Teo Degas' Books & Decks

Descender is a galactic quest to find the child humanoid robot Tim-21, first; to decode his programming, second;  to use that coding to battle The Harvesters, a race of giant robots with the same coding as Tim, which attacked the planet where the United Galactic Council (UGC) has its see and threaten the whole confederation, third. This is also the quest of Tim-21 to find his former human brother. His quest is the only one that focuses on humanity, love and connecting, not on destruction, battling and use of any means to get what you want.

The main characters in this volume are: the uber-cool mega-cute android child Tim-21, his smiley-talker robot pet Bandit, Doctor Quon (the scruffy shave-needed father of modern cybernetics), Captain Telsa (a grumpy tight-panted carrot-headed healed well-connected young "commandress"), the rough-looking dieting-needed loyal pilot, and the good-hearted simpleton-conscious robot Driller the Killer.

Dustin Nguyen's artwork is stunning, really mesmerising regarding composition, framing, use of colour for narrative purposes, light and shadow work, watercolour and pencil technique, attention to the detail, and mood. His portraits are amazing. Besides, his images are very cinematic and stylish, and, let me tell you, some of the kido's clothing is just fabulous -- The work of the amazing painter he is. Having said this, I was a bit disappointed because some of the landscapes and the imagery of the characters reminded me of others already seen in  science-fiction movies. Nguyen talent as painter is undeniable, so I think the script might have limited him.  
   

Jeff Lemire is the author of one of my fav graphic novels but he is not drawing anything here, he is just the writer. The Universe of Descender is not especially original, with plenty of narrative elements and characters pastiched and amalgamated from well-known science-fiction TV shows and movies: Red Sand+Mass Effect, AI, Star Wars, Prometheus, I, Robot, Terminator, and Asimov's three laws. The script does not reinvent science fiction for sure, but it has cohesion, reads well and is entertaining enough. The story starts to get really interesting at the end of the first volume, when things that seemed lineal are not that lineal after all. Most of the characters, even the "good ones" are not likeable, they seem full of suppressed anger, full of secrets, untrustworthy. In that regard, they serve as a podium to enhance the character of Tim-21, who is innocent and likeable, more human than real humans in his approach to humanity. He dreams a-la-Asimov, not of electric sheep, but of electric rebellious robots inciting him to rebel against humans. I, robot. Tim dreams are painted in pink-ish tones, whatever that might mean :P


One of the things I loved in the book is the typography (funny because Descender is a word related to the world of typography), as different sort of fonts are used depending on who or what is speaking: humans, robots, computer system, inter-phone, plus the ambience and noise sounds. I thought the use of typography enhances the reading and made it clearer and more engaging.
I found two major spelling mistakes in the book. They don't make any favour to the authors, nor to the editor if there was any. Can you spot them?
> "Acadamy "instead of Academy.
> "You're father?" instead of "Your father?"

These could be easily fixed in the digital edition.

Although I greatly enjoyed the reading and will probably purchase the next volume, the book does not thrill me, probably because despite the awesome artwork and entertaining story, the book, overall, feels a bit déjà-vue. Let's hope that the main surprises pop up in the coming chapters and volume.

I read this book it on Comixology and the digital copy is fantastic.It makes you appreciate all the details that I would need a magnifying glass to see on paper.

Stunning artwork, entertaining story, at a great price. 

Deep Dark Fears is an imaginary catalogue of human fears, worries and nightmares.

Deep Dark Fears is another Tumblr's web comic strip  turned into book. Krause started drawing his own fears and then readers began contributing theirs. So, what sort of fears can you find here? Adult's fears. Children's fears. Ghost fears. Doppelganger fears. Aliens fears. Death fears. Toilet fears. Cute fears. Gory fears. Religious fears. Church fears. If you have any sort of irrational worry or fear it might be here.

The book is interesting not only because of the irrationality and interest of the fears described per se, but also from a psychological point of view as it becomes a sort of visual catalogue of the "horrors" of the subconscious.

