Ali Binazir's Blog: THE IDEAVERSE, page 3

The 36 Most Useful Books I Read in 2017

The following are the books and courses I found the most useful amongst the 130 I read in 2017. Whether it’s for learning a new skill, managing yourself, or understanding the complexities of the world, these books all offered information that could tangibly improve your life. A rating of 8/10 means the book is pretty darn good. 9/10 means it’s outstanding. And 10/10 puts it in the Useful Books Hall of Fame. Please go through the entire list. Although the top ten listed are indeed the best of the batch, beyond that the books aren’t ranked, and you don’t want to miss the gems that may be at the end:

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (2016) by Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths (ebook & print). A good popular science book takes a complex topic and makes it accessible to a wide, non-technical audience. A great popular science book also makes the topic engaging, immediately usable, and a catalyst for finding out even more. This is one of the greats.

It turns that a lot of stupendously smart computer scientists have not just thought about certain everyday problems we have, but also came up with mathematically optimal solutions to them. There’s the explore vs exploit dilemma: at what point do you stop searching for a restaurant or date or job, and just settle on one of the available choices? For that, you use the 37% rule: if you’re considering 100 different options, when you hit #37, select the next candidate that’s better than all you’ve seen so far. That’s from optimal stopping theory. There are more: “Sorting theory tells us how (and whether) to arrange our offices. Caching theory tells us how to fill our closets. Scheduling theory tells us how to fill our time.” I feel like this book initiated me into a secret society that knows a lot more than me about the inner workings of the world. 10/10

Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong (2017) by Eric Barker (ebook & print). This book is so chock-full of useful information that I highlighted it over 200 times.

What do I like about it? First, it’s full of great stories that stay with you. There’s James Waters with his mental strategies that got him through Navy SEAL training, a Harvard MBA, and a White House job. There’s Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, the illegal Mexican migrant worker boy who became a world-renowned neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins. There’s Spencer Glendon with the debilitating ulcerative colitis who became a world-class money manager anyway. Dozens of vivid, funny, inspiring stories of ingenuity, grit, and optimism here.

Second, Barker amply supports all recommendations with research findings. So you will learn fascinating, counterintuitive concepts from social psychology, behavioral economics, game theory, neuroscience, genetics and evolutionary biology. It reminds me of Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, another great book that’s full of ingenious mindhacks.

Third, it’s full of usable unconventional wisdom. Were pirates the progressives of their day? Why do so few valedictorians become millionaires? Why do jerks succeed? (Hint: they ask for what they want and self-promote to their bosses.) No one book will turn you into an overnight success, but this one has a lot of signposts for living a happier, more fulfilling life. You’d be wise to read and share it. 10/10

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (2016) by Tim Ferriss (ebook & print). This is quite possibly the most useful single book I’ve ever read. It’s a collection of interview highlights from Tim’s podcast, so there’s no central theme to it other than Doing Things Better. If you don’t mind the mild inferiority complex you’ll develop from hearing about all of these world-changing folks, you stand to learn a lot. It’s a hefty beast, best read piecemeal as a book of reference rather than something to finish in one sitting. 9/10

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (2017) by Matthew Walker (ebook & print). This is easily the most important book I read in 2017. Why? Because there is nothing more important in your life than sleep. And Westerners (especially Americans) are chronically sleep-deprived, leading to unnecessary car crashes, illness, and depression. We also have terrible sleep hygiene. I’ve been researching this topic for my own book, so I know this is the only decent, up-to-date book out there on sleep. And it’s fantastic. Walker is a renowned sleep researcher himself at UC Berkeley, featuring some of his original findings in the book. All adults interested in their own health should read this. 9.5/10

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us) (2008) Tom Vanderbilt (ebook & print). I put traffic in the category of “the ubiquitous unexamined” — aspects of life that surround us so completely that we never bother to figure out how they work (electricity and water are two other ones). This long but eminently readable tome covers all aspects of traffic engineering, which turns out to be a serious science with huge explanatory power over our daily lives. He also does a fine job of describing the psychology of traffic, and why we are at our worst when driving. Stress levels of the average commuter match that of a fighter pilot. Having read this, I have a much better understanding of the urban environment. And although I may not have any less road rage than before, at least now I know where it comes from. 8.5/10

Stick With It: A Scientifically Proven Process for Changing Your Life for Good (2017) by Sean D. Young (ebook & print). The seven forces behind lasting change are SCIENCE: Stepladders, Community, Important, Easy, Neurohacks, Captivating, Engrained. Possibly the best book I’ve read on the process of making effective change in one’s life. 9/10

Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout and Thrive With the New Science of Success (2017) by Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness (ebook & print). One of the best books I’ve read on improving personal performance. 9/10

The Blue Zones: 9 Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest (2012), by Dan Buettner (ebook & print). Dan Buettner’s fantastic 2012 New York Times Magazine Article, “The Island Where People Forgot to Die”, was my introduction to Blue Zones. Are there places in the world where people disproportionately live to be 100 or more? And if so, what’s their secret?

With the backing of National Geographic, Buettner and his crack team of top-notch scientists went around the world and found 5 places that fit the strict Blue Zones criteria: Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; the Seventh-Day Adventist community of Loma Linda, California; and the Greek island of Ikaria. These regions have a disproportionately high population of centenarians, up to 50 times the US average. But even more remarkable, their centenarians are independent at a rate far higher than in the US and Europe: 90% vs 15%. What’s going on?

Having gone to medical school and read the NYT Magazine article, I thought I knew what was in the book and thus postponed reading it. That was a mistake. Buettner and team are incredibly thorough in their approach, uncovering details about living a good life that casual observation would miss. And they back every one of their conclusions with as much data as they can.

Definite patterns emerge amongst the various groups. All of them foster a strong sense of community and intergenerational cohesiveness. In Costa Rica, there’s a 99-person village all descended from one person, and there’s a touching picture of a blissed-out 104-year old lady holding her great-great-granddaughter. People hang out with family and friends every day, and the elderly live with their offspring.

All the communities eat a mostly plant-based diet. Exercise is also built into their daily activity. Although it’s safe to say that none of these people have ever stepped into a gym, every day they till fields, work gardens, tend sheep over hilly terrain, and walk around.

Some other data points also emerge. Several of the communities incorporate goat milk products in their diet, which is more nutritious than cow’s milk. Red wine features prominently in the two Mediterranean communities, with Sardinian Cannonau offering an extra dose of antioxidants. Almost all the communities eat diets rich in beans.

Although I hope you find this review useful, there are several reasons to read the book in its entirety. First, there are a lot of practices worth incorporating into your own life that I don’t have room to mention in detail, e.g. “ikigai”, your reason to get up in the morning; “moai”, a group of friends who meet regularly; and turmeric.

Second, by reading the stories of all five communities, you not only get the details but also the gestalt of living a long and fruitful life. Is there a worldview that predisposes to healthy longevity?

Third, the healthy, functioning centenarians profiled will turn your preconceptions of aging upside down. They also have sterling advice to offer: “Eat your vegetables, have a positive outlook, be kind to people, and smile.”

Fourth and most important: do you really have something better to do than learning how to live a long, productive and healthy life? If so, I’d like to know what that is. In the meantime, I also got the book for my parents, and would encourage you to do the same. Its life-affirming message is invigorating and wise for all future centenarians. 10/10

The Blue Zones of Happiness: Lessons from the World’s Happiest People (2017) by Dan Buettner (ebook & print). A National Geographic cover story hooked me into this book, and happiness is my beat anyway, so there really was no avoiding this one. The central idea: if you set up a framework for a more satisfying life, you’re more likely to have one.

Pleasure, purpose, pride: these are the three intertwining strands constituting the robust rope of happiness. The Danes, perennially at the top of world happiness surveys, have a lot of their basic needs met by their generous government services. Danes also have a strong community ethos, so they join lots of clubs and engage in purposeful activities. Costa Ricans, who may have an even stronger community ethos, have lives full of pleasurable moments or “positive affect”: walking to work, joking with friends, playing with their kids. Singaporeans work 60hr weeks to get the 5 C’s: car, condominium, cash, credit card, and club membership. They take pride in their accomplishments, and that supposedly makes them happy. I have not been to Singapore, but the description of their harried, materialistic lives seemed the antipodes of happiness.

What I really appreciate about Buettner’s work is his thoroughness. He goes into the field with a bunch of scientists, gathers the data, crunches the numbers, and presents us with the best practices. That’s why this book led me to his first Blue Zones book, on longevity, which I consider definitive (also reviewed here). He’s also clear-eyed on the benefits of positive psychology: “They may work in the short run, but they almost always fail over time. They’re quick fixes that may evaporate before you know it.” To be happy in the long run, structure a happy life.

I read this book in a day and highlighted 240 passages. It’s fantastic, and should be required reading for all bipeds. As a bonus, the appendix has a collection of Top 10 happiness practices from top experts for individuals and countries. 9.5/10

Money: Master the Game – 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom (2016) – Tony Robbins (ebook & print). Let’s get one thing out of the way: I’m a big Tony Robbins fan. Although his style may seem hucksterish, he absolutely definitely positively gets results.  This is his first book in over 20 years, and he’s done a lot of homework for it. The core of Tony’s approach is finding out the expert’s best practices, and then implementing them. So he found the most successful money people in the world — Ray Dalio, John Templeton, John Bogle, Carl Icahn, T. Boone Pickens, Warren Buffett, we’re talking trillionaires dammit — and extracted their best practices for us.

Problem: at 700 pages, it’s a bit of a brick, with a ton of information to sift through. But is your financial future not worth 12 hours of your concentrated attention? Yes it is. It’s not about the how of financial freedom, but also the mindset and overcoming your blocks. Be an investor, not a consumer! Harness the awesome power of compounding! Got this one for myself in print and ebook format, and I expect it will return the investment thousands-fold. Unless you already have more than a quarter billion dollars to your name like Tony, you should listen to him. 9.5/10

The Art of Loving (1956) by Erich Fromm (ebook & print). This is a classic by a guy who should be far more widely read in this country. Heck, if I was King of the Universe, I’d make it mandatory reading for every high school kid. This guy drops truth bomb like Kissinger on Cambodia: surreptitiously but in abundance.  Here’s one: “It is hardly necessary to stress the fact that the ability to love as an act of giving depends on the character development of the person. It presupposes the attainment of a predominantly productive orientation; in this orientation the person has overcome dependency, narcissistic omnipotence, the wish to exploit others, or to hoard, and has acquired faith in his own human powers, courage to rely on his powers in the attainment of his goals. To the degree that these qualities are lacking, he is afraid of giving himself—hence of loving.” Damn! 80 highlights in 104 pages = most highlights per page of any book I’ve ever read. Insanely prescient; everything he said 50 years ago rings true today. No one should get married before reading and internalizing this first. 10/10

Outsmart Yourself: Brain-Based Strategies for a Better You (2016) by Prof Peter M Vishton (Great Courses). There is self-help mumbo-jumbo from self-proclaimed gurus with no credentials, and then there is scientifically-validated advice for changing your behavior by using your brain properly. Per the course This course is the latter.  Like how? “Want to curb a few bad habits? Try making a notebook entry every time you perform the habit. Have a big project and feel the urge to procrastinate? Do nothing for 20 minutes and you’ll feel ready to get to work. Come down with a case of the blues? Eat some fermented foods such as yogurt or sourdough bread.” Another outstanding course from The Teaching Company/Great Courses.

