This is Your Brain on Music (Daniel Levitin)

I already know a fair amount about music and about the brain, so some of this book was old hat, but I still learned a lot about the intersection between the two. For instance, I never appreciated the importance of the cerebellum in timing and rhythm. I also never realized that even non-musicians can generally sing a very familiar song from memory and get the key, the tempo, and even the singer's vocal mannerisms right. Music is a very complex and meaningful set of promises, and I enjoyed learning more about it.

Einstein: His Life and Universe (Walter Isaacson)

A fascinating look at Einstein's life. Isaacson seems to have done impeccable research and presents his portrait of Einstein with balance but also with obvious admiration for the amazing man he was. I thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity to learn more about this important character who shaped much of modern life. Isaacson even manages to give a clear overview of the basics of Einstein's science and his thinking about quantum mechanics, with no math and nothing too intimidating. It's not a detailed picture, of course, but enough to get an understanding of what was going on in that wonderful mind. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Jill Lepore)

I've never been a big comic-book fan, and only remember Wonder Woman from her TV days with Lynda Carter playing the Amazon princess. This book details the history of how Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston, a harvard-trained psychologist and inventor, by some accounts, of the lie detector test - and advocate of feminism and free love. This is a fascinating story because Marston is such an outre character. He was never really successful at any other career except Wonder Woman, and he very deliberately used her to project propaganda that women can and should have power over men to make the world a better place. His is a story of contradictions, though. While pressing the agenda of women's rights and independence, in his own life he ruled a small harem with a wife, a live-in mistress, and an occasional other mistress who often visited and lived with them for a time. The mistress wore a wide bracelet on each arm as "love bonds" to symbolize her subjugation to Marston; they are eerily similar to Wonder Woman's bracelets that allow her to deflect bullets. This history delves deeply into the lives of Marston and those around him, including his women, his business dealings, and his family. The author argues that Wonder Woman, by herself, bridged the gap in women's rights from the suffrage movement in the 1910-1920 time frame and the resurgence of "women's lib" in the 1960s, keeping the flame of feminism alive. I'm not so convinced. She was clearly a force for strong, independent woman in the 1940s, but after Marston died in 1947 her message was much diluted and she became a pretty face in tight clothes, focused on finding a husband rather than saving the world. One clear sign of this change: The Wonder Woman comic book for years in the 1940s had a four-page section on Wonder Woman in History, profiling strong, independent, world-changing women. In the 1950s, this section changed to one giving wedding tips. How far she had fallen.

Blindspot (Mahzarin Banaji & Anthony Greenwald)

An excellent review of all the research indicating that we humans are just a mass of prejudices, biases, assumptions, and limitations when it comes to evaluating situations, others, and even ourselves. All true! I wasn't surprised by any of the research results here, since I've followed this research for a while, but this is a good resource for pulling it all together. (With just one mistake I noticed: the misinformation effect described by Loftus is not the same thing as retroactive interference - a minor issue that doesn't detract from the work overall.) I highly recommend this for anyone interested in the science behind prejudice and discrimination.

Living With a Wild God (Barbara Ehrenreich)

The author as a mature woman, veteran of marriages and illnesses and careers, looks back at a quest she began at age 14 to understand the real nature of the universe. Raised as a staunch atheist, she wondered what the purpose of life and the universe could have beyond reproduction and death. Was there some ineffable, inexpressible Other that gave the world its real nature? For most of her life, Ehrenreich has been subject to what can only be called mystical experiences, in which language and human labels are leached away, leaving only pure sensations and a strong sense of Presence. This book is her attempt to describe her experiences as accurately as she can and to determine what they might mean. My professional background and my scientific inclinations lead me to something like this: brain circuitry developed for the purpose of recognizing and predicting the behavior of the intelligent social creatures we lived with (other people) sometimes overshoots, leading to pariedolia and, in the case of temporal-lobe epilepsy, a strong sense of oneness with the divine. Ehrenreich dismisses these explanations too glibly, I believe, lumping them in the category of "mental illness." I will grant her that no evidence disproves the existence of Others that are invisible to any rational scientific investigation and can't even be approached in a rational linguistic frame, but I don't accept that she has provided any actual evidence in favor of its existence either. No matter--the book is a fascinating look at the really big questions, and will provoke anyone to think deeply about them.

