Books - A buttload of nonfiction
Today on the blog: more books. Lots more books.
‣ Life Strategies by Dr. Phil McGraw
‣ Rona Randall - Writing Popular Fiction
‣ Steven Levitt's Super Freakonomics
BLOGGING NOW:• Dr. Phil's Life Strategies
• Writing Popular Fiction
• Super FreakonomicsTO BLOG:• The Tipping Point
• Wingnuts
• The Physics of "Star Trek"
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• South of Broad
• "A Doll's House"
• "A Raisin in the Sun"
• God Has a Dream
• Night
• Paper Towns
• I am Legend
• The Virgin Suicides
• Assassin's Creed: Renaissance
• The Lucifer Effect
• The Dilbert Principle
• Descarte in 90 Minutes
• Rousseau in 90 MinutesREADING NOW:• Also Sprach Zarathustra
• Leibniz in 90 Minutes
• OutliersBLOGGED:• Candide
• Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
• Animal Farm
• Michael J. Nelson's DEATH RAT!
• Deep Water
• Big Trouble
• DoaWK: Dog Days
• DoaWK: The Ugly Truth
• Mutant Chronicles
• The Hunger Games
• Citizen of the Galaxy
• Logan's Run
• The Time Machine
• The Island of Dr. Moreau
• The Invisible Man
• God Bless John Wayne
• A Killing in Comics
• The Thin ManThe schpiel:
These books are not fiction, so no tropes or trope links. There will be links to the Wiki, so beware the black hole of following links. (As always.)
Unlike previous blog posts about books, this group is not really in keeping with any theme. It's all kind of a hodgepodge.
On with the show.
Writing is as writing does
Rona Randall is a published author from the U.K., most famous for writing Dragonmede. In this how-to guide, she explains how to write a novel or short story, and get it published.
In a nutshell, she basically says that the key to a good story is the characters in it. Create well-rounded, three-dimensional, realistically-motivated characters. They are key. Give them more than just names, faces, and rudimentary personalities. Give them backstories, even if they never are referenced. Give them likes and dislikes that the audience may never see. Create flesh-and-blood humans (or nonhumans, whatever).
After that, once you plop them into the story's setting (well-researched, if historical and well-detailed, if fictional) and introduce the conflict, the characters themselves pretty much run the show. You can have an idea of where you want the story to go, but don't over-plan and don't be afraid to deviate.
Lastly, it includes some ideas of how you can make contact with publishing companies and writers' societies. Plus, it gives a brief outline of the legalities of getting your work published.
It's worth a read if you're serious about getting your work in print. Since it was originally published in Brittan, it may not be in bookstores. You'd have to go online for it.
Oprah-approved, applied behaviorist psychology
Now I know what you're thinking. "Dr. Phil?!" you must be incredulously asking the computer screen. "He's that schmuck from TV! What kind of credible shrink is he supposed to be?" Well, based on what I've read from him and what I've read of other psychologists, he is basically B. F. Skinner with a mustache and Texan accent. I like Skinner, and use behavior modification methods as part of my classroom management repertoire. That's good enough for me.
This isn't ids and egos and superegos. If you want some of that Freudian psychoanalytic stuff, more power to you, but you won't find it here. This is the behaviorist world of Pavlov and friends.
Dr. Phil organizes his advice according to what he calls his ten Life Laws. Each is accompanied by a strategy, an overall goal to be met in order to bring the life you're living into improved function by making the Life Law work for you, rather than against you.
Think of it as a 12-step program for self-saboteurs, but with only ten steps.
In addition - as any behaviorist like Pavlov or Skinner will tell you - the self-sabotage system relates to unintended reinforcement, which Dr. Phil calls "payoffs." You do what you do because it works for you on some level, though perhaps not working in the way you would ostensibly like.
The system described reminded me very much of the "Games" of transactional analysis, described by Eric Berne in his book Games People Play. It also very closely resembled the kind of self-defeating behaviors that M. Scott Peck described in Part I (of IV) of The Road Less Traveled.
Alright. Enough name dropping.
The "rogue economist" is BACK!
Economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner produced the topsy-turvy analysis of people's aggregate and individual behavior called Freakonomics. Though it didn't seem to have any sort of unifying theme running through it, there were actually two:
→ People respond to incentives.
→ You can discover interesting stuff by mining data.
Now, Steve and Steve decided to do it again, and the result is Super Frekonomics. This book is filled with anecdotes arranged in five chapters and and an epilogue...
The first deals with the economic disparities of being born female vs. male, and the various factors that can grow or shrink that disparity. (Hint: Be born somewhere there are well-fitting condoms.)
The second deals with the statistical ins and outs of life and death, mostly death. Fascinatingly, it concludes with the tale of a forensic accountant who devised a foolproof sorting algorithm for catching terrorists. Contrary to what some (usually those who support racial profiling) believe, it is not statistical data such as race, age, sex, or religion. It charts a specific and quantifiable financial behavior (unnamed in the book for security reasons), and it's super-accurate!
The third is about apathy and altruism. It ties in pretty well with other things I've been reading lately, mostly in the field of social psychology. Lemme tell ya, if you want to learn about sociology, one of the first things you will learn about will be the murder of Kitty Genovese and the "dictator" and "ultimatum" games.
The fourth is one of the most practically applied to real life as we know it. Entitled "The Fix is in - And it's Cheap and Simple," it tells us why washing your hands, wearing seatbelts, and getting vaccinated are all very, very good ideas.
The fifth discusses climate change. There's a think tank of very smart people with some creative solutions to curb the thermal energy of developing hurricanes and blot out sunshine to defeat the greenhouse effect. It's the stuff of science fiction, being proposed as science fact. Personally, I am a bit skeptical...
The epilogue is fascinating. It follows some anthropologists who trained some small monkeys in the ways of currency, teaching them to use small counters to trade for treats. What did they observe? Bank heists and prostitution, among other things.
Cue Progress Bar!!
[###########---------]
PROGRESS = 55%