I love Krause's mastery at creating a story in four or six vignettes, his wonderful sense of colour and mood, his landscapes and chiaroscuro, his black and white and his watercolours. The colour and style change from one fear to another to suit the story.  The book is visually varied, aesthetically pleasing, and very entertaining. I love the winks to the reader in some of the pages, with tiny-winy characters and objects drawn at the bottom end of some pages.

Krause is good enough to acknowledge all the contributors of the dreams at the end of the book.I would rather have them mentioned at the end of each fear. On the other hand, many of the contributors are anonymous, so that is just my preference, and nothing really important.

I super loved the book, I wanted more. More fears. More varied. Why not more? Business? 

The book is In most lists of best graphic books of the 2015. I do love the book but I am not sure I would include it in one. Yet, you don't need to buy it. You need to go to Krause's Deep Dark Fears Tumblr of the same name. According to him, 50 of the fears are unpublished, and the others are favourite ones in tumblr. Well, there are many more unpublished stories in the web than published in the book. Put it that way. If you, like me, read graphic books on digital format, the website is way better than any Kindle format for reading comic strips. Having said that, the rendering of the images and the colouring looks way better in Kindle. 

This is one of those books that would be worth having in paper. And I would say that makes a perfect coffee table book for hypters and comic lovers.  

Beaton is a Canadian cartoonist, actually, a historian turned cartoonist that makes cartoons on historical episodes, historical people, old books and a range of other subjects. This book is a collection of comic strips on different subjects chosen from the strips she regularly publishes in her website Hark! A Vagrant.

Beaton is irreverent, witty and sarcastic. Beaton has an interest in history in general, in the 19th Century in particular, and in recreating old book covers to give them a modern twist.  Beaton uses deadpan humour. Beaton is able to see incongruence and present it an appealing ways. Beaton likes the "whats up dude" approach to stuff. Beaton is funny!

Some of her strips will make you laugh out loud. Others aren't laughable, but they are still a funny reading or just witty overall. I found many others not funny at all. Certainly, different strips will appeal to different people.

Her humour is somewhat elitist. I don't think a person without a good level of education and a good level of knowledge on history, literature, music or the 19th century will able to enjoy some of her strips. On the other hand, some of her deadpan sentences, some impossible dialogues, and irreverence make an entertaining reading overall

I especially like her recreation of old cover books, and the comics related to strong women, femme fatale and feminists. I found them hilarious.
There is a freshness and spontaneity about Beaton's comic strips both in her drawing style, conception and realisation that I love. It feels as if they had been thought and produced in a microsecond, but I am not sure that is the case. It doesn't really matter, they are still great.

I came across this book while browsing several lists of best graphic books of the year 2015, where it was consistently included.  I am not sure if I would include this collection of comic strips among the best graphic books of the year, but it is still a great collection of funny cartoons.

If you don't want to spend your money, just to to her site, as mentioned above, or to her tumblr site. I actually think her website is better to browse her work than any Kindle book.

This is a short silent allegorical graphic novel that touches on the subject of being different, feeling different, wanting to be different and not fitting within the group that is suppose the group you belong You were born with a gender but since your childhood felt that you are the opposite gender. You were born with a specific sexual orientation that is not "straight". You were born within a religious group that you struggle to fit in. You were born within a family of high-end professionals who wanted you to be like them, but you feel that you are a different sort of person. You were born in a family of lefties but you are very conservative. The examples could multiply to the infinite. Fox Bunny Funny depicts all of them masterly. In a way, this is a modern Aesop-sort-of fable, the lack of moral preaching is actually the moral of the story.

I love the cute drawing, which goes from the merely cute children cartoon style, to the not so childish childlike gory, to the tripy and almost psychedelic images at the end of the book. I love the overall humour of the book, and the imagination displayed in the conception of the world of rabbits, the world of foxes, and the mixed world. I found very inventive the shot guns that the foxes use, the church of the rabbits, the somewhat "depraved" and "subverted" mixed world at the end. There are many graphic elements that I considered inventive and humorous, which  put a smile in my face. 

