Rating: 4/5 Linda R. Monk, The Words We Live By (New York: Hyperion, 2003). This book is the entire text of the US Constitution and its 27 amendments, annotated line by line with explanations, historical motivations, and ramifications thereof. If you’re a US citizen, or just interested in politics, then understanding...
Rating: 3/5 Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness (New York: Penguin, 2011). The thesis of the book is that in times of peace and plenty, the best leader is a mentally normative (or “homoclite”) one. In crisis, however, you need an exceptional leader. Ghaemi asserts that the best such leaders are mentally abnormal. He...
Rating: 5/5 William Davis, Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health (New York: Rodale, 2011). This is another book that talks about the low-carb diet, wheat in particular. Did you know that wheat impacts your blood sugar even more than table sugar? One of his main points is that...
Rating: 4/5 Jakob Nielsen & Kara Pernice, Eyetracking Web Usability (Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2010). If you’re a web designer, then you really owe it to yourself to at least check this book out from the local library and read it once. The list price of $70+ dollars is a little more than I would want to spend, but if...
Rating: 4/5 John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010) This book discusses the history, current state, and possible future of trade publishing in the US and UK. This book does not discuss at length academic or STM publishing—he does that in...
Rating: 4/5 Douglas R. Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New York: Basic Books, 1986). This book (revised again in 1996) is a collection of the columns Douglas Hofstadter wrote for Scientific American in 1981–83. The columns are grouped by topic and each is followed by a...
Rating: 4/5 Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: New Riders). Krug’s book on web design is terrific. It’s a nice edition in full colour with lots of illustrations. Whether you’re a novice designer trying to build your first web site or a seasoned veteran,...
Rating: 3/5 Marti Olsen Laney, Psy.D., The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World (New York: Workman, 2002). If you even think you might be an introvert, then this book will be of some value to you. The book’s goal is to help you determine if you’re introverted, explain what exactly that means, help...
Rating: 5/5 Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). If you wanted to read Taubes’s book Good Calories, Bad Calories (GCBC) but were put off by the 500 pages of small print, then immediately go out and get this book. This is a distillation of GCBC crammed into just over 200...
Rating: 4/5 Ben Goldacre, Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks (Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2010). I first saw Ben Goldacre on YouTube, where I saw his stand-up comedy routine in which he talks about the placebo effect. I decided to give his book a go. I liked it, but it came across overall as far...