The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative (2017) by Florence Williams (ebook & print). “We don’t experience natural environments enough to realize how restored they can make us feel, nor are we aware that studies also show they make us healthier, more creative, more empathetic and more apt to engage with the world and with each other. Nature, it turns out, is good for civilization.” Williams gamely camps with neuroscientists in Colorado, experiences shinrin yoku (“forest bathing”) in Japan, straps on a portable aethelometer (soot-measurer) in DC, rambles in Scotland, hikes in Finland, and visits a Korean “healing forest.”

Through her chatty anecdotes, she presents the evidence that nature strengthens your immune system, lowers stress, increases creativity, decreases rumination, and calms down hyperactive kids. I appreciated her exposition of the great E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, which “posits that peaceful or nurturing elements of nature helped us regain equanimity, cognitive clarity, empathy and hope.” Minimum recommended does of nature: 5 hrs/month. An excellent and persuasive popular science book. 8/10

Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation (2015), by Jay Samit (ebook & print). “You have a choice: pursue your dreams or be hired by someone else to help them fulfill their dreams. The great disruptors constantly reinvent themselves and their careers. They never fear losing their jobs, because they create jobs. They control their own destinies. This book is written to answer two very basic questions: How did they do it? How can I do it? The third question is entirely up to you: Will you do it?” I knew Jay from our Los Angeles networking group. I respected the clarity of his thinking and a communication style that cut through bullshit like an argon laser through plastic. His book does not disappoint. “Being a disruptor is simply a state of mind. It is the ability to look for opportunity in every obstacle, to respond to every setback as a new beginning.” Equal parts about both personal and industry disruption, it’s one of the best books on entrepreneurship I’ve read in recent memory.

Whether as a self-employed entrepreneur or top executive in companies like Sony and EMI Music, Samit is a master of taking calculated risks. His anecdotes about creating technologies slightly ahead of their time, reinventing himself multiple times, and accomplishing the seemingly impossible are bold, instructive and inspiring. Read it for a potent shot in the arm that just might awaken the entrepreneurial spirit in you. 9/10

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (2007) by Chip & Dan Heath (ebook & print). Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional Stories: those are the 6 principles of “SUCCES” for communicating your ideas effectively that the brothers Heath lay out in their highly readable, usable, memorable book. Their other books follow a similar structure, with mnemonics, fun case studies, and summaries at the end of each chapter. I recommend all of their works. 9/10

The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life (2015) by Bernard Roth (ebook and print). Roth is one of the co-founders of the Stanford d.school, one of the originators of design thinking, and a professor of mechanical engineering for 40 years. His book is, indeed, partly about achievement. More than that, it’s a collection of life wisdom from a very smart, accomplished, empathetic doer, maker, and teacher who has figured out how to get results from himself and students.

Foremost in Roth’s teachings is bias towards action. Instead of waffling and ruminating, “don’t get caught up in how you’re going to get it just right. That’s what causes people to shut down and never get started. Avoid the desire for perfection right out of the gate. Instead, tell yourself that you’re prototyping your screenplay or your dress. The final version can come later.”

Some of his suggestions may seem radical, but they’re just part of standard d.school curriculum, e.g. getting rid of reasons for doing things. You don’t need them, and they’re all bogus anyway: “Many reasons are simply excuses to hide the fact that we are not willing to give something a high enough priority in our lives.” Substitute all manifestations of “but” with “and.” When you gather up your intention and concentrate your attention, you will move mountains.

There’s a ton of actionable advice here, such as a list of 22 ways to get unstuck (e.g. lists, idea logs, humor, conversation, exercise, compressed conflict, mind maps, working backward), and the “Your Turn” exercises at the end of each section. This is a tremendously useful and encouraging book for anyone whose creative endeavors could use some more bias towards action. 9.5/10

The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold (2005) by Robert A. Levine, Ph.D. (ebook & print) “The psychology of persuasion emanates from three directions: the characteristics of the source, the mind-set of the target person, and the psychological context within which the communication takes place.” Thus begins this revelatory and sobering treatise on the ways humans fool themselves and others. A professor and practicing psychologist for 40+ years, Levine signed up to experience firsthand the persuasive techniques of people like car dealers, door-to-door salesmen (Cutco knives), and cult leaders (the Moonies). One of his key insights is that no one is impervious; we are all susceptible. The persuasiveness triad: “perceived authority, honesty, and likability.” Americans are particularly susceptible to the authority symbols of titles, clothing, and luxury cars (see: current US president). Decisive, swift talkers are no more sure of their facts than more hesitant counterparts, but they create an impression of confidence that audiences perceive as more expert and intelligent. The more jargon you use and the less a jury understands a witness, the more convincing she appears.

Aside from the dismaying news that we’re all patsies waiting to be taken, the book is full of entertaining, insightful stories on scoundrels ranging from psychics to gurus. Moonies recruit in a trademark sequence of “pickup, first date, love bomb”, creeping up on victims with imperceptible subtlety that ultimately engulfs them. Levine’s account of the 10-step method of car salesmen was particularly revelatory and unsettling in the frankness of its manipulation.

The most gripping part of the book was Levine’s depiction of the final hours of the Jonestown cult of Jim Jones, during which 900 members committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, even after witnessing their own infants’ agonizing death throes. To read the transcript of the recording of those hours, and how people just like you and me were rooting for their own demise out of loyalty to a demented and manipulative leader, is to understand how tyranny works, and how it is happening right here, right now. 8.5/10

The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How (2009) by Daniel Coyle (ebook & print). The information in this book has kept well even though it’s 8 years old. How does the tiny island of Curaçao produce a hugely disproportionate number of world-class Little Leaguer baseball players? What’s the secret to Moscow’s run-down Spartak Tennis Club suddenly churning out Grand Slam winners? Where did all these South Korean female golf champions come from? Coyle travels to hotbeds of talent all over the world to distill the essence of exceptional performance. Deep practice (aka “deliberate practice”) is essential, involving practicing to the edge of one’s ability while getting timely feedback. Some kind of spark seems to be necessary to fuel the “rage to mastery.” It’s interesting that a disproportionate number of historical figures — Caesar, Napoleon, Washington, Jefferson, Newton, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Twain — were orphans. And finally, having a master coach definitely helps. There are priceless insights into the slow, attentive, straightforward ways legends like John Wooden got results. Coyle’s odd obsession with myelin as the alpha and omega of learning and mastery is misplaced. Otherwise, the book has a ton of actionable information for creatives and teachers. It’s also fun to read. For just the usable facts and none of the stories, I refer you to Coyle’s The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Skills. 8/10

Principles: Life and Work (2017) by Ray Dalio (ebook, print & audio). This is three books in one: a memoir, life advice, and business advice. Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater Capital, the world’s largest hedge fund, which he started from nothing in 1975 to $150 billion in assets today, amassing a personal fortune of $17 billion along the way. What impresses me about Dalio is that he arrived at his wealth mostly through very careful decision-making and self-observation, which he was then smart enough to encode as principles. That kind of meticulous thinking led to his firm foreseeing the crash of 2008 and even profiting from it. This book is the end result of those principles time-tested and market-validated over 40 years.

Dalio’s frank style of describing his triumphs and mistakes keeps this book from lapsing into self-aggrandizement. He’s hobnobbed with every major world player over the past 4 decades, making for some fun anecdotes. The work principles that have made Bridgewater famous worldwide for its radical openness would form a firm foundation that many companies would be wise to emulate. 9/10

The 7 Secrets of the Prolific: The Definitive Guide to Overcoming Procrastination, Perfectionism, and Writer’s Block (2011) by Hillary Rettig (ebook). Artists, especially writers, who would like to overcome procrastination and produce more, take notice. Rettig decriminalizes procrastination and prohibits self-shaming: “The use of shame and coercion as motivational tools, even on yourself, is not just immoral, but futile. They yield not growth and evolution, but, at best, short-term compliance. They also sabotage the creative process.” Instead, she identifies perfectionism as the real culprit and Compassionate Objectivity as its antidote. She offers six more solutions, as well as how to implement them, such as:

• Develop the Habit of Abundant Rewards and No Punishments: rewards yourself a lot for getting stuff done

• Build Your Capacity for Fearless Writing via Timed Writing Exercises: I’ve found setting a timer to be miraculously effective. Get it get stuff done.

I’m also a huge fan of her Three Productivity Behaviors: “(1) showing up exactly on time, (2) doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing, and (3) doing it uninterruptedly (except for small breaks) for long periods of time.”

I particularly appreciate Rettig’s unequivocal advice to self-publish your books, entirely bypassing the sclerotic traditional publishing industry. She validates the suffering of authors at the hands of prima donna agents and capricious publishers who aren’t really invested in your career. Taking control is the best decision you can make, and more profitable to boot.

In its 182 pages, this book contains zero padding and more actionable wisdom than books three times the length, all coming from a well of deep compassion and understanding. I’ll be referring to this one for a long time to come. 9/10

Entrepreneurial You: Monetize Your Expertise, Create Multiple Income Streams, and Thrive (2017) by Dorie Clark (ebook & print). Solo entrepreneurs, small business owners, domain experts, location-independent knowledge workers, or those who aspire to work for themselves instead of being a corporate cog, take notice: “Becoming a recognized expert these days doesn’t always lead to money. The elephant in the room of modern entrepreneurship is that even people who seem to be at the top of their game aren’t always monetizing successfully. Learning to make money from your expertise is a different skill set from what’s needed to become excellent at your work or well-known in your field.”

