Summary: Spencer Greenberg and Jeremy Stevenson’s The 12 Levers is the end product of an extensive research project aimed at identifying the best psychological tools for improving human life. The book distills a massive amount of information from self-help and psychotherapy into “12 Levers” that we can pull to cope, heal, learn, grow, and reduce […]
Note: This post is a departure from my usual book review format. It was written when I first read No Bad Parts back in 2024, but I am only just now getting around to publishing it. I hope you enjoy! Cast of Characters: Manager (MN): an intellectual, age 36 Firefighter (FF): a skeptic, age 36 […]
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Strife is the fourth novel in his Children of Time series. Whenever a series reaches the very upper stratum of my science fiction pantheon, it can be a little scary to learn that a new installment has been published. It’s definitely exciting, but I also fear it might be disappointing. Will […]
Despite liking a few of his stories over the years and enjoying his memoir On Writing, I’ve been a snob about Stephen King for pretty much my whole adult life. I saw him as a literary shock-jock who attracted millions of readers by appealing to the lowest common denominator. But when I decided to make […]
I recently had the pleasure of visiting a small bookstore with a new friend, and we decided to buy books for each other. His choice for me was Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I’ve been curious about this book for years but never developed sufficient interest to take it on […]
Steve Peters’s A Path Through the Jungle is a unique and valuable guide to self-understanding and self-regulation. The book is presented in seven “Stages,” each of which is comprised of “Units” that build on each other sequentially. The core set of ideas is what Peters calls the “Chimp Model,” summarized in this image from Unit […]
Summary: Scott Barry Kaufman’s Rise Above is about the perils of victim mindset and how we can avoid them. In Part One, Kaufman explores the dynamics of victim mindset, including how people get stuck ruminating about their pasts, how we indulge irrational emotions and cognitive distortions, and how we become overly concerned with self-esteem and […]
Summary: Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning is a treasure trove of humanistic wisdom. Part One describes Frankl’s experiences in several concentration camps during World War II, including the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. As a gifted psychiatrist who had already begun to formulate his own flavor of existential therapy, Frankl entered the camps as both an unwilling […]
Summary: Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is a masterful and urgently important work of nonfiction. It tells the story of how, starting in the early 2010s, the “phone-based childhood” began to radically transform the lives of young people around the world. Haidt calls this “The Great Rewiring of Childhood”––an event which he identifies as the primary cause […]
Summary: Richard C. Schwartz’s You Are the One You’ve Been Waiting For is a guide for applying Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of psychotherapy to intimate relationships. IFS posits that all people have a multiplicity of subpersonalities called “parts,” each of which has its own perspectives, beliefs, needs, goals, and special place in a person’s “internal family […]