Xander Bennett. Screenwriting Tips, You Hack. 150 Practical Pointers for Becoming a Better Screenwriter. Amsterdam: Focal Press, 2012. 210 pages.

I’ve never written a screenplay, but I still believe that Xander Bennett’s Screenwriting Tips, You Hack, has made me a better writer. I’m not being facetious here; Bennett’s book has given me a much better appreciation for techniques of screenwriting and helped me ask questions about how I write my still-non-screenplay work.

It makes sense that a guy who’s trained to write so that script readers keep reading has produced a book that will keep you turning the pages. I understand that Bennett also writes a screenwriting blog, but since I’m just now starting to get interested in screenwriting, I haven’t seen it. So I approached this book with no preconceptions, outside of wanting to learn a little more about how people write screenplays.

Bennett divided Screenwriting Tips into 18 chapters, each covering a different element of the screenplay: structure, dialog, character, and specific mistakes are a few examples. He writes it from a mercifully practical perspective; you can sense that he’s got a deep love for movies and TV, but he doesn’t waste your time talking about theories of screenwriting. Instead, he just tells you how to do it.

There are actually more than 150 tips here, which makes you feel like you got something for nothing. Great marketing. And each of the tips will actually help you sharpen your writing. True, it’s not going to write your screenplay for you, and yes, you’re probably already doing all of these things if you’re a master screenwriter. But if you’re buying a book on screenwriting tips, you’re clearly not a master screenwriter. Bennett doesn’t show you any shortcuts, but he makes sure that you stay on the right road. That, in and of itself, makes the book worth it.

If you want a concrete example, I’ll throw one out there: “Screenwriting Tip #120: Don’t sabotage your own pacing by cutting directly from tense scenes to boring ones.” If you’re writing a script for the first time, you might have a feeling that the pacing is off, but this tip will tell you exactly what the problem might be.

I’ve yet to write a screenplay so I can’t say that Screenwriting Tips helped me cross the finish line, but it’s already made me a more intelligent movie and TV viewer–I’m picking up on a lot of what he’s saying in what I’m watching. Highly recommended.

Jason Falls and Erik Decker. No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing. Indianapolis: Que, 2012. 253 pages.

This book, with a word that you still can’t say on the radio in its title, is certainly trying to be provocative. Beneath the swagger, though, there’s an intelligent, well-conceived manifesto for why social media matters today and how to do it correctly.

No Bullshit takes as its starting point that you, the reader, are working–maybe in marketing, but also maybe in public relations, advertising, or customer service-for a business that has been slow to get on the social media bandwagon. If you’ve picked up the book, you’re a little curious, at least, about how social media works and whether to get involved. Still, there are others in the organizations–including those you report to–who aren’t convinced that social media is relevant. This book will give you the arguments you need to convince them,

By the same token, if you own your own business, this book will tell you what you already know: that you need to embrace social media, not for fuzzy reasons like “community building,” but because it will help your bottom line. The book gives you some tools to diagnose just what you need to invest to make social media work, and what you should expect to get out of it.

Obviously, a 250-page book written by two guys you’ve never met isn’t going to give you a full blueprint for how to manage Twitter and Facebook on a day-to-day business. But it does explain how you can set realistic objectives and how you can evaluate your progress towards them.

There are three parts to the book. The first explains just what social media marketing–which is more focused than plain old social media–is. The second explains how it works, and considers the question of ROI (return on investment) from several angles. The main point here is that in some ways it’s possible to measure social media marketing ROI in very focused ways (click-throughs), while in others it isn’t. That’s OK, though, because traditional marketing’s ROI, it turns out, isn’t easy to quantify either.

The third section of the book explains how to get started, in necessarily broad brush strokes. Again, you won’t see an org. chart or a social media policy widget that you can plug into your business here: just the tools for you to build your own.