The book is silent. However, the action and the expressiveness of the characters speak loudly. Being able to speak to everybody without words is just something difficult to achieve. On the other hand, there is much more to silent books than the specific explicit message drawn by the author. Silent stories allow the individualisation of the reading, to make the story just yours, to adapt it to what you want the story to be and what what the story tells you, specifically. They are Universal, but also less of a monolith.

I found that the transition from the childhood part story to the adult part was too abrupt. I would have loved some transitional elements and I think the book needed a few more pages at the end and also in between.The book is still good without them.

This is one of those books that can be read by pre-teens under supervision, as it tackles important issues about identity and fitting in Society in a very light and easy way, and it could give way to great discussions in the classroom or at home. The book might be disturbing for very small kids unless they are showing an important identity issue already.

A great graphic book.

Andy Hartzell is  an American interactive graphic designer and cartoonist.  

This was the first graphic books by Canadian renowned cartoonist Bryan Lee O'Malley, the author of the Scott Pilgrim series, who wrote it when he was 24 years of age. 

I have many expectations about this short novel. Firstly, the ratings are over the top on Amazon and Goodreads, and, secondly, I love Scott Pilgrim. Unfortunately, this books falls a bit short, even though there are glimpses of the best O'Malley.

Drawn in a lovely black and white with doll-ish characters, Lost at Sea tells the story of the unplanned road trip, and the musings of Raleigh, a gloomy girl who finds herself in the middle of nowhere in a car with a girl and two guys she barely knows. She is the daughter of divorced parents, not very talkative, and she doesn't feel much either. She thinks that she lost her soul somewhere, and that a cat took it. In fact she sees cats everywhere, even when she sleeps. 

The book is good at capturing how some teens transition into adulthood: how they talk, how they behave, which sort of worries and angst they have, how even the smallest thing is analysed microscopically in their head in search for meaning, to find a connection with the world out there, to fit, to belong. The romantic part also shows the infatuation teens go through, where everything feels so profound and deep, but that is never the case when one looks back. Fortunately for the reader, the book has a sense of humour, which makes the bunch of narrative and character clichés a bit more palatable.

We all have seen and/or read a bunch of coming-of-age movies, books and comics. For any new story to work, it has to go where others have not, to be genuine and authentic but also original and innovative.. Unfortunately, this is not the case of Lost at Sea. In fact, I felt that the novel ended when it had started to get interesting, and the vacuous pseudo-philosophical approach was forgotten and the unknown, the world of  wonder and the unreal appeared: the constant presence of cats, the photos found in the wall of the hotel, are wonderful exploratory narrative element that are just sketched and never developed. Thanks gosh, Scott Pilgrim came out to appease our hunger for something new in the world of teen comics, and came out with a gong. One has also to understand that this is the work of a very young artist, trying to find his voice, so in that regard, reading this book one comes to appreciate how a mediocre first novel can help an artist to clear his vision to produce something as good as Scott Pilgrim. 

I think this might be a very lovely book if you are 13-16 and you haven't read much literature. If you have, well, you might find it a bit irritating.  

I read the book in an electronic edition for Comixology. The rendering is fabulous and uses Comixology versatility at its best. A truly wonderful reading experience.  

This is a short but very intriguing wordless novel. I did not read the summary of what is supposed to be. I saw a few pages of the comic book and found them intriguing enough to buy it. 

I am glad that I didn't read anything because this is one of those books that has many possible readings. I 'read' the book several times and I came with two different stories that fit perfectly the imagery. It could be a criticism, but it is not. Anything that feeds my imagination in this way gets a clear wow from me.

 

The book has a glorious black and white in general, it is very minimalist and stylised, with and a clever use of the white space to create mood. The atmosphere is heavy and ominous, and there is tension in the air from the very cover of the book. All the characters are thin and edgy, not even the shining sun is friendly. Kane, the main character, is a also very intriguing character. He is a mix of modern Quixote, 18th-century Japanese farmer and folk monster. The ominous presence of the black sun, the sun-like aspect of the black eyes at times, makes both things indistinguishable at times, as if they were one and only, and even more intrigue. 

