Book Review-Rebooting AI By Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis

The long title of the book is Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust.

In the aftermath of the introduction of ChatGPT, a chatbot by OpenAI, and the attendant controversy which the site stirred up, this book can serve as a great introduction to, and provide an explanation of Artificial Intelligence as it is being designed right now.

The reason for the longer title is that the authors do not believe that AI community, specifically the Deep Learning contingent, are ever going to give the world Artificial Intelligence which will come close to replicating human intelligence. Indeed, the authors make a bold statement about WHY the Deep Learning Approach will never come close. That argument is the premise of this book.

The authors are well respected members of the AI movement. Their credentials are impeccable and they straddle the academic and the commercial spheres of AI.

The authors lay out their problems, and the problems with how the current approach to creating AI as it is practiced today, is flawed. They proceed to explain, in qualitative details, how Deep Learning and the statistic based AI methods are just very advanced curve fitting: no more, no less; they also point out why this approach will not ever create anything that will even crudely approximate human intelligence.

They do so in eight chapters.   The first two lay out the problem and gives us a vision of what our expectations should be. The third chapter details the process: Deep Learning, that all the AI world use to create their systems. Chapters four and five make the argument against the premise that Deep Learning is the sole method that is necessary to create human like artificial intelligence. The authors call what is necessary Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The distinction between what we have versus what we truly want, i.e. human intelligence, is the distinction between AI and AGI.

Chapters six through eight is where the authors make their point about what is missing in just using Deep Learning to build AI, and what is critical and necessary for being able to approximate human intelligence: AGI. They offer up the examples of human traits which are non-numerical, intuitive, causal, and elusive. They also delve into why these traits can not be replicated through programming the AI engine with infinite amounts of training data.

It is necessary to point out that the authors are not naysayers when it comes to the idea of artificial intelligence, they do not outright argue against the enterprise of creating artificial intelligence systems, indeed, they are steeped in the AI world, they are AI enthusiasts, they are AI believers. They are also critical thinkers and cognitive scientists, very well grounded in the human mind and its knowns and unknowns. They give credit where credit is due when they allude to the impressive results of Deep Learning creations; their objection is that the Deep Learning proponents are using just a single note to create the polyphonic sound we hear when we imagine machines that think; because they are neglecting the cognitive and psychological aspects of being human.

Their argument is convincing, because they are clear, concise, and their combined knowledge on the subject is impressive. They lay out their case with an impressive combination of technical papers and study results mixed in with imaginative weaving of common sense. Their logic appeals to what humans have always longed for when we speak of robots and our technical ability to design our dream robots.

As the news of ChatGPT  has made the rounds of popular social media, the mix of concern, amazement, and bemusement has fed the interest of the lay public in the subject, an interest that has even surprised those who created ChatGPT. Yet the discussions have not gotten beyond the superficial layer of AI. This book makes a very fine primer for those who wish to dig in the depths of the subject, at least a little bit. Fortunately, the authors have also provided a substantial list of references for the reader, in case they are curious.

I learned a copious amount about AI research that had been done in the past few decades. Reading the book gave me a foundation upon which I can form an educated opinion. My opinion may not contribute to the state of the art of AI, but it gives me a solid foundation to work from.

Book Review-The Bookseller By Mark Pryor

I had very high hopes for this book. To say that I was disappointed is the understatement of the year.

I had sought out this book because I had read some positive recommendations through my  querying Librarything.com. It had all the earmarks for a great mystery, at least containing the elements that would interest me: it is set in Paris, it involves books, and it involves intrigue and crime solving.

Since it is set in Paris, I also expected to get a travelog: descriptions of all thing Parisian, the arts, the food, the atmosphere, the feel of Paris. I did get all that, which was the  part of the book that drew me in. That was what made me stick with the book for as long as I did.

Mark Pryor has been writing the Hugo Marston series for a while:  there are  nine volumes in this series. The Bookseller is first book, as such, I allowed certain amount of rough edges as Pryor is presumably working on his chops during this first foray.  

I have decided, however, to not pursue this series mainly because I was disappointed with the first one.

The book starts off auspiciously enough with our hero, Hugo Marston, walking down to the Seine and meeting with his friend Max. The descriptions of the Paris Street scenes were evocative, and the descriptions of the main protagonist drew me in and kept me interested. Pryor certainly was not messing around when he starts the story with a bang and a lot of action. He was able to sustain my interest for a long while as he set the scene and the parameters of Hugo Marston’s world.  There's certainly plenty of action, but the actions were written in such a cursory way that the reader seemed to be prodded along by the author to keep going. It was akin to reading by checking off the boxes in a list. This felt like a strategy  by the author to sustain the narrative, and keep the reader focused. There's plenty of action, each element of the story came along at a breakneck pace, which is not a complaint, as I am used to that pacing. The problem is that there just doesn't seem to be any attempt at  spinning a yarn, there was no storytelling, just a death march through the myriad of independent events. It felt like the author was distributing all the pertinent information he can conjure up in his imagination quickly so that he can race to the ending. It made me feel like being rushed through a list of chores that might eventually build up to a worthy denouement. I didn't appreciate being rushed along while not being intellectually  entertained.

Since it is  a murder mystery, there isn't much character development, and not much was expected. Many characters were introduced and taken away, the reader was able to quickly integrate them into the story and then moved on. Pryor did a good job putting these characters in context with the story.

Even though the action came at a breakneck pace, the pace did not allow any  deeper purpose to emerge. The reader was never allowed to let the hooks of the plot to grab them and  wonder about the crime. Or even think about trying to solve the crime.  It was just an action movie on paper.

I am disappointed because I was hoping that this was going to be a series that I could latch onto. Perhaps it's because I've been spoiled by some of the stellar series that I have been reading and made me expect that all mysteries are as well developed.

This book is the second in a row that I've chosen to read which left me cold. It was just not my cup of tea and I never gain a lot of traction with the book or the main character. I usually do a marathon read towards the end of the mystery fictions because I was motivated to find out the ending. I did a marathon read for this book because I just wanted to get it over with.

Although I am still curious about this character:  Hugo Marston, I am not curious enough to jump into the second book. I will just let sleeping dogs lie until my feelings  become more lenient about the shortcomings of the first book.

 

Book Review-Guitar Zero by Gary Marcus

This book is an unexpected pleasure. Unexpected because I had known about Gary Marcus through his professional standing as a cognitive psychologist. I had read his recent article in Nautilus magazine on artificial intelligence.

I was looking around in his list of authored books to find some cognition related material to dive into, but then this title: Guitar Zero shows up on that list. I felt compelled to reading this book after reading about the premise, because it stood out from  his much more serious writings. I had endured years of  violin lessons as all good Asian boys will do, I enjoyed the experience, but I was a miserable player, owning short stubby fingers preordained my fate as a terrible fiddler. The music theory and appreciation comes in handy for the rest of my life, but I had always had a desire to play the guitar, some teenage hormonal dreams never die.

This book was curious to me because: what is a serious cognitive scientist doing writing a book like this? I read some of the teasers about the book and I was intrigued because he seemed to be as hopeless at playing an instrument as I was. But he had the gumption, and a year of sabbatical to devote to this project.  

I was also interested in seeing how he, a cognitive scientist, can parlay his knowledge in the cognitive sciences to analyze what he is doing and to improve his playing.

The book was amazing.

It doesn't hurt that the author is has a good, self-deprecating sense of humor and he made copious fun of his own inabilities to “get” rhythm. The sidebars, if you could call them that, are fascinating because in addition to entertaining us with his struggles learning how to play, he regaled us with solid knowledge regarding cognition, how we humans learn how to play instruments and how our brains work in the cognitive context. It helps that what he said lined up with what I had been reading and learning, a big motivational boost for me. The reassurance that I was going down the correct track was very welcomed.