No Bullshit Social Media is focused and filled with useful statistics and anecdotes that make a strong case for social media marketing. Throughout, the tone is a bit blustery for my taste (using words like “ass” and “suck” more than most business books), but the common-sense, real-world focus is a plus. It’s ironic that a book with “no hype” in its subtitle takes great lengths to demonstrate how bullshit-free it is–which, in my book, is a form of hype. It’s kind of like the guy you work with who is genuinely talented but has a few idiosyncrasies; if you can look past them and work with him, you’ll really be rewarded. It’s a really good guide to using social media marketing in real-world businesses.

Thord Daniel Hedengren. Tackling Tumblr: Web Publishing Made Simple. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2011. 258 pages.

When I got the chance to review a book about Tumblr, I figured I’d give it a shot. I’d heard about the web publishing platform and thought it might be a good fit for a project I’m working on. Tumblr, it turned out, was a lot less flexible than I’d hoped so my experiment with it lasted about three days (switched back to WordPress), but I got a book review out of the endeavor.

In TACKLING TUMBLR, Thord Daniel Hedengren provides novice users with an introduction to the blogging/mini-blogging service. He starts out by explaining just what Tumblr is–and isn’t. Although he clearly believes that it’s a versatile platform, he admits that it’s not for everyone, and in his first chapter provides the low-down on a few Tumblr rivals. Hedengren has also written about WordPress, so he’s clearly got an understanding of the broader blogging world.

Hedengren then walks you through several initial steps: setting up a Tumblr account, creating a blog (or several), and using your own domain name. The last is particularly valuable, because while Tumblr lets you use a custom domain for blogs they host without an additional fee (which WordPress.com does not), they don’t provide any support for the feature.

That’s where much of the value of books like TACKLING TUMBLR lie. You could probably figure most of this stuff out yourself or google to find answers for problems, but this book gives you most of the answers in one place, clearly laid out for you. It’s not a bad thing to have if you’re doing this for the first time.

After you’ve set up your account and started your blog, Hedegren tells you how to change the theme, connect Tumblr to other social networking services, and modify themes using html and css. The final chapter walks you through creating your own theme from scratch.

All in all, this is a good guide to Tumblr. It’s clearly written and has some helpful information. Unfortunately, between the time the book went to press and now, Tumblr changed its dashboard, so not everything is where Hedegren says it is, or is called by the same name. That’s one of the dangers of publishing a paper books guide to something as dynamic as a web publishing system, which can change overnight. But if you’re willing to do a little exploring on your own, this is a good introduction to Tumblr.

The bigger question is whether Tumblr is right for you. For what I wanted, which was a prose-heavy, content-driven blog site, it wasn’t a good fit, but if you just want to communicate in a way that’s longer than Twitter but shorter than a full-on blog post, this could be a good fit.

Financial statements can be a riddle. Loaded down with numbers and sometimes-confusing terminology, they can obscure rather than illuminate if you don’t know how to read them. If you’ve got a degree in accounting, it’s a snap, of course, but not everyone who needs to do financial analysis has that degree–or has even taken a course in the subject. Robert Follett’s HOW TO KEEP SCORE IN BUSINESS isn’t the equivalent of an accounting degree, but it’s a short, readable guide that will make balance sheets, income statements, and other financial analyses comprehensible to the uninitiated.

Follett is a good teacher: he starts off by explaining what he’s going to do, then provides a chapter-length glossary that includes important terms. This part is important, because words on a balance sheet don’t necessarily mean the same as they do elsewhere. For example, we all understand what a “loss” is. If I put $20 into a video poker machine and play it until it’s gone, I’ve “lost” it–the money is gone at that moment, and it’s not coming back. On a balance sheet, however, a loss does not necessarily represent a reduction in cash during the accounting period covered. It might seem like a subtle distinction, but it’s an important one.

After the glossary, Follett spends two chapters explaining the balance sheet, which is really the crux of the book. Here’s where the reader has to get active: Follett has you create your own balance sheet instead of just reading about it. And here’s where readers who put more work into the book by actually doing so will end up getting more out of it. Then there are chapters on the income statement, various ways to calculate return on investment, changes in financial position, and the cash flow budget. At the end, Follett summarizes what he’s presented.