The 'official' story reminds me of the folk story around which the mystery of the Japanese manga series "Monster" revolves. You can see the animated tale in full, in English, here: The Nameless Monster.

I think Black Eyes would make a terrific short film.

Claire Connelly is a young British (?) freelance graphic artist, and this book is a self-edition. Well done. I really love it.  

In Phising for Phools George A. Akerlof --co-Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics--, and Robert J. Shiller --co-Winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics--, discuss the myriad ways in which Politics, the Economy (stock market, businesses, marketers, advertisers) actively use deception and manipulation with all of us, they phish for phools, us. The chilling part is that most of those people are not evil people, they are playing by the rules in an Free-Market Economy that  allows them to deceive and trick us for their benefit using the natural working of the economic system, first, and by exploiting humans' psychological cognitive biases and weaknesses, then. "The free-market system exploits our weaknesses automatically". They lead us to misinterpret reality and act on our misinterpretations, they exploit the conflict between what we need and what we crave, they exploit the volatility of our emotions, they present things in ways that are deceiving but trigger our automatic responses. Thus, we will buy things and services we don't need, at prices that are way over their real value, they will are sell products and services that aren't what they say they are.  Phishing is inevitable. We are all phools by nature. 

The book is structured in three parts. The first is a sort of framework on Behavioural Economics. The authors heavily and explicitly rely on Robert Cialdini's lists of basic biases and principles exploited by marketers and sellers, and everyone that want something from you:   

"we are phishable because we want to reciprocate gifts and favors; because we want to be nice to people we like; because we do not want to disobey authority; because we tend to follow others in deciding how to behave; because we want our decisions to be internally consistent; and because we are averse to taking losses. 23 Following Cialdini, each of these respective biases is paired with common salesman’s tricks." (p. 7). 

Here we also find defined Phishing Equilibrium (those economic forces that build manipulation and deception into the system unless we take courageous steps to fight it.), a concept that will be repeatedly mentioned throughout the book.

Part Two presents the microeconomics of phishing for phools in different contexts: advertising, marketing, politics, real estate, car sales, credit cards, the food and drug industries and the alcohol and tobacco industries. We are also presented with two specific examples from the financial markets, how bankruptcy is used for profit by some financial institutions or financial gurus (examining the case of Michael Milken and his junk bonds) and the crisis of the 1980s. This part ends with a brief exam of anti-phishing heroes, that is, people, private and public organisations and associations in the US that have fought for the right of consumers and for fairer and more ethical business practices. 

Part Three contains two chapters.The Conclusion, which focus on the Economical policies of the US Government and how the change on focus after Regan had dramatic repercussions in the Economy, favouring phishing-for-fools practices like  never before. In the Afterword we are presented with the authors' particular view on the nature of the Free Market, what is good and bad with iy; they explicitly state that this chapter is addressed to their critics, i.e. other economists who advocate the wonders of Free Market and ignore its dark side, or consider economic crisis (resulting from phishing for phool practices) as something exogenous and exceptional, when they are actually endogenous, at the very core of how the Marke works. In this chapter, Akerlof & Shiller also try to contribute to behavioural economics by adding another element to Cialdini's list. The core of their contribution is:

We are claiming that economists’ view of markets makes similar oversimplification. It may be standard economics to pretend that economic pathologies are only “externalities.” But the ability of free markets to engender phishing for phools of many different varieties is not an externality. Rather, it is inherent in the workings of competitive markets. And the same motives for profit that give us a healthy benign economy if everyone is fully rational are the same motives that give us the economic pathologies of phishing for phools. (p.166)

