Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization by Spencer Wells is about the effects of civilization.  It wasn’t too heavy in the science.  The writing was very conversational and the topics were quite varied.  Although some of the reviewers didn’t like that, I did.   By not digging too much into the details, the author was able to express his own theories and opinions.

Most people that pay attention – even a little bit – to evolutionary nutrition know about how societies are getting fatter and less healthy.  Pandora’s Seed also goes into the mental health aspect.  As bad as things are physically, things are equally bad from a mental health aspect.

Pandora’s Seed is an excellent book that is also a quick read.  This is the type of writing I like in pop science.  I plan to read the author’s other book called The Journey of Man.

Primal Body-Primal Mind: Empower Your Total Health The Way Evolution Intended (…And Didn’t) by Nora Teresa Gedgaudas is another great book on nutrition.  As I continue reading more about this topic, I find that I’m being exposed to less new information.  One thing this book helped me focus on was the possibility that I had some level of adrenal fatigue.

For the past 20 years, I have consumed on average 4-5 coffees a day.  In recent years, it has been espresso.  Before that is was mostly french press.  Primal Body – Primal Mind alerted me to the fact that I was actually craving stimulates in a way that some people crave sweets and this could be negatively affecting my leptin, cortisol and even insulin levels.  To test the theory, I decided to cut back on my coffee intake.  I contacted the author and she suggested taking the amino acid L-Tyrosine on an empty stomach to help.  It has helped.  My coffee intake is down considerably, but more importantly I am losing my craving for the stimulate.

Every book on nutrition I read provides another piece of understanding to the puzzle.  For me this book showed me how my love for coffee could be affecting my leptin and cortisol hormones.  I’ve cut back on coffee in the past, but I usually did it much faster and I never established a “new normal“.  I just felt bad until the detox was over and then I resumed coffee loading.  This time I am taking it much slower and allowing my adrenals time to heal.

If you are interested in reading an excellent nutrition book, check out Primal Body – Primal Mind.

Influencer : The Power to Change Anything by Kerry Patterson and 4 other authors is full of stories on how groups and organizations can influence change.  They break down their strategies into six sources of influence.

1. Make the Undesirable Desirable – Personal Motivation
2. Surpass Your Limits – Personal Ability
3. Harness Peer Pressure – Social Motivation
4. Find Strength in Numbers – Social Ability
5. Design Rewards and Demand Accountability – Structural Motivation
6. Change the Environment – Structural Ability

Most of the book was interesting, but not that applicable to my life.  If I were a manager, director or higher in a company, I think I’d appreciate this book more.  The one lesson I took away from this book was the importance of stories.  Combining lessons and values into stories have a more powerful effect on influence than telling people what they should do.

If you really dig stories on when influence works and doesn’t work, check out Influencer.  If you are more like me, just read Chapter 3.

Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival by T. S. Wiley is an amazing book right up until the end.  Readers of this site already know that I am convinced of the evolutionary fitness and nutrition argument.  Although my science background is limited (self taught), it makes sense to me.  Lights Out makes a compelling case for extending the body of evolutionary health to sleep.

For much of evolution, we did not have night time light.  This meant man slept more and moved less in the winter months.  Food sources were more scare in winter and strongly favored protein and fat.  During the summer, days were longer and carbohydrate sources were more plentiful.   Man would eat carb sources in the summer, which would spike insulin that promotes fat gain.  That fat would be utilized for fuel during the winter.  This is the basic concept of Summer vs Winter Mode, which NephroPal wrote about last year.

Lights Out is mostly about the evolutionary and hormonal aspects to light and sleep.  Longer days (more light) tell the body via hormones that it is summer and that means “eat sugar now before winter comes“.  Shorter days (less light) tell the body to sleep more and eat less.  The problem is we are not only in constant Summer Mode from endless supplies of carbohydrates, we are in constant Summer Mode from excessive lighting and shortened winter sleep cycles. Winter Mode is for repair.  When that repair doesn’t happen (no Winter Mode), it can result in obesity, cancer and mental illness.

Even though it goes deep into hormonal science, I found the writing style extremely clear.  Some of the reviewers on Amazon did not like the confident, know-it-all tone of the author.  I loved it.  I felt Lights Out did a brilliant job of digging deep into the science and then stepping back to draw focus on important points.