This is an excellent beginner’s guide that doubles as a continuing reference work. Both the glossary and the other chapters will get a lot of use as the reader returns to them when wading through actual financial statements. It’s easy to read and does a fine job of making those pages of numbers less intimidating. Highly recommended.

Natalie MacLean. Unquenchable: A Tipsy Quest for the World’s Best Bargain Wines. New York: Perigree, 2011.

After reading UNQUENCHABLE, I can state three things with confidence about Natalie MacLean: 1) She likes to drink wine 2)She knows a great deal about it 3) She wants to share some of her experiences and perspectives with you to help you find bargain wines that don’t taste like they came out of a box.

That makes this book an enjoyable read. It’s joyfully subjective, with MacLean sharing her insights into both her visits to several wine-making regions and the taste of the wines. Her mission, simply put, “is to demystify wine price in relation to quality,” in other words, helping wine shopper pick out $15 wines that taste as good as $30 or $50 ones.

MacLean’s approach is best summed up by the label on a Renard Rose bottle that she shares; “The nose suggests smoky strawberries, raspberry cigars and blah, blah, blah…Isn’t wine indescribably fun? Just enjoy it!”

So we, the readers, get to tag along as MacLean enjoys visiting several locales that make good, inexpensive wines, including Australia, South Africa, Argentina, and even Canada. In each stop, she shares the history of the wine-making region and notes which varietal its best known for. She also visits several wineries, relating the stories of the winemakers, which are often interesting in their own right. Winemaking is a field that draws many colorful personalities, and MacLean has a knack for rendering them vividly.

This is a personal book, with MacLean proudly abandoning any claim at objectivity and instead sharing her reactions, which makes sense, since much of the charm of wine is intangible. By unabashedly giving us her own personal take on wine, MacLean does us a great service; we’re free to disagree with her, but at least we know where she’s coming from.

All in all, I learned a great deal from UNQUENCHABLE and had a good time doing it. Outside of pouring the wine for you, there’s not too much more you can ask from a wine guide than that.

Anthony DeBenedet and Lawrence J. Cohen. The Art of Roughhousing: Good Old-Fashioned Horseplay and Why Every Kind Needs It. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2010. 192 pages.

Parents get mixed messages about physicality and child-rearing. On one hand, they remember running around, pushing, and just plain having fun as kids. On the other, there’s an endless list of cautionary tales about everything that can go wrong if kids are taught to play too roughly, from severe (and not so severe) injuries to themselves to fears that they’ll hurt other kids, either physically or emotionally.

Yet physical play is important to developing children, and in THE ART OF ROUGHHOUSING the authors make a strong case for encouraging horseplay. The book is divided into seven chapters that follow a warning label and prefaces from each author. Yes, there is a warning label that reminds parents to be responsible. Which is important.

The first chapter marshals medical and academic literature touting the beneficial effects of physical play (and the potential deleterious effects of denying it to your child. With the theoretical base secured, the second chapter offers a practical introduction, with guidance on how to initiate and structure physical play and how to deal with the inevitable boo boos. It also gives a few introductory exercises. The next five chapters feature short introductory notes for a specific kind of roughhousing (“Flight,” “Games,” “Contact” are a few) and illustrated descriptions of exercises that one (or two, if a spotter is needed) parent can do with a child. Each exercise has a suggested age range, difficulty level, and essential skill that the exercise reinforces.

Even though the authors refer to what they’re advocating as “roughhousing,” it’s actually much more sophisticated than running around the pool hitting each other with floaties. They provide a detailed list of exercises that resemble those “taught” in play classes given by Gymboree and MyGym as well as anecdotal narrative support for their effectiveness.

Overall, it’s a fun book that may give you some ideas on how to have more fun playing with your kids. It will help you and them have a better time and may aid in their development. Sounds like a win-win to me. Recommended for parents looking to spice up their playtimes.