***

This an interesting book, that succeeds mainly at three levels. Firstly, the authors make a terrific job at letting us distinguish the forest from the trees and vice versa. The trees are the phishers (businesses, industries, financial groups, corporations, dealers and facilitators of services, networking sites that have Phishing at the core of their economical practices). Phishing is everywhere, and that is so because the trees are part of a forest, the Economy of Free Market, of how this  works, and of the Politics and economical practises associated with it, which make possible the growth of the forest. Secondly, they succeed at presenting the forest for what it is, a beautiful luscious green forest full of berries and edible wonders that is inhabited by wolves, witches and nasty beings, allow me the analogy. Thirdly, the authors succeed at having a social conscience and at seeing beyond their own noses, and analysing the Economy with a bit of objective distance and with a good deal of ethics, advocating economical practices that are more beneficial for both the Economy and Society in general, not just a parasitic symbiosis that benefits the Economy and its actors. Fourthly, they succeed at adding another layer of interpretation to the biases mentioned in Cialdini's list, that of the mental script or framework. People are phishable because of the stories they tell themselves, or place themselves in, are very important (subconsciously) in the decisions they make, something that leads phishers to create manipulative stories that resonate with the phools and are advantageous to the phishers.

On the other hand the authors also fail at several levels. They fail at times to go beyond what we already know in general. Let's be honest, haven't you found two grandpas in a park talking about how the Economy was different in the old days when there was more protection for workers, Medicare was better when, University free and there was some sort of better life balance Don't you know, upfront, that Politicians would lie and manipulate in pre-election campaigns to get your vote? that lobbies are happy lobbying everywhere and selling things that make you sick? that the commercial that says that  a moisturiser is going to get rid of your wrinkles or the lotion that will make your receding hairline come back are BS and  manicured lies? or that the free stuff given to you by some businesses is never ever free? Don't you tell yourself at times, damn it, this seller was so good that despite me knowing that he was selling half-truths I still fell for them? Secondly, the psychological part, the biases and heuristics, and all the psychology on which Behavioural Economics rely are barely sketched as the information used, although very well presented, is not theirs. They haven't done any psychological study on phishing for phools.
Overall the book is very well edited, with barely any typo, and a good rendering for Kindle. I just noticed a few thingies, resulting from the conversion, like words whose syllables have been automatically split.

The noting system, the bibliography and the index are properly done and a a pleasure to go through. I love and respect any author that bothers to provide these following academic criteria, and that provides notes that are rich in content. Indeed, some points are discussed at length in them. In these case, they are also a sort of  treasure chest for me and I got a good list of new readings to add to my reading list. The notes occupy  52 pages! The index is properly linked back in the Kindle edition, something that I expect from any Kindle edition but it is rarely there.

Akerlof & Shiller have produced a book that has an unified style, with occasional references to them as individuals. They use a very approachable language and the examples they present are really interesting, intriguing and to the point under discussion. and some of them very entertaining. I am not familiar or comfortable with the language of Economics and Finances, so I really enjoyed how the authors describe and analyse the World crisis in the1980s and the collapse of the markets in 2008, or on how crap-bonus work. Some of their explanatory analogies are great.

The book is well structured and organised, very didactic. "We are going to", appears frequently. At the beginning of the book they summarise the parts and chapters of the book and this repeated again at the beginning of Part 2, which is the bulkier one, and the conclusion also makes good points summarising the approach, findings and conclusion. Besides. each chapter ends with a very pertinent summary about the main points discussed in it. However, overall,  the style of the book is a bit conference-like, sophomores course like, and a bit simplistic at times, a bit complex at others.

I dislike it when authors use pretentious words that aren't relevant for what is being said. For example, in this book, I found six times "parenthetically" in expressions like "(We note, parenthetically, that perhaps....) Can you see the brackets, yes? So do I. Unless you are blind you don't need this sort of thing.  I also dislike when the contrary happens, when words that are not popular should be there and are replaced for something too simplistic, in this case "monkey-on-the-shoulder" instead of subconscious. To put it differently, if your are going to be snobbish, great, do that consistently all the way, and if you are going to be pro-general-reader do so consistently and all the way.