What I like about it:

1) It’s concise, well-researched and inspiring. Dorie is not only a first-rate chronicler of the rapid changes in modern work (through the other books in the trilogy, Reinventing You and Stand Out), but she’s also lived at the forefront of these changes. She’s held jobs all the way from stringer for a local newspaper, to political campaign staffer, to corporate consultant. If she’s a sought-after speaker and independent consultant now, it’s all via bootstrapping and sheer hustle. Her story and that of other successful entrepreneurs gives you a roadmap for us to follow. 

2) Radical transparency. Dorie provides dollar figures for how much more (or less) money she made as a result of certain changes, as well as those from such luminaries as Pat Flynn. Most books shy away from such disclosures. EY openly features this information crucial to setting realistic goals and expectations. 

3) Practicality. Dorie provides concrete actions for the three steps to sustainable monetization: building your brand; monetizing your expertise; extending your reach and impact online. And then, she gives us seven golden tactics for accomplishing those three steps: coaching/consulting; public speaking; podcasting; blogging; live conferences; online communities; and selling products. 

Dorie illustrates each of these tactics with real-life examples from top-flight practitioners. For example, for podcasting, there’s Jordan Harbinger (The Art of Charm) and John Lee Dumas (Entrepreneur on Fire). For blogging and email list-building, there’s James Clear (400,000 emails!). For conferences, Jayson Gaignard of Mastermind Talks; for community building, Ryan Levesque. The stories of their process to success are very motivating.

Although the strategies and tactics Dorie enumerates are accessible to all, you need to know that every one of these profiled people has an exceptional work ethic, starting with Dorie herself. These are elite hustlers at the top 0.1% of the population. Are you willing to commit to the work? 

If so, then Entrepreneurial You provides a fantastic framework that will not only save you years of wasted effort but also provide you with ample yes-you-can motivation ammunition. Dorie Clark has written the go-to reference for prosperity, impact and fulfillment in the internet age. Get it to go big. 9/10

The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too) (2017) by Gretchen Rubin (ebook & print). As a rule, I am skeptical of personality profiles. None are scientifically validated, except for the OCEAN framework (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism). The rest are fabricated from thin air with scant experimental support, especially frameworks like the Enneagram and the laughable Myers-Briggs inventory. Sure, you can ask people two questions, like “Do you like barbecued spare ribs?” and “Are you a cat person or a dog person?”, and end up with a 2×2 matrix that tidily divides up the population into 4 categories. But does that have any predictive value outside of a person’s tendency to attend or avoid barbecues with dogs at them?

This book is a follow-up to Gretchen’s last book, Better Than Before, in which she more fully lays out the Four Tendencies that emerge from the answers to two questions: “How do you handle internal commitments?” and “How do you handle external commitments?” Good with both makes you an Upholder; bad with both makes you a Rebel. Obligers are good with external commitments but bad with internal ones; Questioners are the inverse.

The problem is that, depending on time of day, fullness of tummy, looming deadlines, who’s President, and how well last night’s poker session went, I will give different responses to Gretchen’s questionnaire. Sometimes, I’m an Obliger; other times a Questioner; and less often, a Rebel or Upholder. These are not hard-wired aspects of a personality encoded in genes, and to her credit, Gretchen does call them tendencies rather than traits.

Gretchen’s thoughts make up only about half of the book. The other half comprises quotes from her blog readers about how the tendencies show up in their lives. That said, the book was hugely useful in one respect: it made me realize that I work much better when I have external accountability. That insight alone is fully worth 3 hours of my life and $15. 8/10

Transformational NLP: A New Psychology (2017) by Carl Buchheit and Ellie Schamber (ebook & print). This book begins with a comprehensive history of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, where you will find pioneering insights from Grinder, Bandler, Dilts and Steve Andreas. This leads into the exposition of Transformational NLP, as developed by Jonathan Rice and Buchheit himself. This passage about picking unsuitable partners summarizes a lot of its principles:

“The creature brain does not care whether or not the human brain is happy; it cares only about its survival in physical reality. In the remarkable non-logic of creature-level association, the terrible pain of abandonment (in this example) becomes necessary for continued survival precisely because it could have been fatal, but was survived. Because this terrible pain has been survived, it becomes an experience profoundly associated with survival, and actually becomes essential for future survival. Something that is essential for basic survival cannot be permitted to change even a little bit, so the patterning that controls it will be quarantined. Once it becomes quarantined, unless there is an unusually effective intervention, the patterning will never change. Consequently, the core decisions/ beliefs generated by this patterning will never really change, no matter what happens later. The person will go through his/her life both resisting and expecting abandonment, hoping and working for love while waiting to be unwanted and left.”

The book also offers deep insight into how to effectively heal the past: “The goal is to empower the client to view the past not as a fixed source of immutable loss, but rather as a dynamic wellspring of creative decision-making and learning.”

Carl’s been at this for over 30 years, so his observations and therapeutic strategies come from a deep well of experience. There are insights on every other page of this book that would take lifetimes to realize on one’s own. This is essential reading for therapists who want to achieve breakthroughs in treating clients or healing yourself. 8.5/10

Getting Past No: Negotiating in Difficult Situations (1993) by William Ury (ebook & print). “The essence of breakthrough strategy is indirect action. It requires you to do the opposite of what you naturally feel like doing in difficult situations.” Ury, the grandaddy of the Harvard Negotiation Project, proposes a five-step “joint problem-solving” protocol as the way to get past no: “Only they can break through their own resistance; your job is to help them.” The steps: go to the balcony; overcome the other side’s negative emotions by listening to them; reframe the problem; build them a golden bridge; use power to educate. Also remember the five important points along the way to a mutually satisfactory agreement: interests, options for satisfying those interests, standards for fair resolution, alternatives to negotiation, and proposals for agreement. I highlighted 122 passages from this book, so there’s a plethora of practical wisdom here. 9/10

Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World (2015) by Matthieu Ricard (ebook, print and audio). I picked up Altruism at Matthieu Ricard’s reading in San Francisco two years ago. Ricard is a remarkable man: Tibetan Buddhist monk with over 30,000 hours of meditation under his belt; French translator to the Dalai Lama; PhD from Institut Pasteur under Nobelist François Jacob; and current title-holder for “world’s happiest man”, according to brain scans done at Richard Davidson’s lab.

This kind of book is required reading in my line of work, especially when written with the rigor and depth that Ricard brings. At 43 chapters and 849 pages, it has the heft of a brick, and the density, too, with tangled sentences like this: “It now had to be demonstrated that people don’t act solely in order to avoid having to justify their non-intervention to themselves either.”

A magnum opus like this takes 5-10x longer to read than the average book. But the rewards can be immense. Ricard brings massive evidence arguing for altruism as an essential part of our human and animal makeup, even beyond the genetic arguments of kin selection. This has far-reaching consequences in how we run our lives, interact with others, and treat the planet. (NB: also featured in “Important”) 9.5/10

59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute (2009) by Richard Wiseman (ebook & print). Bonding over shared dislikes works better than discussing shared enthusiasms. Active listening does not improve relationships. Sit in the middle of a table to make a good impression. Rhyming persuades. Wiseman, perhaps the only person with the job title “Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology”, offers bite-sized, scientifically validated tips on happiness, persuasion, motivation, creativity, attraction, relationships, stress, decision making, parenting and personality. Fun, fast, stupendously useful read. 9/10

The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning and Gambling Feel So Good (2012) by David J Linden (ebook & paperback). “While we might assume that the anatomical region most closely governed by laws, religious prohibitions, and social mores is the genitalia, or the mouth, or the vocal cords, it is actually the medial forebrain pleasure circuit.” Thus begins this riveting account of how the human brain gets us in hot water. Prof Linden knows his stuff, and the explanatory power of this book about ubiquitous but perplexing phenomena like drug addiction, obesity, falling in love, and deer fighting over yellow snow (?!) is staggering. He explains the science with great clarity and humor without compromising the sophistication of the discourse. 9/10

Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal (2011) Oren Klaff (ebook & print). Although I can’t claim to have used this protocol for an actual sale, Klaff has, and with sepctacular results. His methods mesh with everything I’ve practiced and studied about persuasion and have the ring of truth. Highly recommended if your work involves sales. 9/10

Real Artists Don’t Starve: Timeless Strategies for Thriving in the New Creative Age by Jeff Goins (ebook & print). Goins, an independent author whose methods are well worth emulating, lays out the 12 Rules of the New Renaissance distinguishing Starving Artists from Thriving Artists. Some of the ones I like:

1.​ The Starving Artist believes you must be born an artist. The Thriving Artist knows you must become one.

7.​ The Starving Artist always works alone. The Thriving Artist collaborates with others.

11.​ The Starving Artist masters one craft. The Thriving Artist masters many.

12. T​he Starving Artist despises the need for money. The Thriving Artist makes money to make art.

How great is that? He illustrates the rules with engaging stories from real-life artists and entrepreneurs who definitely didn’t starve, from Michelangelo to Jeff Bezos. This book should be the manifesto of all independent artists. I’m going to print his 12 rules and put it up in my workspace right now. Oh, and make sure you have a “leaky mental filter.” 9/10

So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for the Work You Love by Cal Newport (ebook & print). A professor of computer science at Georgetown and author the Study Hacks blog, Newport makes abundantly clear with both anecdotes and ample scientific evidence that “follow your passion” is terrible career advice. It turns out that mastery gives rise to passion, not the other way around. And when you get really good at what you do, the world will beat a path to your door. His more recent book, Deep Work, is one of my favorites of all time. 9/10

The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level (2015) by Gay Hendricks (ebook & print). I’d heard of this Hendricks guy before, mostly in the context of relationship advice books. I was pleasantly surprised by this robust call to action and slaying of personal demons. Key insight: the human psyche seeks homeostasis. Therefore it will fight against anything that threatens that equilibrium, including success. Success?! If you don’t believe me, think about a time when you had just gotten a better relationship or job, and you somehow managed to screw it up. Yup, everyone does it. This book proposes some potent remedies. I particularly appreciated the following mantra: “I expand in abundance, success and love every day as I inspire those around me to do the same.” A short 200 pages that pack a punch. 9/10

Pause: Harnessing the Life-Changing Power of Giving Yourself a Break (2017) by Rachael O’Meara (ebook, print & audio). Americans live amidst a culture of misplaced priorities. The richest country in the history of the world is also the only industrialized nation with no mandated paid maternity/paternity leave. Only 4% of companies allow extended paid leave. Work defines people’s identities, and overachievers believe that being busy is the highest virtue. Nothing could be more effective in self-inflicting misery. O’Meara exhorts us to pause and reconsider this mindset and its ramifications: how you got in this mess, how to get out of it, and what to do upon re-entry into polite rat-race society.