Dava Sobel. A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos. New York: Walker and Company, 2011. 288 pages.

We take much of our worldview for granted. Most of us, if asked to relate where the Earth is, would without blinking respond that it’s the third planet from the sun. Its daily rotation is responsible for sunrises and sunsets, and it revolves around the sun, more or less, in a year. It’s almost impossible to conceive of any other cosmology. A sun-centered model seems to answer every question we have about the relationship between the earth and its skies, and we’ve sent spacecraft to several planets in our solar system. The heliocentric hypothesis seems almost absurdly self-evident.

Yet it wasn’t always so. As science writer Dava Sobel reminds us in A MORE PERFECT HEAVEN, when Copernicus developed the heliocentric hypothesis in the 16th century (yes, Aristarchus had suggested it long before, but neither Copernicus nor most of the world knew this at the time), the idea that the earth moved seemed utterly ridiculous. After all, the sun rose and the sun set every day; the stars wheeled above the earth at night; and the planets, though no one could quite pin down their motions, definitely seemed to circle the stationary earth. Standing still, one had no sense of motion in any direction. Every shred of accepted evidence, every learned treatise–and the official doctrine of the Church–agreed: the fixed Earth was the center of the cosmos, and everything else wheeled around it.

Those of us who know Copernicus merely as a name in a textbook really can’t appreciate his incredible intellectual courage until we re-immerse ourselves in the world he inhabited–something that Sobel does masterfully. Using original source documents, she painstakingly recreates his life, as best can be done. She does a fine job of placing Copernicus at the center of a group of friends, rivals, and superiors, each of whom influenced his work. She also reminds us that, in addition to making his nocturnal observations, Copernicus had a regular day job as a church canon. In talking about his daily work she introduces what might be the crux of the Copernican story: the struggle between science and faith which for many intelligent scholars, Copernicus included, wasn’t much of a struggle. He himself reminded readers that “mathematics belong to mathematicians,” and that his heliocentric findings were wholly consonant with religious faith. As a man who lived his entire adult life in the Church, this is no small point.

The book is divided into three parts–and here is where it gets a bit revolutionary itself. The first third is a straight-forward scholar-writing-for-the-popular-market biography of Copernicus taking us up to the moment that young mathematician Rheticus traveled to Copernicus’s home in Frauenberg in search of the genius, reports of whose insights had been circulating for years. Rheticus and Copernicus’s former fellow canon Tiedemann Geise, now bishop of Kulm, were instrumental in convincing Copernicus to finish and publish his masterwork, “On the Revolutions,” which, using observed data as a guide, laid out the case for the heliocentric hypothesis.

Then, things take a sharp turn: the second third of the book is a two-act play Sobel wrote that dramatizes the weeks that Rheticus and Copernicus spent preparing “On the Revolutions.” It’s interesting to see the primary source material so faithfully reported in the first third brought to life as a drama, though some readers might find it difficult to become as immersed in the dialog as they had in the narrative. Having told that story, Sobel shifts back to straight historical narrative for the final third of the book, which discusses the publication of “On the Revolutions” and its centuries-long aftermath.

Sobel’s produced a work that brings to mind the cosmology of Tycho Brahe. Brahe knew the geocentric model did jibe with observational data but didn’t quite accept the leap to a sun-centered universe. Instead he created a mash-up of both systems, where the sun orbits the earth and everything else revolves around the run. In the same way, Sobel hasn’t completely abandoned traditional historical narrative here, but instead anchors her dramatic recasting of the life of Copernicus with that kind of narrative.

Even if reading a two-act play on the page isn’t your favored reading experience, the rich detail and meticulous attention to source material makes the other two-thirds of the book a joy to read. A MORE PERFECT HEAVEN is an excellent reminder of how science works (not by consensus and often in the face of what seems obviously true) and of the life of a truly revolutionary historical figure. Highly recommended.

Denise Kiernan and Joseph D’Agnese. Signing Their Rights Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the United States Constitution. Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2011. 256 pages.

