David vs Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell, rating: 7/10

You will find detractors for Malcolm Gladwell, but I find that he does write well and on interesting topics.

In this particular book, I learned a few things.
 
Being disagreeable can be an indicator of success. But you don't tend to be disagreeable unless you've had some hardships in life. (You could be disagreeable because you are a spoiled brat though.)

The other thing is roughly about police state and the legitimacy of authority. When the police state has no legitimacy, you would get rioting and resistance. Gladwell spends a couple chapters on this related to Northern Ireland.

There were a few other more points made, which though I had never really thought about them, they do seem rather more obvious:

Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer, rating: 7/10

The most valuable part of the book is the description of elements of improving creativity.

Having a more dominant right hemisphere of the brain is one thing that might not be altered (does a lefty automatically have an advantage here?). Being in a good mood could also be difficult to contrive.

But working in a blue room is condition which could be effected. So is having an environment encouraging lack of inhibition, yet allowing criticism of others, and featuring interaction with experts in various other fields. Just pretending oneself not to be an expert in a field is an interesting trick (prevents rejecting ideas out of hand).

Meanwhile the reader is treated to the secrets of the creative successes of Pixar, 3M and even Shakespeare.

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August 2012: It appears Lehrer made up Bob Dylan quotes in the book.  I wonder why he would do that.  To spice it up, I guess.  How did he think it would get away with it?

Making Sense of People by Samuel Barondes, rating: 9/10

The subtitle is Decoding the Mysteries of Personality.  It is actually a fairly technical modern psychology book, but puts it all in layman's terms.  It talks about some ten of the troublesome personality patterns, including types like: histrionic, dependent or compulsive.  These were terms I'd heard about before, but never until now got a full understanding of.  The book isn't very long, a significant plus.

And now for a surprise...

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, rating: 8/10

Jon Stewart had author Jon Ronson on the Daily Show. Ronson honestly looked a bit crazed while talking about this latest book. But I was intrigued with the idea of being able to diagnose psychopaths.

It turns out actually to be not that hard. There's a checklist of 20 questions. But psychopaths are fairly rare, supposedly somewhere just less than 1% of the general population. Things like: shallow affect (lack of emotion), superficial charm, manipulative, and lack of empathy are giveaways. Some, more accurate tests, are not allowed to be given anymore because they involve electric shocks (psychopaths don't have fear of electric shocks).

Willful Blindness by Margaret Heffernan, rating: 9/10

The topic is not seeing what you don't want to see. It has something to do with confirmation bias, but as Heffernan describes, there's a lot more to it than that. I found this book fascinating.

the upside of irrationality by dan ariely, rating: 8/10

Another in an almost series by Ariely on the topic of irrationality. It's strange how people act so differently from what you might logically reason they would act. Ariely investigates more or less subtle issues in this field. My short term memory fails me, but certainly if I were to encounter an applicable situation, I would say, "hey, that's just like what that guy said in that book."