Human Memory: A Constructivist View (Mary Howes & Geoffrey O'Shea)

The authors present a thorough, tightly-argued case for the idea that memories are constructed, not simply stored. That is, each time we remember something, we use the bits and pieces of information available in the hugely complex network we've built, incorporating traces of all our experiences and knowledge, to build that memory. We don't just go on a shelf and find it there; it's new each time, and is changed every time we remember it. This is a very strong idea and has a huge amount of empirical support. For me, this was the weakness of this book; it argued against the idea that memories are exact replicas of our experiences, perhaps stronger or weaker, faded or intact, but otherwise unchanged. I don't know of anyone in the field who seriously takes that position any more. This made me lose patience with the book, because it seemed they were devoting their energies toward knocking down a straw man rather than actually examining the implications of the constructivist nature of memory. I also had another issue, which is much more mine than theirs; the book leaned heavily toward a philosophical approach, focusing on logic and introspection, but not so much empirical research. It's a matter of taste, I suppose, but that's not to my taste. I can't fault their conclusions, but don't feel that reading it really changed or enlarged my understanding of memory.

The Mind's Eye (Oliver Sacks)

Sacks is famous for his insightful case studies of people dealing with neurological challenges, and this volume maintains that tradition. Here he focuses on issue related to visual imagery: the ability, or lack of ability, to see things one's imagination, the "mind's eye." The stories he tells range from people with no ability to imagine visual stimuli at all, to the blind man whose visual imagination is so strong he relied on it to climb up on his roof by himself to repair it. Along the way we met a woman who can see shapes and colors perfectly well but can't use that information to recognize what she is looking at and learned about Sacks's own journey as he progressively lost vision in one eye to cancer. As always, Sacks focuses more on each individual's experience, how the challenges affect each one as a person in daily life, than on brain circuitry or the firing of neural impulses. I enjoyed this collection quite a lot.

Mudhouse Sabbath (Lauren Winner)

Winner is a committed Christian who converted from Judaism, and offers in this short book a series of meditations on what the practices of Judaism can offer to Christians. Not in the realm of theology, but in how to bring faith into one's everyday life. For example, she doesn't advocate literally keeping kosher, but does argue that such a practice helps us think about what and how we eat as part of our relationship with the world and with God. The strict observances of the Sabbath, forcing one to disengage from the busy world and direct one's thoughts to the life of the mind, can bring mindfulness and calm to our frantic lives. I was particularly moved by the chapter on mourning and grief, with the detailed pattern imposed on the grief-stricken that allow for a gradual reclaiming over the span of a full year of the life one has lost with the loved one, supported at every step by the entire community. There is a lot of truth here that i was happy to learn about.

Native Tongues (Charles Berlitz)

Berlitz knows languages, and this book is a collection of interesting facts about languages. Here are a few examples: After discussing various Chinese ideograms, including the one for "horse" and the one for "door," we learn that the symbol for something surprising is a horse in a door. I love knowing that the Latin word for "seagull" means "noise with feathers."  Berlitz includes the worlds most efficient travel dictionary, based on the claim that knowing eight words in 25 languages will allow you to convey most essential ideas to the vast majority of the people in the world. Language tells a lot about a culture (in traditional Chinese, the word for "wife" is "the person inside") and about history (the Russian word for "train station" is just their version of the name of an English train station, Vauxhall, that early Russian railroad engineers admired). I recommend this to anyone who wants to know more about how we talk to each other, and why.