Things I like about this book: tons of case studies that you may identify with, including those from luminaries like Gabrielle Bernstein and Danielle LaPorte; step-by-step instructions for initiating your pause; introduction to incredibly useful concepts like self-validated intimacy and strengths finding; great sections on meditation and digital detox; cool exercises, like the “ten-second micro-pauses” of taking 6 deep breaths or breathing into your palms; easy to read.

O’Meara has done a great service by highlighting the importance of taking a pause and providing the tools to make it happen. If you think you’re too busy to pause, that’s like thinking you’re too out-of-shape to exercise: you need this book, stat. I’m hoping this is the beginning of not just a good idea but a great movement to change people’s attitudes towards leading more balanced, happy lives. 8/10

The 25 Most Important Books I Read in 2017

Two things make a book truly important to read. First is urgency. Does it contain information that could immediately protect you from harm or improve your life? That’s pretty important. Second, could this book change the whole way you look at the world, and maybe even revolutionize the way you live? These books have that potential. Check them out:

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (2017) by Matthew Walker (ebook & print). This is easily the most important book I read in 2017. Why? Because there is nothing more important in your life than sleep. And Westerners (especially Americans) are chronically sleep-deprived, leading to unnecessary car crashes, illness, and depression. We also have terrible sleep hygiene. I’ve been researching this topic for my own book, so I know this is the only decent, up-to-date book out there on sleep. And it’s fantastic. Walker is a renowned sleep researcher himself at UC Berkeley, featuring some of his original findings in the book. All adults interested in their own health should read this. 9.5/10

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) by Timothy Snyder (ebook & print). “Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.” Tyranny is on the march not only in the US, but all over the world. Snyder reminds us that we’ve seen this movie before, and it does not end well — unless we get off our asses and do something about it. Let this book be your wake-up call. Prescient, cautionary, essential reading for our times. At 128 pages and less than $7, you cannot afford not to read this. 9.5/10

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (2016) by Tim Wu (ebook & print). Our lives are what we pay attention to, so “how we spend the brutally limited resource of our attention will determine those lives to a degree most of us may prefer not to think about.” Prof Tim Wu of Columbia (of Net Neutrality fame) takes us on a ride from the beginning of the attention economy to the age of social media. Benjamin Day, founder of the New York Sun, was the first to sell his paper at a loss to make it up in advertising revenue, figuring out that his readers were not his consumers but his product. The whole advertising and marketing industries originated in patent medicine and propaganda. Heck, all advertising used to be called propaganda. Wu covers a lot of fascinating ground here: the rise of radio and TV networks; war propaganda; Marshall McLuhan, Timothy Leary and LSD; video games and Facebook. This is a thorough history and cautionary tale about the hijacking of our attention by insidious commercial and governmental forces: “Technologies designed to increase our control over our attention will sometimes have the very opposite effect. They open us up to a stream of instinctive selections, and tiny rewards, the sum of which may be no reward at all.” 9/10

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked (2017) by Adam Alter (ebook & print). While Wu gives you the sweep of history, Alter tells you what’s happening to you right now. Behavioral addiction is affecting millions, making Irresistible one of the most important books I read in 2017.  So how do people get hooked? “Behavioral addiction consists of six ingredients: compelling goals that are just beyond reach; irresistible and unpredictable positive feedback; a sense of incremental progress and improvement; tasks that become slowly more difficult over time; unresolved tensions that demand resolution; and strong social connections.” Remember that thousands of extremely smart, highly-compensated people are on the other side of your screen, thinking of ways of keeping you hooked. This book tells you how they do it.  9.5/10

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016), by Jane Mayer (ebook & print). I’ve read a lot of depressing books in my day, like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee or King Leopold’s Ghost, or the one right above about how everything is going to die. But somehow those tales of mass slaughter were not nearly as big a downer as Dark Money. David and Charles Koch are the billionaires at the center of the concerted effort to purchase American democracy to do the bidding of the ultra-rich. Them and other characters who consistently lack decency, like Richard Mellon Scaife and the DeVos family create front companies and multilayered shell entities to pass the Citizens United verdict, and create the Tea Party, and fund it to the tune of hundreds of millions. The detailed account of their successful experiment in South Carolina is particularly chilling. Not fun to read, but fascinating nonetheless, and utterly crucial. 9/10

The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017), by Masha Gessen (ebook & print). I just knew this book had to be dangerously good when I saw all the 1-star reviews by trolls on Amazon. So I bought it immediately. I had read several of Gessen’s meticulous and eye-opening New Yorker pieces, but this book takes it to a whole new level. And happy to report that it has since won the National Book Award, haters be damned.

Gessen tells the story through seven dramatis personae, each “both ‘regular’, in that their experiences exemplified the experiences of millions of others, and extraordinary: intelligent, passionate, introspective, able to tell their stories vividly.” They give first-person accounts of the everyday ordeal of surviving true to oneself in Russia. Like Zhanna, daughter of popular opposition politician Boris Nemtsov and activist in her own right, whose life demonstrates some of the consequences of opposing the regime (e.g. exile, incarceration and murder — y’know, the yoozh). The story of Masha the journalist illustrates the perils of truthtelling. Pioneering psychotherapist Marina Arutyunyan tries to shepherd modern mental health to Russia through lacerating thickets of state-mandated ideology. Openly gay academic Lyosha tries to advocate for oppressed minorities without getting fired from his precarious university post.

Gessen weaves the last century of Russian history through the lives of the protagonists. Stalin’s self-cannibalizing reign of terror is particularly chilling: “Stalin’s terror machine executed its executioners at regular intervals. In 1938 alone, forty-two thousand investigators who had taken part in the great industrial-scale purges were executed, as was the chief of the secret police, Nikolai Yezhov.” Stalin once invited an old friend from Georgia to Moscow for a reunion, and after lavishly wining and dining him, had him executed before dawn: “This could not be explained with any words or ideas available to man.”

And that is the most astonishing aspect of this book: it is not fiction. The protagonists’ experiences are so logic-defying, so disheartening, and such violations of basic human decency as to exist in a separate universe that no novelist could concoct. And yet, this universe has an internal logic. Perhaps it’s best explained through Hannah Arendt, whose three-volume “Origins of Totalitarianism” Gessen deftly scrunches down to a few essential paragraphs: “What distinguishes a totalitarian ideology is its utterly insular quality. It purports to explain the entire world and everything in it. There is no gap between totalitarian ideology and reality because totalitarian ideology contains all of reality within itself.”

And yet, the book reads like a novel, which is why I don’t want to give away too much. Who is Homo sovieticus? For whom do Russians vote in the “Greatest Russian Ever” (aka “Name of Russia”) contest year after year? What’s going to happen to Boris Nemtsov after he defies Putin? Do our heroes avoid getting beat up and arrested at the demonstrations? Why is Putin so popular in Russia?

One pervasive theme of the book is the hegemony of doublethink over the Russian psyche. Coined by Orwell in “1984”, doublethink is the necessity of maintaining two contradictory beliefs for survival, e.g. publicly supporting the government ideology while knowing that it oppresses your very existence.

This is some crazy-making stuff that Russians seem to have been put through for over a century. And yet, there are still people who fight for truth, healing, and freedom. Over and over, they rise to attend banned protests very likely to land them in jail (or worse). Their stories of stupendous bravery and selflessness consistently inspire.

And lest you as a Westerner think that you’re somehow safe because, oh, this is something happening elsewhere, please note that the recent rise of authoritarianism in countries like America takes its playbook straight out of Russia. Attacks on the press, construction of alternate realities, propagation of fake news, persecution of minorities, and the shameless grabbing of executive power: it’s all happening right now.

And you know what else? We’ve seen it all before: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao. So don’t read this book just because it’s a riveting account of life in what’s still an undiscovered continent for most Westerners. Don’t read it just because it’s a tour de force of journalistic craft and bravery. Read it because it also informs your life as an American, German, Frenchman, Hungarian, or anyone who values the freedom of human life and ideas, and so that you may be impelled to action. 10/10

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World (2011) by Daniel Yergin (ebook, print & audio). Yergin is the pre-eminent scholar on global energy. Intimidated by the sheer bulk of his tomes (the other being The Prize, for which he nabbed another prize called the Pulitzer), I had avoided them till now. But the audiobook was a manageable way to digest this work piecemeal (also, you can’t tell how thick an audiobook is). It’s safe to say no other book has helped me understand global dynamics of energy and politics better than this one.

Yergin is a master storyteller, weaving together a compelling narrative out of the encyclopedic amount of data he covers — Saudi Arabia and ARAMCO, the Kuwait war, Iran, Angola, renewable energy, Russia, China, and scads more. His exposition on the natural history of the petrostate — a country rendered inherently unstable because of its heavily petroleum-dependent income — and the rise and fall of Cesar Chavez in Venezuela was particularly memorable. A contemporary classic. Read it to better understand your world. 10/10

Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People (2013) by Mahzarin Banaji & Anthony Greenwald (). The writing is abstruse, wordy and jargon-filled, meaning it’s a scholarly book by an academic. The basic premise: the current organization of the world into countries is a wholly fictional recent invention, started in the 19th century by South American expats (“creoles”) from European countries inspired by the example of the United States. That a bunch of heterogeneous Spaniards, mestizos, and natives should suddenly feel “Bolivian” or “Colombian” is more a feat of the imagination than anything pre-ordained or natural. It’s an important book, but one that no one should have to read. 8/10

The 5 Most Heartbreaking Books I Read in 2017

Last year I read about 130 books. At that pace, assuming a long, healthy lifespan with decent eyesight and health coverage, maybe I can get through 5000 more. That’s a pretty small number compared to all the books I’d like to read. So I have to be picky and stuff. Great books only! That’s why every book I review here is going to be pretty darn good. Heck, the ones I can’t say nice things about I don’t even bother reviewing. Highlight reel all the way.

Although I read good books regardless of when they were written, a large number of the books on the list were published in the last year or two, and almost all within the last 20.

There were many truly outstanding books in the batch. If I rate it a 10, it means you should stop what you’re doing right now, get a hold of this book and start reading it. Check the review first to see if it’s your dish. Then read it anyway, because a 10 rating means it’s epochally awesome. It will permanently drop your jaw to the floor so you’ll have to carry it around on a leash. Hey, why are you still reading this!? Go get one of those books. Jeebus.

