Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes

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Here’s a lively, hilarious, not-so-reverent crash course through the great philosophical traditions, schools, concepts, and thinkers. It’s Philosophy 101 for everyone who knows not to take all this heavy stuff too seriously. Some of the Big Ideas are Existentialism (what do Hegel and Bette Midler ha

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A book on Near Death Experiences supporting a new and paranormal view of consciousness

How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose

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This wonderful book starts with a discussion of the cuckoo bird who will place one of its eggs in the nest of another bird with similar, yet smaller, eggs. The other bird will then devote its attention to the cuckoo egg since it is bigger. supernormal stimuli, such as this example can be...

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Sean Faircloth is the past president of the Secular Coalition for America and is currently working with Richard Dawkins. His message is about activism.

Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts

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A very readable overview of self-justification and dissonance theory. Reviews the scientific research on the topic and includes many real-world examples of how cognitive dissonance works. Includes pointers on how to combat our built-in tendency towards self-justification.

The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

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The title makes it seem like a how to, but it is rather the story of the author on his one year quest to become the U.S. memory champ.

How we can make it happen in our lifetime

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Sachs’ book is ostensibly the most liberal and left-leaning of its decade’s crop of mainstream discussions of development economics. Before this reviewer read it she was more aware of the criticisms of calls to "double aid" than she was of the arguments, and to some extent it stands alone...

Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good

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"Don’t do it" seems to be the message directed at aid agencies, western governments, transnational (Bretton Woods) organisations and NGOs—in respect of the majority of all their respective efforts to help the poor. While the first tragedy of the world’s poor is poverty itself, Easterly’s...

Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

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This reviewer had to read Bottom Billion through a couple of times because she found it unusually packed with knowledge. Not to mention cool-headed, analytical in high measure, and usefully lacking in political polemic which made it all the more readable. Amid the evidence of...

Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa

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The sensational part about this book is that its author hails from Africa (Zambia) and is calling for the curtailment of foreign aid to the continent. So if she's doing that, then it must be right, right? And Messrs Sachs, Collier, Geldof and have all got things wrong and/or they are...

The Potential And Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility

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Mostly, this book explains why the market of its title—that of doing good for society or corporate social responsibility (CSR)—is small, and should be small, at least relative to some contemporary hype. And mostly it does this by placing corporate virtue in what this reviewer regards as...

Inside the mind of a conspiracy theorist

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(from the back cover)
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The new era of networked science

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An exploration in the cinderalla science of networks.

Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

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The author calls a spade a spade in ways that no politician ever would (if they knew the mic was on, that is)--voters are not just rationally ignorant, they are irrationally daft. And that includes you. In precis: rational ignorance is not the cause of democratic folly, because via...

The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life

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This book's title would ordinarily have led this reviewer to believe she was about to read an anti-business tirade about the subjugation of government and democracy to the superior power of big business, replete with lists of how many corporations had market capitalisation as big as medium...