Dusty Volumeshttp://booklikes.com/photo/crop/50/50/upload/avatar/a/5/azure_a5a749407f670c650e0db1c2011a4740.jpgtmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.com2024-03-28T10:20:08+00:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/rssreview: Why Smart People Hurt: A Guide for the Bright, the Sensitive, and the Creative2013-09-26T00:00:00+01:002013-09-26T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/494791/why-smart-people-hurt-a-guide-for-the-bright-the-sensitive-and-the-creativetmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.com
This is a difficult book to rate or review, not least because I generally have a hate-hate relationship with "self-help" books, and this one pushes too many of my wrong buttons (if it is indeed a book, and not purely a giant informercial for the author's "Natural Psychology").
But ...
It also provided a enough "aha" moments, and insight into some things that have been bugging me for a while, for me to give it a high rating, regardless of its many, many flaws.
The constant refrain of the book is that smart people are really, really good at thinking themselves into all sorts of traps, and really, really bad at being smart about the challenges of being smart. Maisel sets out fifteen key areas in which this often applies, and suggests a variety of techniques for addressing them.
I'm not entirely convinced by many of the proposed solutions (and got increasingly more irritated by the constant framing of them in terms of what "an adherent of natural psychology" would do), but simply providing a framework to notice and name a lot of bad thinking traps — many of which I'm well aware of falling into regularly, but have never really been able to identify with this level of clarity — is (hopefully) of sufficiently high value on its own.
]]>
review2013-09-24T00:00:00+01:002013-09-24T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/469653/posttmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.comreview2013-09-20T00:00:00+01:002013-09-20T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/469654/posttmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.com
Bernie Rhodenbarr and Evan Michael Tanner, with a likable rogue getting into ever increasingly ludicrous situations. This isn't as well drawn as either of those, but there's enough promise (and enough laugh out loud moments) for me to check out more of the series.
]]>
review2013-09-19T00:00:00+01:002013-09-19T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/469655/posttmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.com This is what “Minu esimene raamat” should mean.
]]>
review: Digital State: How the Internet is Changing Everything2013-09-07T00:00:00+01:002013-09-07T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/494792/digital-state-how-the-internet-is-changing-everythingtmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.com Part of the problem, undoubtedly, is that I'm not the target audience. The book is very British attempt[1] not so much to join in the conversation about the impact of technology, but to re-rehearse it to the sort of people for whom the top item in a list of Five Uncomfortable Human Truths needs to be “Life is more important than brands”.
I was particularly disappointed by the chapters that stray out of the advertising/marketing sphere into areas where I have more first-hand knowledge. Christian Johnsen's “Stories into Action — How storytelling and digital platforms will make our world a better place” takes as its premise that great storytelling creates energy for change, and the internet provides a much needed platform for converting that into action. But the bulk of the chapter is given over to key examples (Obama's 2008 campaign, [his own] ThisPlace09, the Egypt Revolution of 2011, and Kony 2012), which at best fall short, and in some cases are primarily cautionary tales about how not to do things. The author acknowledges this at the end by claiming he's really only trying to lay out the beginnings of a framework for how these tools can be used — but in the process he ignores the large numbers of people who have already been doing so at a much deeper level.
This reflects my complaint generally about the whole book: there's very little in it that I haven't already encountered much better elsewhere.
-- [1] and I mean that in the worst possible way
]]>
review: Outcasts!: The Lands That FIFA Forgot2013-09-06T00:00:00+01:002013-09-06T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/494794/outcasts-the-lands-that-fifa-forgottmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.com “In an era when politics means less and less, particularly in more industrialized countries, when fewer and fewer people turn out to vote, sport crystallises the notion of a nation perhaps more than anything else. ... As the world's most popular team sport, football keeps alive the idea of a national identity undefined by political borders better than most. The notion of Englishness and Scottishness, for example, has been kept alive by sport as much as anything else since the Act of the Union in 1707. In places where identity is slowly starting to mean less and less, in an age of globalization where satellite TV is watering down local sports in favour of global brands, some peoples are trying to keep alive an identity that is being lost, through football.”
