if it makes me depressed or sympathetic to know it.

To read:

Conyers Middleton: Letter from Rome

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun

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 ...

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...

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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