Before I got to the last 30 pages, I was ready to call this the book of the year.  It was that excellent.  Then it went down a path of mixing history of the low-fat movement with government conspiracy theories.  Unlike the rest of the book, this section seemed garbled and out of place.  I lost some confidence in the author.  It was enough of a red flag for me to go online and do more research on the author.  The results were not favorable – although I could not find anyone that had issues with the first 170 pages of Lights Out.  Regardless, I am sitting here having read an amazing book where I don’t know if I can trust the source.  My gut says what I learned is accurate, but I think I need to do a lot of follow up research.  The good news is winter is still months away, so I have plenty of time to discover if the Lights Out thesis has merit.

Blunder: Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions by Zachary Shoreis is both a history and a psychology book.  Chapters are broken down by cognition traps and a historical example.  Great stuff.

The conclusion of the book provides advice on avoiding blunders.

…make a realistic effort to slow our rush to judgment before all the relevant facts are in.  If we could grow more comfortable with the uncertainty around us, our daily blunders would not be as great.  All kinds of daily interactions would be altered if we suspended our insufficiently informed conclusions over why others act the way they do.

If you are a fan of history or understanding human error in decision making, I highly recommend this book.

This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff is a collection of amazing research on eight centuries of global financial data.   I am humbled by the depth of the research in this book.  However, the writing was extremely dry and pure academic.   The authors took a topic that I adore and made it insufferable.

Michael Lewis, John Mauldin and Roger Lowenstein are all excellent financial researchers and they happen to be engaging writers.  It can be done. The writers of This Time Is Different earned my trust with their research, but failed on analysis.  This Time Is Different will certainly be used as a reference for better financial writers in the future.

Taking more personal responsibility for ones survival seems like a prudent idea.  Even though I enjoyed the story Emergency by Neil Strauss, I wanted more of a manual to urban survival.

When All Hell Breaks Loose by Cody Lundin is exactly the book I was looking for.  In fact it was more.  The beginning of the book goes straight into the psychological aspects of dealing with survival.  To assume you or anyone else is going to remain calm and act completely rational in a crisis is a bad assumption.

Cody Lundin takes you through what is required for survival in order of importance.  Having a fully stocked cabinet of ammunition and dual citizenship to some remote country is worthless if you freeze to death or run out of water.  When All Hell Breaks Loose breaks it down into a Pyramid of Needs required to survive.

1. Positive Attitude
2. Clothing, Oxygen, sleep, water
3. food, shelter, sanitation
4. lighting, first aid
5. communications
6. cooking
7. transportation

In most cases survival doesn’t mean living off the land until the end of time.  It might mean going without essential services for hours, days or weeks.  You can’t trust that the social safety net will always be there to rescue you.  Taking responsibility for your own safety and the safety of your family should be your first goal.

The first thing I did this week was buy and fill two 7-gallon water containers.  My roommates bought 2 as well.   Humans need 1-3 gallons of water a day.  If an earthquake hits Seattle and water lines are cut, I can now survive longer than I could last week.  And that is the essence of my survival strategy.  Each week I will take an idea or two from the book and implement it.

Reliance Products Aqua-Tainer 7 Gallon Rigid Water Container

Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success by Dan Schawbel is about personal branding for the Millennial generation.   Yeah, I am Generation X, so I knew going into this book that I wasn’t the target audience.  The last time I read a book that focused on the Millennial generation, I gave a scathing review.

Fortunately Me 2.0 provides solid advice in a friendly conversational writing  style.   Because of my branding problems with Coffee Hero and this site, I wanted to take a step back and reassess things.  This book helped me do that, but I fully expect this to be an outgoing process.    Me 2.0 begins with a Brand Discovery process that I found very helpful.  The second half covers more of how to execute that brand strategy.

Even though Me 2.0 is directly speaking to the Millennial generation, I think most of the advice can transcend generations, especially if you are currently out of work and need to re-brand yourself in a competitive job market.

One of the exercises in the book is to ask this question to friends and co-workers:

What are the top 5 personality attributes others use to describe me?

If you want to help me with branding, feel free to leave a comment answering that question.  If you wish to be anonymous that is fine.  For SPAM filtering reasons, anonymous comments can take longer to show up on the site.

Man Eating Bugs: The Art and Science of Eating Insects by Peter Menzel

Simplexity: Why Simple Things Become Complex (and How Complex Things Can Be Made Simple) is by Jeffrey Kluger.  It is not at all like The Upside of Down.  It is a collection of stories of different systems that are more or less complex than appear on the surface.  Simplexity is written in the pop science format that Malcom Gladwell uses in his books.

For me this book was fun and easy read.  It doesn’t cover the growth imperative, collapse or deep collapse concepts that Homer-Dixon explains in The Upside of Down.  Maybe it isn’t fair to compare these books, but honestly I only came to this book because I loved The Upside of Down so much.