Will

This classic offers great advice for befriending and influencing others, but makes excessive use of anecdotes to demonstrate the points ad nauseam. As another reviewer mentioned, it's also not necessarily a good idea to be a people-pleaser all the time. The book could have benefitted from a discussion of when it can be useful to apply the strategies within, and when it may be advisable to not bother.

Interesting thesis, but poorly written. The author comes across as arrogant and overly dismissive of experts and entire fields. I feel that the author is so focused on demonstrating the importance of the black swan that he trivializes the value of the more predictable events that follow bell curves.

Offers up an extensive body language analysis. The writing style and organization is so systematic that it can get tedious to read at times. And some body language signals may be common sense to some people, but for those who aren't fluent in body language it is a great starter guide and reference material. After reading this book, I couldn't help but start to notice body language signals that others are emitting all around me every day, whether consciously or unconsciously.

This was the book that got me started on the paleo diet back in 2011.

Robb Wolf is a key figure in the paleo community, and his book provides a solid introduction to the rationale behind the classical paleo diet: no grains, legumes, or dairy. If that's what you're looking for, this book will fill the need.

I don't adhere to a paleo diet anymore because I no longer agree with the scientific justification provided for it. In particular, there's no indication that “leaky gut” occurs to any relevant degree in the general population, whether from gluten or otherwise. Anti-nutritional factors such as enzyme inhibitors and phytates exert only small effects in the context of an overall varied diet. And the carbohydrate-insulin model of obesity fails to account for the observation that many traditional populations remain thin on high-carbohydrate diets.