A Brief Guide to Smart Thinking: From Zeno’s Paradoxes to Freakonomics

by James M. Russell

Each book is summarised to convey a brief idea of what each one has to offer the interested reader, while a 'Speed Read' for each book delivers a quick sense of what each book is like to read and a highly compressed summary of the main points of the book in question. The titles covered include thought-provoking classics on psychology, mindfulness, rationality, the brain, mathematical and economic thought and practical philosophy. The selection includes books about self-improvement as well as historically interesting accounts of how the mind works. Titles included go back as far as the Epictetus classic The Enchiridion and Bertrand Russell's charming The ABC of Relativity, and proceed through classics such as Edward de Bono's Lateral Thinking and into the digital era with titles such as The Shallows and Big Data. The books are arranged chronologically, which draws attention to some of the interesting juxtapositions and connections between them. Some of the titles included Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt; The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell; A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari; The Organized Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, by Daniel J. Levitin; The Descent of Man, by Grayson Perry; How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker; Black Box Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do, by Matthew Syed; We Should All Be Feminists, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; Guns, Germs, and The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond; The Black The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb; Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl; The A User's Manual, by Alain de Botton; Tools for Smart Thinking, by Richard E. Nisbett; The ABC of Relativity, by Bertrand Russell; The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson; The What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life, by Michael Puett; A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking; The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, by Tim Harford; Big A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger; The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis; The Survivors The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life, by Ben Sherwood; Black Box Thinking, by Matthew Syed; Making a New Science, by James Gleick; A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson; The What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr; Making Ideas Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, by Scott Belsky; The Enchiridion, by Epictetus; Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas R. Hofstadter; What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, by Haruki Murakami; and Lateral Thinking, by Edward de Bono.

Genres: Philosophy

288 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 2, 2020

About the author

James M. Russell has a philosophy degree from the University of Cambridge, a post-graduate qualification in critical theory, and has taught at the Open University in the UK. He currently works as a freelance writer, designer and editor. He is the author of A Brief Guide to Philosophical Classics, A Brief Guide to Spiritual Classics and A Traveller's Guide to Infinity. He lives in north London with his wife, daughter and two cats.

Reviews

[Sambasivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

An executive summary of seventy great books. The author has dived deep into each of them and presents his personal analyses. Phenomenally engaging. Go for it.

[Swanand Kelkar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book to be useful as it summarizes over 70 books in the mind/thinking genre. This space has been of interest to me for a while. It’s evident that James has read all the books he reviews which is not an obvious thing these days.

He also has good judgement of which books are really just a 2000-word blog or a Ted Talk and that’s a great time-saving service for the reader. His writing style is engaging and no review is longer than three pages. For the severely attention-deprived there is a one para review too.

For me it was a great tasting-menu, which now lets me explore books that I really want to without FOMO or regret of having wasted time.

[AAO]

ما شاء الله لا قوة إلا بالله
جزاكم الله خيراً

An efficient survey of enduring classics on psychology, mindfulness, rationality, the brain, mathematical and economic thought and practical philosophy. Hard. Fast. Effective.