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: 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: 3/5 Karl Sabbagh, Remembering Our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us (Oxford University Press, 2011). This book turned out to be not quite what I expected. I thought it would be a lower-level discussion of what memory is, but instead this book is a higher-level overview of memory (childhood memory in particular)...

Rating: 4/5 Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures In The Margin Of Error (New York: Ecco, 2010). This is a book I read sometime last year but just never got around to reviewing. As the title suggests, it’s a book about fallibility. It’s a relatively lengthy book, but the writing style is clear and engaging, and the...