I have an problem with Academics using Wikipedia as a source of anything. We all love Wikipedia, don't we?, but we cannot ignore that, unless we are reading an entry about a celebrity (and even those) the Wikipedia can be misleading and heavily biased, and is not always properly curated. And hey, the Wiki is becoming the only source of knowledge, that is another way of phishing for phools... Wikipedia has the best phishers's crafted grabbing story ever. Besides, any professional editor will tell you that references to encyclopaedias and dictionaries are not recommended in an academic publication unless you are using very specialised terminology that is difficult to find in your usual Oxford dictionary or encyclopaedia or when the definition of word is vital a la Wittgenstein. Now, you can understand my surprise at finding 25+ references to the Wikipedia in the footnotes, when the information could have been obtained through other sources. If this wasn't enough, our Nobel couple use it to provide a contrast definition opposing theirs in the use of the expression... 'rip-off'. Yes, no joke. I'd rather go to the Urban Dictionary for definitions of modern terms, as they show that words aren't always used like a monolith or, I wanted to be  rigourous, I would go to any Oxford dictionary. Yet, do you need any dictionary or encyclopaedia to define 'rip-off'? And, if this wasn't enough, the definition the give of 'rip-off' is like buying "overpriced". Not only that, the same definition of what they mean by rip-off is repeated several times throughout the book as this was just a novelty.  I see in all this the hand of the undergraduates "assistants", not the work of two Nobel laureates.

Arkof & Shiller are gracious enough to enthusiastically acknowledge everybody, every single person!, who has contributed to the book. They are very honest about what they did personally and what their research assistants did. That is always to praise, especially with Academics, as too often this is not the case, sadly. They especially praise their three research assistants, three exceptional Yale undergraduates, who did the research for them, edited the book for them, and made suggestions: Victoria Buhler, Diana Li, and Jack Newsham. So, if they did the editing, why aren't they presented as editors of the book or co-authors? Undergraduates co-authors with Nobel prices, you must be joke, you might say. Yet, they are good enough to make some of the work for them. And the authors themselves say, :

 The ideas in this book are a collage of what we have learned, and what we have listened to, over the course of our lives as economists. (p. 77)

After seeing the bibliography, well, I understood why is so good and so large

 ***

Brilliant at times, mediocre at others, pretentious at others, thought-provoking overall, Phishing for Phools is a great reading that I don't think showcases properly the brilliant mind of the authors, but it is intriguing and entertaining enough.

Phishing for Phools reminds me of the brilliant animated clip below. I watched it about 3-4 years ago and is still one of my favourite animated shorts, i-Diots could be called i-phools as well.  

I have lived in different countries, and in areas within a given country, and I have always been the other, the alien, the non-native,  the foreign or the outsider. It has always shocked me to the core of my being that people would change their behaviour towards me, dramatically, depending on which country they think I come from, that they would treat me more or less or just as a different person for something that is not in me but in their eyes. 

 This is a short essay (not a book) on a subject dear to my heart: averse racism, cultural stereotyping, xenophobia, cultural imperialism, discrimination, and categorisation, the varieties of strong Prejudice we find (or at least I find) often in our daily life. This essay summarises well how Prejudice works, how to spot it and how to be aware of it in your own life, in other people, in the news, and, most importantly, in you. The essay uses well known studies and experiments about biases and heuristics to explain how Prejudice works and keeps alive, and provides ways of counterbalancing categorisation.

I like most of what Pollard has written, even though he has just written very little. He acknowledges that "the average person isn’t going to read a psychology textbook to learn these concepts, so I’m pleased to pack the ideas into a brief, concise book" (loc, 41-42) and that he is touching many subjects and is just scratching the surface. I always appreciate honesty and lack of BS.  

