For me, this book falls into the same genre as Malcolm Gladwell’s books and Freakonomics, all of which I rather enjoy. It contains a lot of anecdotes that build to push a single point. The point driven home in this book is that there are underlying forces that are always at work “swaying” us towards doing things that from the outside seem irrational.

It was a very quick read, but a good one. While reading it, I found myself analyzing situations in my life where the forces they discuss might be at work. Here’s a snippet from the inside cover:

Sway reveals the many dynamic forces that influence our personal and business lives, including loss aversion (our tendency to go to great lengths to avoid perceived losses), diagnosis bias (our inability to reevaluate our initial diagnosis of a person or situation), and the “chameleon effect” (our tendency to take on characteristics that have been arbitrarily assigned to us).

If you need a better selling point, it has a couple sports references. One about the NBA, which I don’t care about at all, and another about college football, specifically Steve Spurrier and his dominance in the SEC in the early to mid-1990s.