As one of the foundation documents of the American Republic, the Constitution is an object of respect bordering on reverence. For the past 222 years it’s formed the basis of the government of the United States. It has an aura of timelessness about it, as if it miraculously appeared as a gift from on high.

Yet the Constitution was written by mere mortals, sweltering in a Philadelphia summer. Many of them acknowledged that what they’d created was imperfect, but it was the best they could hope for. SIGNING THEIR RIGHTS AWAY gives contemporary readers some insight into the men who argued and compromised in 1787 and created the Constitution.

The book starts with a brief introduction that recaps the circumstances surrounding the Constitutional Convention and provides the backdrop for the rest of the book: a series of short portraits of the 39 men who signed the Constitution. Grouped by state, these brief (3-4 page) bios are informative and occasionally cheeky–more than a few signers were touched by scandal at one point or another.

It’s a challenge to find as much to say about Richard Dobbs Spaight as Benjamin Franklin, but the authors do a fine job of making each signer interesting. It’s not a narrative history of the Constitutional Convention, but SIGNING THEIR RIGHTS AWAY gives the reader, along the way, plenty of interesting details about the process to pique the reader’s interest and hopefully inspire more reading about this crucial point in American history.

All in all, SIGNING THEIR RIGHTS AWAY is a quick and thought-provoking read. It might not be the best cover-to-cover reading experience since it lacks a driving narrative, but its structure makes it ideal for reading in short bursts or as a handy reference.

Audrey McClelland and Colleen Padilla. The Digital Mom Handbook: How to Blog, Vlog, Tweet, and Facebook Your Way to a dream Career at Home. New York: Harper Business, 2011. 256 pages.

I’m not a mom, but the idea of mommyblogging intrigues me. It seems like most infant and toddler commerce is sold primarily to women, assuming that fathers will have a negligible role in decision-making when it comes to buying products for their young kids. In addition, it’s indisputable that, when one parent stays home to take care of the kids, it’s almost always the mother who does so. Many of these women are educated, engaged, and taking a step back from careers, so they are ideally situated to appraise, comment on, and spread the word about products geared towards little kids.

Mommyblogging has, for many women, become a cottage industry. This makes sense, since you can do it from home, and you’re already immersed in mommydom, so it’s not like getting another B.A. in Sanskrit Literature at night. The authors of The Digital Mom Handbook both transitioned from careers to moms and, ultimately, mommybloggers, and in the book they offer a guide to how to, as the title says, secure a dream career at home.

The book provides both a window into the mommyblogosphere and offers a guide to how to get there. They stress that the first step is finding one’s passion, which involves a fair amount of soul-searching and contemplation. There are a lot of varieties of mommyblog–one could focus on product reviews, or cooking, or simply talking about the joys of wiping away spitup while hosting a play date. From there, the book gives specific guidance on how to actually get launched into the mommyblogosphere, then offers tips on marketing, networking, and balancing blogging with being a mom.

The authors also acknowledge that blogging itself is just one piece of they puzzle; they stress the role of Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook and talk extensively about the role of Twitter parties, for example, in providing networking opportunities.

In addition to the satisfaction one gets from sharing one’s viewpoint on Lansinoh nursing pads or “The Wonder Pets Save the Skunk,” mommybloggers can make some money through ads on their blogs and also can be invited to try new products. Prominent mommybloggers can even be hired as product spokesmoms and get be invited to exclusive events. So what starts as a hobby can, indeed, become a career.

If you’re interested in getting a start in mommyblogging, this is a good book to check out.

Clayton M. Christensen and Henry Eyring. The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011. 496 pages.

In this book, aimed chiefly at university professors and administrators but also trustees, regents, and potential students, the authors attempt to identify just what’s got higher education costing more and delivering less and to suggest what can be done to fix it. They believe that looking at a university’s “institutional DNA” and changing whatever doesn’t work is the first step towards finding a solution.

