The Undercover Economist by Tim Hartford
The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal by Jonathan Mooney
The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
by Daniel J. Solove
Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School
at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream by
Adam W. Shepard
Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe by William Rosen
Looks: Why They Matter More Than You Ever Imagined by Gordon Patzer
Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West
Point by Elizabeth D. Samet
On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not by Robert Burton
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer by
Shannon Brownlee
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The Undercover Economist
by Tim Hartford
The overall review is 4 stars; the 3 customer reviews
rate is 5 stars.
From Publishers Weekly
Nattily packaged-the cover sports a Roy Lichtensteinesque image of an
economist in Dick Tracy garb-and cleverly written, this book applies
basic economic theory to such modern phenomena as Starbucks' pricing
system and Microsoft's stock values. While the concepts explored are
those encountered in Microeconomics 101, Harford gracefully explains
abstruse ideas like pricing along the demand curve and game theory
using real world examples without relying on graphs or jargon. The
book addresses free market economic theory, but Harford is not a
complete apologist for capitalism; he shows how companies from
Amazon.com to Whole Foods to Starbucks have gouged consumers through
guerrilla pricing techniques and explains the high rents in London (it
has more to do with agriculture than one might think). Harford comes
down soft on Chinese sweatshops, acknowledging "conditions in
factories are terrible," but "sweatshops are better than the horrors
that came before=2
0them, and a step on the road to something better." Perhaps, but
Harford doesn't question whether communism or a capitalist-style
industrial revolution are the only two choices available in modern
economies. That aside, the book is unequaled in its accessibility and
ability to show how free market economic forces affect readers'
day-to-day.
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The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal by Jonathan Mooney
4.5 stars based on 19 customer reviews
Many kids with physical, mental, and learning disabilities have ridden
the short bus to special-education classes, signaling that they were
different, singled out, not normal. Mooney was one of those short bus
children who hated school because he was dyslexic and couldn't read
until he was 12. In 2003, a few years after he graduated from Brown
University, he cowrote a book on learning disabilities and began a
career of public speaking on the subject. Then he set out on a
journey. He bought an old short bus and traveled from Los Angeles to
Maine to Washington and back to L.A., stopping to visit with various
people who were also not normal. Along the way, he confronted his own
preconceptions and assumptions about people with autism, Down
syndrome, deafness and blindness, ADHD, and other so-called
disabilities. In this book, he deals with the question of What is
normal? This is a story about a young man coming to accept himself,
but also a cautionary tale about what happens in schools, in the
workplace, and in society when people fail to recognize that everyone
is normal, just in different ways. Mooney is an engaging writer with a
sense of humor about his own failings, and his story is an
entertaining and enlightening one.
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The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
by Daniel J. Solove
5 stars based on 5 customer reviews
Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the
Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal
expression and communication. But there's a dark side to the story. A
trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the
Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent
chronicle of our private lives—often of dubious reliability and
sometimes totally false—will follow us wherever we go, accessible to
friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone
else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with amazing
examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the
profound implications of the online collision between free speech and
privacy.
Daniel Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a
fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the
way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations.
Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cybermobs, and other current
trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of
information on the Internet may impede opportunities for
self-development and freedom. Long-standing notions of privacy need
review, the author contends: unless we establish a balance between
privacy and free speech, we may discover that the freedom of the
Internet makes us less free.
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Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
5 stars based on 1,173 customer reviews ( ! )
After a failed attempt to climb K2, the second-highest mountain on
Earth, Greg Mortenson was nursed back to health in a remote Pakistani
village. Inspired by the villagers' kindness, he promised to return
and build them a school—a promise he lived up to and then some. Over
the next decade, he went on to build 55 schools throughout Pakistan
and Afghanistan, tirelessly raising funds, defying death threats and
surviving a kidnapping during his one-man mission to provide the
children of the region access to better education and a chance at a
new life.
One of the most inspiring books in recent years, this New York Times
bestseller recounts Mortenson's efforts, showing how he faced down
hostile mujahideen, gained the trust of Islamic leaders and inspired
others to follow his noble lead. His success in these endeavors speaks
for itself. At last count, his schools have helped educate more than
20,000 children, generating more goodwill towards the West than
virtually any other organization, making the young people of Central
Asia that much harder for the Taliban to recruit. This remarkable
story of one man's campaign of altruism has the power to change lives
and restore one's faith in humanity.
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Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream by
Adam W. Shepard
4.5 stars based on 45 customer reviews
Is the American Dream still alive or has it, in fact, been drowned out
by a clashing of the classes? Is the upper class destined to rule
forever while the lower classes are forced to live in the same
cyclical misery? Millions of Americans fight for the answers to these
questions every day, and here, in Scratch Beginnings, one man makes
the attempt at discovering the answers for himself. Carrying only a
sleeping bag, $25, and the clothes on his back, and restricted from
using his contacts or his education, Adam Shepard sets out for a
randomly selected city with one goal on his mind: work his way out of
the realities of homelessness and into a life that will offer him the
opportunity for success. Scratch Beginnings is Shepard's response to
the now-famous books Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, where
Barbara Ehrenreich has written on the hopeless pursuit of the American
Dream. This book offers his observation of what it is like for so many
people on the lower end of the spectrum, the blunt end of the stick.
In this poignant account, Shepard goes on a search for the vitality of
the American Dream, and, in turn, discovers so much more. Scratch
Beginnings is unquestionably one of the most engaging works of the
social science genre. No matter your reading interest, Shepard's
facile writing style is sure to keep you turning the pages.
