PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewPlenty of this is unavoidably hard going. Formulas of conditional probability, in particular, may make some wistful for the torture of medieval syllogisms. Yet Pinker rightly treats the subject as valuable for clear thinking ... These lessons are taught well. Pinker’s jaunty demotic and occasional bar-stool sermons will not be to everyone’s taste, but the illustrative gags and cartoons are pedagogically apt. His deployment of perhaps the finest of Jewish sex jokes as a tool to explain the concept of \'confounding variables\' may deserve some sort of prize ... Pinker’s book does more than just lay out how we ought to reason. It also seeks to explain why our efforts often seem to fall short ... You might think it was impossible to exaggerate the popularity of ill-founded beliefs, but Pinker does manage it.
Malcolm Gladwell
PanThe New York Times Book Review... somewhat rambling ... despite its title, the book is not really about strangers. True, Bland and the patrolman did not know each other, and some of Gladwell’s stories involve collisions between alien cultures. But the deceptions of Madoff, Sandusky and others discussed here were practiced not only on strangers, but also on people they knew. Lies, misunderstandings and escalating confrontations have, after all, been known to occur even within marriages ... It is doubtful whether this notion adds much to our understanding of the cases [Gladwell] discusses ... Throughout the book, Gladwell works to build an air of suspense, zigzagging between cases and portentously promising lush vistas of insight just over the next hill ... There is much use of italics for emphasis, to remind us that what we are reading is interesting and important. It would, of course, be too much to ask for effective tips on how to spot the next Madoff, but a little more substance would have been nice.
Will Storr
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIf we are suffering from self-obsession, should we really feed the disease by poring over another book about ourselves? Well, perhaps just one more. Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It’s Doing to Us, by Will Storr, a British reporter and novelist, is an intriguing odyssey of self-discovery ... Storr’s side of the conversations he recounts tends to be blunt, inquisitive and peppered with salty British swearing. One comes to like him, even if he does not often like himself ... Nowhere in his account of Western ideas of the self does he mention Rousseau. This is quite an omission, since Rousseau was not only the first thinker to examine self-esteem in depth but also ended up with conclusions that are similar to Storr’s.