He delves into the literature about learning, and most fortuitously, he is a fine writer, so he is excellent at explaining the main ideas as well as diving into the granularities. He complements his cognition explanations with examples of his struggles in learning to play the guitar. He not only explains what he is experiencing, but he also discusses why he was having problems and how he can ameliorate the difficulties. He always couples the  difficulties that a guitar presents to your average human with the latest cognitive theories.

Yet another bonus with the author is that he is a major fanboy. He talks about musicians that are around my vintage. I think he's a little younger than me, so the musicians he was using as examples are people that I know, and I also like. It all fits in together neatly in a cohesive package.

One thing that he had that was somewhat unique, outside of devoting a full year to this experiment, was that he was able to hire a top-notch guitar teacher to work with him; something that the average person might not be able to afford.

One of the more interesting experiences that he had is that he was able to attend the School of Rock with his teacher’s recommendation and access.

This interlude at a retreat where he ends up being the oldest person in his rock and roll band —he's playing with a bunch of kids and they're just kicking his butt musically. He knew where he stood, and he persevered through the experience enjoying his time there. Most importantly, it seems that he also improved significantly. We, the readers, are fortunate to be present, through his very well written narrative, at this experience.  

In the end, he had a fun playing experience and he did what most middle-aged guys dream of doing: learn to play guitar and getting a chance to perform with a group of great musicians. As of the end of the book, we learn that he still plays, and his rock band of kids had a successful performance.

This is a serious book, as well as a fun book of nice stories about music and how to learn to play music. There is a significant list of endnotes and list of references that he uses to show us all the serious cognitive science papers that is referenced as the basis for his discussions.

In the end, it is the rock and roll experience that I was really drawn to, and I really enjoyed. reading about the applied cognitive concepts that he discussed.

The most significant thing for me though, is his  good fortune of having access to some of my favorite musicians because he is working on the book. He also introduced me to many musicians that I had never heard of, I need to thank him for that, as I'm checking those musicians out.

The fact that he was able to get Tom Morello and my all-time favorite jazz guitarist: Pat Metheny to sit down and answer his questions just blew my mind and made me green with envy.

This book is great fun. I recommend this to anybody who has had any experience trying to learn how to play any musical instruments or trying to learn to play any sport, because you would appreciate the difficulties that he writes about, as well as his patience and stubbornness.

Book Review-Coaches Guide to Teaching By Doug Lemov

I learned about Doug Lemov and his very successful program: Teach Like A Champion https://teachlikeachampion.org/ when I started teaching as an adjunct professor at the local university. I had some teaching experience when I was a graduate student, but I felt ill-prepared to teach as a professor. Typical of my MO, I searched for resources to help me with my own teaching development. I discovered Lemov’s book, Teach Like A Champion 2.0 and I used it to  guide me to understanding the latest innovations in teaching and how to engage the students and be more effective with them. TLAC is a fantastic resource because they leverage the video technology to show the readership good teachers in their elements, AND they tell you, in fine granularity,  WHY these videos demonstrate the best practices in teaching. They take great pains to teach the teacher and to dispel myths.

So it was with great excitement when I learned that Lemov would be publishing  a book on coaching. I had very high expectations for this book because of his stellar work as a teacher who teaches  teachers because  I had also read his previous book Practice Perfect (Lemov, Woolway, & Yezzi, 2012) (Here is my review of that book: https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2019/10/book-review-practice-perfect-42-rules.html) it was recommended to me by someone I have great respect for and I had heard Lemov speak on a podcast.  I expected the same thing, that he would coach coaches on how to coach. I was not disappointed. In fact, this book was far more than what I had expected.

One note that might be important, almost all the examples and situations that are cited in the book  comes from  the sport of soccer. This made sense because soccer is what Lemov coached. At first, I was a bit bothered, but as I thought about it, I came to believe this obstacle is a form of desirable difficulty to help me pursue applying the book to my coaching: by learning to extricate and integrate the essence of the book through the context of soccer and then translating the essence  to my own sport, I am using those same lessons I had learned from the book to improve my own coaching through the context of my sport.

The table of content is very simple. Six chapters listed and he did not break them down into the subchapters in the table of content, he didn’t even tell you what the chapter titles were. Very curious. I was a little disturbed by that initially, but as I was started reading, I found that not knowing the chapters or sections made me pay attention to what I was reading.  

The first chapter laid out the theoretical basis, the driving point for the rest of the book. The fundamentals of  the latest in cognitive learning.  The basis of everything is Cognitive Load Theory (CLT). Which gave us the concpets of Working memory and long-term memory. He employs CLT as the beacon for everything else in the book.  He also introduced the ideas of chunking, interleaving and spacing etc.  

I had bought the book when it was first published, I read through the first two chapters and then I laid it aside. In the intervening time,  I had read much of the literature on CLT and the related ideas. By reading these papers in its original incarnation gave me a better idea of the driving principles for this book, so that when I returned to reading the book, I was more aware of the ideas and concepts the book references.

The succeeding chapters explored topics like practice design, optimal strategies for feedback to the players, checking for understanding (CFU), developing an overall culture, and an expanded discussion on salient issues in developing both the players and the coaches. All the chapters are full of anecdotes and narratives from soccer. Lemov was deliberately precise and concise in linking the anecdotes with specific lessons within the book’s narrative. He also included Eastern Eggs in the side notes, guiding the readers to videos embedded in his TLAC website because he very much believes in the reader/learner witness real live lessons via video.

I particularly enjoyed the material on feedback and checking for understanding, these are important and readily applicable lessons that could be used immediately. The chapter on culture building was powerful in its implication on the overall picture. Indeed, the culture building is something that many have been searching for like the holy grail. Most references I have read regarding culture building have been somewhat incomplete at best and superficial at worst. Lemov’s chapter on culture building was task oriented but girded by profound empathy and belief in the mission of education and doing what is best for the people we coach. Indeed, the language Lemov chose to use in the book emphasizes the point that ultimately language is the key to communicating with players and that empathy should be the priority of all coaches, whether their ultimate goal is development oriented or results oriented.

The chapter on the issues in developing both the player and coach is a deep dive into the topics that were not extensively elaborated in the other chapters, most of those issues are worthy of a chapter by themselves, but the discussions were thought provoking and allows the readers to contemplate the broad implications of the issues.

This is a game changing book. I believe every coach, regardless of sport, should make this book an indispensable part of their library. The pages need to be dog eared with copious amount of written notes on every page, which Lemov had anticipated because the margins are deliberately wide for such note taking.

I love this book. I am working on thinking through the examples that are in the book and putting them in the context of my sport, an exercise which excites me to no end.

References

Lemov, D., Woolway, E., & Yezzi, K. (2012). Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better. San Francisco CA: Jossey-Bass.

 

 

Book Review-In Search of the Magic Theater By Karla Huebner

This book is an interesting choice for me, mainly because this is not usually the kind of book that's on my radar. I am usually a reader of mysteries and classic literature; this is a bit out of my comfort zone. The fact of the matter is that I do not even know how to categorize the book, which is an exciting option for me. I was looking to expand my horizons and I decided to read this book.

The book is structured much like Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, one of my favorite books from my youth. There are two main characters who take turns narrating. The first one is Kari, a  middle aged, divorced woman who is looking for her former self, somebody who she was before she was diverted by a marriage that wasn't horrible, but also wasn't what she wanted

The other character is Sarah, a young woman who had just come of age, someone who is devoted to her art: the cello, but really unsure of herself, even though she stubbornly believes that she sees and knows her path.

