It looked much more interesting when I saw his talk at Authors@Google. However, I found it rather monotonic. Some of the ideas were interesting, but got boring fast.

I’ve always been interested in learning languages. That’s why I was interested in this Dr. Everett‘s book when I saw his talk on FORA.tv.

The linguistic details on this obscure Amazonian language was a bit too much for me, but the whole process of how he tried to learn the language and the culture was very interesting. It’s actually amazing what he and his family can endure and adapt to when a loftier goal is in place.

The book also talks about Dr. Everett losing his Christian faith in the process (he was sent there to learn the language to translate the Bible). That portion wasn’t as interesting and I wasn’t sure if it mattered that much.

Anyway, if anyone is interested in how one goes about learning a language when there is hardly a common language to start from, this is a very engaging account of one such process.

Another book I was made aware of through “Authors@Google” talks…

This book gives a pretty good idea of what was wrong about the initial approach of the U.S. in Iraq and how and why the “Surge” worked. I think it was somewhat long since it’s a mixture of Mr. Kilcullen‘s personal accounts and field studies of his past dealings of local/global terrorist groups in several Islamic regions.

I thought the essential ideas and messages were interesting, but I thought it could have been a bit shorter.

No wonder this book as been a best-seller for a long time. The book has a very good combination of academic and personal essay styles. Very easy to read and very convincing.

Dr. Robert Cialdini explains, out of curiosity from his personal experiences and his academic research, what makes people agree to the “compliance agent”, such as sales people.

It is definitely a great training material for sales people and con artists, but it also deals with how we, on the other side, can detect the tactics and avoid traps.

A very good and informative read.

Reading this book was more like reading a Ph.D paper. Besides, the idea seems interesting, but the arguments and evidence weren’t there to me. Quite disappointing.

I thought the organization of the chapters were interesting. Some stories were interesting. However, ultimately, this book by Stephen Baker felt too light on details for me.

I liked the fact that the book by Richard Weissbourd had a strong emphasis on the morality (as compared to the happiness). It’s something that I also feel that is lacking in the fast-paced, low-birth-rate world of today.

The book had an interesting section on the affects of the “Americanization” of the immigrant children on their morality. However, the book overall seemed quite not “organized” (or too narrative) for a study/research-based book.

It did have a conclusion section at the end, but I felt that I wouldn’t have came to those conclusions from reading the whole book up to that point.

The concept and intention seem to be good, but I am not sure if it made a good argument for them.

As a person who enjoys movie and technologies in audio-video entertainment, I really enjoyed this historical overview by Scott Kirsner.

The main thread of his storytelling is the struggles between the innovators and the “preservationists” (or “status quo”), and mostly focused on the triumphs on the innovators’ part. And I think that was the only gripes I have about the book.

That is, not all innovations make technical and economical sense. When a technical innovation works out, it usually has been around for a long time and almost always something other than its technical merits made it win over the doubters. I don’t think this book was explaining those triggering ideas and I think that could be a bit misleading.

Other than that, as an interesting overview of 150 or so years of movie industry innovations, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Another pickup from Fresh Air and TED. Also, Dan Ariely sometimes does guest appearance on Marketplace.

This book has some similarities to Freakonomics, but it was more about the social experiments that he and his colleagues have done.

They are showing that we are irrational often times and the irrational behaviors are predictable (or statistically consistent). He doesn’t try to explain why that much, though.

I think this is another author that I prefer listening to that reading his/her book. Some parts were interesting, but often I couldn’t quite agree with the interpretation (or the explanation) of his experiments.

I get a lot of book references from Fresh Air and TED and I heard about Steven Pinker on both.

This book is about the recent developments in social science on human nature (“nature” vs. “nurture” is a very controversial subject). According to Mr. Pinker, the prevalent assumptions in the 20th century about human nature involved three ideas: “blank slate”, “noble savage”, and “ghost in the machine”. However, recent research and experiments show that they are not true.

“Blank slate” states that we can be anything we want to be. This idea helped greatly in the social changes in the 20th century, against many types of social oppression, discrimination, and inequality. However, this also creates unrealistic expectations from parents and well-intentioned but negatively-impacting public policies. “Noble savage” is a notion that in the natural state, we are all “good”, and that the evils in human nature is a product of modern culture. “Ghost in the machine” is an idea that the self (“ghost”) can be completely detached from the biology (“machine”).

I don’t want to go through the book literally, but the main idea of the book is that we can’t ignore our biological nature. One of the studies he included is about the affective-ness of parents (after birth) in forming children’s personalities. This type of studies are done by looking at identical/paternal twins and siblings that grew up together or separately. And it turns out the influence of parenting is almost insignificant.

It was very interesting and informative. I don’t think I agree with everything Mr. Pinker wrote, but still this is something to think about.