The essay is short and sweet, very well intentioned, and very didactic as it explains things in ways easy to apply to our daily lives, behaviour or what we hear or read in the news about "the others". Pollard uses simple analogies to explain things, leaving theories aside to present an essay on applied psychology that reads with gusto. I love works that remind the reader not to live on auto-pilot, not to relate to people as labels, and to see the beam in your eye instead of focusing on the speck in your neighbour's. That is always priceless and the path to high levels of consciousness. If you want a succinct, clear and useful first approach to the subject and you want to discover  your blind spot and see how you are prejudiced and a subtle racist, well, this essay will help you to do that easily.

If you are a Psychology student or just a connoisseur on the matter, this essay is not for you as it is simplistic, unoriginal, does not have a  proper academic referencing or even a recommended reading list, the bibliography mentioned is classic but outdated, and it reads more like a short seminar from University than anything else.

The most important message you get from this essay is this, 

By the time you finish reading, I sincerely hope you have a better understanding of people as a whole. Because at the end of the day, that’s what we all are. People. (loc. 66-67)

Now, who is the author James Pollard? No info in Amazon or Goodreads. Google the Ooragle knows it all. His Linkdlh. and  website show that Pollard is not a psychologist, he just has a basic three-year degree in Psychology & Business, and he is mostly a New Age money-making guru and financial advisor. This doesn't invalidate the contents of the book, just points to the fact that you have to go elsewhere to read something with more substance.  

Mind - 3 bucks for a 42-page essay that is not based on original research or own expertise is not really a bargain. But, I enjoyed it.

What a cool book

What is insight? How does it manifest? Which things favour insight? Which things prevent insight from happening? Which forms does insight takes? How can we increase insight in our private and work life? Klein does have the answers.

Klein departs from the analysis of the a classic work on insight, Graham Wallas's The Art of thought (1926), especially  the chapter "Stages of Control", which presents a four-stage model of insight: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. This model is still the most common explanation of how insight work. Klein acknowledges the good points that Wallas makes, but shows the deficiencies of this system  to provide an explanation to how many real cases of insight occur.

After doing his own research Klein proposes an alternative model, which allows researchers to explain all cases, major and minor, of insight. Klein calls it the Triple Path Model. In this model each pathway has its own means of altering the beliefs that anchor the way we understand things and restructure beliefs (that is, the story we use to understand events). Klein says that Wallas wasn’t wrong, he was addressing just one of the three paths.

Klein shows that there are five different strategies for gaining insights, although most insights are a combo of at least two: 1/connections, that is connecting the dots even when not all the dots are visible, which happens by being exposed to many different ideas. 2/ Coincidences, which are sparked by the question, what is going on here?. 3/ Curiosities, which comes for the realisation that there is something seriously wrong with the story we tell ourselves. That realisation can be achieved by having an open mind or just by having a critical sceptical mind to investigate paths that others have missed. 4/ Contradictions, which lead to paradigm shifts, and 5/ Creative desperation, which is the result of accidental unplanned events, of being in the right place at the right time. Point one four and five are the most common, while 56% of the cases were the 'aha!' type and 44% were gradual insights.

Klein digs in into his own research material and bibliography to try to understand the link among the five categories of connections. The second and third part of the book are devoted to an analysis of what interferes with insights and what promotes it. 

Among the elements that interfere with insight, beyond our daily moments of  stupidity fostered by  us being on autopilot, are 1/ flawed beliefs, 2/ lack of experience, 3/ a passive stance, and 4/ a concrete reasoning style, which is exacerbated by the constrictions that some software has in the work we do, the mere nature of the Internet, and organisational guidelines, procedures, filtering methods, and the zeal to reduce uncertainty and minimise errors with leads them to the  predictability trap and the perfection trap.
The ways unearthed by Klein to foster insights are 1/Critical thinking; 2/ opening up to contradictions and using other people's perspective and views; 3/ having encounters with different kinds of people, working in a variety of areas, peppering us with new ideas.; 4/ focusing on contradictions and 5/regarding organisations, it also involves not being so focused on the war on error, loosening the control filters, and increasing organisational willpower.

