Category: Book review

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Book review

Words That Change Minds

by Shelle Rose Charvet

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A detailed and hands-on look at the different patterns of behaviour that make up the Language And Behaviour (LAB) profile. Each pattern is explained, together with some guide questions that will allow you to determine how the participant fits against the profile. The patterns themselves are derived from NLP, and there has been some good work to establish that they are consistent within particular individuals in a particular context, and also that different interviewers will spot the same patterns in a person.

Understanding the patterns is very useful for a number of things. For example, if you’re interviewing for a particular job, you could usefully think about the characteristics of the job – do you need a creative person, or one who follows processes very well, for example? Each of the patterns will help you think about the role, and give you some very useful questions to ask candidates. Or if you’re selling a product face to face or online, thinking through the characteristics of your intended buyer will help you shape the language you use in the sales pitch. And I first came across the LAB profiles at work, where a consultant interviewed my management team and some of the staff and produced a very helpful set of profiles that allowed us to reshape the organisation to be much more effective.

As a particular example, some people are “towards” motivated, while others are “away” motivated. So when you ask someone why they did something in a particular context (e.g. why they took their current job), if they are “towards” motivated they might say “because of all the great opportunities this job offered”, whereas if they were “away” motivated they might say “because my old boss was quite difficult and I didn’t like the commute”. Both are likely true, but people will focus on one or the other depending on their towards/away inclination in the work context. Some jobs require “away” motivation (health and safety), while others are more suited to “towards” (sales).

Overall this is a very useful practical guidebook more than a pop-psychology book. Having said which, it’s hard to read the patterns and not think about where we might fit on them, and if you are reasonably insightful you’ll make a pretty good guess! My only negative comment would be that I read my copy on a kindle, and the formatting was a bit screwy at times – lots of tables and text boxes, which didn’t always come out perfectly. If I were to need to refer to this book a lot, I would likely buy a paper copy.

Full disclosure: I received a free ARC softcopy of this book. My comments and rating are accurately reflective of what I felt reading it.

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Book review

Team Human

by Douglas Rushkoff

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There’s a lot that I liked about Team Human: the underlying thesis is that we have let technology into many corners of our lives without thought for many of the consequences, and that the motives of those driving the technology adoption are often very poorly aligned with those of the users of the technology. The result is often a significant level of social isolation and repression, and Rushkoff proclaims loudly that the default answer of “add more technology to fix it” is unlikely to improve things. For me, it’s undeniably true, and the author does a great job of assembling a manifesto make his points.

The structure of the book was interesting, too – 100 short sections, varying from a few paragraphs to two or three pages. I did find it frustrating at times, though, as very often you would meet assertions that you disagreed with, and although there are footnotes on each section at the end of the book, I often had to do a reasonable amount of googling to find the supporting evidence. I sometimes didn’t find the evidence very convincing, either – e.g. in #58, where he refers to Penrose and Hameroff’s “Orch OR” theory of quantum consciousness, which is widely regarded as at best somewhat hokey science, and likely to be just flat out wrong.

Also worthy of comment is that the physical book itself is beautifully put together, in a non-traditional way. I almost always buy on Kindle, but I didn’t with this one, because (a) I was able to follow the book’s own thesis of more local, distributed, human activity by buying it from my local small bookshop, and (b) I wanted to own the physical hardback. Definitely worth it (plus you get to Stick It To The Man by doing so…)

The ultimate question is I suppose whether there’s actually anything we can do about any of this. Can we stop the tech juggernauts taking all our data and using vast clouds of Big Data machines and machine learning algorithms to work out how to drive us towards their desired economic behaviours (usually, although interestingly not always, they’re economic)? I don’t know if we can stop it, but I know if we don’t try to at least chisel away a little at that rock face, we’ll very likely regret it.

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Book review

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature

by Matt Ridley

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Today, even more than when the book was written in the early 1990s, this subject area is extremely fraught. Many seek to deny that gender differences are anything other than cultural programming, and in this work the author goes to great lengths to explain the substantial evidence pointing to (a) their existence, and (b) their evolutionary origins, as opposed to cultural origins.