The story revolves around art. Which is another delightful part of the book. Through Sarah’s cello playing and Kari’s experience working in the theater, the reader gets exposed to the inner workings of a musician and a theater person. It is evident that the author has great passion and knowledge about both subjects, as well as art in general, for she slowly and gently exposes the reader to many of the nuances of the arts. It was a welcomed lesson in areas that I had very little knowledge.

The story starts with a gentle pace. It introduces us to the characters and using first person narrative of the two women.  The link is that Kari is renting a room from Sarah’s aunt after her divorce. The initial narratives were the two women speaking about themselves and about their initial impressions of each other. There was judgement and descriptions of their environment in the rooming house, which gives us an idea of who each of the characters are. The story proceeds at a languid pace, which is quite welcomed, it slowly builds the characters through small and not overly dramatic revelations as the plot moves along at a comfortable pace. We learn about the two women, their inner thoughts, how they see the world, and how they see themselves in the external world.  The really clever part is that the author approaches the characters from different points of view which gives us a nice juxtaposition of the two characters, their worldview, their way of looking at their own and each other’s lives. Kari is world weary, and she's lost her compass after her divorce.

Sarah, on the other hand, is much more constrained emotionally because she's a 22-year-old reacting to her lot in life. As we progress through the two stories, they began to intertwine, and morph into a single narrative.  Upon first reading the book, I thought this two-person narrative would be a difficult constraint for the storyteller, but in fact the author did a phenomenal job of describing the two characters in each of their unique voices, giving us discernable impressions at how the  the characters saw themselves and how they saw each other as the story slowly but surely builds up momentum.

In parallel with the story, the author gives us lessons in music: both classical and contemporary music of my youth since the story is set in that particular era.  The reader also gets lessons in mythology, experimental stagecraft, philosophy, amongst many others. It was quite gently and subtly informational, the erudition kept the story going  while also keeping the readers delighted.

The story accelerates as it moves to  the reader begin to know and care for Kari and Sarah in different ways.  The individual sections begin to stop being readings and started to become  a conversation with Kari and Sarah.

The story line accelerates very quickly at the very end of the story to the inevitable and surprising denouement. It took turns where I didn't anticipate. By the time I got to the end of the story, I found myself attached to and involved with both characters as well as being surprised at the ending.

This novel works on many levels for the reader. The mix of the story, the knowledge, and the characters lead the reader into this world of the Magic Theater, where they find themselves in a most magical place.

Book Review-Murder in Chianti By Camilla Trinchieri

I have come to love the mystery novel genre. I follow many mystery series by various authors and the nature of select mystery series has pulled me in. The genre keeps my mind fluid active without overburdening it, although the series that I like keeps my marbles lubricated and my mind in suspense.

The series that I follow, and there are quite a few of them, prominently features certain aspects of life that is particularly attracts my interest. Most are set in other countries, mostly but not exclusively European; they are set in the countryside; the story involves some details about travel,  history, art, music, and of course food, lots of food. So it is with great expectations that I started reading Murder in Chianti by Camilla Trinchieri. The copy of the paperback that I bought has a very complimentary statement from Martin Walker, the author of the Bruno, Chief of Police series. One of the authors that I follow loyally. I thought this was a good sign

This book is the first in a series of three books that Trinchieri has written featuring the main character, Nico Doyle. She has written other books outside of this series, but that I haven't read her other books.

I really wanted to like this novel. It had all the right elements to attract my attention. It is set in Italy, it had the food element, the wine making element, the relaxed and simple countryside lifestyle,  and the dreamy, easygoing nature of living in rural Italy. I felt like this was an easy entree for me. At the very beginning of the book, it was as I expected. I enjoyed being introduced to the main character, Nico Doyle. He is a widowed ex-cop who moved to his wife’s hometown in Italy. He is involved with her family: her favorite niece and her immediate  family, who operates a small restaurant. He lives by himself in a small house that used to be a warehouse for a winery. Perfect.

The pace of the story telling was soothingly slow and detailed, always a good start. But, as the story moved along at the deliberate pace, certain things that just didn't click with me. I thought she did a very nice job introducing us to the main characters,  they were all well sussed out, and she was able to get us to know them and to show us their humanity, both good and bad. The main characters that I felt were best described were the main protagonist, Nico Doyle, and the representative of the carabinieri in town, Salvatore Perillo. The rest of the characters were not so well drawn out because this is the first book in the series so we have not had time to build a history with the others.

The plotting was the main issue with that I had with this book. I didn't think the plot was very believable and I thought the murder mystery and the resolution of the mystery was lacking in facts and a cogent path which led them to their conclusion. I thought the way she handled the unraveling of the facts of the case were haphazardly done. I didn’t understand why she introduced some of the characters, unless she was planning on using them later on in the series, because they did little or no work in this book, nor did it make sense for them to be in the story other than as decoration.

I did like the way she goes into detail about lifestyles of the individuals in the village as well as the general pace and rhythm of the village. She worked hard at it, that was well written. Some of the auxiliary characters, those who would be witnesses or suspects,  are not very well drawn out but then again, they were not expected to be a lot of weight because this is the first book in the series. The rhythm and the way the story moved along just did not grip me.

I also got the sense that the author was trying to hurry the reader along with the plot, that the author did not fully develop the psychology of each of the characters.

So in summary, I felt that the plot was flat,  the buildup of the case was weak, and the big denouement, where Nico and Perillo figure out how and who of the murder was weak. The conclusion was something that came out of the left field. I felt like the author just decided to stick something in there just to finish the book because it was time to finish the book. She created something that was not even hinted at in the rest of the book.

I am at two minds about the book and series. I was expecting more from the promising premise. I am unsure about whether I wanted to read the second book. There was a 15 page teaser at the end of the this book from the second book, but it doesn't look promising, but it's only 15 pages. I may or may not commit to this series although I would like to see how the characters are developed. I do like the two main protagonists however. To be fair, some of my favorite series took three or four books to get rolling and overcome the awkwardness of the beginning.  There is hope for this yet. I am hoping so, but I am still of two minds about whether I want to commit or not.

Book Review-How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question By Michael Schur

This is a book that I would not have read on my own. It is one of these books that came at the reader from various trusted sources.

While I enjoyed the show the Good Place, I was not addicted to it. I had figured that a book on  moral philosophy was worthy of my attention. I'm glad I did because this is not Moral Philosophy for Dummies, it is much more than that.

Michael Schur is known by the public because he created the Good Place television series. The show is funny and entertaining, but it also asks some uncomfortable questions as well as place its character in challenging situations. Schur revealed early in the book that he had to do serious reading and thinking in order to prepare himself for the task of writing the show. He wanted to be thorough with his due diligence because he wanted to get the philosophy right. He also had some high horsepower helps from some actual philosophers. I think he, and the philosophers, did an excellent job of organizing the material and juxtaposing the various schools of thoughts together in a very friendly and digestible way. The learning curve for the book was not all smooth sailing, but it was very good. He was able to ameliorate many problems with the very dense and obtuse parts of moral philosophy. It is not easy to make Nietzsche or Kant accessible, but he did.

The book is split into thirteen chapters and three major parts.  the first part is the introduction to the major schools of  moral philosophical thoughts.  He asked some relatively innocuous questions by way of giving examples of how these schools of thoughts would resolve the conflicts created by the questions. These relatively innocuous situations got the readers primed for what comes up later in the book, although he did start by asking the classic thought experiment about the moral dilemma of the runaway trolley in the second chapter.