THE MOST HEARTBREAKING BOOKS I READ IN 2017

Look, if you’re sitting there in front of a Mac with a blazing fast internet connection, you’ve got it pretty good — in fact, better than 99.99999% of the people who’ve ever lived on the face of the earth. Chances are you haven’t been evicted, exiled, enslaved, had your ancestral lands taken away, or gotten massacred yet. This means you’re probably getting a little soft. You need to read about some serious pain, pilgrim. And maybe stand while you read. It’s better for you, and will keep your socks from getting knocked off by these six gale-force hurricanes, all 10/10:

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016) by Matthew Desmond (ebook & print) I am not the first person to call this a tour de force, and I won’t be the last. To write this book (which started out as his doctoral thesis), Desmond took it upon himself to live in the neighborhoods he studied: slums, ghettoes, and trailer parks in poor, honest-to-god dangerous parts of Milwaukee. What he found was explosive, eye-opening and heartbreaking. At the heart of urban America, a robust business model exists for landlords to systematically exploit poor tenants through loopholes in the law. The result is an underclass trapped in cycles of poverty, drugs, malnutrition, poor health and crime. After reading this, it’s impossible to see America’s inner cities, law enforcement, and politics the same way. A well-deserved winner of the Pulitzer Prize. 10/10

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1999) by Adam Hochschild (ebook, print & audio). One day last year, while  I was traveling in Australia, I thought to myself: “Y’know, self, you’ve led a fairly charmed life. You should read about some pain.” Thus started my Heartbreak Project, in which I took on books about the awful things humans have done to one another. This is totally one of those books.

The plundering of the Congo and the subsequent massacre and enslavement of the Congolese happened on a scale that beggars the imagination, especially compared to how little Westerners know about it. 6-10 million Congolese perished. King Leopold had turned a country half the size of Europe into his own personal colony so he could fund his palaces and the whims of teenage whore-mistresses. If you go to Brussels today — Joseph Conrad’s “sepulchral city” from Heart of Darkness— pretty much every old building you see was built with Leopold’s Congo money.

There are legions of despicable characters in this story, amongst them Henry M. Stanley, the Welsh-American explorer famous for finding Victoria Falls and Dr Livingstone. Only the insane bravery of a few heroes ultimately exposed Leopold’s crimes. Englishman Edmund Dene Morel, black Americans George Washington Williams and Wiliam Sheppard survived multiple assassination attempts and fatal tropical disease to expose the atrocities of the Congo and turn international sentiment against it.

This is holocaust-level stuff that very few people have heard about. The story will break your heart dozens of times, and also redeem and enlarge it. 10/10

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2015) by Elizabeth Kolbert (ebook & print). Caves that recently contained millions of bats now have none — a fungus massacred them. All frogs are vanishing from the face of the earth. “A third of all reef-building corals, a third of all freshwater mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles and a sixth of all birds are headed to oblivion.” There have been five major extinctions on Earth, and we seem to be amidst the sixth one, largely created by humans. Kolbert of The New Yorker is the human reporting on this for the past decade with a sharp eye, steady voice, and muddy boot. Her unsentimental delivery makes the magnitude of the catastrophe hit you even harder when it finally dawns on you: we’re killing everything. This won the Pulitzer Prize, and may it win any and every award that will make kids better stewards of their only planet. I give it a 10 because not destroying all life forms on Earth is kinda important. May want to stop eating tuna and shark-fin soup, like, now. 10/10

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016) by Trevor Noah (ebook, print & audio). Can I tell you how great this book is? I mean, did you ever wonder how a mixed-race South African kid ended up hosting The Daily Show? This book chronicles that astonishingly unlikely journey from the slums of Soweto where Noah’s mere existence was a crime, since whites and blacks weren’t supposed to talk, let alone have kids together. Growing up “colored” in apartheid South Africa where racism was the law of the land meant Noah fully belonged to neither the world of whites nor blacks. But he knew how to hustle. His incredibly poignant relationship with his lioness of a mother had me crying more than once. Damn.

The audiobook benefits from Noah’s comic timing and dead-on rendition of myriad accents and languages. I laughed out loud many times; I don’t think I’ll every forget his story about DJing a bar mitzvah with Hitler (seriously). In the meantime, you and I have no idea how bad black South Africans had it — this shit is bananas. Hilarious, heartbreaking, uplifting and enlightening, this is one extraordinary book to nourish your soul. 10/10

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970), by Dee Brown (ebook, print & audio). The United States of America is a nation founded on genocide. The continental US was the ancestral homeland of millions of natives inhabiting it continuously for 40,000 years. Somehow, this vast territory became the domain of white settlers. How? During the massive westward expansion of the US all the way to the Pacific coast in the years 1840-1890, this was the general procedure:

1) Invade Native American (aka Indian) territory by making trails, building railroads, staking land claims, stealing livestock, or just attacking them without warning.

2) Provoked Native American tribes fight back to reclaim their hunting grounds, get back their livestock or their captives, or take revenge for the murders white people committed.

3) Settlers complain to the US Government, which now sends overwhelming force to attack the tribe.

4) Even though massively outnumbered and only possessing primitive weapons, the tribes inflict huge casualties on the US Military or outright defeat them.

5) The US Government makes a treaty with the tribes, granting them rights to a diminished, marginally livable territory, supposedly in perpetuity, and forbidding trespassing upon Indian hunting grounds and pastures. In the meantime, they forcibly march the Indians on foot to their new territory hundreds of miles away. Many Natives perish in the marches.

6) The Native Americans do not read or write English, so with each treaty, the US routinely swindles Natives out of vast swathes of their territories. Many are confined to restrictive, barely habitable reservations. Their government-issued food rations are meager, or stolen, or of inedible quality provided by profiteers. Widespread disease and death ensues.

7) Within 1-5 years, the treaty is violated by white settlers who want to mine gold, raise cattle, build railroads or make trails through the supposedly sacrosanct Native American territory. The US Government fails to enforce its own treaties. The tribes have no choice but to undertake the defense of their lands.

8) Completely ignoring their own treaties, the US Army takes this as justification to exterminate the Native Americans. Their usual modus operandi is to attack unarmed villages without notice, moving down everyone, including women and children. They all fervently believed in Gen. Sheridan’s maxim, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”

9) The few surviving Native Americans are confined to unlivable reservations far away from their homelands. Most die of disease, malnutrition, or broken hearts.

10) Repeat cycle for any remaining tribes until all are exterminated or confined to reservations.

The pattern of genocide is similar to how the Nazis exterminated Jews. First, Native Americans were declared subhuman, and therefore worthy of slaughter. This was completely accepted public opinion amongst white Americans.

Second, the Americans controlled all the means of creating and disseminating information, which they used to create outright lies and propaganda to further demonize Natives.

Third, once the tribes were overpowered and captured, they were confined to reservations, which functioned just like concentration camps.

Fourth, whites used manufactured, quasi-religious doctrine such as “Manifest Destiny” to justify breaking the treaties they themselves had written up, then invade more territory. America’s destiny was to go from sea to shining sea. The Natives just had bad luck to be in the way, and had to be removed.

Before reading the book, I knew that non-Indo-European place names in the US were of Native American origin. Twenty-six of US States have Indian names, as do hundreds of cities, counties, lakes, mountains and rivers. And you know what? 99.9% of the owners of those names were murdered by the US Government.

If everyone knew about the atrocities committed against the indigenous people, seeing these names – like Nantucket, Seminole, Tuskegee, Massachusetts, Algonquin, Alabama, Tennessee – would have the same emotional valence as signs saying “Auschwitz”, “Buchenwald” and “Treblinka.”

But most people don’t know, because history is written by the victors. And when I was a kid, we watched Westerns and played Cowboys and Indians, and everyone knew that the Indians were the bad guys.

Except that we were wrong. The Indians were the good guys. They were peaceful animists with venerable cultures who had figured out how to live in balance with their environment for 40,000 years. They had a real sense of honor and right and wrong. They were tremendously brave, in a way that astonished their white assailants. They were not afraid of death. And every white person who got to know them well became convinced of their nobility of spirit.

If it weren’t for the Indians teaching the Mayflower pilgrims how to hunt, build homes and farm, all those white people would have died in their first winter, and there would be no Thanksgiving holiday. Instead, the white people grew in number, overtook and massacred the peaceful Indians who just wanted to be left free to live like they had for the 40,000 years prior. The Native American culture was a humanistic, just and ecologically sound one, and the Western world is impoverished for having destroyed it.

Most Indian tribes did not have a written language. Dee Brown’s detective work to find these stories told from the Indian side, dig up government archives, and come up with a cohesive narrative, is nothing short of Herculean. The details of the battles, the marches and councils are alive — and heartbreaking. Americans may want to think about how reflexively proud they want to be of a military that has been a force for genocide and imperialism whose last just war was WWII. 10/10

 

Hella Important, Mind-blowing, Super-useful and Fun: 100 books I read in 2016, Part II

Continuing with the rest of the Super Useful books:

TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking, Chris Anderson ( ebook and paper ). Outstanding guide for all levels of speakers. Enjoyable and authoritative, considering the hundreds of TED talks Anderson has vetted. 9/10

Steal the Show: From Speeches to Job Interviews to Deal-Closing Pitches, How to Guarantee a Standing Ovation for All the Performances in Your Life, Michael Port ( ebook and paper ) Port sets out a whole program for conceiving, outlining, rehearsing and delivering a great speech. I particularly appreciate his emphasis on rehearsal, and doing it in three separate phases. I will be taking almost all of his suggestions to heart in my next performance! 9/10

Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation, Mark Muesse ( Great Courses ). Muesse is one of my favorite teachers at The Great Courses. Even as a long-time meditator, I learned a ton, and the guided meditations were excellent. Fantastic introduction to the field. 9.5/10

Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, Matthieu Ricard ( ebook and paper ). Based on his brain scans, scientists have called Ricard the happiest man in the world. I think of him as one of the wisest. This is a broccoli book for sure, and if you follow its precepts, your life will improve. 9/10

Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Peter C Brown ( ebook and paper ). Very good stuff, of which very little managed to stick since I listened to the audiobook . Lesson: visual learning lasts longer. 8.5/10

The Doors to Joy: 19 Meditations for Authentic Living (2014), Daniel Odier ( ebook and paper ). Daniel Odier is my secret stash for esoteric Eastern wisdom. I started with Tantric Quest , and have been hooked on his stuff ever since. Great little quick read to lift you up. 9.5/10

Originals: How Nonconformists Move the World, Adam Grant ( ebook and paper ). I was bowled over by Give and Take , Grant’s life-altering first book, so I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this, especially since I’m a creativity junkie (see Amazon review ). I found the title a bit of a misnomer since the central message of the book ends up being that massively successful people are often more risk-averse conformists than not. Otherwise a hugely informative and fun read. Favorite bit: to disarm your audience when pitching, open with your flaws. 8/10

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Angela Duckworth ( ebook , audiobook , and paper ). I listened to the audiobook twice, and enjoyed it both times. However, I couldn’t help but think about all the people with passion and perseverance who still didn’t make it big. Without accounting for them and only looking at the victors would make grit merely a psychological just-so story. Also missing: how to get grittier. Still, the central message of hard work trumping talent every time holds true. 8/10

Mind-Body Medicine: The New Science of Optimal Health, Prof Jason Satterfield ( Great Courses ). Really good. 9/10

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert ( ebook and paper ). 9/10
Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work, Steven Pressfield (ebook and paper ). 8.5/10
The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, Steven Pressfield ( ebook and paper ). I read these three books in rapid succession in April, probably feeling the need for a creativity boost. All three are excellent, able to pull you out of a creative rut of any depth. I refer back to the Pressfield books periodically. The War of Art is rightfully considered an indispensable classic, which is why I give it a 10/10.