I was a little worried that the 25 years or so since this book had been published would have produced new evidence that contradicted this thesis. Coincidentally, within a couple of hours of finishing the book, I came across well-reasearched current papers supporting the core points of the book: https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/03/13/…

We can see through these arguments that women are driven by evolution to want different things in their partners than men: on the whole, women are genetically programmed to seek to mate with men of status, so their genes get a leg up the power hierarchy, as higher-status men generally have higher-status children, and generally more of them. Meanwhile, men are programmed to seek younger women, as they may father more children by them.

But as the book points out repeatedly, we have the significant capability to rise above our “programming”: murder is entirely natural, but it doesn’t mean we want it ruling our current society. So the question can still legitimately be asked as to whether we want to be like this: if so, how do we wish to set up our culture, and then, how might we judge those who fail to meet our new (culturally created) standards.

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Book review

Kings of the Wyld

by Nicholas Eames

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“It’s time to get the band back together.”

Many things to like here, in particular the core idea of the adventurer teams as analogous to rock bands, complete with tours and arenas and individual characters, and many lines quoted from movies about bands that you’ll know – from Blues Brothers to The Princess Bride to Spinal Tap. That worked brilliantly, and lent the book a different and often very funny perspective. The characters were well drawn, too, in particular Clay Cooper, but also some of the more peripheral characters – I would love to see more of Jain and her band, for example.

There are some very funny lines in here, though, even aside from the references to other things:

“Please,” he prayed to whichever of Grandual’s gods was in charge of killing people at random with the corpses of chimeras, “grant me this one… fucking… thing.”

Or we could go with:

“They served the most incredible brunch: poached basilisk eggs and toasted bread with brown butter preserve. No one does a good basilisk egg anymore,” he remarked sadly, and Clay heard Ganelon mutter under his breath: What the fuck is brunch?

For me, although there was a lot to like, the flow of the story didn’t always work, and there was perhaps a little too much “deus ex machina” intervention to keep the plot moving forward. In the end, this was still a very entertaining book, and an excellent first novel. I will read more from Nicholas Eames, for sure. But the original and still the best, for me, of this modern fantasy genre is Joe Abercrombie. Up against such illustrious comparisons very few can hold up, but I can still give Kings of the Wyld a happy four stars.

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Book review

The Music Shop

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I was looking forward to this, after the lovelieness from Rachel Joyce that was Harold Fry’s unlikely pilgrimage. It’s a story about music, and love, and how people can fall in love with music they didn’t know they needed to hear. I’ll resist drawing a parallel with the four sections of a symphony, but it’s there if you want it, I’m sure. The incidental characters were I felt in many ways better drawn than the main actors, and the setting of the 1980s small English city was very well done.

In the end, it was a bit of a curate’s egg – good in parts. Loved the beginning, loved the end, I felt a bit lost in the middle. Maybe three and a half stars. And if you aren’t sniffling back the tears at the end, you have no heart.

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Book review

The Small Big: Small Changes That Spark Big Influence

The Small Big: Small Changes That Spark Big Influence
Read date: Feb 2019

The Small Big: Small Changes That Spark Big Influence by Steve J. Martin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An interesting and generally very practical book: 52 short chapters, each with a specific, straightforward, and tested, suggestion for how you might influence people to get a particular outcome.
– Having problems getting people to attend their appointments for your clinic? Get them to write down the time and date on a slip themselves, or read it back to you over the phone – this improves rates over simply giving them a printed slip with the details.
– Want to improve your own likelihood of going to the gym or remembering to meditate? Visualise the specific details of what you’re going to do as you start the process, in advance of when you want it to happen. Better yet, write these details down in a short note to yourself.
– Want to improve your tips as a server in a restaurant? Put a sweet or a mint on the tray with the bill for each person in the group – and then come back after a minute with another mint or two.

And so on. Each chapter will only take you ten minutes to read, and although you may have come across some of the suggestions before if you’ve read the authors’ other works, there will very likely be some that are new to you. And by the way, the authors are not science journalists, but are among the most widely recognised leaders in this field – Cialdini, for example, is the most referenced author ever in the field of social influencing.

