Nonfiction Smackdown
2005 is destined to be a lean year for nonfiction, but the early contenders for book of the year in that segment are starting to sort themselves out. At the moment, these are the front-runners:
You've read in these pages of my admiration for Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. He's a slight, soft-spoken man with a calm visage and the build of a runner. As a journalist for The New Yorker, he has become a facile observer of cultural phenomenon and is the author of the best-selling The Tipping Point.
His second book extends his reach into the consciousness and wallets of corporate America. Gladwell is accomplished at distillation, the ability to coin a memorable and descriptive phrase to cement an idea or concept in the zeitgeist.
This book will popularize the phrase "thin slicing," a process of decision making that contends that choices made on a limited set of data are often just as valid as those made after exhaustive gathering. Without preaching it, he tells example by example how instinct can and does guide our decisions, no matter how analytical and reasoned we think ourselves to be.
January also brought us the followup to Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed chronicles the decisions made by societies throughout history that doomed them. His survey informs us of the fundamental choices made by peoples from prehistoric Polynesian cultures, formerly flourishing American civilizations like the Anasazi and Maya, medieval cultures, and up to the modern day.
Keep an eye out for Richard Florida's followup to The Rise of the Creative Class, which has gained adherents elsewhere in our Southern Indiana blogosphere. And February brings us The Flight of the Creative Class, which adds new research to Florida's revolutionary thinking about how to build a survivable future.
In a post down below is a patron review of Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, a history of a seminal moment in Western history that's most appropriate during Black History Month. It is sure to join the non-fiction favorites list.
In case you forgot, we are a for-profit operation here at the store. So if you have an interest in any of these, drop us a line and we'll put your name on one. If you've read one of them, we'd love to share your paragraph-or-more review with our readers.
We invite you to add your own nonfiction picks to this thread, too. Let's keep the community going.
You've read in these pages of my admiration for Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. He's a slight, soft-spoken man with a calm visage and the build of a runner. As a journalist for The New Yorker, he has become a facile observer of cultural phenomenon and is the author of the best-selling The Tipping Point.
His second book extends his reach into the consciousness and wallets of corporate America. Gladwell is accomplished at distillation, the ability to coin a memorable and descriptive phrase to cement an idea or concept in the zeitgeist.
This book will popularize the phrase "thin slicing," a process of decision making that contends that choices made on a limited set of data are often just as valid as those made after exhaustive gathering. Without preaching it, he tells example by example how instinct can and does guide our decisions, no matter how analytical and reasoned we think ourselves to be.
January also brought us the followup to Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed chronicles the decisions made by societies throughout history that doomed them. His survey informs us of the fundamental choices made by peoples from prehistoric Polynesian cultures, formerly flourishing American civilizations like the Anasazi and Maya, medieval cultures, and up to the modern day.
Keep an eye out for Richard Florida's followup to The Rise of the Creative Class, which has gained adherents elsewhere in our Southern Indiana blogosphere. And February brings us The Flight of the Creative Class, which adds new research to Florida's revolutionary thinking about how to build a survivable future.
In a post down below is a patron review of Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, a history of a seminal moment in Western history that's most appropriate during Black History Month. It is sure to join the non-fiction favorites list.
In case you forgot, we are a for-profit operation here at the store. So if you have an interest in any of these, drop us a line and we'll put your name on one. If you've read one of them, we'd love to share your paragraph-or-more review with our readers.
We invite you to add your own nonfiction picks to this thread, too. Let's keep the community going.
posted by All4Word at 12:31 PM
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