Klein makes a detailed and clear exposition of how he approached this research and is honest about the sources and method he uses. He uses a naturalist approach, that is, he uses examples from people acting in the real world under natural conditions, and not from people subject to artificial lab psychological tests. I am sure the Academia, the establishment, will hit back and question his approach, but I love when people who are part of the same Academia question it and come up with new approaches and theories. Klein is a Ph.D. scientist, a respected psychologist, who has been there, done what he is supposed to do and seen that it does not always work. When he criticises lab experiments in the field of Insight, he is not using generalisations or is not saying that lab research is not good, he is saying that lab research is leading nowhere in the field and that models developed in the early 20th century are not good enough to explain how insight occurs. His critique is elegant, tamed and conciliatory. I love that true researchers are always non dogmatic. They are the ones giving us breakthroughs in Science not the others.

The examples he uses for his study come from the real world: the military, astronomy, medicine, fire fighting, scientific discoveries, the stock market, corporate world, sports, and from Klein's own personal and family life, and they are truly illustrative, and very interesting for the lay reader.

Some brilliant quotes by Klein in this book
 >> "I don’t believe insights are the same as “aha,” any more than conception is the same as orgasm."

>> Systems such as Google determine what we don’t want to see and either filter it out completely or bury it so deep, perhaps on page 25 of the search results, that we probably won’t find it. The personalised searches we get from Google, Yahoo, and others gauge our preferences and then screen out the items we’re likely to find irrelevant. Pariser argues that searches also need to show us items that are challenging and even uncomfortable. They need to expose us to other points of view. (p. 147).
>> Our insights transform us in several ways. They change how we understand, act, see, feel, and desire.
>> Intuition is the use of patterns they’ve already learned, whereas insight is the discovery of new patterns (p. 27).
>> I don’t believe the purpose of science is to do “good” science. The purpose of science is to learn more about the world, including the world of insights. We don’t want to be sloppy about it. We want to use methods that yield results worth taking seriously. We shouldn’t, however, become so fixated on the methods that we lose sight of the object of our inquiry. We shouldn’t evolve a set of methods that don’t fully capture the phenomenon we want to understand. (p. 178)

The book has two main downsides. The first, is that Klein's considerations about his naturalistic approach are repetitive and redundant at times, split in two different parts of the book. A chapter on methodology would have sufficed and, honestly, I would have expected the editor to regroup Klein's considerations in whichever part was most convenient. Regarding content, many of the considerations that Klein makes regarding how to foster insight in the corporate world and organisations are a bit 'wouldn't be nice?', because although he solutions he proposes are great, they go against how the corporate world and organisations are structured and function internally. 

This is a book really easy to read, well structured, entertaining, and with substance, and some aha moments that make any reading always special.

Paul Auster is one of my favourite writers, and I have read a good deal of his books. This is the favourite of one of my friends so I got it from my public library basically because of his insistence I would love it. Yes, I did love it. I was  mesmerised, once again, by Auster's mastery.

Unlike many of Auster's books, this story is not contemporary or fresh, immediate or "abstract". However, the book shares with other books the quality of the writing, the importance of Magic Realism (Auster is a master at creating a distinctively American magic realism), his use of the English language, and the brilliant way in which he builds his characters and stories to make them utterly realistic and believable no matter how outrageous the premises are.

Mr Vertigo is a delightful entertaining reading, full of adventure, fun and surrealism. It is also a lesson on how to write an a-priory fantastic story in a believable way, and on how to write a historical novel without writing one, yet capturing the events of a decade with freshness, verisimilitude, accuracy and respect.

Have you ever dreamt of levitating? Do you recall the feeling in the dream? I do, and I felt that part of those sensations, feelings and experiences were captured in the levitation phase of the book. The childhood and circus years are infused, to me, in an end-of-the-19th century feeling, perhaps because there is a transitional mood from an old era to a new one in these pages. This part is, indeed, my favourite. I felt that Walter's adult years, despite being greatly narrated, didn't have that enthralling magic feeling that the first part of the book had; in that regard, the mood of the book is uneven. 

Walter's life is full of wonder and you want be part of it. Levitate!