That’s easier said than done, of course, and like most management/self-help books, The Innovative University is long on generalities but short on specifics. That’s to be expected, because each institution has its own unique set of circumstances that defy easy classification; if there was a specific one-size-fits-all solution that one could put in a book that could claim to set every American university aright, it would almost certainly be unworkable.

Much of the book is taken up by dual institutional histories of Harvard University and Ricks College/BYU-Idaho, two decidedly dissimilar schools whose sole commonality seems to be that each currently employs one of the authors. I accept that there are lessons to be drawn from each school’s past, but I’ve got to wonder if there are better things to be learned by looking at, say, Princeton and Santa Monica College or Yale and Henderson State College. At times the authors work in other schools as well, but none are treated with the same detail as Harvard and BYU-Idaho, which begs the question of whether the authors just went after low-hanging fruit as opposed to conducting a truly comprehensive survey of institutional histories.

The ultimate lesson of the book–that not every college should strive to be Harvard, and that Carnegie-climbing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be–is one worth hearing, as is the authors’ charge that traditional schools need to pay closer attention to what they deliver for their price to fend off competition from for-profit colleges. And the histories of both Harvard and BYU-Idaho are of genuine interest. There is also merit to their idea that some schools may want to refocus on teaching as opposed to research as well, but I’d be more interested in looking into the ultimate impact that conversion would have on both higher education and innovation in American schools. I’m certain there must be a few unintended consequences, some positive, some negative, lurking there, and I wish the authors had explored those possibilities.

All in all, it’s an interesting book and one that should inspire educators to think about just what they’re doing, but I’m not totally sold on it as a blueprint for change.

Michael Levy. Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching, and Eating with China’s Other Billion. New York: Henry Holt Company, 2011. 256 pages.

China’s burgeoning middle class and growing economic power is all over the news these days. But there’s more–about a billion people more–to the large Asian country than Beijing and Shanghai. IN KOSHER CHINESE, Michael Levy shares insights into “China’s other billion” gleaned during a two-year stint as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English at Guizhou University, an undistinguished university in a glamourless city smack dab in the middle of the Chinese version of the Great Flyover.

Levy’s a fun and insightful narrator. He does a great job of depicting the culture shock of arriving in China; a kindly grey-haired woman sitting next to him on his Beijing-Chengdu flight offers him one of her spicy chicken feet. He declines, she belches politely, and later “smiled and spit out a chicken talon.” That’s not exactly the kind of fast food you’ll see riding SEPTA. He walks the fine line between devolving into out-and-out farce when describing some of his students’ initial difficulty with English and the Chinese twists on American popular culture and being overly serious. It helps that the book’s chock full of pop culture references that give the American reader something familiar as an occasional touchstone.

In a part of China where any Westerner is a curiosity, Levy is a double attraction; initially unsure how his hosts will react to his being Jewish, he finds it actually puts him in high regard, since both Karl Marx and Albert Einstein, as his hosts continually remind him, are Jewish. He even takes part in a student club that meets Friday nights to explore Jewish cuisine and culture.

Levy tackles many important subjects in this memoir, including US/China relations, the fish-out-of-water experience of a Peace Corps Volunteer, and life in central China, but to me the center of the book was China’s underlying identity crisis. As several of his students point out, China’s in a precarious predicament: cut loose from the “iron rice bowl” of Maoism that stifled opportunity (to put it mildly) but provided security, and unmoored in a society that now values accumulation but isn’t quite laissez faire or politically free. Though China’s more prosperous than it was, many of his students feel a great lack of something–direction, meaning–in their lives.

In KOSHER CHINESE, Levy does a good job of sharing his experiences teaching and living in central China. It’s a book that’s sure to teach all readers something. I’d particularly recommend it for those who might be interested in serving in the Peace Corps or doing a similar stint themselves, and those curious about China, even from just a business perspective.

Tom Hopkins. Selling for Dummies: Third Edition. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2011. 362 pages.

If you’re in sales, you’re probably always looking for that extra edge. If you’re not, you’d probably like to know a little more about how salespeople get you to sign. In either case, Tom Hopkins’ SELLING FOR DUMMIES is a good read.