The Science of Fear (Daniel Gardner)

Gardner sounds a clarion call for making decisions based on rationality and reason, rather than the emotionality encouraged by our primitive brains and the media that surrounds us. Why do we spend such a huge amount of energy and money on fighting terrorism, which objectively offers virtually no risk, when automobile accidents and heart disease are much more dangerous? Why is everyone convinced that crime is going up, that our children are at great risk for being stolen by strangers, that chemicals are giving us all cancer,when none of this is actually true? Gardner explains this irrationality by describing the many cognitive biases and shortcuts we use when making sense of the world, and how they can lead us astray. I found it compelling and very readable. Highly recommended.

Peking to Paris (Dina Bennett)

This is the author's story of a 35-day road rally across Asia and Europe in 2007, made by over 100 classic cars duplicating a trip over much the same route in 1907. I enjoyed a lot of the details of what the trip was like, including experiences in crowded Chinese cities, vast Mongolian deserts, and frustrating Russian checkpoints. The ongoing saga of their car's inadequate shock absorbers was, forgive me, absorbing. I was less enthralled with the author's harping on her overly-fragile emotional state. She was upfront about admitting that slights she perceived from other rally members evoked the angst of her 13-year-old self; I was less likely to find this charming or enjoyable in an adult. I would have preferred to spend more time on the journey, less on her inner securities. I can say that I liked parts of it, but don't feel that my life was better in any way for having read it.

Orange is the New Black (Piper Kerman)

The book on which the Netflix series is based contains virtually no sex, drugs, or violence. Kerman was a rebellious young woman who got involved briefly in the drug trade after college, once carrying drug money for her girlfriend who arranged transport for the ring. She got out of the business quickly and went on with her life, but five years later the feds caught up with her, and then five years after that she was in a minimum-security Federal women's prison. What I found most striking about her story is that there was almost none of what I would have most feared, but was still worse than I dreamed. She was never attacked or even threatened, physically or sexually, though there were occasional moments of harassment. The only drugs she saw people using were those handed out by the medical staff at the prison. Until the last few weeks of her stay she never actually wore orange or shackles. Still, the system was brutal, demeaning, and dehumanizing on a level that seems carefully calculated. I was moved by this view of what life was like for her on the inside, and almost want to try the recipe for prison cheesecake.

The Other Wes Moore (Wes Moore)

This is a memoir and a biography, telling the stories of two men named Wes Moore.  Both were black, both lived in the same neighborhood in Baltimore at the same time, both grew up in single-mother households, both had scrapes with the law at an early age, both struggled in school. Their lives diverged wildly, though; the Wes Moore who authored this book became a military man, a Rhodes Scholar, a graduate of Johns Hopkins University, a happily married man, and a nationally-known speaker, while the other Wes Moore will live out his life in prison for murder. What happened? How did the author's life get turned around and set back on track, while the other kept spiraling further and further down a dark path? The book offers many possibilities: one father abandoned his boy while the other died unexpectedly, one mother was never able to complete college while the other was a college graduate, one dropped out of failing inner-city schools while the other was able to attend private and military schools. Ultimately, though, there are no clear answers. This book is a thoughtful look at the questions, opening our eyes to the complexity of the situation and the difficulty of finding the answers. Highly recommended.

Teaching With Your Mouth Shut (Donald Finkel)

This slim book presents the author's philosophy about education and learning. He is passionate about teachers doing things other than lecture and other things he calls Telling - presenting information to students with the idea that this will cause them to learn. Instead, he says, teachers need ton craft experiences and situations in which students will actively engage in creating their own understanding. Some of his specific ideas I find exciting and will try myself, at least in modified form, such as conceptual workshops (very similar to the in-class activities I do in some classes) and responding to student papers with an actual letter (similar to what I already do in my Honors class). Others strike me as unworkable and frankly appalling. He holds up as a model a teacher who tells students on day one (a Monday) that on Tuesdays the class will be entirely run by students as a discussion of the assigned Shakespeare play, and he won't tell them what to do. The next day he sits at one seat in a circle, silently, reading his copy of the play and jotting in a notebook. If nobody else has said anything after 5 minutes he sighs and says, "Remember, I won't tell you what to do. Discuss the play." He is then silent for the rest of the two-hour class. This is to encourage independence in the students and a democratic environment in the class, but all I can imagine is fruitless struggle and resentment. I am apparently not as enlightened as Dr. Finkel.

