my mind on books

So Much, So Fast, So Little Time: Coming to Terms with Rapid Change and Its Consequences by Michael St Clair (Praeger, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

Twenty-first-century technology opens up fabulous opportunities, but also changes how we relate to each other and warps our sense of time, reality, duty, and privacy. Technologies and time-saving devices make everything happen faster, with the result that we feel busier than ever before. “Free time” seems in danger of extinction. So Much, So Fast, So Little Time: Coming to Terms with Rapid Change and Its Consequences provides fascinating insights about how our changing world is changing our families and our personal relationships; how we travel, behave as consumers, and communicate; and how we entertain ourselves and deal with our anxieties.

Written in a popular, accessible style, this book describes seven areas of significant societal change, providing concrete examples and engaging stories to illustrate how drastically our right-now mindset has shifted our perception and experience of the world. In the last chapter, the author makes some practical suggestions on how to take thoughtful action to respond to the onslaught of inevitable change.

See also: Google Books preview

Noted sociologist Robert N. Bellah’s new book is Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Belknap Press of Harvard, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk – 9 Sep)

Book description from the publisher:

Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution.

How did our early ancestors transcend the quotidian demands of everyday existence to embrace an alternative reality that called into question the very meaning of their daily struggle? Robert Bellah, one of the leading sociologists of our time, identifies a range of cultural capacities, such as communal dancing, storytelling, and theorizing, whose emergence made this religious development possible. Deploying the latest findings in biology, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, he traces the expansion of these cultural capacities from the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (roughly, the first millennium BCE), when individuals and groups in the Old World challenged the norms and beliefs of class societies ruled by kings and aristocracies. These religious prophets and renouncers never succeeded in founding their alternative utopias, but they left a heritage of criticism that would not be quenched.?Show More

Bellah’s treatment of the four great civilizations of the Axial Age—in ancient Israel, Greece, China, and India—shows all existing religions, both prophetic and mystic, to be rooted in the evolutionary story he tells. Religion in Human Evolution answers the call for a critical history of religion grounded in the full range of human constraints and possibilities.

See also: Author website

Google Books preview:

Who Am I?: And If So, How Many? by Richard David Precht, tr. by Shelley Frisch (Spiegel & Grau, 2011)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

TRANSLATED INTO 23 LANGUAGES, WITH MORE THAN ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD

What is truth? What is love? Does life have meaning? Bestselling author Richard David Precht, “the Mick Jagger of the nonfiction book” (Tagesanzeiger Zürich), has traveled the globe searching for answers—and his odyssey has become one of the most talked-about books around the world. Combining classic philosophy and cutting-edge neuroscience, Precht guides readers through the thickest jungles of academic discourse with the greatest of ease, taking on subjects as challenging and divisive as abortion, cloning, the eating of animals, euthanasia, the ethics of reproductive science, and the very future of humanity.

Who knows? By the end of this wildly entertaining journey, you just might be able to answer, Who Am I?

Jokes and the Linguistic Mind by Debra Aarons (Routledge, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk – 30 Sep)

Book description from the publisher:

Through the lens of cognitive science, Jokes and the Linguistic Mind investigates jokes that play on some aspect of the structure and function of language. In so doing, Debra Aarons shows that these “linguistic jokes” can evoke our tacit knowledge of the language we use. Analyzing hilarious examples from movies, plays and books, Jokes and the Linguistic Mind demonstrates that tacit linguistic knowledge must become conscious for linguistic jokes to be understood. The book examines jokes that exploit pragmatic, semantic, morphological, phonological and semantic features of language, as well as jokes that use more than one language and jokes that are about language itself. Additionally, the text explores the relationship between cryptic crossword clues and linguistic jokes in order to demonstrate the difference between tacit knowledge of language and rules of language use that are articulated for a particular purpose. With its use of jokes as data and its highly accessible explanations of complex linguistic concepts, this book is an engaging supplementary text for introductory courses in linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive science. It will also be of interest to scholars in translation studies, applied linguistics and philosophy of language.

Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change by Timothy D. Wilson (Little, Brown, 2011)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk – 1 Sep)

Book description from the publisher:

What if there were a magic pill that could make you happier, turn you into a better parent, solve a number of your teenager’s behavior problems, reduce racial prejudice, and close the achievement gap in education? Well, there is no such magic pill-but there is a new scientifically based approach called story editing that can accomplish all of this. It works by redirecting the stories we tell about ourselves and the world around us, with subtle prompts, in ways that lead to lasting change. In Redirect, world-renowned psychologist Timothy Wilson shows how story-editing works and how you can use it in your everyday life.

The other surprising news is that many existing approaches-from the multi-billion dollar self-help industry to programs that discourage drug use and drinking-don’t work at all. In fact, some even have the opposite effect. Most programs are not adequately tested, many do not work, and some even do harm. For example, there are programs that have inadvertently made people unhappy, raised the crime rate, increased teen pregnancy, and even hastened people’s deaths-in part by failing to redirect people’s stories in healthy ways.

In short, Wilson shows us what works, what doesn’t, and why. Fascinating, groundbreaking, and practical, Redirect demonstrates the remarkable power small changes can have on the ways we see ourselves and the world around us, and how we can use this in our everyday lives. In the words of David G. Myers, “With wit and wisdom, Wilson shows us how to spare ourselves worthless (or worse) interventions, think smarter, and live well.”

See also: Author’s webpage, blog, book on Facebook

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