It’s a basic primer on how to sell, and how to improve your selling technique. Hopkins walks the reader through the seven-step selling cycle with pointers on how to improve each step of the way. He intersperses his instruction with stories of his own sales background, which makes for both good diversions and real-life application of his principles.

As a “For Dummies” book, the emphasis is on basic, easy-to-understand instruction rather than deep discussion. And the reader will have to do most of the work of connecting Hopkins’ advice, which is necessarily general enough to cover a broad range of sales-related fields, to his/her own work.

In general, the pointers Hopkins offers seems to be good. Much of what he says will likely not be news to experienced sellers, but one of the values of basic instruction books like this is to confirm what you already knew and give you a base for adding to it. Similarly, much of it is stuff that the average salesperson could probably figure out for themselves, given enough time. With this book, however, you’ll save a lot of time, which is probably the point.

If approached with the mindset that this is a book that will help you put in the right effort to refine your selling skills, rather than the expectation that this book will give you shortcuts to tripling your sales with no additional effort, SELLING FOR DUMMIES has a lot of value. If you are in sales, it probably won’t be the last instructional or motivational book you read, but it makes for a good start. And if you’re a consumer, it’s a nice peek into the world of salespeople.

Tali Sharot: The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain. New York, Pantheon, 2011. 272 pages.

People always seem to expect the best, despite the odds. As Tali Sharot discusses in THE OPTIMISM BIAS, most people have unrealistically positive expectations of their future. She does a great job of summing up much of the current neuroscientific research–including her own work–on the subject of optimism, and has a life-affirming conclusion: even though we might be irrationally positive, for the most part that’s a good thing, as optimists tend to face adversity better than pessimists.

While there is a great deal of good material in the book, there is also a lot of what feels like padding. In the first chapter, there’s several pages of “intro to perception” material–including a “thatcherized” photo of a young girl that had me desperately wishing for some brain bleach–that feels like could have been summed up much more quickly.

In general, the feeling I got was that there was enough here for a great article or two, but not quite enough to justify its inflation to book length.

In addition, some of the references to current events don’t seem particularly apt. Early on, Sharot enthuses that some believe optimism might be a curiously American invention, “a by-product of Barack Obama’s imagination.” Huh? Before 2008 no one in America was optimistic? She hinges an entire chapter on “when private optimism meets public despair” on just how incredibly awesome the president is; his election apparently set an unprecedented wave of optimism sweeping over the nation despite dire economic circumstances. It gets scary when she compares listening to an Obama speech to holding a baby, patting a dog, or having sex, telling us that hearing him speak triggers a feeling called “elevation” that erases cynicism and generates hope. And the Coca Cola Corporation would like to teach the world to sing, I’m sure. Sharot doesn’t mention “I’m going to lead you to a better future, just trust me” is a theme presidents from Reagan to FDR have sounded before; its something every politician who wants to get elected is going to tell you, no matter where they stand on the political spectrum. It seems willfully naive to believe that any politician, no matter how well-packaged, is that much different from the thousands of others who have come before. Also, her use of Lance Armstrong as a case study in the power of optimism seems a bit off, in light of the doping allegations that continue to surround him. For someone who has a psychology background, Sharot seems to take an awful lot at face value.

There are some really interesting implications of Sharot’s thesis–that the human brain is conditioned to take an irrationally rosy view of the future–for the study of gambling. Mercantile or commercial casino games are, almost without exception, negative expectation games where the player is sure, over time, to lose to the house. Yet they have not lost their appeal. Could this be because most people assume that, like getting cancer or losing one’s job, sevening out is something that will happen to other people, but not to them? Intuitively, that seems like a reasonable assumption. I’d really like to see neuroscientists like Sharot look more deeply into how gambling fits in to the optimism equation.

In short, THE OPTIMISM BIAS has some genuinely thought-provoking material and offers a nice window into the author’s interesting work, but disappoints as a book. Still, I’m hopeful that future work from Sharot will be a little more on-point and help the general public better understand her work into the mechanisms of hope.