The Power of When: Discover Your Chronotype -- and the Best Time to Eat Lunch, Ask for a Raise, Have Sex, Write a Novel, Take Your Meds, and More, Michael Breus (ebook and paper). The science of chronotype is just emerging, and I predict that the near future will make it a major part of how we think about work and health. This book helps classify yourself into one of four activity patterns of lion, wolf, bear or dolphin, with corresponding recommendations. 8.5/10

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Techniques for Retraining Your Brain, Prof Jason Satterfield ( Great Courses ). As a part-time therapist, this seemed like a topic I needed to know more about. CBT is no panacea but a useful tool nonetheless. Satterfield is an immensely knowledgeable and sympathetic lecturer. 8.5/10

Million-Dollar Consulting: The Professional's Guide to Growing a Practice, 5th Edition, by Alan Weiss ( ebook  and  paper ). Weiss is Jesus, Buddha and Moses rolled into one when it comes to solo consulting practice. I consider him the ultimate authority. Whether you're a seasoned consultant or just about to strike out on your own, his principles can multiply your income, sometimes overnight. The section on value pricing alone is worth 100x the cover price. 9.5/10

The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connection, and Courage, Brené Brown

The Man's Guide to Women: Scientifically Proven Secrets from the "Love Lab" About What Women Really Want, by John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman, with Doug & Rachel Abrams ( ebook  and  paper ). John and Julie Gottman are the husband-and-wife founders of the University of Washington's Love Lab. For the past 40+ years, they have observed thousands of couples, and know of that which they speak. Gottman is the Magus, and I consider his word gospel. A treasury of insight into relationships; should be required reading for all heterosexual males. 9/10

Nutrition Made Clear, by Roberta Anding (The Teaching Company). This audiocourse filled a part of my missing education. Heck, this stuff was not even taught to us in medical school! Everybody needs to know what they put in their body, what they should put in their body, and why. Highly recommended. 9/10

If You Really Want to Change the World, Norman Winarsky & Henry Kressel (ebook and paper ). When it comes to tech startups, these two guys are the genuine article. Required reading for all starry-eyed entrepreneurs and the VCs who would fun them. 8.5/10

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What it Says About Us), Tom Vanderbilt ( ebook , paper , and audio ). There’s a ton of science on traffic, and you spend half your life stuck in it, yet nobody seems to know anything about it. Huh? There are very few books that will help you understand your world better. Get the audiobook to listen in the car so you can make traffic educational. 9/10

The Power of Kindness: The Unexpected Benefits of Leading a Compassionate Life, Piero Ferrucci ( ebook and audio ). Got this audiobook on a lark since it was on sale for $2.95 and I’m a sucker for that kinda thing. Brilliant choice! Drawing upon his lifelong experience as a therapist, Ferrucci sprinkles his precepts with case histories and touching fables from ancient traditions. 9/10

Your Body at Work, David Givens ( ebook ). A good reference on body language at the workplace, by one of the pioneers of the field. 8/10

Wired to Connect: The Surprising Link Between Brain Science and Strong, Healthy Relationships, by Amy Banks ( ebook  and  paper ), 2016. The clever bastards at Amazon somehow figured out that a book on brain science applied to relationships would hit the sweet spot of my brain, so I let this one skip the queue ahead of 100+ other books on my list. The centerpiece of the book is Dr Banks' CARE protocol, an acronym for Calm, Accepted, Resonant, and Energetic.

Being Better Better: Living Better With Systems Intelligence, Raimo Hamalainen ( ebook ). A quirky little Finnish book referred to me by another quirky book. 8/10

Touch: The Science of the Hand, Heart and Mind, Robert Linden ( ebook and paper ). I must have highlighted half of this book! Almost all its information was novel to me even though I’ve studied neuroscience and medicine. Touch is such an integral part of our lives, yet it's remarkable how little we know about it. The good news is that the science of touch has been on the rise in recent years, and Linden does an excellent job of presenting its findings in a comprehensive yet engaging manner. I'll be recounting several of the stories from this book at lectures and cocktail parties many years hence. 9/10

Unmasking Narcissism, by Mark Ettensohn and Jane Simon ( ebook and paper ). The US Presidential Election of 2016 made it necessary for me to find out more about narcissistic personality disorder. This is a very good primer. 8/10

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph, Ryan Holiday ( ebook and paper). Quick read, time-honored precept, middling book. If you can get past Holiday channeling the voice of his mentor Robert Greene without being as clear a writer or thinker, the message is still worthwhile. Good for a dose of applied Stoic philosophy. 7/10

Nutrition Made Clear, by Roberta Anding (The Teaching Company). This audiocourse filled a part of my missing education. Heck, this stuff was not even taught to us in medical school! Everybody needs to know what they put in their body, what they should put in their body, and why. Highly recommended. 9/10

The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention and Energy, Chris Bailey ( ebook and paper ). Read this in one sitting, but can’t say it had any breakthrough ideas. 8/10

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results, Gary Keller and Jay Papasan ( ebook and paper). Start with your endpoint: where do you want to be? What does success look like? Then trace backwards and find that one thing that needs to be done to get you there this year, this month, this week, and today. Then do it. Written by two real estate moguls. 8/10

The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate, Eugene Ehrlich ( ebook and paper ). Basically a word list for those who already know a lot of words. About 25% were new to me, making me happy enough. 8/10

How Sex Works: Why We Look, Smell, Taste, Feel, and Act the Way We Do (2009), Sharon Moalem ( ebook and paper ). A primer on the science of sexuality, with lots of tidbits on the role of smell, the origins of circumcision, the neurological effects of being in love, and the use of leeches on wedding nights. A good, breezy read for beginners to the topic. 8/10

The Gift of Gab: How Eloquence Works, David Crystal ( ebook and paper ). Not sure if the book delivers on the promise of its title. So I will just say that this book is entertaining and useful, but perhaps less so if you’re already a professional speaker. 8/10

FUN AND FAST
I picked up these books mostly for kicks or out of curiosity. All of them are quick, entertaining reads.

Forensic History: Crimes, Frauds, and Scandals, Elizabeth Murray ( Teaching Company ). Every once in a while, I pick a course solely based on the fact that I know little about the subject. Now I know all about Lizzie Borden, forced confessions, and the utter unreliability of eyewitness testimony. 8/10

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg ( ebook and paper ). I freakin’ loved Duhigg’s first book, The Power of Habit , and judging by its 4,000 Amazon reviews, so did everyone else. And how am I supposed to resist a title like this, especially when it’s about productivity? Bring it on, I say. Hell, I even pre-ordered it, which I never do. Unfortunately, it’s not really about productivity. What?!? Yeah, Duhigg spins a yarn like nobody’s business, but the book’s simply about stuff other than productivity. Kinda like buying a pound of apples, and when you come home, it’s turned into a porcupine. Still pretty cool, but not what you paid for. 8/10

Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal, Erik Vance ( ebook and paper ). A brand-new book about suggestion, placebos, hypnosis? Yes please! Quick, engaging read. Especially if you’re a professional hypnotherapist. 8/10

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World

The Warrior Ethos, Stephen Pressfield ( ebook and paper ). I did not know Pressfield had written this. Once I did, I had to read it, duh. Short (122pp), wallopy, inspiring. You will probably want to go to a kickboxing class afterwards. 8/10

Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card (ebook). A science fiction classic, and a thriller all the way. Kept me up past 3am, with one of the most jaw-dropping plot-twists of all time. 9/10

The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice, Trevor Corson ( ebook and paper ). A super-fun, light read, full of cocktail-party fodder. Eat rice sushi (nigiri) by hand, sashimi by chopstick, and always dip sushi in the soy sauce fish-side.

Ali and Nino, Kurban Said ( ebook and paper ). A dear friend gave this novel to me about 15 years ago, presumably because it had my name in the title. Now I know why it’s considered a classic. Ali and Nino, both around 20 and living in Baku, Azerbaijan, are in love. He's a Muslim Persian prince; she's a Christian Georgian princess. The backdrop of their love affair is the perennial power struggles in the Caucasus and Middle East; ethnic conflicts between Georgians, Turks, Azerbaijanis and Persians; religious strife; gender politics; East vs West, Europe vs Asia, Christianity vs Islam; and impending takeover of Azerbaijan by the Red Army. The depictions of the various locales and ethnicities are lovingly precise, and I learned a hell of a lot about exactly how backward Islam has been, especially in its treatment of women. It's a quick read, and it's considered the national novel of Azerbaijan, for what it's worth. 8/10

Into the Magic Shop, James Doty ( ebook and paper ). A quick, easy, entertaining and uneven read. Not fully memoir, not fully self-help, and not a whole lot of science. Doty, a noted neurosurgeon who started from hardscrabble beginnings, is a curious character who can spin a good yarn. 7.5/10

The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America, Don Lattin ( ebook and paper ). This sat on my shelf for about 6 years, then I picked it up on a lark and devoured it in an afternoon. Helluva story about four dudes at the forefront of the psychedelic revolution who shaped the 60s, 70s and way beyond. 9/10

Choose Yourself: Be Happy, Make Millions, Live the Dream, James Altucher ( ebook and paper ). A Kindle freebie, so I downloaded it and even read it. Short essays of bracing honesty that deliver a much-needed kick in the rear. I now understand why he has a following. 8/10

Models: Attract Women Through Honesty, Mark Manson ( ebook ). Stumbled on this and just had to find out what the fuss was all about. Learned some stuff. Title made no sense. Good for nice guys who want to be better at dating. 8/10

Weird-o-pedia: The Ultimate Book of Surprising, Strange, and Incredibly Bizarre Facts About (Supposedly) Ordinary Things, Alex Palmer ( ebook and paper ). An impulse bargain buy, ‘cause I dig trivia and stuff. Fun read. 8/10

LOVED IT!
My reaction after reading these books was “That was awesome! Why did it have to end?”