He jumped in a little deeper in the second part of the book as he attempts to untangle some of the knottier problems of moral philosophy by discussing them and giving us more nuanced arguments from different schools of thought. This is where Schur makes his greatest contribution, the problems and potential solutions are explained in entertaining fashion as we were able to understand where all these philosophers are coming from, the nuances of their arguments, and how it all applies to us and our lives. There are no real heroes and no real villains in this exercise, they are just there.  The maddening part is that he tries to fairly present the philosopher’s arguments when we are passionately falling on one side or the other of the arguments, like all good humans. Schur does express his opinions to us, which is what makes it interesting as a reader because this makes the presentation more approachable.  Schir is not just pontificating to the reader. I agreed with some of his arguments, yet many times I did not.

The third part of the book is where everything falls together or falls apart depending on your viewpoint. This is where we get into the difficult moral questions and where context becomes very important in the situations that are presented. These situations are classic moral philosophical discussions and thought experiments placed in the modern context so that the premises of the thought experiments are appealing to the contemporary viewpoint. Of course,  since Schur is a successful comedy writer,  his discussions of the moral philosophical dilemma  are peppered with funny asides when it gets  too deep or too serious.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but the effort is appreciated.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I found myself underlining certain passages and thinking about these thought experiments as my mind wanders after I had put the bookmark in and put the book down.  The philosophical arguments stick because these arguments are all pertinent discussions that affects us and ultimately will impacts our thinking as we navigate our way through the real world.

Even though I thought I would enjoy this book. I enjoyed it a little more than I thought I would. One of the most important things about this book is that the key points and important nuances of the schools of philosophy were revealed to the reader without having the reader dive through voluminous, extremely dense, and opaque outputs of the Greek philosophers, the Stoics, Kant, Nietzsche et. al. This book gave the reader nuanced understanding of the philosophies and more importantly, did the essential exercise of comparing the schools of thoughts in a fair and provocative way. It got the reader thinking about moral philosophy, even though neither the book nor Schur’s arguments for his own beliefs are perfect.

Book Review-Write for Your Life By Anna Quindlen

It isn't very often that one gets to have a conversation very famous author. Of course, I didn't actually have that conversation with Anna Quindlen, but I feel like that I did as I read her latest book Write for Your Life.

The book is out of the ordinary because it is Anna Quindlen way of motivating people to write about things that we don't usually think is so important. She is very convincing in making the case that those very things that we don’t feel are important may end up being very important. The very first example she uses is Anne Frank.  A young girl who’s diaries documents her life, and trivialities of living, but also describes to us her life as lived in hiding from the Nazis. Anna Quindlen made sure we understood the importance of us, the future, having the documentation of life as it existed for the Jews who were in hiding from the Germans through the eyes of a young girl. That explanation packed a particularly powerful punch for me.

We don't take our writing  very seriously. We think that what we have to say is not important enough to be scribbled down., that our scribblings would not be interesting enough to be passed on. Her entire book is trying to convince us that what we do, how we do it, the result of what we did, and the importance of what we say is not up to us judge. Indeed, it is up to posterity to judge the writing. Of course, what we write has to be honest and we have to dig deep into our hearts and minds in order to be genuine and detailed.

She gives some very strong argument and uses real life examples to make us think about writing. In addition, she writes about what our writing should mean to us. How our writing would help us in our daily lives. She writes about journaling; she talks about letter writing — a lost art in this day and age.

She tells us about the medical training process and how they have made doctors writing down their daily experiences a regular part of the training. This practice helps the doctors to process the experiences that they are facing. She emphasizes that this writing is not frivolous, this writing is not just done for the sake of writing, this writing helps these doctors as they process life and death situations and maintain their mental health.

She also delves into the technical parts of writing, the structures and rules that scares the living daylights out of your average writer, i.e., someone like me. She delved a bit into poetry — something that most people are definitely afraid of attempting — mainly because there are  so many structures and constraints to deal with. It is rare for an average person who think they can writes to feel completely comfortable unless they felt capable at dealing with the  technical issues.

The beauty of the short book is that she discusses all of this not as a naggy English teacher, she writes about it as a practitioner who is revealing our misconceptions about writing and defanging our fears slowly but comfortingly. The fact that we were having a conversation with her, the very accomplished and credentialed writer made me feel comforted about my own writing.

The book is a short one, but it is one that I will revisit repeatedly. This little book has and will inspire me. We shall see how my own writing experiment progresses,  but as of right now she's convinced me to do that write.

One deliberate but interesting feature of the book is that she added lined pages at the end of the book so that the readers could scribbled down notes at the end. It is a sneaky way of encouraging the reader to do that very thing that the title suggests: Write for Your Life.

I found this book interesting, entertaining, and inspirational. I hope I live up to Anna Quindlen expectations.

Book Review-Let Them Lead By John U. Bacon

I don't know who got me interested in this book, but I was drawn in through the sports aspect of it.  The author of this book coached hockey at the Huron High School in Ann Arbor MI, he was an alum. He is also a well-known business book writer. Which gave me pause because I am not generally a fan of that genre. Nothing against John U Bacon but I am wary of  leadership books written as if leadership can be taught by taking short cuts,  recipes and formulas. I am of the belief that just reciting superficial recipes and formulas is not just inadequate, but it is defrauding the readers as they seek wisdom from the business book genre. 

I had never read any of John U.  Bacon’s other books so I didn't know what to expect, but the title intrigued me as I also believe that the best course to take as a coach is to train my players to take charge, to train them to be leaders. I jumped into this book despite my own misgivings. I hoped  to gain some insight into the mind of the author through  reading the stories and hoping to harvest ideas for my own coaching.  

He first got my attention when he quoted one of my favorite bands, Yes, in the very beginning of the book, I know, it doesn't take much. But as I read, I started to be drawn into the narrative. His descriptions of his teams, their travails ,and how he managed to get these players to buy into his program were familiar and I sympathized, as I had similar experiences in coaching. His emphasis on having achievable vision, convincing his players to buy into that vision, and coaxing them into playing the leading role in creating their own legacy is a philosophy I share. As the title suggests, the main theme in this book is to convince the reader that the leadership and motivation to achieve a vision resides with the players, the people who have the most skin in the game. As I read, I began to understand where the author is coming from. And my admiration for him grew overtime as I started to delve deeper into book. He laid out his lessons succinctly by letting the reader know the main points that he wished to convey at the beginning and end of each chapter. He did so without commenting on how hard it was going to be nor by answering the question of “How does one achieve these lessons?” This kind of presentation bothered me a bit, as that is exactly the reason for my antipathy towards the business genre. But I was somewhat placated by the narrative and the vividness of the stories that he told. While I am still not completely convinced that this is the best way to communicate the lessons, it is the most entertaining way to do so, especially in this case. This is the generally accepted structure of the business book, lay out what needs to be said, illustrate the points with anecdotes, and then expect the readers to piece together what needs to be done without having been shown how. What helped the author is that he is a very good storyteller; that is more than half the battle: convincing your audience by giving them a great story.

The book is separated into three parts: First, second, and third year; each with its own tagline: Changing the Culture, Building Trust, and Giving Control. Each part is again split into a number of chapters, each chapter dealing with a particular lesson which falls under the theme of the parts.

What made the lessons palpable and memorable was the narrative, and the fact that  he was able to get the players as well as his assistant coaches’ perspectives to flesh out his stories and make the stories whole. I appreciated that effort because prevented the key component, the stories, to becoming a soliloquy from him, one that had become rose colored through the years. Those statements by the players and assistant coaches were powerful testamentsbecause they weren't just statements from young kids, they are statements from grown men who had lived a life beyond their teen years, players who had time to think and appreciate their experience from the  perspective of having hindsight.

The haplessness of the team that he inherited is laid out in full in the beginning of the book. They were winless for a couple seasons, they had little tradition, they had little school pride; in fact  the players resorted to gallows humor to obscure their own embarrassment. The first two parts of the book describes the drastic steps the author took to start the transformation.   He had only two rules: work hard and support your teammates, they are the only two rules he needed. Even though they are simple, the power of those two rules can be applied in any situation; they were simple but all encompassing.