Clear, helpful, actionable: what more could you ask?

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Book review

Moon Called (Mercy Thompson #1)

Moon Called by Patricia Briggs
Read date: Feb 2017

4 stars

Three and three quarter stars, really, but rounded it up to four as it has potential for the rest of the series (and minus a quarter star for the cover art – I mean I know sex sells, and it’s fun, but it nearly put my wife off reading it, which would have been a shame as she loves them now!)

Quite a fun fantasy-in-the-modern-world story: you’ve got shapeshifters, werewolves, vampires, and the fae, all hiding in plain sight in the modern world. A slight twist in this world is that the fae – at least the “lesser” fae – have been outed, and their existence is known to us mundanes.

The plot is centred around Mercy Thompson, a shapeshifting car mechanic, and the troubles she gets into with the neighbourhood werewolves. Her next-door neighbour is the alpha of the pack, and tends to do things like leave Mercy’s pet cat on her doorstep with a note saying “please keep your cat off my lawn, or I might eat him”. Things get complicated when Mercy hires a drifter type to help out in the garage, who she quickly realises is a “lone wolf” werewolf, one without a pack.

The story is fun, with quite a lot of scene setting in the first half, but the pace picks up in the back half and I enjoyed the ride. I will definitely pick up the next one if I’m off on holiday and fancy an entertaining read on the beach!

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Book review

La Belle Sauvage

La Belle Sauvage (The Book of Dust, #1)
Read date: Feb 2019

La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Philip Pullman is back, and it’s awesome! I read the original Pullman books when they first came out, but not since then, which means my memories of them are vague, and probably influenced by the movie (which was good, but the Armoured Bears and Zepplins of my imagination were way cooler).

La Belle Sauvage fairly rips along – I was gripped from the start, and found myself unable to put it down at various crucial junctures of the storyline. It centres around Malcolm, the young son of the owners of an inn to the north of Oxford, and you also meet some of the other characters from the series, such as Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter, although they play much smaller parts. I won’t give too many plot details because, spoilers, but I loved it all. It ends at a logical point, but as it’s the first in a trilogy, one is definitely left in anticipation of the next one, if only to enter the magical world once more.

This book is set in the same world as The Amber Spyglass series, but ten years earlier, with Lyra as a little baby. Malcolm is a young adult, and the writing in this book is straightforward and accessible. I’m sure this book would be enjoyed by younger people – my kids at that age would have loved it – but as with the other books in the sequence, it’s by no means YA fiction, with some complex themes opened up, and Pullman’s characteristically dark views of the established church firmly on display.

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Book review

How Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life

How Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life
Read date: Feb 2019

How Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life by Jordan Ellenberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Four and a half stars, plus or minus half a star (to stay with the spirit of the book itself).

A delightful survey of a diverse array of subjects, showing how mathematics is important in our discussions in everyday life, from politics to podiatry. At the bottom, a lot of it comes down to logic and to numbers, and our ability to understand what’s going on is greatly aided by the wise words and examples that Jordan Ellenberg uses. Great discussions about p-values, about what use geometry is in our real lives, about how the Supreme Court makes its decisions, and more.

Loved it. Half a star off for the election rules discussion at the end – too much detail for even me to care about, and I really actually do care about it quite a lot.

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Book review

Don’t Shoot the Dog!: The New Art of Teaching and Training

Don't Shoot the Dog! by Karen Pryor
Read date: Jan 2019

5 stars!

I cannot find fault with this book as an overview of the use of conditioning in training. Karen Pryor’s experiences with training aquatic mammals in the 1960s lead her to a deep understanding of the nuances of what works. She found that positive reinforcement not only works well, but it works much, much better than anything else: it is faster, longer-lasting, and can elicit a greater range of behaviours. And, not insignificantly, it deepens the bond between trainer and trainee.

So if you want to reinforce (or extinguish) particular behaviours from your dog, your horse, your pet porpoise, or even your housemate, this book will show you how. There is a chapter at the end specifically about clicker training, which is now very widely used for dogs, but read the rest, too, as it explains how all this works, and how it works best.