The author tracks the progress — usually slow, frustrating, and contentious — towards international recognition (whether at the highest levels, or simply to get an occasional match) by teams from the Channel Islands, Greenland, the Falklands, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, Northern Cyprus, Occitània, Monaco, Kosova, Zanzibar, Tibet, North Mariana, the Vatican, and Sápmi.
Unfortunately the book is in dire need of a good editor. The book keeps cutting between general history lessons of the various nations; the history of football within them; the quest for international recognition of their football associations; and (surprisingly detailed) reports on some of the matches they actually get to play (e.g. at the Island Games). Each of these can be quite interesting, but they don't cohere well, and the book ends up incredibly disjointed, failing, as a result, to tell any compelling story.
]]>
review: The Idler's Glossary2013-09-04T00:00:00+01:002013-09-04T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/494795/the-idler-s-glossarytmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.com
]]>
review2013-08-25T00:00:00+01:002013-08-25T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/469656/posttmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.comreview2013-08-24T00:00:00+01:002013-08-24T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/469658/posttmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.com
]]>
review2013-08-22T00:00:00+01:002013-08-22T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/469659/posttmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.com What makes this book so frustrating is that Newsom seems to have completely failed to understand the value of this lesson. Rather than using it as a prompt to explore how other cities and countries around the world have already discovered creative and innovative approaches to many of their issues, so as to copy or even improve on them, he remains trapped in his California bubble, preferring instead of seek advice from the usual roll-call of tech pundits as to how best to model his city (or state, or country) on Farmville instead. Other than a couple of token nods to internationally led approaches in internet voting and participatory budgeting, Newsom's entire field of vision seems restricted to Silicon Valley startups, "Code for America"-style hackathons, and a few ideas being tried in a couple of other US cities (the leaders of whom he'd be happy to regularly learn from, as long it's through some sort of MayorBook social network).
Hidden amongst the shallow treatment of most of the key issues surrounding citizen participation (e.g. reducing the privacy debate to Guy Kawasaki's laughable claim that there could be no problem with Facebook knowing every other website you visit unless you're a paedophile), there are some interesting tales of the problems Newsom faced when trying to actually implement some of his ideas in San Francisco — whether from entrenched bureaucracy, a hostile press, or even just their own self-doubt and lack of research (an initial idea to make public transport free to use is abandoned after "realising" that this would simply lead to residents abusing the system as they would no longer value it — an argument that has turned out be entirely untrue in Tallinn.)
Had this been a more reflective book, wrestling more deeply with how to adjust all the superficially neat theories to better cope with exposure to day-to-day political reality, it could have been a very useful view from the inside. But instead these are largely shrugged off with a "Do as I say, not as I do" approach, and that opportunity is lost.
]]>
review2013-07-15T00:00:00+01:002013-07-15T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/469710/posttmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.com However, I immediately followed this book with [b:Radical Honesty|551511|Radical Honesty How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth|Brad Blanton|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348064838s/551511.jpg|538752], and by the time I'd finished even the introduction to that, I had docked one star from my rating here. I'm still undecided whether Blanton's take is great or terrible, but either way it exposed remarkably quickly that Harris' version is actually deceptively shallow.
]]>
review2013-07-14T00:00:00+01:002013-07-14T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/469660/posttmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.comreview2013-07-12T00:00:00+01:002013-07-12T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/469657/posttmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.comreview: Understanding Asexuality2013-07-02T00:00:00+01:002013-07-02T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/494800/understanding-asexualitytmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.comreview: The Case of the Calendar Girl2013-07-01T00:00:00+01:002013-07-01T00:00:00+01:00http://tmtm.booklikes.com/post/494801/the-case-of-the-calendar-girltmtmhttp://tmtm.booklikes.com