Jen A. Miller. The Jersey Shore: Atlantic City to Cape May. Second Edition. Woodstock, Vermont: The Countryman Press, 2011. 207 pages.

The phrase “Jersey Shore” is heard a lot these days, but mostly for the wrong reasons–shorthand for the kind of low-class self-indulgent behavior that will land you a gig on an MTV reality show or hosting a Vegas nightclub. With this book, Jen A. Miller reminds us that the real Jersey Shore is actually a pretty fun section of the Atlantic shoreline for vacations for people of all ages.

The book’s amply illustrated in color, with both historical and present-day photographs. The frontispiece is a great shot of the Trump Taj Mahal and Steel Pier just after dawn. There are also plenty of maps, something that’s helpful even in the age of GPS–it’s nice to be able to get your bearings while reading about the sights.

THE JERSEY SHORE is organized into six chapters, covering Atlantic City and Brigantine/Downbeach; Ocean City, also including Somers Point; Sea Isle City, with Strathmere; Avalon and Stone Harbor; The Wildwoods; and Cape May. Each has plenty of information about the highlights in lodging, dining, shopping, nightlife, and beach-going.

It’s obvious that Miller has a deep love for the area she’s guiding the reader through: at several points in the book, she shares her own Jersey shore stories, going back to her childhood, which helps the reader understand Miller’s depth of knowledge and appreciate where she’s coming from. This isn’t someone who got handed an assignment, did some Google Fu, and tuned in a manuscript; the Jersey Shore has been a big part of Miller’s life for years. That makes for a friendly, conversational guidebook that will point readers to many of the area’s gems.

The best part about this guide is that it makes the South Jersey Shore, which is a bit un-user-friendly, accessible to anyone. Because it doesn’t have the same level of visitation as Vegas, there are far fewer places to get good information about the area’s amenities for tourists. THE JERSEY SHORE provides plenty of advice on where to stay–even how to best contact realtors for towns where house rentals make more sense than motels or hotels–and every other aspect of a vacation down the shore. There are even very helpful itineraries for each city, and plenty of options for people in every age range.

If you want to spend some time down the shore this summer and don’t have decades of family tradition and insider knowledge to draw on, THE JERSEY SHORE will make you feel like an old-timer.

Earl Swift. The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighway. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. 384 pages.

Even if you don’t use it every day, the interstate highway system affects your life every day. Odds are the food that you eat traveled at least part-way on the national super-roads, as did most of the consumer goods you use. So highways are an important part of American life. But most of us have only the haziest ideas of their origins. Based on what we’ve read at strategic rest stops, we might know that Eisenhower had something to do with it, but that’s about it.

In THE BIG ROADS, Earl Swift addresses that knowledge gap. He’s written a very readable but still detailed history of America’s highway system. Starting in the 1890s with Carl Graham Fisher, a once-household name who today is almost completely obscure, Swift traces the development of private, state, and federal road-building initiatives that culminated in the construction of the interstate highway system, starting in the 1950s.

In place of Eisenhower (who Swift almost goes out of his way to downplay at times), Swift identifies a triad of engineers as the real father of the American interstate: Thomas “The Chief” MacDonald, Herbert Sinclair Fairbank, and Frank Turner. Together, they shepherded the system that would become the interstates through several administrations.

In addition to charting the careers of those who built the interstates, Swift also discusses those who opposed the big roads. He’s strongest in this regard when talking about men like Joe Wiles, who rightfully objected to an interstate spur that was planned to carve through the heart of his neighborhood, and weakest when recalling Lewis Mumford, whose criticisms seem more aesthetic than practical. The author himself admits that a uniform highway system is actually safer and quicker than the alternative, and having the same assortment of fast food choices at each rest stop is, in my own opinion, a small price to pay for having the ability to easily drive coast to coast in three days.

This is a very good book, particularly for anyone who’s driven the interstates and been curious about just where they came from.