The Case against Education
Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
By Bryan Caplan
Review by Peter Murphy on Tue, Dec 24th 2019. |  | About 75% of Americans favor more spending on education; about 5% favor less. In this thorough, hard-hitting book, Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University, makes the case that if we care about the social good, we should try to grow the 5%. The reason is simple: there is now a wide variety of evidence that the American education system fails to substantially build human capital.
For many readers, the claim that our education system fails in this way, and Caplan's evidence for it, will stand out the most on first read. It is a subsidiary claim though in the book'
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The Arc of Love
How Our Romantic Lives Change over Time
By Aaron Ben-Ze ev
Review by Michael Maidan on Tue, Dec 24th 2019. | Professor Ben Ze'ev, emeritus professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa in Israel, works in the interface between Philosophy and Psychology, and for the last twenty years has published several studies on emotions in general and love in particular. The Arc of Love studies love and romantic relationships from the point of view of time. Indeed, time in two dimensions. Time as an internal dimension in a relationship between two individuals, as well as the historical time in which –at least in our individualistic Western societies– our relationships are immersed.&nb
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The Limits of the Self
Immunology and Biological Identity
By Thomas Pradeu
Review by Uziel Awret on Tue, Dec 10th 2019. |  | Thomas Pradeu's The Limits of the Self: Immunology and Biological Identity aims to reset the traditional boundaries of the organism and biological individuality. Pradeu, an accomplished researcher, brings to bare his knowledge of evolutionary and cancer biology, microbiology, philosophy of biology and especially immunology to propose a novel theory of biological individuality motivated by the rejection of the traditional self-nonself distinction in immunology which fails, among other things, to account for the ubiquity of autoreactivity, continuous self-monitoring and symbiotic relations with
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Psychology of Family Law
By Eve M. Brank
Review by Maura Pilotti, Ph.D. on Tue, Nov 12th 2019. | The psychology of family law, written by Eve M. Brank, is an informative read for those who are interested in understanding the often obscure relationship between legal codes and the scientific facts, principles, and logical considerations upon which they rely. Under the category "facts", the author offers a thoughtful and thorough examination of the evidence that has been used to either justify existing codes or to make alterations after enactment. In her deliberate attempt to clarify the nature of existing codes, she considers not only contributing sources, but also neglected or discounted s
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Risk and Reasoning in Clinical Diagnosis
By Cym Anthony Ryle
Review by Douglas W. Heinrichs M.D. on Tue, Nov 12th 2019. |  | Dr. Ryle, a practicing primary care physician, has written a book directed at other practicing physicians and the general public. His goal is to explicate the process of diagnostic reasoning in medicine, particularly in primary care settings, in order to encourage clinicians to reflect on that process and reduce errors and biases as well as to help patients understand the inevitable uncertainties in the diagnostic process. He starts by stressing the central role of accurate diagnosis in effective medical care. He argues that the basic principles of effective diagnostic reasoning are an applica
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Zaitoun
Recipes from the Palestinian Kitchen
By Yasmin Khan
Review by Christian Perring on Tue, Nov 5th 2019. | The cover of Zaitoun is beautiful and it will make you want to look inside. It turns out that the dishes that British author Yasmin Khan describes are also photographed with great skill bringing out the vibrant colors, and there are also location shots showing places and people. It is a lovely book and would make a great gift.
The contents are divided up into the mazzeh, salads, soups, main courses and desserts. There are geographical associations with each: Haifa, Akka, Jerusalem, Nablus, Jenin, Gaza, Bethlehem, Nazareth and Galilee. Khan writes about Palestinian culture
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Our Symphony with Animals
On Health, Empathy, and Our Shared Destinies
By Aysha Akhtar
Review by Michael Sakuma on Tue, Oct 8th 2019. |  | I have a, mixed, love-hate relationship with western medicine. In the span of 100 years it has significantly extended our lifespan and changed the things that most often kill us from things in the environment (malaria and pneumonia), to ourselves (i.e. excessive French fries and smoking). Medicine, built on the cold-mechanistic shoulders of science, views us, in large degree as machines. We can replace, tighten and modify most all of our parts, in the same way that we can soup up a muscle car or renovate an old Chevy. Doctors all too often lack bedside manner, seemingly
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Democracy in Chains
The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
By Nancy MacLean
Review by John Mullen on Tue, Oct 8th 2019. | Gerrymandering to restrict African American votes. Laws requiring voters to show picture Identification. Closing state picture identification offices in largely African American counties. Videoing at polling booths. Closing polling places in poor counties. Distributing false information about the locations of polling places. Stripping voter registrations based upon minor differences in signatures separated by many years. Posing as polling workers then falsely offering to deliver absentee ballots.
Prior to reading Nancy MacLean's book I had little context in which to understand these wel
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