Thanks, but This Isn't for Us (Jessica Page Morrell)

Excellent advice from a developmental editor (one who works with authors to get their projects ready to submit to publishers or agents) on how to avoid many of the problems that leads to rejection. I found useful tips here about things like balancing plots and subplots and structuring scenes, and a good plan for the many stages of revision. Recommended for people who want to write fiction or memoir.

Time Warped (Claudia Hammond)

An interesting discussion of the many ways in which our perception of time can warp. The author comes back again and again to the Holiday Paradox - the fact that while on a vacation trip, seeing new things and having new experiences every day, the time seems to fly by, but after returning home and looking back on it the trip seems to have lasted a very long time. How is this possible? There are many theories, and she discusses them all, but the most likely has to do with attention and memory. When we are focused on things because they are new an unexpected, we lose track of the passage of time and are surprised when suddenly it is dinner time, so the day seems to have gone quickly. Looking back, however, we have so many separate memories it seems impossible that they all fit into that one small time frame. There is a lot more here, including why time seems to speed up as we get older and how to make better predictions about our own future. At times the material seemed scattered, with less organization than I would have liked, but overall it was interesting and informative.

Stories I Only Tell My Friends (Rob Lowe)

In this memoir, Lowe tells how he knew he wanted to be an actor from age 6, and fought single-mindedly to make that happen. He writes fairly openly about his difficulties with relationships and with alcohol that led to a downward spiral, and about the redemption that turned his life around. There is a great deal of name-dropping, but this is to be expected from someone whose middle-school friends included Charlie Sheen and Sean Penn. Aside from a disconcerting tendency to switch from past tense to present, the writing is quite good. He describes drunken evenings with his gang of friends, living for weeks in Paris with a princess, and other debaucheries without avoiding them but also without sensationalism or meanness. It is a good look at a life most of us will never know.

Mnemonology (James Worthen & R. Reed Hunt)

This small but dense scholarly text is not for the lay public. However, for a student of memory, it is an interesting examination of mnemonics; their history, their classifications, their effectiveness, and their use in everyday life, in education, and in rehabilitation. The authors argue strongly that the formal study of mnemonics is important to a complete understanding of memory, and that formal training in the selection and use of mnemonics would be a valuable addition to standard curricula at all levels.

Of Dice and Men (David Ewalt)

The author is a journalist and also a dedicated gamer in the Dungeons & Dragons tradition (under his name it says, "Level 15 cleric"). He writes a history of the development of the pastime, from its roots in prehistoric games up through D&D Next (otherwise known as D&D 5). We get to learn of the collaboration between Gygax and Arneson and about its falling out, of the various companies that owned, developed, and sold various D&D games, and their successes and failures. He talks about the hysteria that equated the game with satanism and about its value for its players. Along with the history, though, Ewalt gives us an inside look at what the game is like to play and why it is so popular. As a player myself (D&D and some of its competitors, such as World of Darkness), I found his story appealing and accurate, and can recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about this game. No previous gaming knowledge or experience is needed.

How We Decide (Jonah Lehrer)

The author gives us a suitably complex and nuanced description of the mental processes involved in making decisions about everything from what to eat for breakfast to whether to shoot down an incoming object that might be a friendly pilot or an enemy missile. The basic message is that our brains have two separate but interconnected decision-making systems. The rational system, housed primarily in our oversized, relatively modern frontal lobes, is great at weighing the odds and calculating probabilities. The emotional system, mostly in the lower levels of the brain and honed by millions of years of evolution, is great at making snap decisions about a wealth of fuzzy information. To make the best decisions, we need to know how these two systems operate, how to help them operate most effectively, and  when to turn over control to which system. The examples are numerous and fascinating, and the writing is clear and accessible. Highly recommended for anyone who makes decisions and would like to make them better.