The third part of the book is where he makes the case for the title of the book. The first two parts sets the stage for him and his coaching staff. Part three would not be successful unless they were successful in parts 1 and 2. There is a connecting theme in all three parts of the book.

There are many things to like about this book:  the unwavering commitment to a vision and to a set of principles, the stories that the author chose to illustrate his points are very well thought out and brilliantly written. It seemed that just about every vignette from every chapter brought me to tears because these snapshots of the team’s journey together emphasized the pertinent lessons as well as tore at my deeply help beliefs. Through his description of the players and their interaction, the reader can sense that there's a love that he has for his players as seen through his eyes and told through his voice that is more than just a coach-player relationship.

One of the lessons late in the book was: all the credit goes to the other people. He told a famous story about Herb Brooks, during the 1980 Olympics when USA team beat the Russians. Brooks made sure he left the celebration to the players because the moment belonged to the players and went back to the locker room to weep his own happy tears. This perfectly illustrated the point that the feats are accomplished by those who had the most skin in the game and it is best for the coach to stand in the darkness of backstage, no loess joyous but out of the limelight.

This book was remarkable, I truly enjoyed it.  It has been my habit to take notes in the nonfiction books that I am working on so that I can come back  I can condense my notes into a cogent review because I can use it for my own coaching. I chose not to do this when I started reading this book because I just wanted something to read to inspire me, to motivate me, and to make me excited about coaching; and I was sure that since the author’s philosophy seemed to be so in tune with mine, that what I could learn would not be enough for me to note. My own hubris in not taking notes was a bad mistake. I am now having to go back through the book to mark those pearls of wisdom.

I believe that this is a book that needs to be read for all coaches in all sports at all levels.

The part of the book that I most enjoyed was when he talked about his former players and the pride with which he recited their accomplishments after that seasons that they played for him. He recounts them like they were his own children, which really is why we all coach.

John U. Bacon had an idea, and that idea was that it is best to let the players lead themselves because that is when true leadership reveals itself, it teaches the young what being a leader involves, and it is a selfless act of altruism. He also speaks of the hardships and difficulties that his approach entails, that the work is not easy, but worthy of the effort. In the end, I learned from John U. Bacon, despite my bias against business books, mainly because he tells a great story and he does not sugar coat the arduousness of the journey.

Book Review-Brainscapes by Rebecca Schwarzlose

I am a neophyte in the area of cognitive neuroscience, the brain, and psychology. I became curious about the general area after I read Physical Intelligence by Scott Grafton (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2020/08/book-review-physical-intelligence-by.html), as it dealt with connection between our minds, nervous system, and our bodies. It was after reading that book that I decided to work on learning more about the general area of mind-body connections: the how’s, and the why’s. I tried to create an autodidact’s  course into how we think about learning, and how we learn about learning.

As a part of this effort, I picked three books to focus on as a starter set of readings. The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2022/02/book-review-extended-mind-by-annie.html) , Mind in Motion by Barbara Tversky, and Brainscapes by Rachel Schwarzlose, supplemented by an undergraduate text in the area titled: Cognition, Brain, and Consciousness: Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience by Bernard J. Baars and Nicole M. Gage. I read the three together, more or less in parallel and consulted the undergraduate text, as my backstop reading. I knew I was taking on a challenge by reading all three books together, but I liked challenges. I tried very hard to keep the contents separate from each other in my head while still trying to integrate and coalesce the concepts from each book.

The author, Rachel Schwarzlose, is a neuroscientist at the Washington University in St. Louis and has the necessary credentials to write about this subject of brain maps. What is remarkable is her ability to communicate with amateurs trying to dive into the area. Her prose is clear and her explanations unfussy and to the point. She does it without smearing over the pertinent and salient details, she is  not afraid of explaining things that doesn’t seem to fit in.

The first two chapters explain why she's undertaking the writing of the book. These chapters lay out the answer to the question: Why should we want to learn about brain maps?

The next two chapters goes over the fundamental brain map for the visual sense V1, the touch map S1, and the auditory map A1 as the next chapter covers the taste and smell maps.

The next few chapters show how all the brain maps work as we function in our everyday lives doing the things that makes us sentient beings. The author dives deep into how we are able to take action, i.e., our M1 motor map; she delves into how the brain maps evolve, grow, and adapt as we mature, and how the brain maps develop to where we are starting from the womb.  It is followed by a chapter on how the brain maps work together in helping us recognizing people’s faces and places as well as a chapter devoted to how brain maps help us  pay attention. This section of the book ends with a chapter on how our comprehension  and communication faculties use brain maps.

I read the penultimate chapter as the contemplations and musings of a neuroscientist. It is full of the latest in research results, as with all of the chapters, but since it is on how the latest technology enables us to mind read and mind write with brain maps, the author does a bit of prognostication, extrapolation, and moral reckoning on the intended and unintended consequences from mind reading and mind writing, a prospect that made me quite uncomfortable, because if we had a way, someone will misuse it, guaranteed.  It was a sobering chapter to read.

The book ends with the author discussing the ways that brain maps has slowed us down, the downside of the maps, as well as how we all are able to overcome the drag on our cognition.

I found the organization of the book logical which made the book enjoyable to read, it is laid out in rational sequences which highlighted the nuanced description of the brain maps.

The illustrations by Paul Kim in the book is stellar, they complemented the descriptive text and brought forth the full and complete vision of what the author had intended, as well as making the text come alive in the readers mind, connecting the concept with the reader’s imagination.

Brainscapes is actually the closest to what I thought I needed in my autodidactic curriculum; it nicely connected the concepts with the physical brain. It was through this book that I was able to map out the physical locations of where the cognitive functions “reside” in our brains. Yet the book also revealed that my naïve, mechanical, and didactic mind did not adequately understand the breadth of the cognitive sciences, nor the depths that it reaches. The positive is that I happily revised my initial assumptions and corrected my own cognitive dissonance; for which I am truly grateful.

Book Review-The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul

I started reading The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul as a part of my own effort to learn about the  cognition and neurosciences.  I am a neophyte in this area, and I became curious about the general area after I read Physical Intelligence by Scott Grafton (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2020/08/book-review-physical-intelligence-by.html), as it dealt with connection between our minds, nervous system, and our bodies. It was after reading that book that I decided to work on learning more about the general area of mind-body connections, the how and the why. I create an autodidact’s  course into how we think and trying to understand and  learning about learning.

As a part of this effort, I picked three books to focus on as a starter set of readings. This is one of the three books. The other two were Mind in Motion by Barbara Tversky and Brainscapes (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2022/03/book-review-brainscapes-by-rebecca.html) by Rebecca Schwarzlose. I read the three together, more or less in parallel. This was the first one that I finished. Mind In Motion was a little bit more challenging for me to understand, and I started reading Brainscape much after I started the other two. I knew it was challenging to read all three books together, but I liked challenges. I tried very hard to keep the contents separate from each other in my head while still trying to integrate and coalesce the concepts from each book.

The Extended Mind explores the different ways of extending our minds that are external to our minds, i.e., how to use the environment around us to ease our internal cognitive loading, a mind-blowing idea. The author simplified some very obscure and amorphous concepts to clarify our understanding. She cited  numerous research literature in her explanations as examples of the concepts, as with all good nonfiction books seeking to explain complex material.

The book is split into three parts: Part I is thinking with our bodies,  Part II is thinking with our surrounding spaces,  and Part III is thinking with our relationships. Each part is further  split into three separate chapters, in addition to a conclusion,  so there are ten chapters in all.  

