Ali
As a work of fiction, it is terrible book, cliche characters, forced drama and suspense, lack of penmanship in describing dynamics (hence resorting to outright naming them with overt adjectives). As a non-fiction self-helpy psychology book (which it so tries to be) it is nothing more than psudo-scientific, psudo-profound, new-age tale of spirituality.
Good narrative on history of cancer as a pathology and our reaction as species to it from ancient times to this date. Without having any background in medicine, it sounded balanced and well researched.
As some have pointed out, the literary devises sometimes felt a bit much, but I appreciated the overall effort on making it more readable for a wide audience.
It started pretty strong and reasonable, but finished with typical anecdotes of self-help books.
I got these useful bits out of it:
* learn to express needs instead of demands
* learn to articulate observation of others without value judgement (positive or negative)
These two combined can sooth out many otherwise confrontational encounters.
A lot of ground is covered in this book about relationships. A good side of the book is that the author explains most of the terms and phenomena that is referenced here, from game theory to Zeigarnik effect, and those descriptions are apt and accurate. Other than those, there are a lot of terminology introduced by the author, which are again well explained.
The book breaks down for me at two points, stretching external references beyond their descriptive power, and using anecdotes and subjective observations (or pure practice based evidence) as a basis for conclusions. Some examples of stretching referenced effects is Zeigarnik effect, which is a relatively obscure and barely scientific idea on its own which can be narrowly attributed to short time horizons (hours), but the author uses it to explain certain tension build ups in spans of months and years between couples, it just doesn't hold. And then we move to practice based evidence, which without an accompanying randomised controlled trial or such rigorous process is not scientific: adds up to just some nice anecdotes, but not beyond that.
Don't get me wrong, a lot of explanation and advice about trust and betrayal checks out with common sense, I just wouldn't call it “science of trust” without some rigor.
I have mixed feelings about this book, and need to dig into scientific resources to validate some parts. It is well written in a sense that it provides good narrative to understand how we got here in terms of dietary advices and trends. Some parts like drawing on analogies and examples, or referring to religious practices as sources of wisdom (for fasting for example) was off-putting to me.
This was one of the mos cringe-inducing books I have read. I was trying to sift through the BS to find some kernels of useful advice, and couldn't really.
For a while I thought it might be that it is out of date, but nope, at no point in contemporary history this stands to be a proper book.
And like many self-help books it can be summarized in 10 or so pages, if you remove all repetitions (like full sentences repeated, not even same idea in different forms).
Finishing this was an exercise in self-control and persistence.
A thorough explanation of dream functions with proper references and mentions of alternative explanations along the way.
I specially liked the mature non-arrogant scientific position of being (and remaining) open to possibilities beyond current established facts regarding sleep. As the book mentions many discoveries seemed unreasonable at their time and later on proved to be correct and scientific. Remain open minded, but skeptic enough that your brain won't fall out!
[deep breath] it was a hard read, not that it was not well-written (it is captivating), but that I would find myself cringing while unintentionally imagining myself under the circumstances that characters went through. It reminded me of [b:Man's Search for Meaning 4069 Man's Search for Meaning Viktor E. Frankl https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1535419394l/4069.SY75.jpg 3389674] a bit.
Oh how I cringed throughout some parts of this book, excreting will power not to abandon it half-way.
There are some kernels of truth in it, like asset vs liability, financial literacy, importance of investment and passive income. But despite many backstories and allegories presented, these points are so shallow that quickly loose applicability when you move out of the book and into the real life. These were the good parts.
The book is full of biases, survivorship, hindsight, etc. And in many parts it looses touch with the intended audience of lower to middle income class, in couple of stories you hear “all it took to start on the path of financial independence was $70k and willingness to risk it all for a big win”. Well, that amount is the annual net income of many middle class families around the world, and even if they could set such amount aside, couldn't be as risk-taking with it as the author suggests. A lot of examples of inventing money in this book either rely on existing financial affluence and network of rich friends, or are borderline immoral (like preying of laid off people to buy their houses half the price of market).
So to summarize:
* Is this a good read? depends, if this is your intro into thinking about money, probably, if you have basic knowledge of finance and money, no!
* Is reading this beneficial for financial education? only if the reader read throughout the book with adequate skepticism, take the new point of views presented and make strong moral and financial judgements before using them in life.