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives, by Steven Levy. The amount of access Levy got to the top Google brass is impressive. The backstories of the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin explain a lot about their ethos and how they handle hiring, fundraising, expansion, and crisis. 9.5/10

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Ashlee Vance ( ebook and paper). Vance does a great job with this biography of arguably the busiest, most interesting man alive. Have no idea how he got such crazy access. Loved it! 9/10

Losing My Virginity: How I’ve Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way, Richard Branson ( ebook and paper ). What an amazing memoir! Loved it, and will probably end up reading all his other books now. 9/10

The Speed of Sound: Breaking the Barriers Between Music and Technology: A Memoir (2016), Thomas Dolby ( ebook and paper ). Delightful! Bought this on a lark on the recommendation of several sites (thanks, Amazon). First a precocious pop music icon, then a producer, then a pioneering Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, and now a professor at Johns Hopkins, Dolby’s tale of hard work and serendipity warmed my heart and had me guffawing loud enough at 2am to wake my neighbors. Inspiring stuff. 9/10

Proof: The Science of Booze, Adam Rogers ( ebook and paper ). Read this one in a day. Thoroughly enjoyable, literally full of cocktail party fodder. 9/10

HEART-EXPANDING

Indivisible: Coming Home to Our Deep Connection, by Christine Mason (ebook and paper). An MBA serial tech CEO and mother of 6, Mason is a survivor of her mother's murder at age 9, the Iranian Revolution, and two rancorous divorces. This memoir-travelogue-personal growth book explores her journey into yoga, prison peace mediation, restorative justice, intentional communities, and the heart of healing the sources and effects of violence. Beautifully written and deeply personal, this is the grown-up, battle-hardened sister to Eat, Pray, Love. A call to deep compassion and connection. 8.5/10

The Charisma Code: Communicating in a Language Beyond Words, (2016) by Robin Sol Lieberman ( ebook and paper ). A spirited, exhortative self-help guide more than an explicit manual for developing your charisma. 8/10

The Power of Kindness: The Unexpected Benefits of Leading a Compassionate Life, Piero Ferrucci

Devotion: Love and the Power of Small Steps, Kim Nicol (ebook and paper). A gemlike series of vignettes about centering yourself, taking time to smell the roses, and expressing love. Short, easy, uplifting read. 8/10

When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi

MORE
I read only books I like, and don't report on the mediocre ones I stumble on. These books didn’t quite fit the categories above, so here they are.

Isaac Newton, James Gleick ( ebook and paper ). Concise and thoughtful, Gleick places you in the midst of Newton’s world: his farm, lab, thoughts, alchemy, books, and romping genius. 9/10

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks ( ebook and paper ). I was the last science-minded person never to have read an Oliver Sacks book, so I got this audiobook. Just wasn’t my dish. It’s good writing and some fine musings, but very little by way of actual science and diagnosis. 7/10

The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time, Arianna Huffington ( ebook and paper ). A timely book written by a sleep enthusiast (if not a scientist), ‘cause we definitely need more books on sleep. Arianna’s style is light and breezy, first presenting a strong case for making sleep the centerpiece of your day, then the science behind it, and practical suggestions for good sleep hygiene. For the definitive resource, see the related Great Course reviewed here. 8/10

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, Douglas Rushkoff ( ebook and paper ). Wasn’t expecting much from this one, but Rushkoff spins a good yarn, making a convincing case for how fantastically costly the growth-at-any-cost mindset is, with some suggestions for taking local action. Required reading if you’re all about the sharing economy and reducing your footprint. 8/10

The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, Amy Chua & Jed Rubenfeld ( ebook and paper ). A sense of superiority, insecurity, and impulse control: this “triple package” enables cultural groups like Cubans, Chinese, Iranians, Jews, Mormons, Nigerians and Lebanese to do much better than average in America. In spite of the anathema heaped upon the Tiger Mother and her husband, this book has potent explanatory power. 8.5/10

A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age, Dan Levitin ( ebook and paper ) Levitin, a renowned neurology professor and professional rock music producer, is my personal hero for writing This Is Your Brain on Music. However, this was thinner than expected. 7.5/10

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius. This is a classic of the Stoic literature, and a remarkable book in its own right, written mostly in battle-tents by perhaps the wisest Roman emperor who ever lived, and the most powerful man of his day. My version was a bit archaic-sounding and hard to apprehend. Get a modern translation and run with it. 9/10

America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks, Ruth Whippman ( ebook and paper ). An Englishwoman moves to the US and notices that Americans’ obsession with happiness is actually making them miserable. Acerbic and well-researched, with astute observations about parenting, Mormons, and other American peculiarities. 8.5/10

You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life, Jen Sincero (ebook and paper ). A quick, irreverent and motivating get-off-your-ass self-help book. 8/10

Code to Joy: The Four-Step Solution to Unlocking Your Natural State of Happiness, George Pratt & Peter Lambrou ( ebook and paper ). The authors are experienced therapists who claim to get excellent results. However, their methods contain a bit too much unscientific mumbo-jumbo (e.g. muscle-testing) for my taste. 7/10

Man Interrupted: Why Young Men Are Struggling & What We Can Do About It, Philip Zimbardo & Nikita Coulombe (ebook and paper ). As a habit, I buy a friend’s book at his reading and get it signed, even if I don’t fully intend to read it. This one turned out to be much more interesting than anticipated. Video games and pornography are reprogamming young men’s brains en masse, and not in a good way. A cautionary tale and call to awareness. 8/10

Collaborate or Perish: Reaching Across Boundaries in a Networked World, William Bratton and Zachary Tumin ( ebook ). Lots of great stories of the triumph of collaboration, many of them drawn from the two authors’ illustrious career. A bit dry; mostly skimmed it. 7/10

Broadcasting Happiness: The Science of Igniting and Sustaining Positive Change, Michelle Gielan ( ebook and paper). More about the workplace than happiness in general, so less my dish than usual. But it had “happiness” in the title, so I had no choice but to read it. 7.5/10

Hella Important, Mind-blowing, Super-useful and Fun: 100 books I read in 2016, Part I

At the beginning of 2016, I decided to devote more time to my favorite activity: reading. I set myself a rough target of two books a week, and got through about 110 of them. Below are capsule reviews and ratings of about 100 of those, categorized into the following 5 headings: Hella Important; Mind-Blowing; Super Useful; Fun & Fast; Loved it!; Heart-Expanding; and More. Note than I'm counting audiocourses as books, some of which are much longer than the average audiobook (36hrs vs 6hrs). If a book looks like it doesn't have a review, it means I put it in more than one category and the review's coming right up.

Enjoy, and please chime in with your own reviews, reflections and recommendations in the comments!

HELLA IMPORTANT!
These books aren’t necessarily the most fun to get through, but they’re talking about something super important that is probably affecting your life right now.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport ( ebook and paper ). The most behavior-altering book I read in 2016. Georgetown computer scientist Newport differentiates between deep and shallow work, making the case that a life of meaning has more of the deep than the shallow. A roadmap for fulfilling your purpose in life, which I intend to fully deploy in 2017 and beyond. 10/10

Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Sherry Turkle ( ebook and paper ). We’re in the midst of a social revolution, and not in a good way: digital communication is eating away at face-to-face interaction, with measurable, scary and disastrous effects on our minds and relationships. Turkle places the problem in its proper apocalyptic context and proposes some solutions. 9/10

The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, Adam Gazzaley MD/PhD and Larry Rosen PhD ( ebook and paper ). You can’t multitask. Period. The authors, a renowned neuroscientist and a psychologist, provide the scientific evidence for how distractions and interruptions of high-novelty digital media degrade our brain function, productivity and relationships. An accessible and thorough presentation of an extremely important, timely topic. My full Amazon review here . 9.5/10

The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State, Graeme Wood ( ebook and paper ). Who really gets ISIS anyway? Even to an educated audience, they seem like a jumble of acronyms, leaders, factions and philosophies falling somewhere between incoherence and chaos. How did they come about? Are they real Muslims? What’s up with the beheadings, amputations, and sex slavery? What compels so many seemingly nice young men to leave everything behind and join them in Syria? This brand-new book places IS in an historical, religious, geographic and ideological context so by the end of it we can all say, “Aahh, now I get it.” The encounters are kinda amazing. Full review here . 9/10

Tribe: On Homecoming & Belonging, Sebastian Junger ( ebook and paper ). Pretty short as far as audiobooks go, but it packs a wallop. Junger gets deep into the human psyche’s need for affiliation and fellowship, and how that manifests (or doesn’t) in the modern world. 9/10

Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World, Srdja Popovic ( ebook and paper ). Loved this book! Enough to review it twice, push it on all my friends, and befriend the author. Srdja knows what he's talking about. As one of the founders of Otpor!, he masterminded the nonviolence movement that eventually toppled the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Later he and his colleagues consulted with the nonviolent movements in the Maldives, Egypt, and Burma. This book draws upon these frontline experiences: what worked, what didn't work, and how to do it better. Read my rhapsodizing review here . 10/10

Girls and Sex: Navigating the New Landscape, Peggy Orenstein ( ebook and paper ). Hoo boy. Sobering, sometimes terrifying stuff here. Our girls are in trouble, and Orenstein shows us why, mostly from the mouths of girls. Eye-opening stuff. 8.5/10

The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture, Philip Slater

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Davis ( ebook and paper ). A jaw-dropping work of investigative journalism so explosive that it subjected its incredibly ballsy authors to years of harassment and death threats, continuing to this day. You read it and think, “That didn’t actually happen, did it? People can’t possibly be that evil.” Oh yes it did, and yes they are. Remember these names: Competitive Enterprise Institute; Heartland Institute; Marshall Institute; Frederick Seitz; Bill Nierenberg; Robert Jastrow; Fred Singer. These are some of the denialist Cold Warriors and turncoat scientists who for decades defended the tobacco industry, denied the industrial origins of acid rain and ozone depletion, disseminated pseudoscience in support of the Strategic Defense Initiative, defended DDT, and are still trying to discredit the science of global warming. Another fantastic recommendation from Jesse Kornbluth’s Head Butler blog , and one of the most important books I’ve ever read. Know thine enemy. 10/10

Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, John Ratey ( ebook and paper ). Another life-changing book I’m embarrassed to have taken my sweet time to get to. Ratey makes a spirited case for exercise being the best thing you can do for yourself, ever. Fun to read and highly motivating. Exercise makes you smarter! 9/10

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Eric Hoffer ( ebook and paper ). Where do fanatic nutjobs come from? Hoffer – an unaffiliated, self-educated longshoreman awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his writings – breaks it down in exacting and prescient detail. When he wrote this in 1952, WWII was still fresh in people’s minds, and folks like Mao and Stalin were still in power. With the 2016 US elections, fascism and nationalism on the rise, this classic is a timely read. 9/10

The Conversation: A Revolutionary Plan for End-of-Life Care, Angelo Volandes ( ebook and paper ). Have you talked to your parents about advance directives, living wills and other uplifting topics yet? What, you think they (and you) are somehow exempt from death? This is pretty important stuff, folks. Take-home message: the three end-of-life care choices are life-prolonging care (“Do everything, doc!”), limited medical care, or comfort care. After watching the videos, most people opt for comfort care. Watch the videos here in 20 languages. The book also has links to all the forms you’ll need. Every new book these days has the word “revolutionary” in the title, but this one earns it. Essential resource. 9/10

The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings of Authenticity, Connection, and Courage, Brené Brown ( audiobook ). How good is this? Really, really good. 6 hours to shift your thinking and change your life. Screw perfectionism. 9.5/10

The Power Paradox: How We Gain & Lose Influence, Dacher Keltner ( ebook and paper). How is it is that to get power, you have to be nice to people, but once people become powerful, they tend to turn into jerks? Keltner is one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, and this book illuminates the relationship between kindness and power. Lots of useful, revealing tidbits about human behavioral quirks. 8.5/10

MIND-BLOWING
My reaction after reading these books was “Holy cow that was amazing,” whether due to content, style or both. Many of them would also fall under the “Important” or “Loved it!” categories.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Harari ( ebook and paper ). Deep insight into what it means to be human, from evolutionary beginnings to modern days, from micro to macro. Seriously mind-expanding stuff. Everybody’s read it, so why haven’t you? 10/10

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, Phil Knight ( audio , ebook and paper ). An intimate, revealing, moving, poetic, and often hilarious account of an extraordinary life. I cracked up listening to this book more than any other since Dave Barry. Knight may have missed his calling as a writer, but I’m glad he made some damn good shoes. A masterpiece of the genre. 10/10

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt ( ebook and paper ). Normally, I don’t read a lot of history, and I only came to possess this book through a Harvard January-term class taught by Greenblatt himself. Years later, I finally deigned to pick it up. It’s astonishingly, mind-blowingly good. There is a direct line from the modern world to the writings of the preposterously prescient Roman poet Lucretius. Greenblatt takes us through the history of classical Rome, re-creates the world of the Renaissance book fiend Poggio Bracciolini – quite possibly the only person who could have dug up a copy of De Rerum Natura – and makes it all relevant to our present-day lives. This book deserves its Pulitzer and every other accolade it ever gets. 10/10

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee ( ebook and paper ). I acquired the galley of this at Book Expo America six years ago, and thought I'd leaf through it before putting it in a donation pile. Except that I couldn’t put it down till I’d read the whole damn thing. Holy rumbling Krakatoa it’s one of the greatest books I’ve ever read! Sid Mukherjee is a brilliant scientist in his own right, and therefore supremely qualified to write on this topic. What he does above and beyond the call of duty is to tell a damn fine story, too. Humane, erudite, moving. Can’t wait to dig into his new one, The Gene . 10/10

The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture (2008), Philip Slater ( ebook and paper ). Every once in a while a book comes along and tilts your whole world such that you can’t but see it differently. This is one of them (like Sapiens). Slater is a deep thinker, and his formulation of Control Culture vs Integrative Culture has enormous explanatory power, especially in an age of rising authoritarianism. Read it and be blown away. Another Head Butler favorite. 9.5/10

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi ( ebook and paper ). For the three people who haven’t read this yet, Kalanithi was a hotshot neurosurgery resident with a wobbly relationship when he got diagnosed with lung cancer. With months to live, he decided to finish residency, get married, have a kid, and write this book. We’re really glad he did. Life-affirming, poetic, deeply moving. Next time someone asks, “What is the meaning of life?”, hand ‘em this book. 10/10

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, Sean Carroll ( ebook and paper ). It took me a month to get through this, and I’m glad I did. Sean is a brilliant theoretical physicist who has the distinction of being the only person to turn down a postdoc with Stephen Hawking twice. He’s also one of the best living popularizers of science, with a lively and funny delivery. This is a deeply rewarding book, if not one you can necessarily speed-read. You end up questioning your assumptions, and reconfiguring your worldview on almost every page. 10/10

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, Alice Schroeder ( ebook , paper , audiobook ) An amazing book! It's really a biography of 30+ people – not just Warren Buffett, but also Charlie Munger, Ben Graham, Susie Buffett, Buffett's grandparents, parents and children, Katharine Graham, all of Buffett's business partners, Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway, and the US economy in the 20th century. The vividness and empathy with which Schroeder describes them makes each character come alive, illuminating Buffett and his era through the prism of his relationships. You also get inside the head of one of the richest men who has ever lived. A masterpiece. 10/10

Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, by Karima Bennoune ( ebook  and  paper ). The atrocities, inhumanity, resistance, bravery and hope that Bennoune describes in this 2013 collection of interviews and stories from around the Muslim world will shake you to your core, bring you to tears, and ultimately, make you hopeful for humanity's future. She collected these accounts at considerable risk to her own safety. Bennoune's father was a noted fighter of fundamentalism in Algeria, so she speaks from firsthand experience. Mind-blowing stuff. 9.5/10

The Perfect Meal: The Multisensory Science of Food and Dining, Charles Spence ( ebook and paper ). Once I had heard about Oxford’s Crossmodal Research Lab, I had to get this book written by its director. I used the book to design my first Neurodinner Party, and it worked magnificently. Required reading for neuroscientists and aspiring chefs. 8.5/10

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell ( ebook and paper ). Mitchell is a genius, and his book is a mad tour de force of novelistic craft. He re-creates or invents six worlds, getting the tone, diction, genre and feel for each one pitch-perfect. Who can sound convincing as a 19th c. sailor, a 1930s aristocratic English musician and a post-apocalyptic Hawaiian? Whether the novel itself is fun to read is another question entirely, and although it was mostly riveting, it was also a slog at times. However, my sense of the possibilities of fiction has been expanded, and the likelihood of ever writing a novel commensurately shrunk. 9.5/10

The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease, Dan Lieberman ( ebook and paper ). One of those awe-inspiring reads that makes you wonder what took you so long to get to it. Dan is the man. 9.5/10

Redefining Reality: The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science, Steven Gimbel ( Great Courses ) Prof Gimbel goes through the history of revolutionary scientific thought – micro to macro, from Aristotle to Copernicus to Galileo to Newton, Eintein, Hawking, Darwin, Freud, Kahneman – and how our view of the world reconfigured itself each time. Mind-blowingly good. Learned so much. 9.5/10

Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, Huston Smith ( ebook and paper ). To write a great memoir, it helps to have lived a great life. Huston Smith has lived at least five of those. Astonishing story from a generous, wise soul. Very sad that he passed away on 30 Dec at 97. 9/10

The Future of the Mind, Michio Kaku ( ebook and paper ). Physicist Kaku is a great popularizer, and this journey into cutting-edge neuroscience is exciting, accessible and thought-provoking. 8.5/10

SUPER USEFUL
I read a lot of personal growth books, and these are the ones I found particularly useful.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, Anders Ericsson & Robert Poole (ebook and paper ). A superb compendium of the work and thought of Ericsson, the undisputed god of high-performance studies and father of the misnamed 10,000hr rule. This book completely upended my notions about talent, achievement and expertise. Hard work beats talent every time. 10/10

Joy on Demand: The Art of Discovering the Happiness Within, Chade-Meng Tan ( ebook and paper ). You may be tempted to dismiss this book because of its goofy humor and non-sequitur cartoons. That would be a mistake. Meng, the Google engineer who founded their in-house meditation program, packs this book with transformative meditative practices, most of them new to this long-time meditator. I expect to re-read this one regularly. Full review here . 9/10

Money: Master the Game - 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom, Tony Robbins ( ebook and paper ). Tony’s first book in 20+ years. Wordy and exhortative in Robbins’ trademark good-natured hectoring style, this book makes all kinds of sense. Well worth the slog. 9/10

The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play, Neil Fiore ( ebook and paper ). One of the most popular books ever written on procrastination. And effective, too! Fiore decriminalizes the habit and provides some solid tactics for managing it. I’ll start implementing its suggestions next week. Maybe. 9.5/10

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?, Raj Raghunathan ( ebook and paper ). This is the best book on happiness I’ve read so far because it’s so damn practical. The exercises are excellent. Take the free online course that goes with it. 9.5/10

The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown ( ebook and paper ). What with Oprah as a fan, all women seem to already know about Brené Brown. If not, this is where you start. Transformative thoughts on living a more self-compassionate, fulfilling life rid of perfectionism and other pernicious cultural afflictions. If you’re too lazy to read a whole book, start with this 27.7m view TED talk . 9.5/10

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating Like Your Life Depended On It, Chris Voss ( ebook and paper ). In business, parenting and relationships, we’re negotiating all the time, so we might as well be good at it. Voss, the former lead FBI hostage negotiator for 20+ years, spills the beans on how it’s done. With pithy maxims and riveting anecdotes, this book is both compulsively readable and eminently useful. Essential reference. My full review here . 9.5/10

Pre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade, Robert Cialdini ( ebook and paper ). I’ve been a Cialdini fanboy since 1997, and pre-ordered this, his first real new book in over 20 years. It did not disappoint. Full review here . 9.5/10

The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, Shawn Achor ( ebook and paper ). Because of its practicality, this is one of the better happiness books I’ve read. And I’ve read ‘em all. 9/10

Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life, Susan David (ebook and paper ). One of the best personal growth books I’ve read in recent memory. David, a South African psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School, has seen and experienced a lot. Her storytelling and clear instructions for implementing change make this a standout. 9.5/10

The remainder of the Super Useful titles, as well as the remaining 50 books, are in the next post, Hella Important, Mind-blowing, Super-useful and Fun, Part II.