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Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe
by William Rosen
3.5 stars based on 31 customer reviews
What might be called "microbial history"—the study of the impact of
disease on human events—is a subject that has received great attention
in recent years. Rosen's new book follows John Barry's The Great
Influenza and John Kelly's The Great Mortality. An editor and
publisher for more than a quarter century, Rosen absorbingly narrates
the story of how the Byzantine Empire encountered the dangerous Y.
pestis in A.D. 542 and suffered a bubonic plague pandemic
foreshadowing its more famous successor eight centuries later. Killing
25 million people and depressing the birth rate and economic growth
for many generations, this unfortunate collision of bacterium and man
would mark the end of antiquity and help usher in the Dark Ages. Rosen
is particularly illuminating and imaginative on the "macro"
aftereffects of the plague. Thus, the "shock of the plague" would
remake the political map north of the Alps by drawing power away from
the Mediterranean and Byzantine worlds toward what would become
France, Germany and England. Specialist historians may certainly
dislike the inevitable reductionism such a broad-brush approach
entails, but readers of Collapse and Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared
Diamond's grand narratives, will find this a welcome addendum.
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Looks: Why They Matter More Than You Ever Imagined
by Gordon Patzer
4.5 stars based on 4 customer reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Here is a book whose title says it all. Written by an academic expert
on lookism who is also director and founder of the Appearance
Phenomenon Institute, this volume is an exhaustive examination of how
the handily summarized PA (for personal attractiveness) gets you
everywhere, from the better job and the better spouse to the better
verdict at your criminal trial. Beginning with early evidence of
lookism in history, Patzer analyzes preferential treatment given to
pretty people from beautiful babyhood onward. While consumers of
women's magazines might not find as much new information as other
readers, Patzer refers to dozens of studies, articles and
investigation to prove his thesis. Yet Patzer's volume doesn't offer
much in the way of solutions, apparently because you've either got it
or you don't. While Patzer does criticize the overzealousness of the
media, reality television and unethical plastic surgeons, he only
devotes one chapter to personal affirmations to help deal with and
fight back on image obsession. Although he concludes by proclaiming
the reader's newfound awareness of lookism's pervasiveness is a step
forward, one can't help seeing the weakness in a conclusion that
leaves the reader with little more than a well-argued reminder of our
culture's shallow side.
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Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point
by Elizabeth D. Samet
4.5 stars based on 19 customer reviews
(Note: the negative reviews are from people who find the book too
mindful and too critical of the government!)
She got her BA at Harvard and her PhD at Yale. Yet nothing prepared
Professor Elizabeth D. Samet for her ultimate learning experience:
teaching classic literature at the United States Military Academy at
West Point. Provocative, absorbing and enlightening, Soldier's Heart
is an unforgettable account of what this civilian educator and her
soldier students have taught one another about life, literature, war
and the way they intertwine.
For 10 years, Samet has educated West Point's warriors-in-training in
Homer and Hemingway, Montaigne and Milton. But after 9/11, her
students don't simply read stories of war: they live them in the
battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Writing to her from the front,
her students explain how the great books they've read influence them
as they confront profound questions of life, death and morality on a
daily basis. Meanwhile, Samet relates her sometimes funny, sometimes
troubling first-hand experience of the roles religion, gender,
politics and war movies play in the military and the classroom. All
told, Soldier's Heart is a moving tribute to the deep, complex minds
of American soldiers, and a powerful examination of what literature
means to them—and to us all.
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On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not by Robert Burton
4 stars based on 11 customer reviews
"On Being Certain challenges our understanding of the very nature of
thought and provokes readers to ask what Burton calls "the most basic
of questions": How do we know what we know?"--Scientific American Mind
"In his brilliant new book, Burton systematically and convincingly
shows that certainty is a mental state, a feeling like anger or pride
that can help guide us, but that doesn't dependably reflect objective
truth… In the polarizing atmosphere of the 2008 election, On Being
Certain ought to be required reading for every candidate -- and for
every citizen."--ForbesLife
"What do we do when we recognize that a false certainty feels the same
as certainty about the sky being blue? A lesser guide might get bogged
down in nail-biting doubts about the limits of knowledge. Yet Burton
not only makes clear the fascinating beauty of this tangled terrain,
he also brings us out the other side with a clearer sense of how to
navigate. It's a lovely piece of work; I'm all but certain you'll like
it. "--David Dobbs, author of Reef Madness; Charles Darwin, Alexander
Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral
"Burton has a great talent for combining wit and insight in a way both
palatable and profound."--Johanna Shapiro PhD, professor of Family
Medicine at UC Irvine School of Medicine
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Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer by
Shannon Brownlee
4 stars based on 21 customer reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Contrary to Americans' common belief that in health
care more is more—that more spending, drugs and technology means
better care—this lucid report posits that less is actually better.
Medical journalist Brownlee acknowledges that state-of-the-art
medicine can improve care and save lives. But technology and drugs are
misused and overused, she argues, citing a 2003 study of one million
Medicare recipients, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine,
which showed that patients in hospitals that spent the most were 2% to
6% more likely to die than patients in hospitals that spent the least.
Additionally, she says, billions per year are spent on unnecessary
tests and drugs and on specialists who are rewarded more for some
procedures than for more appropriate ones. The solution, Brownlee
writes, already exists: the Veterans Health Administration outperforms
the rest of the American health care system on multiple measures of
quality. The main obstacle to replicating this model nationwide,
according to the author, is a powerful cartel of organizations, from
hospitals to drug companies, that stand to lose in such a system. Many
of Brownlee's points have been much covered, but her incisiveness and
proposed solution can add to the health care debate heated up by the
release of Michael Moore's Sicko.