Chapters 1 and 2: Thinking with Sensations and Thinking with Movements did not draw me initially as I was reading articles in the same general area, so the topics seemed familiar.  The chapter that captured my attention was Chapter 3: Thinking with Gestures. The topic coincided with my own use of gestures when I lecture on video. I had tried to limit my own gesturing, fearing that the students would find it distracting. It was after reading this chapter that I felt liberated  to gesture freely, as well as consciously making my gestures meaningful.  I don't know how successful I was, but it made me think in terms of how extending my lectures to my gestures would serve to help my students understand my lectures.

The next two parts were much easier reading for me because I became more open to the ideas presented in the book. I was delighted with Part II: Thinking with Our Surroundings.  I've thought about using natural spaces before reading the book,  but I've never made that connection. Thinking with built spaces hit close to me because I have worked in industry for many years and I have always wondered about our office space and how ill-conceived most of them are, how ill design they are, and how unproductive the spaces made me. I was thinking about the open plan offices that became de rigueur.

Thinking with a Space of Ideas that was watershed chapter. It opened up the possibility of using different spaces to enhance my creative process, which made me quite excited as I took off tangentially into exploring how I can do this extension in my life.

Finally, thinking with our relationships with others hit another sweet spot, as we are bound to our fellow humans with regard to our cognition, whether we liked it or not, so we need to make that process simpler and more conducive to thinking creatively.

The chapter on thinking with experts reminded me of the times during my gradual school research days and how I felt dealing with experts; whether I was presenting a paper or what I was interacting with my gradual school advisor. The chapter made me re-evaluate those experiences  and allowed me to reexamine my history for the first time. The memories of the difficult times  during my student days and I wondered whether I could have done better if I knew this information then.

Thinking with peers and thinking with the group gave me motivation for  my teaching because I have liked having the students do group work,  but I have always dealt with student groups that were unbalanced, where one person  did all the work while the rest just coasted. I was determined to avoid that scenario. The chapters on peers and groups help shed light on some of the dynamics that I had observed but not really understood. I incorporated some of what I had learned from this book into my instructions to my students this semester. We shall see how this works.

I recommend this book. Although I don't know if people are going to fully incorporate all of this into their lives as I am hoping that I'm doing, it helped me to understand the part of cognition; The Extended Mind explained the connections for me between how our minds incorporate concepts outside of our mind and extend our cognitive process, it gave me a better understanding of the cognitive sciences and helped make connections to other material. If you are interested in how the mind works and how one can make our minds be better at what it does as it extends it with other tools, this is a good start. It is not a how-to book however, which I appreciate.  It made me learn and consider the various other tools and it made me create a paradigm that I feel I need to make my unique circumstances work for me.

Book Review-Sparks of Genius By Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein

This book Sparks of Genius was not a book that I had intended to read. I started reading this on the recommendation of Prof. Steven Strogatz, the renowned mathematician. He had mentioned this book as an instructive examination of the creative process, as a book on some of the tools to be used to spur our creative juices. I didn't believe him, so  I tweeted back to him that I didn't believe him. He kindly responded that he was skeptical at first as well but felt that it was a worthy read. I took a chance and bought a copy. As it turned out, he was correct, I truly enjoyed reading this book. I gained a considerable amount of knowledge regarding the creative process; more importantly the book opened up my mind to the possibilities of applying the 13 tools that the authors culled from their examination and study of some of the world’s most creative minds.  The 13 tools are natural things that we humans all do in flashes of inspiration. The difference is that they put the 13 tools next to one another and created connections between them and painted a mosaic which makes up the creative thought process.

The authors began the book with a chapter titled: Rethinking Thinking. The chapter observed our traditional way of thinking. How procedural our thinking has become as we have become acclimated to a specific way of using our senses and made the process of creating bypass our creativity, because we wanted to be efficient and expedient.  That first chapter drew me in, it fired my imagination and it made me consider the narrative that they described.  The first chapter also defined the difference that the authors thought between knowing and understanding, a key concept that I kept running into in my other readings. The authors also expounded on the importance of feeling as a major part of the creative process, something that is often neglected in the western traditions when it comes to thinking creatively. We have taken the mechanistic method of creativity to its extreme.

The second chapter is titled:  Schooling the Imagination. That chapter also goes hand in hand with the first chapter and it sets up the book nicely as to what the authors were trying to do with the 13 tools. In the second chapter, they make a case for changing the way we think about creating and inventing. This is where they lay out the 13 tools and gives us a bit of an advanced taste of what is to come in the later chapters. They go down the list of the 13 tools: observing, imaging, abstracting, recognizing patterns, forming patterns, analogizing, body thinking, empathizing, dimensional thinking, modeling, play, transforming, and synthesizing.

The last chapter is their summary and a call to arms to introduce these 13 tools into our educational paradigm formally so that we can educate the future generation on how to be creative and innovative through the application of these 13 tools.

The book starts with the most basic tool: Observing. And observation is illustrated by citing numerous examples of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things as they apply their keen sense of observations as a major part of their creative process. Observation is also explained and defined; they explain that observation  is not just looking for something but also knowing what to look for.  Which was a voilà moment for me.

The next chapter on Imaging, which  naturally flows from Observing. Imaging takes the results from observations to create images. Again, many examples of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things are described to demonstrate the  imaging process.

Abstracting follows and one gets the idea of the way the authors are using the sequencing of the chapters to create a sense of the natural sequential flow of the tools. They take the relatively concrete skill of  observing and move the thought process to something a little less tangible.  They then arrive at the actual act of abstracting itself.

Next on the tools list is Recognizing Patterns which was almost predictable because once you've abstracted the image our mind naturally begins to identify or recognize patterns for our own edification. Humans are very good at recognizing patterns; in fact, humans are too good at recognizing patterns. Sometimes we ascribe patterns for things just aren't there, but that is our creative advantage when we wish to create and innovate, we recognize patterns that are not logical.

Forming  patterns follows, because the natural instinct is to  create our own patterns after having recognized patterns from nature or from other people’s work.

As humans, we start drawing connections between the unfamiliar, we start Analogizing. This now takes us away from the most primal tools, those involve sensory perceptions and moving onto something that's mental: drawing analogy between the observed, imaged, abstracted, identified and formed patterns of; and connect with the familiar and recognized ideas from our experience through analogies.

Body thinking is next. The idea now is to imagine placing our bodies  into the analogy that we have drawn while centering that experience around our body.  

I have always taken empathizing as something emotional, but this chapter on empathizing made me think of empathizing in terms of slipping into someone else’s center, of changing my usual view from my center of existence and shifting it into observing all that is around me through the eyes of someone or something different.  

Dimensional thinking is next; this chapter is about  distorting, scaling, twisting, and rotating our  perceptions from the  body thinking and empathizing into a perception that is completely new and unknown.

Next two are modeling and playing. Modelling takes all the physical abstractions from body thinking, empathizing, and dimensional thinking  and creates a model. Which makes good sense. Playing is something very powerful that we humans do,  but we don't do enough of it because we are usually discouraged from playing in order to be serious, that is a bad mistake.  It takes the act of playing with the ideas before the concepts are made real.

The last two tools: transforming and synthesizing takes all that the previous 11 tools and use all of them together in a cohesive way. The transforming chapter talks about distorting and creating innovative concepts through the exercise of transforming the usual and daring to make it different, transformed.

Synthesizing is the critical final tool where we take the various disparate ideas that results from using the other tools and  put it all together into a consistent and cohesive whole.

The last chapter is again the authors’ opportunity to plea for the educational system to promote creative thinking, and they lay out their vision for a better process using the 13 tools in this chapter.

