Tag: Book Reviews

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Under the Influence

Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: How and Why People Agree to Things. New York: Morrow, 1984. Print.

How do you choose what books you read? Read the options below. How you respond might say something about the weapon of influence for which you are the easiest target.

  1. You were given the book as a gift.
  2. You are part of a book club and have committed to reading what the group selects.
  3. The book is a #1 New York Times bestseller.
  4. You like the author’s other books.
  5. Someone you respect—the NYT book critic or your pastor—suggested the book.
  6. The book is being banned in your child’s high school, and you want to know what the fuss is about.
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Essentialism Isn’t Minimalism

McKeown, Greg. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, 2014. Print.

Greg McKeown’s Essentialism has a thesis similar to Richard Koch’s The 80/20 Principle: pursue less and achieve more. This is an attractive offer. It’s a version of Walmart’s USP: “Save money. Live Better.” I.e. spend less and get more. Unfortunately, McKeown too often confuses minimalism and essentialism. The book can’t deliver what McKeown promises because he ultimately doesn’t know what’s essential. 

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Deep Work? Yes. Deep Worth? Maybe.

Newport, Cal. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. 2016.  

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to be more productive. Cal Newport’s book Deep Work has greatly influenced my approach to productivity this year, and I wanted to offer a more formal review of a book I’ve read three times over the past few months. Computer Science is Newport’s discipline, but productivity is his domain. He was writing books about mastering college while he was still in college, and his degrees from Dartmouth and M.I.T. and professor gig in Georgetown University’s computer science department testify to his own productivity. 

His thesis is that the most immersive, cognitively demanding, and rewarding work we are capable of—what Newport calls deep work—is valuable, rare, and meaningful. Deep work allows us to learn faster and produce more. Consequently, it is the master skill for twenty-first century knowledge workers. We should contrast deep work with shallow work, nearly automatable tasks that we can perform while in a state of distraction. For Newport, an example of deep work would be producing a scholarly paper (he published nine of them during the year he was writing this book) while an example of shallow work would be answering email. Newport argues that the extent to which we can cultivate the ability to work deeply will be the extent of our success.

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Want to Make Change Happen? That’s A Marketing Problem This Book Can Help You Solve

Godin, Seth. This Is Marketing: Making & Sharing Work That Matters. PORTFOLIO PENGUIN, 2018.

I’m a college professor who teaches English, and I have a marketing problem. Our university’s English majors are disappearing, and I’m worried about our university cutting our program. I teach three general education courses a semester, but my passion for my subject area isn’t translating into many converts. Our faculty and student community is solid but not as robust as I wish it were. In short, I have an enrollment problem, which is exactly the problem Seth Godin says marketing was designed to solve. I might think the problem is spreading the word: “If only more people knew!” Godin says that this confuses marketing with advertising. The problem of audience, design, and storytelling all must come first. Marketing is about making change and, if done well, produces a virtuous cycle where I get to help people who want to change themselves or the world do the work they want to do. It’s as simple, and difficult, as that.

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The Black Swan Problem

Taleb, Nassim N. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011.

The Book of Job records a divine Black Swan. Without warning, Job loses his children, possessions, health, and the approval of his wife and friends. These events meet the Black Swan’s initial criteria: its unexpectedness and big consequences. The rest of the book concerns Job and his “friends” trying to figure out why Job’s Black Swan event happened. This is the Black Swan’s third criterion: it is only explainable retrospectively. Job’s friends think Job must have sinned because God punishes sinners. Job knows he’s served God and wonders why God is punishing him. Both claims are logical. Sin has consequences, and so does serving God. Yet both Job and his friends are wrong.  No one brings up Satan, who had challenged God concerning Job. The story we’re given—the one Job and his friends never learn—is that Job suffered because he was good. Job and his friends didn’t know what they didn’t know. As a result, they were overconfident in what they did know. When God finally replies to Job, He does not explain the Black Swan. Instead, God confronts Job with his own ignorance.

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How To Make Your Ideas Memorable

Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. New York: Random House, 2007.

A lawyer asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells him a story about a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. The man gets attacked by robbers and left for dead. Two men, a priest and a Levite, pass by the injured man but do nothing to help. A Samaritan sees the injured man and gets him shelter and pays for his accommodations while he’s recuperating. Jesus then asks the lawyer, “Which of these three was a neighbor to the attacked man?”

The parable of The Good Samaritan does not appear in Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick, but it embodies the book’s core idea: communicating a message worth remembering in a memorable way.

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A Review of Michael Lewis’s Book on Bias

Lewis, Michael. The Undoing Project. Penguin Books. 2017. Print.

         One project Michael Lewis undoes in his 2016 book The Undoing Project is his own best-seller Moneyball. In their review of Lewis’s 2003 book, economist Richard Thaler and legal theorist Cass Sunstein argued that the scouting mistakes Lewis explored were well-documented biases of human judgment and decision-making. The work documenting those systematic errors had just earned Daniel Kahneman a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. Lewis had never heard of Kahneman or Kahneman’s collaborator Amos Tversky, who had died in 1996. The Undoing Project shows Lewis offering a richer explanation for the phenomena documented in Moneyball by telling the story of Tversky’s and Kahneman’s relationship, explaining the ideas their research uncovered, and surveying the impact that research has had in fields ranging from medicine to economics and, yes, even sports.

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A Review of A Memoir about an English Prof’s Conversion

Butterfield, Rosaria Champagne. The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, 2012.

Formerly a Syracuse University tenured-professor of English and queer feminist activist, Rosaria Champagne Butterfield tells the story of her tumultuous conversion to Christianity and her sanctification as the wife of a minister and mother to adopted children of different races. As churches debate how to respond to both their LGBTQ neighbors and proponents inside the church, Butterfield has found herself a poster woman for Christians who believe scripture condemns the expression of same-sex desire. In this book, Butterfield does not rehearse that debate’s typical discussion points. She doesn’t discuss the origins of her same-sex desire (i.e. whether or not she was “born this way”), approve or condemn conversion therapy, or give her views on the various political issues surrounding gay marriage. Butterfield doesn’t even recount her childhood or give many details about the lesbian relationship she was in when she came to Christ. The book’s title is important. Butterfield hasn’t written The Secret Story of an Unlikely Convert. Neither, I presume, would her thoughts about a variety of political and cultural issues be “secret” since that’s what everyone would expect her to write about. Instead, she’s provided a testimony that is, at minimum, sixty percent about the difficult sanctification process that follows conversion. I recommend this book as a great starting place to consider with prayer and humility what it is we’re actually praying for when we ask God to save those who do not know Him.

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A Review of a Classic 18th Century Novel

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe, 1719.

A voluminous writer who has been hailed alternately as English’s first novelist and the language’s greatest hack, Daniel Defoe wrote this wildly popular tale of isolation in 1719, just before he turned 60. Defoe adapted the true account of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who had lived alone on a remote island for four-and-a-half years and whose exploits had been recorded in “true histories” prior to the novel’s publication. In this the 300 anniversary of the novel, it’s worth noting that Defoe’s book remains staggeringly popular, with too many cultural adaptations (think of Swiss Family Robinson or the film Castaway) to count. The book has given many an economist a fictional representative to help explain a host of basic principles like consumer goods or capital goods in the pursuit of capital accumulation. In it, you can find the very roots of the novel, the dominant literary form of the past 300 years. You can also read the book as a story of redemption and resurrection, one that foregrounds physical isolation and the desire for physical rescue as a way of getting at the human need for spiritual deliverance. I recommend the novel as a seminal volume of English literature, one that shows how close the roots of the English novel are to spiritual autobiography.

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