Winter Reading List
16 January 2012, 12:36 pm · Books
It's time once again for me to catalog the books that are cluttering up my coffee table until I can get around to stripping their pith and depositing it into my commonplace book. Here, for your enjoyment, edification and relaxation, are a few of the volumes that I recently finished reading.
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The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker
This is one dense little book--let me start by saying that. Pinker is arguably one of the greatest scholars working today, and in this volume, he attempts to explain how our words and language color our perceptions, opinions and thoughts. It is heavy on linguistics, but even if you have a weak (or no) background in that particular field, Pinker does a reasonably good job of providing examples and explaining himself from one chapter to the next. There is a great deal of information here, and it's a book I will likely read again in the future specifically to absorb more of it. -
The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser
When I picked up this book at Borders during that ill-fated chain's final days, I bought it based on the cover flap's description of the text. What I didn't realize is that Pariser is the board president of MoveOn.org, a decidedly liberal activist group. That in and of itself is not a problem, and I found Pariser's attempts to be politically even-handed throughout the book laudable, but his ideology does tint the text. In short, Pariser's argument is that Google fine-tunes search results so that individual results differ from one person to the next. He frames this as a negative--as something that must be changed or stopped--because it threatens to somehow bury or obscure relevant search results. I found myself largely losing interest in his argument once it dawned on me that the title of the book is far more sensationalist than the actual "problem," which I view as nothing more than a new trend in artificial intelligence and search algorithms. Your mileage, of course, may vary. -
The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What we Do by Eduardo Porter
First of all, let me just say that this book's cover art is mightily misleading (proving that I do indeed sometimes judge books by their covers--I blame the design-focused part of my brain); I expected it to be much more along the lines of Martin Lindstrom's books or Paco Underhill's work. It is not. Porter is a New York Times reporter and not a consultant as Lindstrom and Underhill are, and he is much more interested in the price of intangibles (happiness, faith, freedom, etc.) than retail items. It's an interesting read, but it's a bit nebulous at times and lacks a certain amount of depth. -
Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter
This book held a lot of promise initially, as I definitely believe we're seeing a rash of irrationality on the part of Americans (see vaccine denialism, the complete nonsense of "creationism," and so on)--but this book's biggest flaw is its incredibly limited scope. Specter focuses on only a few specifics--Vioxx, vaccines, organic "fetishism," and so forth--specifics that are so... well... specific that they almost can't be generalized. I was hoping for a broader view of how the American public poo-poohs science. I got that, but only in a very limited fashion. -
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies--How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer
This is easily the best out of this bunch of books. Shermer is one of my favorite writers; he's a well-known skeptic who writes for Scientific American and was one of the founders of Skeptic magazine, so his positions are pretty well known. However, this book is slightly different from his typical volumes in that he attempts to try and explain why people believe anything at all (that is, why aren't we just emotionless, logical automata?), regardless of his position on said beliefs. It's an interesting and enlightening look at psychology, neurobiology and neurochemistry that I definitely would recommend to anyone who is interested in how opinions, beliefs and thoughts form and "stick."