I truly enjoyed this book more than I thought I would, much more than I thought I would. I want to thank professor Strogatz for recommending it even though I gave him a little bit of guff for recognizing this book. It has modified and fortified my instincts on creativity and broadened my vision. I look at the world in a different, more nuanced way because I am aware of the 13 tools. Perhaps I knew some of the 13 tools as separate acts of brainstorming, now I can see them all as 13 ideas that must be coordinated and fleshed out in my thinking if I wanted to be optimally creative.

Obviously, I recommend this book very much.

 

Book Review-Travels with Herodotus By Ryszard Kapuściński

I bought this book many years ago, it was one of those impulse buys where I indulged my aspiration in polymathy and thought it might be interesting while also giving me a chance to explore a world that was heretofore unknown to me. As with all aspirational things, I tossed it on my teetering tower of To Be Read books on my bedside table, where it languished for years.

I picked it up again this year one evening as I settled in for the night, looking for something different, and the book reeled me in.

Ryszard Kapuściński was a Polish journalist. He had written a number of other books prior to this one, on various subjects. This was his memoir, of sorts. He passed away in 2007, the year the book was published. There are two main threads with this collection of essays. I say they are collection of essays because each chapter can be read individually but they are linked to one another through his recounting of the stories from Herodotus’ The Histories. I was unaware of what the book was, but as the author explained it, The Histories served as a record of the ancient traditions, politics, geography, and clashes of various ancient western cultures. The exceptional thing was that while Herodotus did not witness the histories of which he wrote, he did travel to those regions that he wrote about —Greece, Western Asia and Northern Africa — and took oral histories from the people who lived there. It was a written account of his impressions, a pretty dodgy practice of history writing to be sure, but it is the earliest and only history that we have of that time in that place.

Kapuściński took The Histories with him as he traveled to some of the same locales that were in the book, as well as many others. He made it his companion to keep him occupied during the down times. This was traveling in the era before mass media communications, so he had a lot of down time. The second thread of the book is as a rambling history of the authors own recollections of his travels, woven loosely with The Histories. The author’s stories were interesting enough, but the intermingling of the two threads were fascinating to follow. Kapuściński recounted how his wanderlust were sated through serendipity, how he was assigned to go to a “friendly” fellow communist country: China, in the 1960’s and how that experience led to travels around the world as a reporter for the Polish media. He focused on the small details, partly because those were the most interesting stories and partly because the then big stories have now receded into the past, its one-time importance fading with age and the context which drove its importance losing its force in driving narrative. The author’s interweaving of the classical text with his own reminiscence wove a very attractive landscape for the reader. His rhythm and range of tones were very comfortable. The book was just short of hypnotic but well into the realm of comfortable reading. It served my purposes well: I needed something to read which I can pick up for a short mount of time and then be able to put down comfortably, all the while knowing that I can pick up the narrative easily. It did not encourage my propensity to read as if I was in a race to the end, it was a gentle and comfortable read. The stories however were intense and kept my interest. I am sure I will read The Histories in its original translation during my lifetime, Kapuściński was able to tell Herodotus’ tale very well, well enough to pique my interest in the original form, but for now, the author’s interpretations are enough. The tales of the ancient Greek and Persian wars and the bloody accounts of those battles ring loudly in my brain, as fresh and evocative as if I had read the original story. The intensity of the tales was modulated by the author’s own stories.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone. Although it does take a certain kind of mental state to sit and read this book, a state that I have come to appreciate as I age. It is a state that allows me to filter out the realities of modern life so that I can indulge in the realities of ancient life. It is a difficult state of mind to contemplate and accept, but I found comfort in this book.

Book Review-Leaders: Myth and Reality by General Stanley McChrystal

I don’t usually read business books unless I am convinced that the book is extraordinary. I especially don’t indulge in this kind of reading unless I am convinced that the author speaks from a point of authority. In this case I was convinced of the veracity of General McChrystal’s bona fides to speak on the topic by what I had observed of his actions as a commander. This book was a group project, which also included Jeff Eggers and Jason Mangone as co-authors, but the voice of the writing centers around General McChrystal.

I am also very skeptical of any book that speaks of leadership. I am of the opinion that leadership is something that is hard earned and amorphous rather than something that can be attained by following scripts or checking off check boxes. Most business books, even other books written by military commanders have been disappointing because they fall into the trap of churning out books that are best sellers initially but end up in the discount bins because the wisdom, or lack thereof, are pedantic, formulaic, and promises too much while delivering too little.

This book however, is honest to the point of declaring that the authors’ intent was to dispel the mythology that accompanies our cultural worship of the leader. They immediately disabuse the reader of their romantic notions, taking on one of the biggest mythological leaders in American history: General Robert E. Lee. The deconstruction of the Lee mythology took courage, especially from a West Point graduate as General McChrystal. In addition, the book delineates the three myths that has obfuscated the characteristics of a leader and the qualities of leadership. In the first chapter, General McChrystal admits that the term “Leadership” is almost impossible to define forthrightly and correctly. The authors also drolly points out that a leadership expert found 221 definitions of leadership in 587 examined publications.

The foundation of the three myths is that those who study leaders and leadership, all focus narrowly on the leader — the person — at the exclusion of anything else. The three myths which results from our hero worship, or more accurately, worshipping in a cult of personality are:

The Formulaic Myth: We think leadership is achieved through rote procedures: being formulaic and following a recipe. This myth ignores the fact that leadership is tightly coupled to environment,  situation, and context.

The Attribution Myth: We attribute all the leadership to the leader, the sole chosen focus of our studies. This myth ignores the contributions of the many in order to simplify the vast and complicated reality so that we can create bullet points.

The Results Myth: We attribute the success and failure of the leader upon whether the narrow desired outcome is achieved. The myth ignores the fact that sometimes the symbolic worth of leadership is far more valuable in the final assessment of a successful leader than just the results.

We analyze leadership in the way that we do because we are ever the optimist, and we wish to indulge in our own confirmation bias by ascribing nobility to our leaders and promote the myths and ignore reality.

 The author’s stated purpose is to dispel our very comfortable biases and  conduct the very difficult exercise of reconfiguring the idea of leadership into a different structure, to show leadership in a very different light. They do this by employing the method first used by Plutarch in his Lives. Plutarch wrote biographies of 48 worthy subjects seeking to answer the question: “What sort of man was he”? He paired his subjects and set about identifying the salient factors which would answer his question.

While the authors used the same structure, they also made significant changes to the analysis as they sought to answer the question: “What sort of leader were they?” While Plutarch only wrote of men, the authors included three women, because we should be beyond that particular bias and the three women are worthy subjects. They grouped them into pairs as well, but in different categories: Founders, Geniuses, Zealots, Heroes, Power Brokers, and Reformers.  Some are notable in their fame, others are obscure. The authors gave a succinct and clear history of each leader, highlighting both their qualities as well as their weaknesses, which served to balance out their claims to leadership and made their place in history all the more real.  

Indeed, the histories of each of the twelve personages, fourteen if you included Lee and Winston Churchill—who’s history was also documented— were well written and honest. The judgements made were fair and informative.

It is the last two chapters that sucked me in. They analyzed the three myths, spoke of how their views of the myths changed over the course of writing the book, and finally gave a different, more useful structure for assessing leadership, and avidly avoided the same mythmaking that they were trying to dispel. As I sat on my chair trying to digest their conclusions, and I must admit, I am still chewing over the structure and idea, I was struck by the possibilities that the last chapter engenders.

Being cynical to the tricks of the business book genre, but especially skeptical of the leadership specialty, I want to consume and accept the concepts laid out in the final chapter, but I will think critically about the chapter, as the authors made a significant case. I must give them the respect of indulging in the granularities of their hypothesis.

Book Review-How to Live or A Life of Montaigne (In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer) by Sarah Bakewell

I had always been interested in the Essays by Montaigne but have been intimidated by the task of reading the tome. As it turns out, my hesitancy was warranted, as Sarah Bakewell explains in this extraordinary book, as Montaigne apparently continually edited the book during his lifetime, amending the Essays over his entire lifetime. To add further complications, the different editions of the Essays were completed at the discretion of many different publishers, with many varying agendas. The book has also gone through many cycles of popularity, ranging from complete public adoration to banishment, riding on the waves of popular opinion throughout European history. It had also appeared on the Catholic church’s list of banned books at one time. This book approaches the subject of Essays and the author Montaigne from multiple points of departure: it is at once a history of the Essays; a biography of Montaigne, his family, and those who were close to him; a travelogue detailing the places that Montaigne had visited; a history of the Dordogne region and France during Montaigne’s time living there; a concise explanation of the Greek philosophies that inspired Montaigne: Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism; and finally a work of philosophy which tries to encapsulates Montaigne’s guiding principles of life. It is no wonder that this book has met with critical success: the prose is welcoming to any level of reader, the historical backgrounds that is necessary to understand the story is included in the text, so the reader will not be lost in the narrative due to a lack of supporting information, and the multiple threads of topics have been interwoven skillfully to maximize reader interest. When I first started reading the book, I took it upon myself to glean the philosophical lessons that is presented by Bakewell, and there are plenty, twenty to be exact; but that is the worst way to read this book. It wasn’t until I was well into the book that I proceeded to relax while reading and took in those stories that Bakewell had included as the nuggets of gold to be enjoyed rather than extraneous information that pads the text. Once I came to that realization, I learned to love the style of the book and I was able to allow myself to fall in love with this great story, as well as learn lessons in history in Montagne’s time, philosophy, and history of philosophy. Indeed, it was Bakewell’s skillful weaving of all the multiple threads into the narrative that seduced me into the book. The twenty answers which made up the chapters melted into a natural progression of Montaigne’s story, which made their philosophical lessons even more cogent. I wish now that I were not so dogmatic in my zeal to view the book as solely a work of philosophy, I wish that I were open minded to what Bakewell was trying to do. She was entirely successful in what she had plotted, it was just that I was initially a fool to impose my sense of structure to the book. The lesson is that I needed to let the author lead me through the book the way they want to tell the story. I have learned my lesson and I will willingly let Sarah Bakewell lead me through anything she writes.

Book Review-The Data Detective by Tim Harford

 The Data Detective is yet another fine book from the Economist Tim Harford. The premise of this book is to give the layman some sense of examining and interrogating the  statistics that are thrown at us in the media, government reports, and research reports.

Harford is a radio host, a popularizer of economics, as well as a renowned economist. He is very well practiced in explaining the many points of confusion that comes with statistically oriented reportage. He is also an excellent writer. In this book he tries to dive into the rarified world of statistics. As he is an economist, he is quite well versed in the area, but it is one thing to be well versed, it is quite another to be well spoken in the arcana of statistics, especially as those who are the producers of the statistics do not practice disciplined statistical data gathering and analysis and are sometimes confused at what they are trying to do. This is not to say that they are naïve, or that they are deliberately obfuscating the discussions by introducing unnecessary complexity. Even though there are those who are guilty of obfuscation, most confusion in statistics come from unconscious biases, which is the thrust of Harford’s book, as well as David Spiegelhalters’s The Art of Statistics (Spiegelhalter 2019) and Ian Stewart’s Do Dice Play God (Stewart 2019). This book adds a third book in my reference library that explains how opinions, policy, and lives are affected by the subconscious biases. Lay people are often misled using statistics. Some have been trained or exposed to a certain amount of statistics in our undergraduate days or even in our work but that just touches on the bare essentials of statistics; that fundamental lack of basic statistical knowledge and the unawareness of how statistics can be misconstrued and misinterpreted  is what confuse us, which  allow people disseminating the statistical information to mislead us, whether the misleading is intentional or not.

Researchers, governments, advertisers, and people who has malfeasance in their hearts will often confuse us intentionally with statistics. Statistics are often so subtle that the interpretations that are given to us often seem to make logical sense, even when the interpretations can be skewed in many ways. This book seeks to explain some of the nuances and gives us something to work with when we read the popular press,  social media outlets, or when we are dealing with very complex issues that cannot be explain with just simple statistics. The complexity of some of these illicit statistics that are quite challenging.

Harford starts the book out in his introduction; he lays out the case of why he's a tackling this problem as he cites a well-known book written by Darrell Huff in 1954 titled How to Lie with Statistics. He relates the story of Huff and his book and declares that this book is not trying to cover the same grounds as Huff’s book. Indeed, Harford is trying to undo the damage that Huff had inflicted on the credibility of statistics in the minds of the public.

Harford neatly lays out his 10 rules  for making sense of statistics, each rule are chapters in the book explains why some of these rules are necessary.  Harford  digs into the past research and past events that serves as examples of where the confusion originates. He then lays out the landscape for the reader. Harford is exceptional at this particular phase of explaining the problem because he is well practiced in explaining complex ideas to the general public.  The best part of the book is that he is very clear on what he wants to say, he is very clear on saying it, and he is clear on his opinion about all of these rules.  The rules are quite nuanced, but they also are quite useful in guiding us through similarly challenging issue which uses statistics. His cerebral agility with the subject is helpful because he is able to communicate the topic.

The problem with most books which seeks to explain statistics is that the sometimes the authors over explains, relying on the assumption that the reader has a well-grounded background in statistics, so the technical jargons flows unabated; while  other times the authors under explain, assuming that the reader does not have any common sense. To be fair, it is very difficult to get the level right because it is difficult to reach a mass audience as the mass audience has varying levels of expertise, but Harford seemed to have found a way to not condescend to the reader while at the same time effectively educating the reader on the basic essentials of statistics and statistical concepts. It is quite remarkable how he does it and it is a bravura performance. He makes it easy for us to understand these rules while also  giving us  enough material to explain the subtleties of each of these rules and their importance. The act of invoking 10 rules is somewhat gimmicky but it seems to work for Hartford because the material sucked me in.

The most interesting chapter is the very last one,  it invokes his Golden rule: Be curious. Harford wrote this chapter to address the polarization of opinions which is rampant in  present day society. This polarization is derived from a number of factors and is exacerbated by the social media’s penchant to encourage being right over learning. What Harford had found through various research is that the best way to ease that tension and to decrease the polarization is to appeal to the curiosity of your opponent; by appealing to their curiosity, we are extending them an olive branch, to meet them halfway,  and to offer to open up our minds to the civilized discussions of the issue which seemingly divides us.

We have all experienced the aftereffects of trying to go head to head against someone who has an opposing viewpoint:  inevitably, both side would dig in even deeper and the need to be right supersedes the need to understand the issue even further. The nuances of the  different shades of grey that exists is painfully lost and forgotten.

I quite enjoyed this book. This book was recommended to me by a friend who saw that I was struggling with some of the issues with statistics that had saturated the air waves during the COVID 19 pandemic. Initially, I looked upon this book with a certain amount of suspicion but since it is Tim Harford and since he wrote one of my more favorite books: Messy, I took a chance. I was glad that I did because this is a superb book. I think however, that Harfords book with Spiegelhalter's book are complimentary, sothey should be read, if not concurrently, then one closely followed by the other.

Harford also references many other authors in the fields of psychology and economics. People like Tetlock, Kahneman, and so on.  The saliency of Harford’s effort is that he helps us to suss the essence of many of these ideas to make it understandable to an educated audience but not an expert audience.

Works Cited

Spiegelhalter, David. The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data. London: Pelican Books, 2019.

Stewart, Ian. Do Dice Play God: The Mathematics of Uncertainty. New York: Profile Books, 2019.